DOMINATE DURING RECESSION! (opportunity of a lifetime)

Hey everyone, it's Mike Candies here. I'm driving and recording, but I wanted to drop in and just share a quick note and message with everybody. All these small business owners, landscapers, lawn care business owners, home improvement professionals and talk about the recession that's happening.

Literally in 2019. One of the first Landscape summit conferences that we ever had, I talked about preparing for the next recession. I talked about again, literally every single landscape Summit in the past three years about getting your business ready for recession and the things that you should be doing in terms of ensuring you don't go into debt, ensuring you have recurring revenue and not project based work only.

And really getting ready for that next recession which is going to be the biggest opportunity typically of your business career to get ahead. Every single great wealth generating event has happened usually during a recession. You think about 2007, 2008, what was what happened? The real estate market crashed. Whoever bought real estate and went all in on real estate during that time crushed it. What we're going through right now with the labor economy the way it is, it's so hard to find employees. There are a lot of small business owners that are just closing up shop and quitting. It is the equivalent of what happened in 2007, 2008, 2009 in the housing market is now happening in the labor market where it's hard to find people. People leave, there's massive turn to entry level positions and it's causing small business owners to give causing to close down. Inflation, can't even find equipment, let alone the fact that it's twice as expensive, fuel has doubled in price. All of these pressures have caused small business owners to just collapse. You look at the labor market and the jobs, the jobs reports that have been coming out, small businesses are failing. They're losing jobs like crazy. In case you wonder why. I'm sweating. I just finished a long run and was thinking out some of this stuff. And you look at the massive companies, the big conglomerates, S&P 500 companies hiring like crazy right now, but they have access to capital that small business owners don't have. And so how do you prepare yourself for this? I've been talking about literally for years because we have been overdue for a recession for a very long time. Usually you have one drawback in the market every 10, 12 years. And we're talking 14 years since 2008 when we had our last recession. Really. And so for a lot of small business owners, we don't even remember what it's like to be in a recession. We don't remember what the pain that is, psychological pain, pain that you have to go through to buy when everything is down to go all in our business, when everything around you looks negative and every single news outlet is saying doom and gloom and the world's coming to an end. The same thing happened literally in 2020 when Covid hit. If you bought stocks or real estate or anything during March, April 2020, when literally people thought the world was going to come to an end. Like you couldn't make. You couldn't make fortunes. And so right now, when everyone's willing to give up on their small business and they're willing to throw in the towel because they're so hard to find and no one wants to work for you, I agree it's difficult. It's hard. Margins are going to get compressed, and the B and C players in your market, your competitors, are going to lose. They're going to go out of business. And it's going to leave massive opportunity for the businesses that stay in business and weather this storm. And it's not going to be easy. It's going to be some of the worst years of your business career in the next couple years, in my opinion. It's going to be the hardest to find employees. It's going to be the hardest to move your prices higher because now the consumer doesn't have a bunch of cash. They're not getting stimulus checks. So last year, when there was inflation, 2021. Yeah, you just raise your prices because everyone was raising their prices and no one had an issue with it because everyone had cash. We were getting money from the government and child tax credits, and no one was paying their rent, no one was paying their mortgage, no one was paying their student debt. And all that's changed now. And now all of a sudden, credit's at high limits. People are taking out credit card debt and all the rest of it. The consumer's weak. You got earnings reports that are just getting demolish. The stock market's in bear territory Yesterday. S&P 500 is now officially in a bear market. NASDAQ is in a bear market. The Dow's falling. Housing looks horrible. Interest rates have gone from 2, 3% to 5, 6, 7% like we are. We are in a recession. And I said this in October of 2021, and I, when I sold a whole bunch of my stocks and said, hey, I don't think 2022 is going to be that great. And it's done just that. And then they had the war in Ukraine, which compounded the fact that, you know, fuel price prices went through the roof, so we're in a really bad spot. The next couple years are gonna be absolute trash. And this is the equivalent of me saying in 2006, 2007, right when the housing market was about to crash, me saying, look, things are gonna crash and you've gotta be ready to go all in on the market. And that's what you gotta prepare yourself mentally for the next couple years in your business. It's time to go all in. And I made a video, I'll link to it at the end of this one. Last weekend, I made a long form video about what I expect 2022 to 25 to be, where like literally 40 to 60% of your competitors will get wiped out, leaving a massive opportunity. If you can just stay in business and thrive after this next couple years. And someone made a comment that was actually very intelligent and that was like, well, why would I start a business now when it's the next couple years can be so brutal? Why not just wait until the labor market's better, unemployment ticks back up to 4 or 5%, people actually want a job. They don't just, you know, flake out all the time. Why would I not just wait until then? And this is what I said, you could wait till 2025 when things are better, easy to find employees. Housing market stabilizes, stock market stabilizes, credit balances stabilize. You know, we potentially have a different administration in the White House. You could wait for all of that. You could, but that's not who's going to win the game that starts a business at the time when things get better. Who's going to win the game is the person. The next couple years gets the testing of going through the hardest market and figuring out how to hire employees when it's hard, figuring how to get customers when it's hard, figuring how to beat the competition when it's hard. Because the person that can do that, the person that can win in the next couple years at least just stay alive, is going to have so much more skills than the person just getting started in 2025. And so don't think like, oh, okay, this is the time to sit back. I'm not going to really grow the business. This is a time to focus on increasing your margins, getting ultra efficient, implementing systems like, if you're just doing hourly wages, you're going to lose pay for performance is what you must be on if you're going to have any shot in the world of retaining talent over the next couple Years. You've got to figure these things out now. Like you know, one day I'll talk about this more.

But how much money I've invested personally, my own cash in order to develop P4P software dot com. The reason I have gone all in on it and still lose like our margins on it is like negative 90%, like massive losses on that company. And it will for the next couple years. But the thing is, I know how important it is for small business owners, especially next couple years when it's gonna be so hard to find employees. These are the systems you've gotta figure out. You've gotta have a cashflow system, you've gotta have a sales system, you've gotta have a CRM. You've gotta make sure that when an estimate comes in, you have a process that that lead goes through and a follow and it's all automated. You've got to figure these things out. And the person that does that now, the person that can figure that out now over the next couple of years is going to crush it, absolutely Crush it. In 2004, 2005 when things start stabilizing and when the economy starts to recover. And during that time that is when millionaires will be made. And the people that laugh about me talking about becoming a lawn care millionaire or you know, becoming, you know, you can make millions of dollars mowing grass or cleaning houses or cleaning gutters. People that laugh about that now because anyone can do it. Just wait till the 80% is wiped out. All the chuck in the trucks get wiped out. All of the middle level companies that have between 3 and 10, 15 employees get wiped out because of margin compression, because of rising fuel costs, because they can't find employees and they retreat back to being solo. Wait till all of that happens and then come talk to me in a few years. When whoever gets through the next few years is so battle tested and understands that game and has the skills and know what it's like to operate on 5 to 6% margin instead of 20% that everyone has been enjoying for the past 12 years. Just wait till that person that knows how to run a business on 5% margin when they're out up against people that are just getting started. Because now it's time to start in a business. Now unemployment is 5, 6%. We can find employees. The person that will absolutely crush it is a person that can figure out how to survive and thrive when it's extremely difficult. That's why if you look at athlet, they go into hyperbaric chambers. They try to. They go into ice baths, they go into saunas, extreme temperatures, so that when they come back to normal temperatures, when they come back to the performance of the game in a normal environment, they perform so well because they put themselves through extremes. And the next couple years, the economy is going to put small business owners through the absolute sauna, the intense heat, the intense environment, the equivalent which is going to make that entrepreneur, that small business owner, so extremely resilient, that when the economy get good, when the economy becomes better, when the labor market becomes improved, where you actually find employees, they're gonna absolutely crush it. So, you know, some people say you're just hyping everyone up. You just want everyone to stay small business owners, because that's your. Your demographic. No, I've been saying this for the past three years, and that is prepare for the time of battle during times of peace, all right? And times of battle is when you take ground, and we're heading into battle next to the leaders, and there's gonna be a lot of people and a lot of people that will fail and give up, and it'll be too hard. And for everyone else that stays their ground and can operate and live on less and downsize their house, downsize their car, downsize their standard of living to take opportunity and take market share now is going to absolutely be incredible over the next decade.