DAY 11 (pt 2) of Building a $1M Business in 1 Yr

I moved across the country to build a $1 million lawn care business in 1 year. We're our first weekend. The vans are behind, the wraps are behind, the ramps are behind. It's been chaos, but it's good to document it because that's pretty much how most businesses start. We just hired our first technicians, and this is day 2 of training them up and getting them ready to be out in the field.

I'm ready to start.

They need to know you lay the law. They can't come to me.

You're making money, I'm making money, he's making money, he's putting it back into the business. We're going to be more efficient. You're making more money, I'm making more money. It just goes around and around and around.

I highly recommend these days and not just throwing your guys out in the truck and just hoping they survive and do good. Train them. Give them a space to be able to ask questions. Show them how they can succeed, make more money, and get to the next stage of their career. Let's roll the tape. Have either of you done open book management before? So it's basically where we show you all the numbers. So it's not just the revenue that you'll see. You'll see all the expenses. At the end of each quarter, we'll show you all how much, how much of the money, how much money spent on marketing, insurance. For the entire brand? Yeah, everything. And so what you'll also see there, the reason that's important is because when you start to see, When you— we say, hey, you get 10% of profit sharing, you're like, well, I would like to see the numbers and not you just randomly throw something on my paycheck. So that's why we do open book management. My biggest thing is I like being open and transparent, but I don't necessarily think everyone else is built that way. Sometimes as a member of the team, you don't really want other colleagues knowing how much you make. And so I try to respect the privacy of people inside the organization. That being said, if you have a system of how you get to the next stage of your career, I don't really mind people knowing how much people make. And this is why, like, in all of our business, we try to create tiers, whether it be in the media, we have like, here's how much you're making. We all know what levels we're at. We know how much we make at every level, how long we need to be here, what tasks we need to be taking ownership of in order to hit there. Same thing as in the software and engineers, you have different levels. And so I think the more open and transparent you are, it forces you in the— In the event that you're going to share and open up the numbers, you may better make sure there's a system for things, because now if there's nepotism, if there's favoritism, it's going to be reflected because you're sharing the numbers. And so I think there's a healthy balance. I don't think everyone should share every little thing, especially when it comes to sharing how much people inside your organization are making, if they're at different levels, if they're one-off management departments. Sometimes it's very difficult to go across departments because they think they work harder than so-and-so. But, you know, like from a leverage perspective, this person is much more valuable to the business, I got to pay them more. And you might not have tiers of pay because you don't have a big enough company. So that's where it gets a little hard. And I don't like to jeopardize someone else's privacy. So for example, if someone's working in the office, and I'm doing a P&L, and I'm opening up the books, I'll just show wages for the whole company. I'm not going to break it down as like, well, our office manager makes this and our salesperson makes this, because they might not be comfortable sharing that across departments. And I might not have a system in place for people to get into those roles or inside of those departments for them to move up. And so I don't think everything should be shared. I'm not like that, especially when it comes to the privacy of the team. But I think 99% of people stay small because they think small. And thinking small means I will hoard and I will hide things from my people, people that I expect to work really hard. I expect to go the extra mile, but I'm not willing to tell them how much my hourly rate is and How much money this business makes? So you'll see specifically over the first 6 to 12 months as we're growing and stuff, we're spending a lot, we're losing money. But when we start making money, that's when you get a piece of the action.

Cool.

And open book management is just another one of those things that makes Augusta so different from other companies. Most companies don't wanna share with the frontline employees who are actually getting the work done what's happening behind the scenes. They wanna hide how much money the business is making for no good reason. At Augusta, we want employees to understand how the business actually works. And by doing that, we open up the books. Open book management, it's not just about sharing the numbers, it's understanding how your daily work out in the field affects the bottom line results of the business. Ultimately, by sharing open book management, it gets you to recognize how your actions affect the bottom line results. And then with profit sharing, once we're all aligned and like, hey, let's do less damages, let's have less equipment repair, let's have less callbacks. Once we're all aligned in that, we're able to generate more profit, which the company's able to give back to the crew. So again, the whole system is designed to sort of work together in that respect.

When it comes to profit sharing and sharing a piece of that, at the end of each quarter, we will share what he was talking about, which is called a P&L, profit and loss statement. Shows all our revenues, all our expenses, how much money we actually made. We'll do it at the end of March, end of June, end of September, end of December. So 4 times a year, each quarter. So you'll see everything. And we'll have a meeting about it. So you'll be able to ask questions like, hey, why is the insurance higher? Why is there— why are you spending so much on fuel? You'll be able to ask all those questions. I think thinking big is thinking in terms of possibility and opportunity instead of scarcity and that everyone's out for your back. And there's people gonna take advantage of you. But I think the people that I have seen be very successful, the vast majority of them default to trusting people because it allows you to go faster. And so if I can create systems of business like Profit Training, like Open Book Management, like Paid for Performance, What it does is it creates a system by which we all speak the same language and we have all the same goal. If we all have the same goal and we're all— we all know that everyone's striving for the same thing, we trust each other. And if we trust each other, you can move faster because you don't have to always watch over your shoulder like, is my manager trying to take advantage of me? Is that other department against me? Are they trying to jeopardize? No, we all have the same goal and we all know that we're compensated and rewarded for reaching that goal. At the end of the 3 months, Most locations, how they do it is based on attendance because and being on time. We are not having specific start times, and as long as your job's done, we're happy. So we're changing the profit sharing just a little bit. So it's not like you have to be here at a certain time, and you have to be here every single day. That's not how we're going to do it. We're going to slightly different, which is as long as you produce at least ten thousand dollars of revenue for the business. in each of these months, at the end of the quarter, you're gonna share in 10% of the profits of the company, okay? So let's just say there's 4 technicians, you'd all split this. So let's actually run some math. Let's assume for April, May, and June, April we got, let's say, $100,000 in revenue. Let's say here's $150,000 in revenue. And let's say June is $200,000. In revenue, just for this example. So that's going to be a total of $450,000?

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

So $450,000 in revenue. But again, this is profit sharing, like Nick was saying. Just 'cause something makes $450,000 in revenue does not mean that's how much profit we made. Let's say this month we made— let's do $30,000. This month we made $25,000. This month we made $40,000 in profit. That's after all our expenses are paid. In that case, we would have $55,000, we have $95,000 of profit for that quarter. This is what we share— do profit sharing on. So $95,000 goes down here and gets split between the team that is currently employed. All right, so for the end of the quarter, we made $450,000 in revenue, $95,000 in profit, $9,500 Is gonna be split to the team that is currently hired. OK? So let's just say our team has at that point 5 people. Alright? Divide that by 5. Each person is now going to get $1,900 as a profit-sharing check at the end of the quarter. Make sense?

Mm-hmm.

So now what Nick is saying about like damages, these things, even though they might not be on your route, if it's happening a bunch, it is affecting your paycheck. At the end of the day, 'cause coming out of the bottom line. And that's what we all share in at the end of the quarter. And so, especially when we come together, team meetings, if you see someone's making damages, it's kind of affecting your paycheck. You wanna make sure you're like, hey buddy, the reason you keep breaking that is 'cause it's laying on the ground. Get it on the rack. Stuff like that. So it kind of forces the whole team to basically mold each other. It's accountability, basically.

Yeah, it's ownership for every single individual here.

You know, this happened one time at one of our locations is someone got in an accident the week before profit sharing. $60,000 worth of damages basically wiped out profit sharing for the whole team.

Holy cow.

Not fun, right?

That was what I was just gonna say. It was similar to like we, our quarterly bonuses, it only affects like, you know, like if there's like, you know, no accidents, equipment, Nothing like that. And, uh, kind of the same thing where, uh, this guy, uh, he flipped the Z-Spray.

Oh man.

Like, he was driving down the street, he was driving down the road and didn't, you know, like—

It was on the trailer?

Yeah, on the trailer. And then he, I guess when he was driving, he didn't— the gate wasn't secure.

Yeah.

It was like the lock, the latch was like halfway. So when the Z-Spray wasn't even strapped in.

Oh man.

When he was driving it, the Z-Spray went in reverse and went straight through the gate. So that's— that cost $20,000— that was $25,000 that we had to buy a new one. So like everybody was like, man, everybody was upset because, you know, that came out. So nobody got a bonus.

Oh man.

So, but for 2 quarters.

Oh man, yeah, mercy goodness.

Yeah, and what a lot of companies do, it's upper management that gets these bonuses.

Yes.

You know, and, and it's like, so there's really no incentive for technicians to, to try harder and do better. You know, this, like, everybody's involved. Like, you own a piece of this, of this business. That's what I love. Like, you know, every— everything that you do matters, uh, and, and I just think that's great. I mean, I'm, I'm super excited about that. Just, it's a different way of thinking.

And I love it.

I think it's gonna be great.

Yeah.

Yeah. So the reason most locations in Augusta and for most businesses, profit sharing usually hinges on attendance. So them not calling out last minute and then not being late. And the reason we have to do that is because otherwise on P4P, if I have one technician in the passenger seat, one technician in the driver's seat, and driver shows up 20 minutes early, ready to go. Passenger 20 minutes late. Guess what? Guy in the driver's seat is waiting on that other technician. So being late hurts the team. In this case, that doesn't happen. We have solo routes and they all have their own vans. So there's no like waiting on the team or being late hurts the team. And so instead what we're doing is they have to hit a certain amount of revenue per month for all 3 months of the, of the quarter. So consistency. So they aren't gone for 3 weeks or like, I'm just out. Or like even gone for a week and a half or 2 weeks might hurt them. It creates more— I own this route, I'm going to take care of it. And especially during the busy season, I'm going to make sure I'm around to get at least $10,000 of monthly labor revenue, which honestly most of them could hit in part-time. Once a route is full, they can easily do $15,000 to $20,000 a month in revenue, very easily, of labor revenue. A lot more if they're doing chemicals. And that's just running the math of $100 per hour and they can get 30 to 40 budget hours per week done. So the ability to be able to get $10,000 is not too low of a bar. Also make sure that as someone's getting trained up, just because they're here, they don't get profit sharing. You've got to be able to contribute back to the business in order to participate in the profit sharing. And so you can kind of do the math on this. So if you have, say, I need to produce at least $10,000 revenue per month just to be eligible. The reason we do that is so if someone takes a 2-week break or a 2-week vacation, well, that's like scrambling. Probably John's covering for you, another technician's covering for you. That person's not going to participate in profit sharing.

No.

Right. And that's where it's like, hey, take your vacations and everything on the months where you know you're not going to be able to, like during the offseason.

Right.

Go for it. That being said, at the end of the quarter, we have $450,000, $95,000 in profit. I will be very clear in that we are growing this location very quickly. I don't anticipate profit sharing this quarter, next quarter, or the quarter after. So just to be perfectly honest, and we will share the profit and loss statement so you know, it's like, okay, I see we're not making money, I get it. Because we're gonna be spending so much on marketing, ramping it up, and then the goal is that towards the end of next year, that's when you're gonna see profit sharing checks.

And if y'all aren't making money, I'm not making money.

So I wanna throw that out there too. If you're hurting, I'm hurting.

My salary's tied to all that stuff. So if you're making money, I'm making money, he's making money, he's putting I'm money in, putting it back into the business. We're gonna be more efficient. You're making more money, I'm making more money. It just goes around and around and around. So we're all in it. You're not making money, I'm not making money, he's not making money. And so that's just, we wanna be making money.

Yeah, absolutely.

One thing too is we don't have it in this training. If you ever bring a technician in and they work for 90 days, you get $3,000 bonus. So if you do know someone and you think they'd be a great fit, let John know. They'd obviously have to get through the interview process and everything, but as long as they get here for 90 days, You get $3,000. Yeah, I'd rather give the technician $3,000 than paying Indeed for a whole bunch of applicants. I'd rather pay them than have a bunch of overhead for my general manager doing interviews, multiple interviews with them. And when you hire someone that comes from referral, the person that's referring is kind of putting their name behind them. It's almost like a great reference and they're usually gonna make sure they're successful. Just to look good in front of the team. So like after work they'll check in. How was it? How was your route? Do you have any questions? Like they'll do that almost like organically, especially when they're incentivized to make sure they stay 90 days. So they're going to make sure they go through onboarding and any questions, any problems, like, hey, make sure you're good. Also, if you have a really good technician and they refer someone else, there's a really high likelihood that the people they're hanging out with, the people they know, the people that you refer are also very high quality. And so your hit rate with referrals are just so high. And so I would rather pay a little extra, get that money to my team instead of Indeed overhead expenses and everything else, and just create this referral engine inside the business of bringing great technicians and having technicians ready to go. Like if you have that kind of incentive, they'll be like, I got 3 guys in my back pocket. You let me know when you want to hire and I'll give you their names and we'll rock and roll. And so now I have this buffer that when I get a bunch of leads or new customers, I actually can just tap into this backlog or this bench of technicians that I can pull from. The reason is 'cause it costs us about $2,200 to just go advertise, do Indeed ads, do all that stuff. And we would rather bring the people in that you already know, like, this is a great fit. They would love this. They hate working somewhere else where they make a dollar more. They work great here. So if you have anyone like that, let John know. We'll make a mark on their employment record, like the date they started. As soon as you hit 90 days, you'll get $3,000. That's cool.

Because I think back in church you got like $100 or not even that if they made it and if church is honest to you.

Yeah.

It was the minute you talked about profit sharing, it clicked with him.

I know.

He was money motivated and then that just spun him.

Yeah.

And then he started engaging more. I wonder if it was because he just saw like it wasn't like—

Right.

Where they say all that stuff.

Say it, yeah.

And then there was nothing happening.

Exactly.

They're almost there with it and like I said, when you start talking about the profit sharing, I mean, he like—

Yeah.

It like clicked with him. Like, okay, I'm gonna make some money here.

Like, what you're telling me, I believe him. Yeah, yeah, I agree. Yeah, you don't believe people after working in tan-out years and like, oh, you're gonna profit sharing, bonuses. And why are they excited? Because I think they believe me. Um, they saw Nick talk about it. They saw the change it had in his life. Like, we start that training with my story and why we started Augusta, vision the business. And then we go right into Nick, which is a testament to the mission of the business, which he changed his whole life around. He started as a technician, stage 1, moved through all the stages, became an owner, and was able to say Augusta Longhair changed my life. And that is the testament required for them to pay attention and believe that everything we're about to say matters. For him to be able to say like P4P changed my life and I basically Got me on this journey. It put me on this new path. It gets people's attention, and his background speaks to them. Like he was kicked out at seventeen of his house. He had a rough childhood, rough background. Lots of bad things happened to him, and he's he's turning it around. A lot of technicians they come from that place, and so to be a see an example they can identify. Oh, that's me. Oh, I can see myself in that, and then see that what Nick. Nick has done over the past 7 years, I think that's inspiring to people. So that's how we do profit sharing. But just to run the math, that's what I was going back to.

Sorry.

You're in $10,000.

Okay.

How much do I have to produce every month? You can divide this by $100 per hour because we charge the client. You basically have to do about 100 hours of work per week, per month to be eligible.

Okay.

Makes sense. So if I am producing $100 per hour, that's what we are always doing our rates on. I need to do 100. So you could still take 10 days off. You could probably take a week off and still hit this number. It's really just a matter of rewarding the person that is consistently producing high enough. And if you're only producing this every month, like, you can do better. This is an easy target. It's basically 25 hours a week.

Yeah, that's the alpha. That's super easy.

I expect when we hit that first one, because remember they have to be here for the whole month, I think we're going to get quite a few people joining right here. Next, next, going next spring rush. They're not eligible for this one. So, 'cause you have to work all 3.

Correct.

Right? So I do anticipate us to have profit sharing, especially for the new, 'cause like, there's only 2 people. You might have 5 employees, but if only 2 of them are eligible, this is what's happened in a couple—

Oh yeah.

This happens. That's okay with me. Right? For all of me. What was interesting to me about the tech training was actually how much, as we went through several hours of training, the more engaged they got with the process. And so I'm not usually a big fan of watching long videos on a screen, and I've talked to Nick about how we can shorten this up and tighten it up because the, the best parts of the training was the interaction between the team, myself, John, and us just bouncing ideas off of each other. I felt like it really built the camaraderie. I could feel them participating. Everyone was very much interactive. And by the end it was like, let's go. Everyone was very much on a high note. And so I want to bake a little bit more of the interaction into the video training. And because in general, if you watch— if you have a technician sit down for 30, 40, 50 minutes watching videos or hours straight, no interaction with a human, they will lose interest. They're just going to— like, most people don't have attention span like that. And I don't blame them. And so I want to break that up as much as possible. But I could feel by the end, even when we were going to like Field Force, the mobile app for homeworks, and going over the P4P app, they were starting to connect all the dots. One thing I talked about with John is what we might do next time is do the vans first and then do the video training, or do this like midday to break it up, the videos. But also because once they saw the vans, they saw how everything started piecing together. Like, oh, the reason you do the mowers this way is because it makes it more efficient. The reason you want to be more efficient is because you make more money on P4P. Like, all these things started connecting. Less than 10,000 miles.

Oh yeah, dude, this is nice.

I knew he was going to react like this. This is nice.

Yes, it is.

The, uh, I'm ready to start tomorrow.

And so good to see by the end of the day, like, high energy. Everyone's like, let's go. Uh, and even for the, the the technicians that were kind of like considering joining, you could see they were ready to go after the videos and just being as honest as possible because I was very honest, like about profit sharing, about P4P. Like you're not going to make P4P bonuses for the first few months as we get the routes dense in your market. We're brand new. Same thing with profit sharing for the next 6 to 12 months. We're putting, putting money back into this business to grow it to the size where you can have a full route. And I think that culminated in a day that everyone's like, the camaraderie was just really high, the passion, and like you could just feel like the energy was so different at the end of the day versus the beginning. I think we can tweak it just a little bit, shorten up the videos, move the van a little forward in the day, and just make this even more dialed in. So what this does is make sure that if there's a bunch— if I join the week before the end of the quarter, that person shouldn't be splitting the profit sharing. It should be the people who have been here the whole quarter.

Right.

And so it's rewarding the people that stick around, not like, I joined the week before, I made an extra $1,900. That doesn't happen.

Yeah, we can stick with that number.

You're like, can we fire everyone the week right after that?

Hey, we can do it with 2.

So awesome. So basically there's 3 levels, right? You got pay for performance, where every day how hard you work, you make more money. Then there's open book management where we share all the numbers, right? And if you ever have a question about something, whether it be John, and if he doesn't know, he'll bring it to my attention. If you have a question about the numbers or math or like anything, please bring it up. It's open book management. There's nothing to hide. We will show you every single expense. There's nothing expense-wise, revenue-wise, there's nothing we're gonna hide. So that's just— there's never gonna be a time where like, oh, you don't get to see that. So that's open book management. And then that last part is profit sharing. And that's this right here. As long as you're here for all 3 months of the quarter and you produce more than $10,000 of labor revenue for that each month, you're eligible for, for profit sharing.

Reviews and upsells, 2 very important elements to being a successful technician inside of Augusta. When you do great work, asking for review is the natural next step. For upsells, like when you notice something on the client's property, mentioning it to the manager so that we can to offer the client an additional service is how you help solve problems for the client, which is ultimately why they give us money. It's 'cause we solve problems for them. So both of these things will help you gain more money because we pay bonuses for them. But more importantly, they're gonna allow you to gain communication skills and confidence that's gonna serve you for the rest of your life, whether it's you continuing through Augusta, going through the 21 stages, or if you go and take the skills that you learned here into something else. Focusing on reviews and upsells is going to equip you for whatever it is that you decide to do next. Or if you go with—

go ahead.

Well, right now we're not doing any type of bush trimming, mulch, nothing.

Correct. But when you're out mowing and someone has a bunch of weeds, that's a great opportunity.

Okay.

And so on the next video, we'll show like the mobile app, but you can just shoot a picture, be like, hey, this person needs weed control.

Yeah.

And then John sees that Shoots the customer a text, says, here's your quote. If they accept it, you get $50. Oh, that's cool.

Let me— okay, so let's just say if what he just said about, you know, you pretty much just, you know, you see something, you're just helping them solve a problem. So if you see it and then you tell them what it is, like, okay, sign me up. So like that, so we just—

all you have to do is communicate with John. Okay, so right on your app you can make what's called dispatcher notes, take a picture That's all the information he needs to be able to do the quote, sell the job, and then you get the $50.

Sweet.

Okay.

Yeah. And so like there's one, we do the same thing for reviews. So if Mr. Jones, you know, he comes out, he's super happy, he loved the service. Like, hey, can you leave me a 5-star review? And they can go on Google, they can leave a review. If they do that, you also get $50. And so like there's this one guy, he was from Australia, he was only working with us for about 6 months and he had to go back. And so the last month or so, he went to every one of his clients to just chat 'em up. You know, an Aussie, they can just somehow talk to everybody. Got every single one. He made $1,100 in one week. Did you do one of that before?

Yeah, so that'll be me.

Yeah, let's go, let's go. So if you have— so you basically get $50 for an upsell, $50 for a 5-star review, either way.

It's almost like a side hustle.

Yeah, for sure.

I think with those 2, man, I don't know.

I know, I felt good.

Yeah, I do too. And then, and then what I also liked, uh, they were engaging with each Yeah, you know, shaking each other's hands like, hey, we got this. Like, the chemistry is already there. And even out there, the way they were talking, like, I'm ready to start tomorrow. Yeah, you know, so I want to be able to knock off like an hour a week where we're just sharpening blades, we're talking about the game, whatever, whatever y'all want to talk about. We're working, we're moving, uh, we're doing our meetings, going through books, like all that stuff. But I want to definitely carve out at least an hour a week for us to do that.

I like the fact that they are onboarded too, because their skin— they already felt like they're on the team. Exactly. Like, they already were like, we're going to do this. It's not like, let's try this out. I kind of like the fact that they're onboarded prior.

Yeah, me too.

Okay.

Me too. It gives them— there's some incentive there, and it just makes it feel like they're already on the team.

Yeah.

So no, I'm liking those 2 guys. I mean, DeAndre, before he left, he's like, I'm ready to go. This is going to be easy. I'm going to kill it.

Yeah.

Confidence. I'm Good with that.

Yeah, you don't have to say, hey, call in, or just like, hey, go to Google. This guy specifically, he had a QR code made that went to Google, so he's like, here, scan this, and then just be talking to him like, right while we're talking, write a review. So he was great.

By the way, who do I talk— do I call Liz or something?

For what?

QR code.

Oh, QR code. Oh, you can make a QR code online. Just take the Google— take the Google account, the URL, and then you can just put it behind any. And we, if you want, we can make you, uh, business cards.

Oh, sweet.

Yeah, business cards will have your name, it'll have lawn care technician, and then the QR code's on the back. It's in the pro shop. So we can order you a pack of 100 of those bad boys. You can put, give it to people, et cetera. Hey, lunch is on me next time. Well, if he gets 10 though, you might be taking your words back. All right, this is gonna be so the reviews and upsells easy. It's like you ask for the review, get five stars. It's really easy because they're on our routes. Like we're you're gonna the same route. So if we know if Mr. Jones is on DeAndre's route and Mr. Jones leaves a review, you didn't even mention your name. We just know that's a five star from you. With upsells, same thing. As long as you initiate this customer needs service, which almost all of yours at the beginning is gonna be. You're on a mowing job, they didn't accept treatments of any sort, I know they have a problem, get that information over to John. The easiest way to do that is inside what's called the FieldForce mobile app. And so we're going to walk you through what that looks like. You can take videos in there, you can take pictures on there, you can leave notes for the dispatcher, and they can see all of that right from there.

Okay, cool.

Your goal is just to try to incentivize the guys in the way that the owner typically acts automatically. When you're out on the job, people walk up to you, they ask for your car, you're getting estimates of the neighbors. Like, it just happens. People come out and you talk to them, you ask them for a 5-star review. You're just trying to incentivize the behavior for the technicians to get rewarded the same exact way so that they do take the same exact behaviors.

In this video, I want to walk you through Fieldforce and P4P. These are the 2 apps that we use to basically do everything that we need to out in the field. When you first open the app, you're going to see this clock-in at the top. And obviously it says clocked out. I'm just going to clock in. It's going to open this up at the bottom and you press start. Now you're clocked in and you can swipe that away and go about your jobs. Right here you'll see this dropdown with today's date. It's always going to default to the date. It is important just to look though and make sure that you are on the correct day because that can happen sometimes. You're like, where are the jobs? But you accidentally flip to the next day. The order in which it shows up has already been determined by the manager when they dispatch all of these jobs to you. So they set the schedule, they look at how many budgeted hours, and they're able to allocate everything accordingly. This takes the guesswork away from you throughout the day-to-day of, oh, should I go to this job after this one? It's very simple setup in the most efficient manner, so all you have to do is just work down the list. It was already set up efficiently. From the start by the manager.

Now keep in mind, you guys know the local area a lot. And so if you look at that and you're like, well, those first 2, that's over next to a school zone, I'm going to do the 3rd one and then bounce back after. That's fine. At the end of the day, the job just needs to get done. John will get as close as he can in terms of like what he— the optimized route is literally a button he clicks that optimizes it on Google Maps. But you guys know certain times of day it gets different and different. You know, it's just different. Feel free to move them around. We're not worried about that. Also, once you know, if you know, I always want to start these 2 after the 3rd one, or I want to reverse my route, he can save that in your route for the future. So, hey, my Tuesday route, I want to start further away because I know that one day there's always this crazy thing happening at school or whatever. Reverse my route and then he can save it. So it's locked in.

And that's how I like to do it. Like, I like to go to my furthest one out and then just work my way back to the shop.

Yeah.

Yep, exactly. And these will— you'll be routed from your house, right? So as soon as you get in, because your van will be there, be parked. Again, one of the things that's really important with the vans, we're gonna have padlocks in the back, obviously, but if someone really wants to get in, they can get in. So one of the best ways for security is just backing that van up against a wall. So this training day, we paid about $100. It has this little conference room, a TV up on the screen. We can put the video, just connect it into our laptop, whiteboard. It was like $100 for 4 hours. And if you don't have a shop space, you can still rent these out. You get coworking spaces just to feel professional. There's a nice bathroom, water station, break area. It feels nicer than just being like, hey guys, I'll train you on the truck. And then it's like bad weather. Like this morning was torrential downpour. And so I highly recommend, even if you don't have a shop, go get coworking spaces for this orientation day just to feel like it's a more professional experience for the guys. So, so you'll be routed from your house each day, but if you ever want to tweak it, you know, just let John know. He can always save it. The thing to keep in mind is to always look at your route because new jobs will get added and like you're not gonna get notified. So for example, if today's Tuesday route, you're looking at tomorrow's route of Wednesday, over the past week there might have been 3 jobs accepted and on that schedule. So it's always good to just like look through and like Does this route look like how I want it?

Gotcha.

So, but just keep in mind, you don't have to do the next one because it's the next one. That's okay.

On the day of, like, let's say today we got our route and everything, and now does stops get added through the day?

No.

Oh, okay.

No, no, no, no.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay.

Yeah.

Because that's another thing they used to do to us.

Yeah.

Same when I was on.

Yeah.

I used to do that all the time.

I get that notification and it starts ringing.

I'm like, oh, they're sending me to Prosper. Yeah.

Yeah. No. So, so command center who answers our phone, If that ever happens, it's their fault. It's not John trying to throw you under the bus, but they are instructed that you never do same day unless we get direct authorization. So typically they're always like someone calls in today, for example, today's what, Thursday? Hey, next day to service, looking at next Tuesday.

Gotcha.

Okay, cool.

Yeah. So almost always at least 24 hours is what we expect. And I still think there'll be some bumps with like just this whole scheduling aspect, but I feel much more comfortable when they've been in the industry for so long. They're not going to be surprised by 100 degrees. That's like my biggest concern around here. It is different to be in here talking about videos versus going out and doing the work.

Yeah.

And like now it's cooling off.

Yeah.

So like you're not feeling it anymore. Yeah. But then June 15th or whatever, it's like, oh, you know, it's just horrible.

We will rarely move jobs between routes, but it could happen if someone got hurt, someone had to have an emergency. It's like, hey, could you go cover for them? That could happen. And then that meant John on the WhatsApp group would be like, hey guys, can everyone just refresh their schedules? We're not adding new jobs, but that does occasionally happen when there's emergencies, something happens just to get it covered.

Yeah.

The manager's goal is obviously to be able to see where everybody's at throughout the day and manage the schedule to make sure that everyone gets done around the same time and everything's on track.

For us, unless you ask for help, we will probably let you just keep going. 'Cause you have your own van, right? What he's mentioning there is like when they're all coming back to one spot, the manager's kind of trying to even out everyone's end time. For you, it's like, hey, you got the jobs in your schedule, gotta go get them complete. If you need help, reach out. But like, we're expecting that you're gonna be able to get them done.

Right.

And if you need to push a job one day, that's okay. So like if it's 4 o'clock, you're like, man, the last 2, I'm just beat. That's okay. They can go the next day. They can't get pushed more than one day though. 'Cause I felt like at the beginning of the day, we were watching the videos, they were observing, they're basically seeing like, Can I trust these people? Which is what a technician should do. But I feel like if I bring something like the vans forward, it would then unlock that energy we felt in the second half of the day where people are just like coming up with ideas and like, oh yeah, my older boss, this other client, and people are telling stories and like we're bouncing things off of each other. But I don't know, I'm gonna play with it. It's like you need the broccoli before you get the sundae at the end of the day. Yeah, but this is like the settling Oh, I see, I see. I could see how it could go both ways. Chocolate-covered broccoli. You know, you put the van, the equipment, that's the chocolate around the broccoli. Again, you need to understand P4P. Yeah, get the chocolate. There's a little broccoli under there. You don't care because it's still sweet. Yeah, exactly. Throw a little Dunkin' Donuts in there. We got them some breakfast sandwiches, got them some coffee. Make it a day. So you can pull the job forward one day, we can push it off one day, because that's what we tell the customers. We say, hey, hey, Mr. Jones, we'll be there Tuesday plus or negative one day. Gotcha. That gives us a little bit of flexibility for weather, etc.

Something.

Yeah. And even for you, if you're like, hey, I need a day off. Okay, let's just move some of those jobs more forward and a little and we can make it happen.

Okay, cool. That makes sense.

So it's not like it has to be done on that day. Just know if the jobs are on a day, they can only be pushed off one day off. But it's really helpful. Customers will come up and be like, hey, you're always here on Tuesday. Why are you here Wednesday? They were told and guarantee you. They were told it's plus or negative 1 day. They will forget that after you've been there 10 times on Tuesday and all of a sudden you're there on Wednesday and they think something's gone bad. But they have been told when they accepted and we put them on the schedule, we tell them the day of service plus or negative 1 day.

Do the customers get literature notification on like, you know, hey, if you got a dog in your backyard, multiple toys, I mean, it's like 5 hours just to pick up toys. Policy do you have? Because sometimes you're trying— what a 30-minute lawn could turn into 2 hours depending on goats in the backyard.

Yeah, 2 things. So first off, let's do the like gates, dog poop, pet stuff. Yeah, make dispatcher notes. He'll walk through that. That's a little icon there that means dispatcher notes were made. You can add those in. John will see that and contact the customer. And more importantly, we can set up an automation that reminds them that you're coming the day before. Okay. Hey, we're gonna be showing up tomorrow. Please unlock the gate. Pick up the dog poop. Pick up the pet waste, etc. So that's the first thing we can do is basically remind them we're showing up. Very soon in here, there'll be a button you can actually just text the client. And so you could say, hey, I'm gonna be there in 15 minutes. Can you please unlock the gate? For example. So that's coming very shortly. The other part is initial mows. This is the big one. So initial mows is you show up. They did the The measurement of the property over the phone or from the website.

Right.

You could show up and to your point, it says half a budget hour and it's 2 hours because it's a long— it's overgrown. Usually we don't get a lot of that around here because we are already a premium price cut. Like people that are using our service didn't let their lawn get to a foot tall typically. That being said, every time you go to initial mow, it is not P4P, meaning you clock in on the job, you get it dialed in, you stop, And we charge them based upon how long we were there. We charge $2 per minute per man. $2. So you're making significantly more because you remember you're still making 30%, but now we're charging based on how long it took you to get on the job. So on that first job, the first— you'll have it. So you see how it says mowing? It'll say initial mow. And when it says that, it'll also have different notes. And part of it is like, take your time. If you need to double cut it, if you need to edge it, Several times, like use the stick edger, talk to the client. Most of your callbacks happen after that first visit. It's like, I just go talk to them because I'm clocking my time on the job. And by the way, they are told on the phone that first visit is per minute per man. So when you're on the job, take your time on the first mow because when you come back next week, it's now back to this price.

Right.

And you're on P4P. So you really want to dial in that first visit. And if it's going to take longer because overgrown edges, the lawn is overgrown, whatever, Take your time on the first visit.

If it's a particular customer, I always like— I've got kids, so I understand. But if there's tons of toys and just obstacles that just not being uptaked, you know, I mean, obviously we educate the customer, but in that regards, you just go ahead and pick everything up and just take care of the customer. But then it's going to delay us in timeframe.

Totally. So 2 things. First off, I would probably just talk to the customer. When you talk to them, they almost— it's like 10 times more impactful than us calling them.

Okay.

Because they see the person that it's affecting.

Right.

Almost every time you do that, they will make sure it's happening. And then what I would do is make a dispatcher note, say, John, hey, this person's always having this problem. Can you please remind them that when I'm coming prior? And then he'd set up an automation so you don't have to think about it. He puts a tag on their account to where every time they're on the schedule, the day before they get a message.

Okay, cool. I mean, this area probably won't. Like, uh, like when I— like this area, probably like Southlake. But I— it was some customers that, that I had like that. They, they still wouldn't do it.

Yeah, in that case, we dropped the client.

I was telling Steven, like, if we want to do like, you know, a day here and there for Steven. Yeah, like training and like, you know, just random, random days before just to keep them in the flow. Like, if you're open to that, we could do that. Same with maybe DeAndre, just like a day. If I could have him for a day before he starts.

Okay, I'll let you handle that. Yep. I think they're solid enough both to where you can put them in a WhatsApp group too.

Yeah.

The client doesn't necessarily have to tell you what notes to add. If you notice something that you think might trip up the future crew that's on the property, leave a note. Also things like the gate code, uh, if there's like a combination lock on the gate or if it's a gated community, Being able to put that in the notes so that it doesn't trip up the crew in the future goes a really long way towards giving that consistent experience to the client. So before and after media, again, this is typically gonna be on like your initial services specifically as sort of how I look at it is like your insurance policy. You know, if the client wasn't available for the walkthrough, you couldn't get a review from the client, you couldn't get ahold of them on the phone or something like that. This is just sort of your record that like everything was done to specification and that Nothing's trying to be hidden. It really just helps break down that barrier and show them again, even if they're out of town, we can send them these before and after videos and show them like, hey, like here's everything we did. We hope you're happy. We have nothing to hide. Like this is your insurance policy. This helps really cut down on the amount of yellow slips that end up happening where the customer calls and, you know, they say, oh, this wasn't done. Having the before and after videos to be able to demonstrate that Really helps.

We don't require you to make pictures before and after on every job. I know that can be a hassle. We do not require it. Just use your discretion, especially on initial mows, or if the client's not home on that initial mow, I would just take a quick video and picture. It just saves your bacon. Yeah. The other thing is when you guys go out to the vans, John will show you this. We do have the dash cams.

But yeah, this is pretty much it. I mean, it's it's pretty simple. Yeah. I put this mower up.

Yeah.

I put this mower up front. Based on my thought of we're going to be using that more, right? So I'm just trying to get you to grab that right away. I'm going to talk to Mike as we get going, like, possibly seeing if we can look at getting ramps on this side of the door or on this side of the van. So you can have your, your zero turn in the back and then you can have your push mower like here and then you just pull it out with a ramp. Pretty, pretty simple. Pretty straightforward.

We do have the dashcams. They do not do internal to the cab. They do not record audio in the cab. I'm pretty hardcore against it in terms of privacy. It does record facing forward. So if you got in an accident, we have evidence for you of what happened. The other thing that is really helpful for is being able to prove you were there because you will get clients like, they didn't do anything. It's like, no, we have proof that the vehicle was at your property for 36 minutes. So that's also why we have those trackers. So John will walk you through that out there. But like, I want to be really clear, we do not do any video or audio in-cab.

Never.

Just imagining that I completed my entire day's route, I would have all of these complete, and then at the very end of the day, after I've cleaned the equipment out, I've parked the truck, I hung up the keys, that's when I'm going to go into the top right, and then I'm going to click on this and clock out for the day. It's very basic, very simple.

So when we do our last client, do we then clock out at that point? Because that's Literally our last job for the day, or do we clock out?

I usually like to gas up at the end of the day just because that's when less people are at the gas station. So after that, once you're driving home, yes. Keep in mind on P4P, it shouldn't actually change your pay because if your P4P is up here, base pay doesn't really matter. But especially the beginning, great point. It's like you drive your first job, clock in, get started.

Yeah. So this is off, but so as far as uniforms go, like what do we—

That's what I was going to ask about. Yeah.

Yeah.

So, homo, but I like your pants.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, these ones? Do you have these ones?

Yeah, I like those.

These are dope. These are super dope. You like those?

Yeah. Yeah.

So in terms of— Can I see what— Yeah, Truewerk. These ones are like— I wouldn't recommend these for the summer. These are like what's called their 3-season ones. Their 1-season is the summer ones. I'd recommend these. They're cheaper too.

Because I saw Nick wearing those.

Yeah, he has the exact same pair. But in terms of pants, shoes, do whatever you want.

Okay.

Only thing we require is that your shirt is an Augusta shirt. We have multiple. Yes, we have long sleeve, short sleeve, sweater, hoodie, the whole nine. So when you get started, before you get started, John will be like, "Hey, what do you prefer? We'll order it in." Okay. And then if you're ever like, "I like a different one," or we give you a few of each, that's fine.

I've got some stuff for y'all now, but when y'all get started, we'll we'll dial it in and go.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah, and because like obviously it's hot days, cold days, you want different stuff. So If you— we'll get you set with like a bunch of them, like 3 to 5 usually, and then you can just play with however you want.

Okay, so now let's run through P4P. And P4P, it isn't essential to be in the P4P app every day. Most of the day-to-day work gets managed through Fieldforce. But P4P is what tracks all of like your clock in, clock out, how many budgeted hours you produced, how much labor revenue, and shows you ultimately how much you earn. You're gonna see how many clocked hours you have for the month. You're gonna see how much per hour that you've actually earned based on, you know, how efficient you are and how far above base pay, how much that's averaging out to. And you'll see whether it's trending upwards or downwards. And then also things like your efficiency score. I know we haven't talked about that a lot. As you work for the company more, you'll start to understand what good efficiency scores look like, which the minimum that we always shoot for is 75%. But you'll see efficiency score, budget hours completed, et cetera. As an example, I can see that I'm looking at the week of June 20th through June 26th. Okay? So the total time for this week, this is 23 hours. Obviously we're still in this week, but what we can see is the clock in and clock out. So you can always verify and make sure that those are done. The shift length, the base pay earned, and then the hourly rate being charged to the client. The budget hours completed in that day, and then ultimately The P4P earned. And what's so great about this system is all we want to see is that P4P earned, $292, is above base pay of $255, right? And this was a long shift for this employee, but they got a lot done and they made far above base pay. And they wanted to work those extra hours to get their pay up to almost $300 that day.

And then you could see So they made about $38, $40 extra pay on this day.

So we can look at it in the app?

Yes, exactly. So I'll be honest, I'd say half our techs now don't open up this app because you're going to get an email the day after with the summary.

Oh, OK.

So if you want to open up the app though and see, like, I want to see the whole paycheck, like what happened, you can go in here and see everything. So we do this mostly because— have the app part Mostly so that you never like, what did John do to my paycheck? You can just go in and see what's going on. Also, John does not do P4P. That's being done by Command Center, so they don't even know you. They're just looking at the math of how many jobs you completed, and they're running the math. And so if you have the app though, you can go through each day, you can go through each pay period. One thing he mentioned here is this efficiency score. I wanted to show you what the— how we calculate that. That's budgeted hours divided by clocked hours. So budget hours, how many budget hours did you complete in the day? Let's just say for this example, you completed 6 budget hours of work when you stacked all your mows up and you worked for 8 hours. That would be a 75% efficiency score.

Mm-hmm.

So budget hours completed divided by how long you clocked in for your shift That's your efficiency score. Some people are like, well, I gotta get my efficiency score higher to make more money. Yes. At the end of the day, you just need to earn more revenue. That's all it is. Like, keep P4P really basic. Make more money for the business. You make more money.

Gotcha.

This tracks the efficiency though. And what this helps you understand is, okay, well, that means that out of my 8 hours, 25% of it was spent driving, fueling up, doing other stuff. So in general, the rule of thumb is If you're making about 70% efficiency, you're making above base pay, which makes sense. Like there's time of driving, it takes some time to fuel up. But if you're, if you're like 60%, you're probably hitting base pay. And that's probably what you'll be at for the first couple of weeks as we build up the route density. First few paychecks, you're not going to have it because you don't have— we drive up and do 5 lawns. That's when you start crushing it. That's when your efficiency score— a lot of our guys go 110, 120%.

Oh man.

Because you're just beating all the budget hours and there's no drive time. I've seen people make over $50 an hour. Usually it's because they complete projects that were, say, 100 budget hours and they complete in 40 or 50 hours or 60. And it's usually because they figured out a way to just completely remove a big chunk of labor from the job. I remember one time there was a backyard project we were working on and I was just assuming everyone was gonna have to go through the gate with wheelbarrows. And I showed up at the job on day 2, and I thought it was gonna be like a 4-day job. And he's like, oh, we're wrapping up. I was like, what in the world? They— all they did was take out a fence panel because he's like, oh yeah, we just took the screws out and we will put them back when we're done. I was like, didn't think about that. They got the job done half the time. So again, like, that would have never happened if they're getting paid by the hour, where the longer the job takes, the more money they make. They only— you only unlock those creative ideas to make things more efficient. when you're aligned on let's make sure this job is as efficient as possible. And if you do that, you make more money. And the reason that people mostly don't use this app is because it all syncs from, from Field Force. So when you clock out of Field Force, it clocks you out here. It's all just syncing up. So you don't have to have both apps going back and forth. This is for you to be able to see the reports. And then I think he'll show it later is you can look at tomorrow's jobs and see how much you're about to earn. But realistically, you don't need to open this app up.

Okay.

Now what if you get a little earnest in your step and you're halfway through the lawn and you're like, oh, I forgot to clock in for this property?

Doesn't matter. Because remember, the clock in and out on the property is mostly so we can see if we're accurate on budget hours. It is not changing how much revenue you produce.

Okay.

So it's just estimating time.

Correct.

Yes. Yes. It doesn't change your pay. Okay. Don't worry. Like people, I've sometimes technicians like, so if I clock out, if I clock into the job a few minutes into the job and I clock out a little before, like, It doesn't matter realistically if you beat budget hours.

Just looking at your numbers.

You completed X amount of revenue.

Okay.

So I know that both of you will probably be starting over the next few weeks. So after today, John will reach out to you, establish what that date's going to be, make sure you're comfortable, etc. Make sure you get uniforms, date of training, etc. When you're— when you first get started, at least half a day to a day, John will be with you. Both of you have a ton of experience, so I don't anticipate it to be a week or two. If we had someone green, that's how long it usually takes. Both of you just need to understand, okay, this stuff— how do I track stuff, the vans, the equipment, how do I interact with the customers, uniforms, etc.— that would be in your first day or so of training out in the van. But ultimately, John's the one that'll be like, hey, he's ready to go. That's when you take the van home and you're good to go. Any questions for me though? This is— this might be one of the last times I see you. Honestly, because the vans go out and then you guys are good to go. I might see you at weekly meetings, actually. So once a week you guys will meet up usually at the storage facility, sharpen blades, wash the vans, just kind of have a breakfast, something like that together. But I'll probably see you then.

And that's once a week?

Once a week, exactly. We're still establishing where exactly in our territory we want to put that storage. And down the road, as we continue multiple locations, there'll probably be multiple of those kind of like depots. For us to meet up each day as we add kind of throughout North Dallas.

Sure.

So any questions for me?

Nothing crazy? No, I'm just super excited.

Me too.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's it's gonna be pretty easy.

Good. Well, well, both what's nice is both have experience to where like you're not gonna be surprised by 100-degree weather. You're not gonna be surprised when it rains like this and you're like, okay, it's not raining now. Let's go.

Yeah.

And so I like the ability to have the flexibility with the vans because like this morning you're not ever going to go out and mow, but now you're not waiting on a crew member and someone else is bringing the truck. You just have your van at your house. You're like, all right, let's go.

Yeah.

So I have a question. So when I have my daughter, I'm dropping her off at daycare. If I have a route that the daycare is on the way, am I able to drop her off at daycare and then shoot to my route?

Yeah. Not in the van though.

You would have to just take her separately and then you'd have to come back and get the van.

Thank you for jumping in there at that last one spot, 'cause I'm very lenient usually on that stuff. Oh, what's that? When he asked about dropping someone off, I think at daycare, and you was like, no. I appreciate that.

Oh, okay, good.

Yeah, 'cause I'm much more like, you know, we can kind of make it work. But I appreciate you stepping in and be like, it also asserts to them, even though they could probably tell I was about to be like, eh, and you came in, I appreciate that. 'Cause they need to know you lay the law. They can't come to me.

There's a line there.

Yeah.

Absolutely. And I almost said, if you have to ask, The answers most of the time.

Yeah, yeah, that's a good point.

I used to tell my guys that all the time. If you have to ask, yeah, all the answers no. Yeah, you know what I mean?

Yeah.

Um, and that was one of those examples. He asked, he knew the answer was no, but he just wanted to clarify it.

I'm glad he did. Yeah.

Um, because if they don't know— because that used to happen in the town all the time, like that line could be erased and stuff. I just wasn't like that. There is a line here. Yeah, it is black and it is white.

Yeah.

And this is where we're gonna roam.

It's a It's mostly our insurance. In terms of other people in the van, uh, if you were saying, hey, I want to go to the gym on the way to my first job, that's fine. Like, that's okay. It's realistically just we have to have this line because like as soon as you do anything personal, it's not covered.

Right.

And that's why I was asking. I assume probably—

Yeah, it happened to one of our team— not my team, but one of the owners. They were doing a personal trip with the vehicle, got in an accident, everything got declined. And so all the medical, everything didn't go through because it was like You weren't going to a job, you weren't in uniform, you weren't on the clock, you're out.

Sure.

So that's what I'm trying to protect against.

That's fine.

When you do your training, he'll show you how the geofencing works in terms of making sure the vans stay in a certain area, mostly to protect against theft.

Sure.

Because that's the biggest concern we have is the keys. As soon as they have the key, they got the van. They have all our equipment. And so we do have it geofenced. And then based on where you live, we can increase that geofence. So, OK, let's give them a little more space. So if he's driving around his spot and it's a little further up north, et cetera, we're happy to accommodate that. All right, I feel good.

Yeah, me too. I feel a lot better.

Yeah, I wish Jose would have been here.

Me too.

Because he's also another flexible person.

Absolutely.

But I think if we can really focus next week, I'll hit the ads, turn them on. Hopefully get some for DeAndre, get him in the loop for the first couple weeks, and hopefully bring Steven on. And then if Jose's still around and he stayed in touch—

Yeah, I need to— Yeah, I want to talk to him a little bit.

So overall, I thought that the video section of technician training went good. They will do a lot more infield training with John, um, but I'm making notes. So I think there's several segments that could definitely be shortened up. So I already reached out to Nick Reed, um, and just make it a little tighter. Uh, technicians, I feel like if the video is even more than 15 minutes, they just start to get a little restless. And so I think we could tighten some parts up. Not repeat ourselves, show some more examples. But overall, like, this is 10,000 times better than even it was a year ago to be able to have some structure to explain PPP and open book management and profit sharing and 21 stages of success and what they can do inside the company. So I think overall it was a big win.