FIRED EVERYONE... SOLD EVERYTHING

I'm not doing this again. I'm not doing this again.

Today we're in Pennsylvania visiting Jack with Jack Mack Landscaping.

Hey, we're gonna keep all the prices the same. Psych. Actually, we're raising them. Business is business, I guess.

Last year, I visited Jack Mack Landscaping, and he hadn't paid himself for almost two years from the business.

I'm, like, looking at my personal bank account like, there's just nothing. There's just nothing there.

He was taking out a loan from his girlfriend just to get by.

My girlfriend has been covering my living expenses. I need to give her that money back.

Also, around the shop, a bunch of trucks and equipment that were not being used. You literally have five trucks of them runs.

Yeah, not that I need them all. Can't afford to fix even one of them that's broken.

I told him to sell half of his trucks and half of his equipment. So you have two weeks to essentially sell four trucks. I don't care if you have to give them one. Get them out of here.

I don't think I want to do this anymore.

Let go most of his crew and.

Go back to being solo.

I had to sit everyone down and lay three people off all at the same time. And that was a. Not an easy conversation, and I never want to go through that again.

But now he's letting unpaid invoices stack up. He bought a snowplow, and some of his customers are holding his payment ransom.

This is actually, like, a terrible shot. I don't know what happened, but anyways.

Like, 20,000 overdue, you think?

No, it's probably more like 30 now.

Okay, so 30,000 overdue, that kind of burns.

His bank balance is dangerously low at just $6,000.

I want the business to just be, like, sustainable. That's the goal. All right, then I don't have to think about the fact that, like, we have no money in the bank account or anything like that. Scott of Workers comp lean on camera, Cut off Danny's finger.

This is the business turnaround show. My name is Mike Gandies. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care, where we have over 175 LOC around the world. And I travel around the country fixing struggling businesses. Our goal is to give Jack a strategy to fix his cash flow problems.

In the next six weeks.

Yeah, like last year, I think in terms of the 400 framework, their constraint was still liquidity, and that's why I was telling them to sell everything so quickly, because they had no money in the bank and they had a lot of Unused assets, their asset utilization was very low. Had a whole bunch of employees, didn't.

Need the experience itself of the first turnaround, I was in a different place. I was trying to pretend like like Jack back was, oh, we were doing great and everything. And I was exposing that to the world and saying like, actually guys, we're broke and we make no money.

You grow in a chaotic way, like he was doing last year, like buying a bunch of trucks and equipment he didn't need, hire a bunch of people he didn't need. You have to unwind those decisions to grow the business correctly. And so that hopefully over the past 12 months he's been able to unwind. And now it's like how do we restructure the business with higher pricing, better systems and a whole bunch of unused equipment and hopefully become profitable?

You're saying like there's almost no one saying no, that that does not pair well with, there's so much compet, I.

Can'T charge very much.

That makes no sense whatsoever. Your close ratio determines if there's a.

Lot of competition, if you're overpriced.

But if you're saying that, hardly anyone says no. It means we're taking on a whole bunch of unprofitable work and handing it off to a bunch of overpaid team members for our business size. And that makes no sense whatsoever.

Immediately after you came, I just got to raise the prices to actually make money. I was like, we're doing this, I'm just working for free. You know, there's no point in it.

It's not a horrible thing to use price as a differentiator like to say that that should not be the, say that Walmart and McDonald's should not exist. For most home service businesses, we do not have the scale required to be the low price competitor. Most of the time a low price competitor goes out of business because we do not have economies of scale like a Walmart that is, you know, international. Whereas with like home services, that moat of just being around for a long time doesn't do a lot. Someone else can enter the market and offer it lower and so there will always be someone lower that can do it cheaper in the industry. So usually bigger differentiator based on price is a short term strategy. If you can do it based on value, you can, you know, have higher margins. And the difference between a 5 margin 5% margin business and 15% margin business is a tripling of profits. And so it's rare that a low price strategy is going to ever win in this home service industry, because there's always someone willing to do it cheaper. And last year's profitability, do you know kind of roughly what that was last year in 2024?

Not. Not off the top of my head, unfortunately. All I know is that we came out of last year with 40. There's like 40 grand in the bank, which is not a lot compared to the years before. That's world's different. And I could actually pay myself. Like, I more than doubled what I paid myself the year before and also had money in the bank, so I'm not the best numbers guy, but that's telling me that something's going right.

So last year he had like 30, $40,000 in the bank in terms of cash. That's great. That was a byproduct of raising prices, et cetera. How many mowing customers we had before that?

Off the top of my head, probably like 110. And we probably went down to like, maybe 100.

What was the percentage that you kind of raised it?

$30. Lawns probably went up to around 37, 40, right? Depending on 20% increase.

Right.

Around 20. Definitely raised prices on. On everyone. And didn't lose. Didn't lose very much at all. We have a running joke, me and my buddy who's also in landscaping. When you lose a customer, you gain three more, and almost religiously that happens.

But now he's all the way back down to 5, 6, 7 grand in the bank account, which is way too low for a business that's going to probably do.

But we did it with less people. So there's me, Santos, and Jade. Every once in a while, we would bring in one guy for, like, extra help for, like, a few weeks, and then they would. They would go. I don't have the desire to own, like, a giant mega corporation of any kind, but I do want to get to a place where I could, you know, not be here for a few weeks, and everything would be fine. I want the business to just be, like, sustainable.

Like, if this is just going to sit here and collect rust, get rid of it.

Hey, get to the dump. Give it away for free on Facebook. Like, it just. It's cluttering your head.

I, like, just, like, messing with the trucks and stuff like that. That's why I keep. Because I'm like, oh, yeah, one day I can fix them. But I'm so busy doing all my stuff, it's delusional to think that I can do all that.

You definitely see some broken stuff sitting around the lot. We could sell you know, you come in every morning, it's just sitting there. It would be nice to just have that extra space and not even money thinking. Just have that extra space and not have so much junk just sitting everywhere.

After you came, a bunch of the mowers went up on Facebook Marketplace. I actually sold one of the mowers the same exact day that Mike showed up. I went right back to our lot.

And just threw a whole bunch of.

Mowers and stuff on Facebook Marketplace. Immediately, I was getting people like, oh, yeah, I want this, this, and this. So I think people were getting ready for the spring rush. Everything got put up. Two of the mowers went.

They.

They went immediately. And then it took a little bit longer to sell the nicer stuff. We still have some of them. Some of the more, you know, the better mowers.

The.

The kind of cheapy, crappy ones, they went immediately. But eventually we sold the skag. I did end up keeping both of the riders, so. So we had an extra just in case. The Ford F350 that sold, that took a little while. Nobody wanted it because it had 400,000 miles on it.

You got the two grand back out of it?

I got 20, 2300 for it. But, you know, definitely lost money after I, like, fixed some things on it. But the F150i sold for $500, it was probably worth more, but I sold it to one of my guys, and he's been with me forever. So I was like, Listen, man, 500 bucks, it's yours.

You've probably seen the 4L framework. Liquidity, leads, labor, leadership.

The 4L framework identifies the 44 key constraints to growing any business. Liquidity, leads, labor, and leadership. This cycle continues as you continue to grow the business.

If we can get to 500,000 this year with three guys and yourself, very possible this month. What do you think we're going to do in revenue?

April, 40, 50 something.

So we're getting close to it. We're getting close to 500,000. If we can go into next spring with 40 grand in our bank, you'll be able to accelerate so much more.

Right now, it's tough. So, Charlie, that old truck that they're driving for mowing did great last year, but we used it for snow, and it just beat the crap out of it.

It was running great, and then all.

Of a sudden, after we ran it in the snow, now, I don't know, salt got in somewhere or something.

Snow is tough on the vehicle.

It's starting to fall apart. So we need some Money to replace that with some other mowing truck.

But also I do see that he went and bought another snow plow.

That's our plow truck that we got. Same deal. We only use it for the snow. This truck needed a work. Needed exhaust manifolds, which on a 5, 4 is terrible. It was like a 30 hour job. In the middle of the snow.

In the middle of the snow.

It was. It was, you know, the day that we got like our first snow call. We were still working on the truck, like getting it all together, and they called me. They're like, can you go, can you go out and stall? The axle was out of the truck. And I was like, oh, all right.

Although I'm a huge fan of solving off season revenue and like, having snow is a good thing, My concern is that we keep buying new equipment without fully utilizing the trucks and equipment we already have. Like, this seems to be a pattern. It's always the next shiny thing. The one truck with the box truck, could you sell that one in Charlie, you think to get another truck that's actually usable for mowing?

I could, yeah.

Why didn't we sell the other box truck?

Oh, man, that's like my. That's my, like one guilty purchase in life.

We have at least $45,000 of equipment that can be liquidated in two weeks. It's not going to be fun. You're going to lose your beautiful box truck.

It's going to be kind of tough. I don't want to get rid of it. I like, I thought about it so hard and you told me. I was like, yeah, it would be nice to have the money. But it wasn't solving any, like, actual problems. Right. It was nice to get some money in the bank account, but our real problem was that we were working for free because we weren't charging enough. So selling the box truck wouldn't fix that. So I focused more of my efforts on just like fixing other problems that would actually improve the business. I said I could probably get 25 for it. That was a little bit high of a number. But do. I mean, maybe it's an automatic, not a manual, but, you know, it does have 50,000 miles on it. So.

But do we, do we use it right now?

We use the cold tools. It's a really expensive.

We can get a box. We can get a box.

Yeah.

Well, the other garage, could it hold those tools there?

It could.

Now the only problem is, like, we use all that stuff every day. I can't build like anything on that property.

Like, what about Those metal storage containers, if you got a six by ten or eight by ten trailer, that's.

Let's say it's two grand, three grand. You get that?

Yeah.

Get rid of the $20,000 truck.

I could do that.

When it comes leadership, the only thing I really think Jack Mac needs to work on is his breaking of nostalgia with these trucks that are sitting in his shop collecting dust and doing absolutely nothing good for the business. Sell them, get rid of them, and move the business forward. So from a leadership perspective, I'm gonna.

Actually put that there. It's like we got to sell the box truck. All right. And then the reason I'm putting a leadership.

Because we have sentimental value.

There's a sentimental. Like it's a problem. Yeah, yeah.

We need the cash now because we.

Have this all these over days.

It's an expensive storage container right now.

It is expensive. I mean, it doesn't cost. I mean. Yeah.

Why do you love it so much?

I don't know.

Yeah, it's a problem I'll put here.

Okay, so we got sell box truck.

That's gonna be the hardest thing on the whole list.

Yeah, that's right.

Let's just call it 18 grand for selling the box truck. Like that's the fire sale. We're getting rid of that bad boy 50,000 miles. And then what about Charlie? What is he worth?

Do you think?

Think a thousand?

Yeah, that's also going to be tough. We're a little like dancing on our toes right now. Like, oh, when's Charlie gonna die? Because it's coming. We know it's coming. It's time for him to retire. He's. He's 30 years old and doesn't need to work anymore.

I'm okay. That Charlie's existed for a long time and that this truck is nice and you worked on it. But we've got to move forward. We gotta sell these things, liquidate them. Being that is the constraint inside the 4L framework and move forward with the business.

Business.

Sell the box truck, Sell Charlie, get the new truck. We need more dependability in that area anyways. Like, if Charlie goes down right now, we have a problem, a big problem. Especially in the middle of spring rush.

If you're not busy right now, there's something wrong. Yeah. So you're getting the. The wrong footage of the middle of spring rush type stuff.

If we were Elliott, two grand for.

Charlie, we're gonna get 20 grand.

We're gonna spend two to three, maybe.

Four grand on that into an enclosed trailer that will actually work. Well, for the toolbox. So we can just throw all the.

Tools in there, still work.

And we could use the trailer, actually use.

Bring the trailer to job sites, keep it locked up, leave it on the job site. Put a wheel lock on that bad boy.

We're in business. Business wise. That's a way better idea.

Cut ties with nostalgia. Sell the box truck and sell Charlie, get a more reliable truck and put any extra cash back into the bank. Because right now the biggest constraint in this business is liquidity.

Right now from a liquidity perspective. I know there was a snow contract that kind of burned you.

It was a company that, you know, that hired us. I don't know what happened, but any. There's ten grand and from work we.

Did in like February or we finished.

Yeah, February. So now it's May. That kind of burns.

I would assume with that $10,000 job and other stuff, we got like 20,000 overdue, you think?

No, it's probably more like 30 now.

30,000 overdue. Sounds like he still has a problem collecting money though. Fortunately. It's like a really easy fix. It's like, look, you get the work, you're doing the work good. You're just not actually collecting the money that you are deserved. Fixing. That's pretty easy. Do you have QuickBooks set up right now or not?

No, no, no. This is bad.

Technically all you really need to do is have, have several cookbooks, have someone doing the transactions for you.

Right.

And you could even just like check on it once a month, but it's really. So you have a P and L. At the end of the month, we can actually know what the numbers are. It's not just based on like money in the bank or like, you know, if we're too busy.

It's just kind of whimsical.

Like, you know, it's maybe $50 per month for him to get a subscription, set up his bank account, set up his credit cards, and start tracking transactions as they come in so he can have a solid profit and loss statement as well as a balance sheet. To know exactly how much is in accounts receivable, how much is actually in the bank account, we've got to know our numbers. And if we don't know our numbers, we're flying blind. As we grow past $500,000. We can't be flying blind if it's.

A one time customer that, you know, we're not on like a recurring, you know, mowing schedule with. Definitely, definitely, definitely want to make sure that we're getting that money one time. Mowings and stuff. It's half the time or more that you'll do, you know, 40, $50 long. You reach out for payment. Nothing.

When we look at the 4L framework, liquidity being the first constraint or cash in the bank, right Now Jack has $6,000 in the bank. He has $30,000 in overdue invoices or accounts receivable. Fancy words for people I did work for and they did not pay me. If we could just collect on Those invoices, we would 5x the amount of money we have in the bank.

I only send out one monthly invoice for mowing, mostly from the perspective of like inputting payments. But we do still accept Venmo and cash Ave. So putting in, you know, $30, $40, $50 payments for every single lawn job for me, unfortunately, I just don't. That would take up so much of my time of like getting other things done. One of my biggest problems always is, you know, keeping track of the numbers. I don't want to have to manually input 150 payments every week. There's not a lot of time, you know, when am I going to find the time to do that? That's why I've just pushed to let's just do one, one monthly mowing invoice. And for the most part that's been fine in the springtime. That hurts in April because we don't have any revenue from March.

Really. Have you thought about changing the payment terms?

For me, it's always an awkward conversation with homeowners. When everything's all done, it's like, all right man, roll me my check. Where's my money?

One thing to kind of fix that is just requiring when they accept the.

Estimate that they have a card on.

File or ach, Right. Because then you can actually still at.

The end of the job, like, yeah, you're great, fantastic.

You don't feel that pressure. But then you can get back to.

The office and clear, click, run that credit card.

And so right now are you getting cards on file for every single estimate?

As of right now, I'm not getting cards on file for everything that we do. There's an inherent value in having that money now instead of a month from now. So that's gonna be probably the biggest obstacle to jump over to start instilling. Right credit cards on file for all of our mowing customers. I can at least send out an email, like just a bulk email to all my customers saying like, hey, you know, they won't do it, but they won't do It.

That's the problem. You got leverage. When you're there saying, I want service, you have leverage and say, great, I just need your car information.

You have no leverage.

Once the job has been done, you.

Walked off, everything is.

They're happy and like, oh, well, I can just put this off as long as possible or wait until there's a lien on my house.

And that's the problem with, like, existing customers too. It's like, well, we've been doing this for six years the other way. Why I can't. Why do I have to put a card on file?

So one way to do it. Them. So I would say for now, like, just get new people that are accepting card information. It. But how you can get existing customers is bake it into your next price increase. So, for example, what you could do.

Is you could say, hey, our prices are going up.

But if you're willing to put your car on files to help our cash flow, your. Your price will stay the same. Look, if someone really wants to pay cash, I'll charge an extra $10 per cut.

Yeah, right.

Everyone's price is going up. Unless you follow this link and put your car information on file, your price.

Price will not change. Now you'll get, instead of 5 or 10% of people putting their car on, they'll be like 80% to put their car up on file because they don't want to have a price increase. So you have some leverage. So that might be helpful.

I think so. I think that's a. That's a good plan. That's. That's gonna be probably the biggest obstacle to jump over to, to start instilling. Right. Credit cards on file for all of our mowing customers. That would fix our cash flow, really. Especially this time of year. I'm. I'm game. And I'll pay that 3% on credit cards every day of the week to. To save that time. Yeah. And just have money in the bank.

It's worth.

It's worth it.

Yeah.

And then if we do that, if we do that, because, like, technically I.

Think we could get there in six weeks. Like, if you hit capacity, raise the prices, slash, get a card on file and then switch to weekly billing, where we're not sending them invoice, we're just charging their card at the end of the month. They can get. You could send them an invoice of, like, the last four visits paid. But, like, ultimately, hey, you're on weekly billing. We have your car on file. You're getting charged every week. And if you have questions, log into your customers portal. That one would really hinge on getting the cards on file. Most customers give them the option they want to pay at the end. The thing is, we don't want to be chasing them for money.

It's nice for the customer to just say, oh yeah, just pay me in 30 days. But for me and for my guys and like, just the business in general, it's just. It starts hurting after a while. I realized this was a problem. I mean, it's always been a problem. But this year I was like, we need to do something different on our estimates almost immediately.

We can change our payment terms. So like going instead of 30 days, it's overdue, it's do with after seven days. After seven days, we're charging fees. What do you think is fair? Like from a surcharge perspective, overdues is like, can you do 1% a week or would you rather just do like, if it's over seven days, you get charged 10 bucks. Like, what's the easiest for you? Because I don't want to complicate it.

Yeah, no percentage would probably be the best.

Let's do the overdue fees for now, 1% every week. But the very first thing we'll have to do because you can't do like on old invoices is change it on your estimate. Like your terms and conditions.

Yeah.

So on the terms and conditions, saying, hey, it's due within seven days. After that, you'll be charged 1% per week as an overdue fee.

I don't even want to have to get to seven days because I'm also getting a card on file and getting deposits before big projects. I've got to collect that money before big projects so I can go buy the materials and pay for my labor. And I'm going to require a card on file so they don't ever have the option of not paying me right when that job is done, I'm charging their card. And that's why at Copilot, we make sure that before the customer even accepts the estimate and you get notified, you're getting a card on file, a deposit is paid, and then you get an accepted estimate. Then I know I will never, ever have overdue invoices.

I kind of see that as the biggest constraint right now from liquidity perspective is we have $30,000 overdue. It's already work. We've done A big chunk of it's from the snow plowing that like was done in February. The people who are at $10,000 overdue like, man, I'd be harassing them. The fast thing is like just changing your payment terms. So, like having it where it's seven days after seven days to get fees.

There'S no punishment for, you know, paying later. Then like, what's the point, right?

I think that one's pretty easy. Realistically, do I think you're getting cards on file this year? Probably not. But like, it should, it should be the goal.

And in the perfect world, you'd start.

Just requiring for every new customer. And then we'd switch to weekly billing and we would not be sending invoices. So, like no invoice monthly.

I don't want to be waiting an entire month to get collecting on the payment of the work I did on the 1st, the 2nd or the 3rd of the month. I don't want to wait till next month. I want to get that money as soon as possible. The next constraint in the 4L framework is leads. And right now Jack Mac is super busy during spring, throughout the summer and the fall. It's during the off season, during his winter when revenue is dropping off a cliff.

And then in terms of the winter, we kind of went in the winter with like 40,000 in the bank. Now it's lower. Was that a function of just less work? Was it a function? I know we got into snow plowing. What was sort of your idea going into winter?

Winter is a bottleneck. In November, a few companies reached out to me to do snow commercially. Never did that before when I told them that I could do it because I was thinking, well, we need to do something in the wintertime. Having that would at least help revenue a little bit. But I'm saying that with no plows for trucks, no nothing, determining the best.

Opportunity when it comes to off season revenue, adding service, et cetera, you want to be careful because Jeff Bezos says this really good quote, and that is the level of your focus is determined by the size of opportunities that you say no to. And so if you're focused on your landscaping business, maybe it's a good idea. You say no to a lot of the other good opportunities. They're good. You could have a million dollar snowplowing business, you could have a million dollar painting business, but you're not going to do all of those things at the same time.

I had to put some money into buying just kind of a junkie plow truck and another plow for Charlie, the other truck, that was 12 grand. Probably that's the problem with snow. The truck was not great, but it was seven grand needed some work, like thousand dollars worth of work. And, and we only use it for three storms and some salt and stuff.

We got a box truck we don't use. We got Charlie that, you know, he's on his last legs.

We gotta put him out.

He's got one foot in the grave.

One foot in the grave.

We gotta put him out to pasture. So we're gonna get rid of that. If you're gonna focus on growing the existing business and fully utilizing the assets you have, I would first focus on services that I can offer with my existing trucks, my existing equipment, my existing employees before I start thinking about new and shiny services.

Options I can offer my customers.

But that's not fun and exciting.

It's more exciting. Buy a brand new snowplow. Yes, it is a good opportunity. It is not to say that snow plowing is a bad opportunity. I am a big fan. Is it also the opportunity we should be facing when we have low cash for not using our. All of our trucks and we have equipment that's sitting there that could be used to do other things during the off season? I do not think so. It sn a few times. Do you think we made decent on that?

There was like some, some profit to it, but not, not a lot. It just doesn't quite snow enough here to really like, ramp up a actual snow operation. I feel like, like in this market.

You can do winter service services. I know that. And that is where we're gonna focus on trimming bushes, hauling away debris, doing property cleanups, leaf cleanups throughout the off season. I don't need snow plowing. Now. If you were under snow for three months of the year, I would change my mind on this. But in this market, I don't need the snow plowing to fix Q4 collapse and get off season revenue. Have you ever tried doing winter services? Right now you probably have 100 recurring customers. Have you ever tried to sell them into a recurring maintenance package throughout the winter?

We have 20 or 25 customers that are on an actual, you know, annual maintenance contract stuff. They pay us a deposit in the, in the springtime. We just take care of all their. Their stuff throughout the the year. We don't do too much for them in the wintertime, but we do have some customers that we will come by and do some cleanup work and that kind of thing. But we should push that stuff more.

And yes, I know it's the middle of spring, but we've got to start thinking about it now because you could put it on the estimate notes. You start mentioning it to customers and actually talk about the value of having year round service and saving on their leaf cleanup, spring cleanup next season. We've got a plan for an email, a text message to be sent out to all of our customers explaining the value of winter services. So we don't this massive drop in revenue come this fall, this one is.

Really going to come down to how you sell it. Like you can literally just only get 5 to 10% of people.

If you're like, hey, this is a.

New thing and let us know if you want it, it's got to be like, this is what we're doing and.

We'Re going to roll straight into winch.

Services unless you let us know. So you say, hey, like, hey, if you don't want us to continue service after, you know, November, you know, let us know and we'll pick you back up in March.

The difference between getting 5 or 10% of his customers to opt into winter services versus getting 50 to 70% of them to use winter services is going to be simply how he sells the service. If he just tells the customer, hey, we got this winter service thing and if you want the service, let me know, he's not going to get a lot of customers. Instead he's going to actually pitch the value to the customer because of the new service. They're not used to this. He's going to have to sell them on the fact they actually save money in comparison to having a fall and a spring cleanup and their property is going to look good year round for us.

I'll actually have my general manager's contact every, every single mowing customer and just be every single one. Hey, just by the way, this is what the price is going to be. It's the same as your regular mowing price. Here's all the stuff we're going to do for you. It'll take you a week to contact 100 people, right. But if you retain 50, 60, 70% of your revenue from mowing going into your off season, it'd be huge.

I mean, that's huge.

I just want you to think about like, how's that going to roll out? When am I going to do that? Potentially even plan like an email. We make a video for our customers. We like explaining it and we showed them the price breakdown and how much they're going to save. Like the more you can plan for it, the more likely in September you.

Actually pull the trigger. Yeah, I think that's a, that's a good idea for the winter for sure. Our Customer base is kind of funny. We have everything from like your twin or row home small houses to two, $3 million houses up on the main line we call it here. I think we can get some. Obviously like the lower end clientele probably won't be very interested in it, but some of, some of the higher end people might be interested in just, you know, keeping their house clean. They like to flex on each other. So we can take that as an advantage to ourselves. Being able to just use all the stuff that we already have and do winter services I think would be huge.

The next constraint in the 4L framework is labor. And honestly I don't think Jack Mac has a huge constraint here. From a labor perspective, I think you have a pretty solid team.

I don't see that as a current constraint like to the business.

He has a great team and a lot of them have been with him for a year, two or even more. And I don't actually address this as a issue in the business cuz he could easily grow past 5, 600,000 with his current team.

Last year was a really good improvement. I'm super thrilled. It's just raising the prices is huge. Getting rid of a couple of the trucks, getting some clarity on that. I do think there's so much room just like fix some of these overdue things and then fix offseason.

If we do that, we'll go into next spring.

The goal really for in my opinion is going to next offseason with 40 grand. Your bank. That's it?

Yeah.

Instead of five grand, six grand.

We're struggling after coming into April. If we can go into next year with 40, 50 grand, that's what sets you up to go to 700,000 in 2026.

That's what was so nice about last year. After raising prices, I just consistently kept 30, 40 grand in the bank. So it's a peace of mind thing where if something goes wrong, it's not like I'm trying to scrape together $500 to fix a mower or something.

You're not reactive based upon the fact there's no money.

And I'm feeling that again now, now. And it's like I'm not doing this again. I'm not doing this again.

It's been a unfortunate, very rough spring and it's mostly, it's mostly weather related. It's been raining so much. I mean that, that just messes up everything. You send the guys out and then it dumps rain for, you know, two, three hours. So then we're already out there. Let's just wait it out for a second. So then you're just paying dues to sit around for a while. And that has happened just time and time again. It just kills, like, it kills profitability, like, entirely. Right. Because you're just paying due. So just stand around and wait. Unfortunately, that's been the gist of things.

And.

And then the days where we can work, it's catching up with everything and working 12, 14 hours just like, crazy. So, like, it's like a snowball effect, right? Like, you're already behind. Now you have a bunch of customers reaching out, asking where you are. So then you have to stop what you're doing and stop progress towards getting jobs done to, you know, answer all your emails, answer all your text messages from customers saying, all right, we'll be there when we can. It's just been kind of a frustrating, you know, May and now into June, we're still getting a lot of rain.

So, you know, that is unfortunately kind of taken up most of my time, and I haven't been able to implement a lot of the things that we've talked about really much at all. It's been really just a keep up with the work of what we had in the springtime. I'm hoping that, you know, things calm down a little bit here in June, July, August, typically not as rainy for us. Usually we can, you know, catch up on a lot of the work that we need to get done. Like, we've gotten into our project season now. This is where we're doing all of our hardscaping work and our artificial turf installs and that kind of thing. And that stuff has been great.

Like, we.

We are busier with that than we ever have been. It would be nice to have.

Another either. Another crew doing landscaping work, but I think. I think actually.

More a better plan actually for for now would be to raise prices and kind of lower, you know, because we're. We're totally at capacity. Like, we're working crazy, you know, full, full schedules all the time.

I think it's. It's due time for a little, little price increase so we can get, you know, increase profitability, maybe lose a few customers that aren't as great. We can only take on so much work, right? Yeah, for sure.

That.

That's one of the biggest things that, that I'm excited for. For what Mike and I were talking about is right try and really push winter services, keeping everyone's, you know, properties clean through the winter. Keep, you know, keep my guys busy enough.

Yeah, I wish I wish I had.

Better news for you. Like, oh, yeah, we've implemented everything and everything is great. But, like, like, you know, we've. How do I say this fully? We've gotten shafted this winter. I mean, this springtime, it's the easiest way. That's the best way I can say it.