FIRING EMPLOYEES to Save His $250K Landscaping Business
YouTube coaching session where Mike Andes audits Eric Vasquez’s Knoxville-based lawn-care business (Newgrounds Lawn Care). Mike diagnoses core constraints (labor, pricing, lack of budgeted hours/job notes, weak systems) and proposes a six-week growth plan: sell winter services to customers, capture budget-hour data, create service pages, implement job notes/videos in the CRM, and prepare a price increase (15–20%) to reach sustainable profitability and a $500K revenue target with two trucks. Key context: business projects ~$250K this year, ~110 recurring customers, ~50% gross margin that depends on the owner working in-field, owner mortgage ≈ $3,000/month, and current effective hourly rate ~ $50–60 if counted against budgeted hours.
Questions this video answers
Approximately $250,000.
About 110 customers.
Approximately $3,000 per month.
About 50% gross margin (includes owner labor).
Approximately $50–60 per hour (some jobs as low as ~$40/hr).
Chapters
You thinking 15% raise?
Oh, at least.
Oh, my God.
Today we're in Tennessee visiting Eric with.
New grounds lawn care.
I feel comfortable with my ability to train someone to do quality service.
The business will make $250,000 this year.
If it's not gonna die, I'm gonna grow it. I want it to be sustainable.
You're kind of speaking at both sides of your mouth.
But Eric's star employee left, forcing him.
To work seven days a week. Go ahead.
Hey, what's the good news?
You're probably gonna have to lay off both your team members.
Getting too comfortable. It sucks. Bit off way more than I can chew. Ended up flipping my dump trailer on the side of the interstate.
He recently got married.
The wife's acting like we haven't seen each other. I was like, what do you mean? We see each other at night, every.
Night, and bought a house.
I was just, like, playing around. But now I'm like, okay, I got a wife and a house, and I gotta dial in.
He doesn't know his numbers.
I've only been looking at it, like, once every couple months. Just like, okay, we haven't lost money.
I'm not even looking at that number because right now, your numbers are all over the place. We don't even have a clue.
And I found out he's only making $50 an hour.
Can't keep growing at 50 to 55 dol.
This is the business turnaround show.
My name is Mike Andes.
I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care. We have over 190 locations around the world. I travel the country fixing struggling businesses.
You're like, hey, I need $500,000 a year. I believe you can actually do that with two or three employees.
Our goal is to give Eric a strategy to turn around the company in the next six weeks.
Eric Vasquez.
Hi, my name is Eric Vasquez. I'm in the Knoxville area. We've got, like, one employ, maybe three. If I'm including people, I just work part time, but very unsustainable with just about every single one of them. I've been working, like, seven days a week.
This is always where solo operators get stuck because they realize that if they don't work in the field, they don't make any money. And if they don't not work in the field, they'll never grow their business.
Gross margin. I saw we're doing about 50%, and that's with me in the field. I'm worried that if I step out of the field, then that will be suppressed.
Whenever you're a solo operator or someone with maybe one or two employees, it's very easy to have high profit margins because you're out in the field working. So one thing he stated that was very true is he has 50% gross margins. However, that includes him working in the field. So if you take that out, he is almost no profit.
I just got married and I have a house. So there's a $3,000 payment right there.
On the P and L. It says there's $40,000 of profit, but that's without him taking any payroll. His monthly payment on his house that he just got when he got married is $3,000 a month. So if you just his mortgage from the. The net profit of the business, there's no money here. Zilch, nada. I have a feeling this turnaround will go much more in the direction of speaking kind of to quote, quote, unquote, like, younger version of me and, like, how to deal with, like, him just getting married and juggling attention and stuff like that. I have a feeling, but I don't know, man. Good morning.
Absolutely.
So this is your dad's place?
No, this is my house.
Oh, really?
Just got it in August. Yeah, my dad's place is. Is a lot. Has a lot bigger, a lot more house. I just moved in here in February. Yeah, I was. Yeah, I was at my dad's house, and then I just bought a house in August in the garage. Just loading up and out every day. Sometimes, whenever I was lazy at my dad's house, I was able to pull the entire trailer into the garage so I didn't have to unload. And that was nice. But this is a better alternative. This is my 1.0 vehicle for the most. The Ridgeline. Yeah, the Ridgeline. Oh, you have no idea. That thing's got 250,000 plus miles on it.
I've heard good things about them. You can't tow a ton, but, like.
I've towed too much with it. Far too much. The trailer and all the equipment stays at the shop.
All right.
We got glasses, gloves in the truck. I brought those AirPods, but that left one's still missing that cushion. Well, you have some. Some plugs in there? All right, We've got it all in there.
When y' all move in here, you said July?
August, actually.
Oh, so just recently?
No, last year.
Oh, last year.
We did the floors, got that renov, got a bathroom taken care of, and we're just slowly, like, kind of doing a live and flip sort of situation.
When y' all get married.
We got married in August. This past month? Yeah.
Oh, it was like, a month ago.
Yeah.
Oh, dude.
Let's go. Congrats.
It's better in every way. I mean, it's just, like, now it's real, you know? I mean, before I was able to just kind of, like, not really struggle, I was just, like, out here just mowing yards and playing around. But now I'm like, okay, I got a wife and a house, and I gotta dial in. I'm realizing now that, like, I'm not giving her the attention and the time that she deserves. Cause I'm always, like, thinking about the business whenever I'm with family or with her.
The challenging part is the business needs all of his attention to grow. So then also add in the financial pressure. Owning a house that basically sucks all the profit of the business. And then also, at the same time, getting married to someone that you also need to invest time into. Like, you're investing time and energy and money in a place that you don't have. You don't have anything to spend. I really empathize with those sort of people because, like, right when you need to be giving your time and energy to someone else, the business is also, like, completely sucking it all from you as well. And so it can be very debilitating, honestly.
Give me a little bit of a background.
So I know you went to college and then decided, hey, that's not for me. Started, kept doing the lawn care thing. How long were you doing the lawn? Because that kind of paid your way through college.
It did. I still have a little bit of college debt, like, about less than ten grand now. Went through college because my. My parents really pushed me. Had some sense of security going through college, and graduated and was in that position with an internship. I had an internship at a development corporation as an analyst. And once my internship was over, they, like, came with the offer for the job, and, like, they offered, like, 75 or something like that. And I was thinking, oh, man, I made that in revenue, so I might as well, you know, I'm making the same amount, but I'd rather see what I could do with this than do something in finance. I don't think about it as a backup plan. You know, if it failed, I just start over, you know.
When did you kind of determine, like, hey, let's like, scale it up? Is that last year, whenever I left.
That internship, I decided to go full time and, like, start thinking about expanding and everything. But the first year, the focus was like, let's get our service like dial in, make sure that we're good before we start really, like, promoting too hard. I remember the first year I got that smallest mower up front. I had a customer asking me if I sharpened my blades and I was like, what do you mean, sharpen blades? Like, this thing's a commercial mower. What do you mean? I didn't know anything about cutting grass or maintaining any machines whatsoever, dude.
I was the same way. I didn't know you needed to sharpen the blades at the beginning. I don't think we sharpened our blades from the time I was like 11 years old to probably like 14 or 15, dude, like a few years.
I'm not joking.
I'm not joking. I think the only time they ever got sharpened is like we changed the oil at the dealership. Like we had them change the oil and they would sharpen the blades.
But I never knew you needed to do that.
Now that I got to a position where I feel comfortable with my ability to train someone to do like quality service, but turnover rate and everything, it's just been, it's been killer. This season.
The foil framework shows the four different.
Reasons why every home service business will stop growing.
The first reason is because of a.
Lack of liquidity or cash in the bank. Second reason, a lack of leads, then.
A lack of labor or a lack of leadership.
From your perspective, like, I know you want to grow the business bigger, but like, what, what's kind of the goal size and what are you trying to kind of shoot for this season?
I like to be 2, 250, maybe more depending on what I decide to do. Like in the, in the off season, once we get to like, I'm thinking around 500,000, we can start doing a little more like project based stuff. I would like to have a good foundation of something recurring just so that I can kind of that dependability that comes throughout the season. Kind of something that can cover my inevitable mistakes and breaking things and losses and all that. Because I will, I always do that. You know, I bit off way more than I can chew this past February and ended up flipping my dump trailer on the side of the interstate. Truck didn't flip. We were able to salvage all the, all the material that was in there. Had a good physics lesson about how to load a trailer. We broke even on that job. Took a week. So that, that was nice to not be in the hole.
Where do you see the constraint for growth? Like, why are we not doing 500,000 this year? Because you're like on top of like 250.
The main constraint was labor, the inability to step out of the field and focus on like sales. I thought I had the capacity, the asset capacity to be able to run two crews. All I need is another trailer and then I can just have two crews going at the same time. Maybe doing like 75 yards a week. I wasn't able to get that first full crew without, you know, things happening all the time. So.
And you got the first full crew. That's when you had to kind of like, you're a really great employee.
Yeah.
That was like basically your right hand kind of doing all that.
I had a guy working like 55, 60 hours a week and he was an 18 year old kid that was my crew lead. He was, he was a go getter. We always joke about like, who can tap who out, you know, and we would just see who can work the longest. But I was just like, he's gonna die if we keep doing this. So once he was gone, kind of just, you know, threw me right back in and I was like, oh man.
So when did you hire like a second employee? Is that just the most recent?
The second guy that's a crew member today, just riding along. He was hired like. Yeah, the same, the same week they were both hired.
Oh really? Okay.
Yeah. Today is actually going to be the first day that we're letting this crew lead operate without me. So I'm a little nervous.
And then. So you just recently have lost the one that was like your crew lead?
Yeah, got it. Now that he's gone, I'm fully in the mowing truck. So now I've been in the field since the first week of August.
What's sort of like your training, like hiring process right now? Is it coming through? Indeed. What's the kind of the interview process look like?
It's indeed. I have a handful of questions that I, that I ask. It's like 15 questions and then once that's over, I decide whether or not that's something I want to follow through with. I like to do an in field training, especially towards this summer, because I was like, I need somebody yesterday. So I would just throw them in the truck. And then if it worked out, I'd let him stay. But that seemed to not work out. We lost projects and jobs because we weren't able to get there. And that was very unfortunate. That was very stressful.
And so were you just burning through people or were you not able to find anyone to apply or what was kind of the constraint there?
Was I. No, I was kind of like just going through interviews and stuff and people wouldn't show up. 60% of people just won't show up. I thought I could find somebody like him, just replace him, but it's been tough.
What was your highest peak revenue month this year then?
It's been around 20s all year.
How has it been in terms of just like tracking the numbers? Like, is that this year you started doing that?
Yeah, Jobber. This year is my first. It's my first season with that. I was tracking numbers on QuickBooks for the most part. But at this point this season, I've been looking at QuickBooks other than other than just to do payroll, I've only been looking at it like once every couple months, you know, just like, okay, we haven't lost money, you know.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay, cool. And like right now, from a liquidity perspective, from what I saw in terms of the balance sheet, you know, assuming that's correct, there's not like a cash crazy crunch. It's not like we're struggling like payroll. Am I wrong in that? Like, is that balance sheet correct or is there enough capital to kind of like we're a month worth of revenue or so?
Yeah, there's not a crunch with paying payroll at all. Now we do have a little bit of fixed expenses like insurance. Well, we had that already, but now it's a little higher with this new truck. And now we have this unit and a parking spot over there. But otherwise we're still pretty lean.
Right now there's not much of a lack of liquidity or cash because he has over one month of revenue in.
The bank, about 20, 25 thousand dollars per month.
Ultimately, this means we're primed to be able to grow the business and afford that.
Assuming that's what he wants, I'd say.
The constraint personally is time. You know, I'm always in the field, and I'd say that's kind of a concern of mine, being that I'm in the field so much that, you know, if I stepped out, maybe there would be more of a crunch because I'm not generating the revenue that I am now. At this point, being an operator, an owner operator, it's easy to not reach that liquidity constraint because you're generating the revenue.
I agree with you. Like, if you take out your contribution in terms of labor, that's when the business looks pretty skinny.
Yeah, right.
And so as long as you're out in the field working, it works. If you had like no cash bank, I'd be like, hey, you should actually stay in the field and optimize for that so you can get some money set aside. But given the fact that you have enough cash and you want to grow, I think we can default more aggressive and focus on sales and leads, et cetera.
I think I've heard at one of the conferences something about up to 500,000. You should be like an operator. And I like that idea of staying in the field until then. I think about, man, I should be selling a lot of times during the spring because I'd get 10 calls in a day and I just have to step off the mower, walk away, take the call. And I'm just like, man, this could have been better if I just didn't have to worry about operations so much.
The nice thing is that you have a little bit of a cushion in terms of cash to where we can do that. Because right now without your labor, the business is basically break even.
If a business has no debt and has at least one month of revenue, I'd give it the green light because it has enough liquidity to go get more leads to grow the business.
Right now on your website, are you building your site? Do you have someone else making your site?
I built it a few years ago. I just change a little bit every once in a while, but there's not much on it.
There's a few things you could really do to improve it. Like you have decent number of reviews, like 53 or so on Google. So right now you have one service page with them all listed. Just simply make that to where it is. Like Newgrounds Lawn is a newgrounds lawn.
Care.Com newground lawn care.
Yeah, yeah, slash corporation slash lawn care slash landscaping and use ChatGPT to give you the text for those pages and a couple pictures of your crew doing that work. Service pages alone will help just with SEO and the fact that like that is what the search engines are crawling is that URL I want to get.
Started like today on the website stuff. I feel like I could knock that out just tonight From a pricing perspective.
What is kind of your hourly rate currently?
Like to say 70 something.
And right now how far are you booked out? Like as of right now do you have like two or three weeks work to worth of projects and stuff? Are you like projects?
Yeah, I'd say we have about two weeks but I told them like I don't know when I'm going to be able to get to this at this point, you know.
Got it.
All right.
And so you're, you're kind of two weeks project booked out yeah, kind of. And so if you got like another employee that was really good, you have the two trucks, is that correct?
Yeah.
If you were like, hey, labor is a constraint, can't find good people. If you've got another person, would that allow you to go focus more on sales?
I kind of don't want another employee because going into the end of the mowing season, I'd like to have a crew of two, especially at my revenue size. If I could just have those two running without me, I can go do projects by myself.
Got so them doing the mowing, you do projects which is like kind of gravy on top and then be able to sprinkle in estimates throughout the day, etc. Yeah, okay, got it.
I like the idea of having a two crew going next year. It's just a matter of I have to get a few things like asset wise, need another trailer and probably another mower. But outside of that, just the people getting the people on board right now.
Like the business is doing decent. And honestly, like a lot of the things that you're, you're struggling with are just kind of like a feature, not a bug of going from solo operator into sort of the working gm, which is you kind of in the field kind of being doing estimates and admin and juggling the non operational stuff. These ones remind me so much of when I first got started and how painful it was. I can very much feel their pain. And it's so I was like, yep, you're on the right path. Just keep doing what you're doing, dude, it's gonna stink for a bit. It's a pretty relatively normal thing to be in that transition period. I think your pricing is pretty low. If you actually track the numbers against budget hours, your rate's probably even lower than 70.
Really?
It's probably 55 to 60.
Really?
Especially. Cause you have three people in the truck. Like that will bring down a mowing crew a lot. Because every single time you stop, all three of you don't finish at the same time. There's inherently more waste at every single stop. There's a few minutes every single time that you all are not matching up at the exact same moment. And on small lawns you're like, okay, one person weed wax, maybe someone else, someone else push mows in the backyard while someone else, like it never ends at the same time. And so there's a lot of waste when you have a three man crew. And I know you tried pay for performance and it kind of fell flat because like 60% of your revenue was going to wages. And so when I see 60% of revenue going to wages, it's a function of either a inefficient labor. So people are just ditto dallying, which if you were on the truck, probably wasn't happening. So immediately, I know this is a pricing problem.
Yeah, definitely. That's. That's why I was mentioning I'm sitting on a lot of people that could go up in prices on. But I'm thinking it's the end of the season, you know, they're gonna just drop if I do. But kind of wanted to get to like 125 and increase like maybe 15%, hoping that I lose maybe 10, 10 people or so.
So then, then this function of. This is what always happens. It's like, I got capacity.
Great.
That means we actually have a leads problem.
Yeah.
Because if you've got enough leads, you were drowning in leads, and you have so much work coming in, you would immediately raise your prices because you hit capacity. And so as much as like, well, I don't really need leads. And like, I got good now, like, in order to be able to raise your price, you'll need enough leads to fill capacity. So get another 15 to 20 more customers.
Now, when it comes to leads, he's not doing any advertising or really any marketing. And so I want to be able to do that as soon as possible so that we can get to capacity of about 125 customers. And once we get there, we'll be able to raise profit prices.
When was the last time you raised prices?
I don't know. Maybe a year ago, Two, maybe.
Okay. And was that to a lot of your existing customers or a lot of just, like, past people you don't even serve?
It was to a few of the existing customers. It wasn't.
It wasn't across the board.
I actually went down in the price, which is terrible, terrible idea. I went down, like 50%. So not my brightest moment.
If you're pro growth, you don't raise prices right now. You wait till next spring until you're actually at capacity.
That's what I wanted to do, but then I was thinking, like, my capacity is fluctuating all the time.
Labor capacity, it doesn't fluctuate. What does fluctuate is whether or not you know how many budget hours you can actually complete.
Budgeted hours is how long you think.
The job is supposed to take, and.
That'S usually what you base the pricing on.
You're gonna burn out employees too. Cause some weeks they're working crazy amounts of hours. Other weeks it's like, oh, we're getting early off on Friday. Like that will burn people out very quickly. And that's only a function of knowing what our capacity is and how many budget hours you complete. Like it's a math game. Yeah, if someone works 40 hours in a week, they complete 30 budget hours. I have 90 budget hours on the schedule. I need three full time employees. And so if one of them drops out, that means we're all working overtime. Like budget hours is the lens to make sure that there's not the peaks and the valleys overtime sometimes. And sometimes we don't have enough work on the schedule. And then like I'm scrambling for next week. The way out of that is understanding budgeted hours.
I was using a software that didn't have any sort of tracking anything. You can't clock in on a job. So I didn't know how long we were spending at jobs. I mean, kind of did in my head, but outside of that was just kind of guesswork.
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Go check it out. The reason I need to know budgeted hours is I'll be able to look a week, two weeks, three weeks ahead and know exactly how much work is on the schedule and whether or not my crew is going to be fully utilized to max capacity or if there's room to schedule other projects or take on more customers.
And so if we take all of your prices and just divide it by a number 70, we'd actually come with how many budget hours are on the schedule based upon how much work we sold. Do you have it pulled up or you cannot.
No, I couldn't get it.
One really fast way to do it because you're mostly doing labor. Like you don't have a ton of projects, do you?
Not right now, no.
Like you can literally take your whole week. If you're not have budget hours, take the amount of revenue that's on the schedule, divide it by a number like just call it 70 and kind of come up with how many budget hours you have on the schedule.
In my Opinion. If I'm having someone work full time, 40 clocked hours. If I have 30 budget hours on the schedule, and I take my efficiency score, which is budget hours, in this case, 30 per week, divided by clocked hours, which is 40 per week, that imputes a 75% efficiency score. In other words, 75% of their day is actually spent out on the job doing the work. If that number's under 70% bad, very inefficient crew. Our goal is to get above 90, which means most of their day, 9 out of 10 minutes is spent doing work on the schedule, doing work on the actual property, making money.
I think you could probably get away with raising all your prices across the board.
What about the few that are definitely priced pretty well?
Okay, there's a few. That's the difference between, like, let's raise prices on 10 or 15 versus let's not raise prices on 10 or 15.
Okay, yeah, that's fair.
So if you. If you had a list of 110, if you want to mark off 10, they're like, these are great. I know, they're really good money makers. Great, let's leave those. But I would say everyone else, we could raise prices on. And I think what's going to happen is you're probably going to lose a team member and need to do this anyways.
Going into the off season, I needed to do that like a few weeks ago really bad. But I was like, if I just push through, someone's gonna come in and sort of alleviate that constraint.
Well, that's the tough part right now. When you have two employees, one of them leaves and immediately 33% drop in how much revenue you can produce. And if you get a new employee immediately, like 50% jump in how much revenue you can produce. Cause it goes from two people to now a third person, it's 50% jump. So like, that seesaw of like two to three employees in the field is difficult because if one person leaves, you're immediately open, overbooked. If one person joins, you're immediately like, under booked. It's very difficult to be in that stage.
Yeah.
When you have a small business that has one, two, three employees, one employee joining increases capacity so much. Losing one employee can literally put you way behind schedule. So it's a very volatile stage. So he went into last spring rush thinking, oh, I'm gonna grow.
And he got all these door hangers.
And all of a sudden he's overwhelmed with work.
Why not?
Because he got too many customers. Because one employee left. So going from him and two employees to then losing one, essentially cut how many jobs he can get done in a week by 33%. So now all of a sudden he's way behind. So he wasn't able to actually execute on all the door hangers. When you're at two, three employees, it's not a bad idea for everyone to work a few less hours per week and have one extra employee just in case if someone left, we can at least get the work done and maybe work 42 or 43 hours per person.
It's rare that I would say with your amount of liquidity and you wanting to grow to go raise price prices. If we spent some time on leads and like you selling actual like corporation actually doing that, you get to capacity very quickly. I think you're afraid to go out hard on the leads because if one of your guys left, you'd be completely overbooked like you were a month ago.
Most definitely. Yeah. It's a little easier to deal with not enough hours on the schedule right now than it was. Like, we can't finish these jobs even if we all like redlined ourselves.
Okay, well, this is cool. Eric is like, you're not telling me, hey, I need a five million dollar business and I gotta grow and expand this thing. You're like, hey, I need $500,000 a year. Because I believe you can actually do that with two or three employees. You're just gonna have to be a premium service and not making 50 bucks an hour.
I think Eric is in a great spot to grow this business. And in the next 12 months, there's absolutely no reason why you can't take two trucks and run a $500,000 business. Have him and one new employee, along with another crew of two employees. That's three employees and Eric making $500,000 in annual revenue being very, very profitable. You don't have to grow a million dollar business. I truly believe he, he can make easily 100, $150,000 in owner's distributions and be working part time in the field and the rest of the time working on the sales. That's a great business. To be able to have just two trucks, low overhead, very profitable. I like it.
You're thinking 15% raise?
Oh, at least.
Oh my God.
Because I know if you raise prices by 20% across the board, you would probably lose five to 10 customers.
It would hurt my feelings as 10 people. I'd be like, wow, really?
Yeah. But you're going to make twice as much profit.
Yeah, that's fair.
The reason got to raise prices is because even though he's okay from a cash perspective, he won't be okay from.
A cash perspective and a liquidity perspective.
If down the road he scales this, because right now he's not making much per hour. And the only reason he is profitable is because he's working 60, 70 hours out in the field seven days a week. As long as a solo operator is out in the field doing the work, it's very easy to be profitable because you're generating so much revenue for the business. When you get off the truck and you're no longer generating revenue, you're now an overhead, experience, expense. And if he wants to scale this business, he's going to have to focus on sales, he's going to have to focus on admin. He's not going to be able to do as much operation and actually revenue generation. So to scale the business, we've got to create systems in place and a pricing model that works even if the owner is not working on the truck.
If the goal is to grow quickly, wouldn't it be a good strategy to keep it low?
And then so you're kind of speaking on both sides of your mouth, right? You're saying, okay, I don't really want to get too many jobs. And I see this fear of getting more leads and if someone leaves, then I'm dead. There's definitely two roads you can go here. One is we raise prices, we make this much more manageable. I just tend to believe that, like right now you have more stress by getting more leads because you're almost stressed that if one person leaves, this all is gonna like, be right back on your plate. You working seven days a week.
So look, right now, this month, go up on mowing pricing.
I'm asking like, what's more important to you? He was a little indecisive in terms of what he wanted in terms of his goal, because it's difficult because I don't want to just tell someone what to do. I want them to be like, what's your goal goal? And how can I get you close to that? But I was like, do you want.
To be in profit mode?
Yeah, let's go to your patience.
Like, no, I want to grow.
Like, oh, we're in growth mode. He was very open to anything I said. I didn't know which way to push him because we can gas this.
I'm fine gassing it.
Okay.
I don't think I'm at my physical capacity. Although, like, time wise, I could spend less time on it. Operationally, but I'm not there, like physically, you know, I could do more, but I think with this guy in the field, it would open me up to be able to, to sell a little bit more.
But I'm concerned that you have a fear that if he doesn't work out. Yeah, like, is that fear? So if we go out and like right now we gas it and get 15, 20 more mowing customers get to capacity, then go hardcore into winter services to keep at least one of them busy. Is there a fear there? Because like you're not sending out warm emails, text messages to customers? Like, we're kind of doing this halfway leads thing right now. Like, we're not gassing it at all. And we can do that. We can grow this business in terms of top line revenue. Revenue. It's not going to be profitable because we're making 50 to 55 bucks an hour. But you're making it work because you're working a ton of time. Like you're, you're putting in all the effort. Like your labor is the thing that's putting any profit margin on the business. So as long as you're okay with that, we can grow the business.
Eventually. I'd like to be able to step out, but not, not for some time, you know, not for a few hundred thousand more of revenue. What about like just getting the winter services at a price that works? You know, I guess I don't know how the winter services would look. If it's a recurring structure, maybe like double what mowing is, but half the frequency of visits. That would be the same thing though, in the end.
Yeah. I think honestly your off season from now is super important because now you have the mortgage, right, and you have fixed expenses. You've got to keep at least yourself busy and at least make ten grand a month revenue. You're probably gonna have to lay off both your team members, but at least keep yourself busy on winter services. That would be the goal. Because if you made eight to $10,000 a month in revenue, you would be able to still home to cover the fixed expenses.
Yeah.
What are you thinking?
I'm getting too comfortable letting people go. It sucks, right? But last season I was just able to. I had enough in my personal account to be able to just pay for whatever needs to be done. I'm comfortable this season being able to do the same thing, but I don't want to be at that, you know, where we're not making anything. You know, I'd like to not, not have to let both of them Go. But if that's what has to be.
Done, it's just a matter if you want to be profitable during the off season, Right?
Yeah.
Because right now you're doing 20, 25,000amonth in revenue with team people. If you go hardcore winter services and convert most of your customers to winter services, you'll make about 10,000amonth in revenue if you went hardcore. And I'll give you the recipe for going hardcore, but, like, that would be just enough to keep you busy and be profitable. Now, if you kept them on board, you'd have to produce 20 to 25,000amonth in revenue.
If I kept both.
If you're trying to keep both of.
Them full time, I could do part time with them.
Just do like part time and then like. I agree, you can. Have you talked about the off season?
Yeah, I told them that there's. I told them way less hours. Yeah.
And then it's just a function of, like, from a profitability perspective, can we afford it? Because if we do 10, 10,000amonth in revenue, give them $2,000 each for working part time, the business will basically break even.
Yeah. Okay.
Well, like, essentially, this is the thing. We are at a crossroads. We either go profit mode, which is going to be raise our prices, focus on our current team. You've told me you are more comfortable with a little bit less work than having too much work for the guys.
In the field for the sake of getting people on board to be able to do the work. For myself, I'm fine with a lot of work and not a lot of time, but growing.
So then that would be growth mode, which is we gas this. We focus very little on raising prices. Even though right now we are not running a profitable. But we get to capacity and next spring we raise prices. Because I do think next, at least next spring, you got to raise prices. The 50 to 55 will keep you in the field forever.
What's the finish line? Because if you don't have a clear finish line, you're somewhat aimless. Not in a bad sense. Like, you can still work very hard.
Make a lot of products, grow your business. But it's a function of like, are.
We trying to maximize growth? Are we trying to maximize this to sell the business? Are we trying to maximize this for profit? Are we trying to maximize this for the owner working less than the business? And so I had a. I struggled with. Determine exactly what was the goal here. Like, is it to grow? Is it to make it more profitable?
Is it. Spend more time with your wife? Is it to like, like, I was.
Struggling with, like, what do you actually.
Want from this business?
I think clarity on that first is so important for business owners because then you can develop a plan to actually.
Attack that goal versus being like, yeah.
I want to raise my prices, but, like, I also want to grow and like, I also want to spend more time with my family, but also have more capacity to work more hours.
So it's very difficult to like, narrow.
In what is the goal and then work backwards from that.
All right, so the current strategy is we're actually going growth mode. Then the six week plan is we've got to focus on the off season and selling winter services. Now to do that, we have 110 customers. So selling winter services and in the next six weeks is literally the time to sell them winter services. It's not the week before you stop mowing. So you usually mow till the end of October, into November kind of thing.
We have some into November, Yeah. But for the most part, October is kind of whenever it's pretty much died down.
So by the end of September. So by end, end of September, we've got to pitch all the customers on winter services.
Okay.
The goal here is to be able to get at least 50% of them to convert to winter services. And that's going to look like bi weekly service at the same price. We, we spend the same amount of time on your property. We're not doing mowing, we're doing picking up branches, blowing off your property, edging the lawn, checking the gun gutters like.
You can throw the gutter thing into.
Winter services to provide value, checking the gutters like the downspouts, making sure nothing's blocking it, make sure there's no overflow, things like that. We make it very clear. Then we spend the same amount of time on your property that we would for mowing. And we go through these services and we spend this. And once we're done, we're done. Like, we're not. We're not gonna do all of these tasks every single time.
Okay.
How you pitch to them is like this Saves them an extra sprint cleanup. This means making a personalized video for every customer or calling every single one.
How do I do the personalized video?
I would make a document on canva, make it look pretty, put your logo on it and put winter services versus a property cleanup. So what you want to do is pull up, okay, here's what you're paying right now for a property cleanup. And that's because we have dump fees. We have to come out and do an estimate. It's $600. Here's what you're going to pay twice a month, 80 bucks. It's $160 over the course of four months. You're paying about the same. But your property's gonna look good all winter long. And how you pitch is like, hey, this is a budget friendly option we now have for our customers. So that way you don't have to wait for a spring cleanup when we're super busy. And this allows your property to look good throughout the whole holiday season.
Okay, that's.
But it's one by one by one. If you just blast this as an email, you'll get 10% of people that sign up for this.
So personalized to each person, every person.
Before the end of the mowing season. Because we wait till the end of October. October. And they're all canceling. They think they don't need you anymore. And for the past five years of them you're doing service they've never thought about paying you during the winter. And then how you say like, hey, if you don't want us to do this, great, just let me know and we'll put you on the schedule for March to start with mowing season. That also allows you to not have to re engage them next spring.
They've.
You're already pre selling them now. And then make those videos less than two minutes.
I think the more personalized I could make it, it might close a little better just because they're like, oh, this is for me. Have you found found it closes better with the video and the visual representation or the visual pricing right there. Opposed to the call, you could do the call.
The more outreach you do, the better you'll explain the value to them.
My main concern is that they're not going to see any work that needs to be done. So I just want to make sure that I can pitch that there's actually stuff that we could do.
Literally 3 to 5 extra revenue during your slow months just by locking in for probably two to three, three days. So selling winter services I think is probably the most important thing then in terms of having the cash next spring to actually expand. But when you expand next year, you're going to hit capacity pretty quickly. You only need like 15 or 20 more customers. You're going to raise prices. You have to. You can't keep growing at 50 to $55 an hour.
So think 70. 70 is comfortable.
I'm not even looking at that number because right now your numbers are all over the place. We don't even have a clue realistically.
We just need to raise price across.
The board by 20, 20% to make sure we're profitable.
20, at least 20, 15 even. That's just like a scary amount because I'm thinking for a 50 yard going up 20%, and I'm just like, oh, gosh, that's gonna, it's gonna be a nominal amount and people are gonna be like, oh, now I gotta pay this much more.
You're literally making 50 to 60 an hour.
Yeah, max. Like there's a good shot. Some of your jobs are making 40 bucks an hour, which means you're losing money.
Yeah, yeah, that would suck.
It's happening.
It's happening. I promise you.
A huge gap in Eric's business right.
Now is that he doesn't really know his numbers.
He doesn't know his hourly rate. Secondly, we don't have budget hours on.
Every job, every task, every visit.
Therefore, we can't accurately predict what the.
Schedule'S gonna look like next.
We don't even know our close rate. The close rate or the percentage of estimates that are getting accepted is super vital to know. Is our pricing too high? Are we too low? Are we not following up fast enough? Is our speed to lead too slow? These are all super important things. But if we don't know these fundamental numbers, our budget hours, our efficiency score, budget hours divided by clock hours. If we don't know our close rate, these are numbers. If we don't know this, we are flying blind. And that's why you might find in the coaching, it's like we're somewhat like.
Going down this path and we're going.
This path because I don't have the clear numbers to know what the close rate is. If I knew the close rate was 70, 80%, I'd probably tell them to raise the prices tomorrow. But because it's kind of like 50, 60%, I'm like, okay, well, I'm not sure exactly what to do here. That's why the number one thing in your business you've got to do is know the numbers. What is your close rate is the number one number you got to know as a solo operator. It determines so much your schedule, whether your pricing is correct, and then you've got to know what your efficiency is. Just least know those two numbers to be able to accurately predict where your business is going and what to do next.
As much as I want you to.
Really know your numbers, you won't have.
A full like 6 months of data by next spring. So we're going in the tail of this season. You're starting up next spring in March and April, you're gonna be immediately at capacity. I need just to raise prices across the board. Right now you can float it because you work more hours and you're like, yeah, I'll just work more. Great. Until you can't like eventually get 150 customers and you can't just keep working more hours.
Yeah.
And eventually she's not gonna be happy.
Eventually.
Yeah, sometimes I'm already working a lot and it's, it's lot to deal with. I'd like to continue to be able to grow, but also at the same time being able to make time to spend with her.
Well, that is important. You're married now.
Yeah, yeah, it's very important. And I also want to make sure that I have this not running me into the ground, you know, So I want it to be sustainable. The price increase will be scary. You know, at the first, first couple weeks, few people are losing or dropping out. I'm thinking like, oh shoot, we're head to the ground. But I mean, if it's got to be done, you think just like an email, a quick email before we start mowing. Everybody's in the spring.
Well, here's the thing. If you go in and next spring, you're going to have like, let's just call it 100 people that are ready to go. Yeah, you're not at capacity, but probably within five to six weeks of being spring rushed, you're going to be at capacity and ready to raise prices. I would have all the emails ready to go. Just have it in your chamber. Exactly what you're going to say. And it's not like, hey, it's like, hey, this isn't your new price going forward.
Here's why we're doing this.
If you have any questions, please let us know. If this puts you in a bad financial hardship, let us know.
So not at spring, but whenever I reach that capacity.
Correct. Because if you're gonna be like, I'll just do this, why don't I just do it now? Yeah, they need the mowing service. But if you're like, hey, no, I want to grow, great, let's not lose five or 10 customers. Let's get every single person we possibly can into winter services. And then after winter services, four to six weeks into spring rush, you'll be at capacity. Like, I cannot get any more customers. Leads are pouring in. Great. Raise prices.
And immediately, if you raise prices by.
20% on 25,000amonth, in revenue, you're bringing five grand more to the bottom line. That five grand is gonna get you.
An admin person and advertising to scale up.
Yeah. Wow.
That'd be cool, right?
Yeah. Let's go 20%. I'm just gonna do it. What's the worst that could happen? You know, I drop them, but then I get to fill them up with somebody that's paying a higher price.
I'm gonna get everyone to commit vicariously.
It's just like, underhanded, sort of like, yeah, we're gonna be.
The downsell is I'm getting.
Getting them to come all the way to the end of this season for mowing, and I'm getting them to commit to next mowing season starting in spring. Go ahead.
What's the good news? I was just asking what. What if they're doing a job that's bi weekly in a cluster of yards that we are. That we usually do. He was asking if we have it, and I was like, is it on the schedule? And it is. So. So we've got it.
Is part of it just the fact that. That they are doing it without you for the first time?
He's. I don't know why he called me for that. That's crazy. But it's because these are a cluster of yards, and they have no real, like, defined property lines or like gates or anything. They're kind of like literally in a cluster in front side of each other.
One thing to think about too, like, as you grow into next season and you really start to scale up, is every time someone calls you about something like that, ask yourself, like, what. What is the root cause of this? Yeah, the root cause. They don't know the proper line. Okay, how do I solve that? Like a picture on the job, like an aerial showing what they should and should not do, or like color coding. It would solve that problem in the future. And the reason that you haven't needed that in the past. Cause you've been on the truck. And so a lot of times, the reason a solo operator can't get off the truck or can't get a second crew going is because they are the job notes.
Yeah.
And what I'm saying today is every job, there's a question or two.
Oh, yeah.
And that just needs to be job notes, pictures, or video attached to the. Attached to every job.
Most of the time, we as business owners don't actually recognize the problem in our business until it's a blazing fire. And so right now, a few calls each hour to answer questions about trailer Wires or where do we mow in this property? I saw his phone was blowing up with text messages from customers asking about the weeds in the backyard. All those things now manageable at 110 customers. You gotta ask yourself, if my goal.
Is to build a business that has.
500 customers, will I build, be able.
To 5x this type of influx of calls and text messages?
And the answer is no.
I've been lucky for the past couple seasons with the crew lead that like I've been on all the route or the whole, the whole route with them and they know, you know, all the little notes about it. This guy has a dog lock the door. But right now the guy this crew lead hasn't even seen every yard.
So yeah, it is a good forcing mechanism though, like when you have new eyes because they have all the questions. Yeah, the goal is how can I, I make the job notes and the information I give them so comprehensive that even someone brand new could walk on the property and be like, okay, I know exactly when to do it, how to do it. There's an aerial photo. Like the more you can give them, the less that happens. Because like that doesn't scale. If you have 10 people doing that every day, every single job, you're gonna have a hundred phone calls a day.
Yeah, yeah, you're right.
At Eric's current size of business, he can afford to take a call or two each day from his crew, employees and, and even customers. But as the business grows, he's got.
To focus more of his time on sales.
And he can't have this distraction constantly reaching his pocket when every, every single time a customer or employee has a question. Now he can solve this problem by using homeworks and using software to create.
Systems in his business.
One of those systems that we use is making videos and attaching inside of homeworks so everyone can see what the project includes, the customer, the crew and the office. So I'm going to show an example of what he could have done for this project. Alright, it's Eric. We're over at this property, we are installing a border, concrete border.
And what we're going to do is.
Remove the edge of the lawn, push back the lava rock and install the concrete border all along this hedge and this flower bed. A quick video like that I compressed and attached directly inside the Field Force mobile app allows everyone to be on the same page and, and no more.
Calls back to the boss asking for little questions. So if I was you, like even going into next spring when you're setting up mowing services, I would think through like, okay, that property's a little strange with the property lines. Okay, screenshot Color in this part. This is bi weekly.
Color in this part.
This is weekly. Right.
Little things like that will help so that it prevents this. Cause like right now, it's fine you're on the truck and how this looks like, hey, boss, do you want me.
To move over here?
And you're like, yes, but like, if you're not there, it becomes fucking a phone call.
Yeah, you're right.
And if you're not available, that becomes a 15 minute wait. Or they mow some area that they're not supposed to.
Yeah, that's happened before.
I'm actually gonna add that. Like job notes, you've got to build systems that scale.
And so whether it be, I have 100 customers. Okay. Will this same system work at 500? Will it work to have employees show up an hour late and that be okay? No. Will it work for customers be texting me individually about the. The weeds in their backyard or about an employee texting me about the trailer wires or them not understanding all these job notes? No. So if the root of the problem is the employee doesn't know what to do on the job site, we need to fix that with a system which is job notes, pictures and video. Otherwise, we'll come back to this business in a year and the constraint will simply be the fact that the owner is running ragged like a chicken without a head, running around every single day trying to fix all the fires in the business because they simply didn't take preventative action right now. Now to ensure that systems were in place.
It's just a function of how do we go to 500,000 without having a big break, like a huge problem.
That's what I don't want.
Right. And that's the pricing. Like, the pricing is so low. If you were to scale this, it would just fall apart. Having the knowledge. Okay, that would happen. What do we need to do to make sure that doesn't happen is like, we got to get budget hours, we have to get job notes, we have to raise our prices. We have to actually make sure that we have winter services so we don't have an off season. I'm glad we came now and not in like a year year when, like, okay, like now we have real problems because we have a bunch of overhead during the off season. We're losing money throughout the off season. And now it's like fixed expenses being married. Like, there's way more responsibility.
During that time, I was considering A.
Loan in the spring for some marketing and getting.
No, we make money in the off season, so you don't have to get a loan.
Well, there's an awful little right here. I feel like this has also been a struggle. Once I got to two people in the crew and they're operating well, I felt like Churn was crazy. I was like, there's got to be a leadership thing. I don't know, because the labor was fine. You know, they did good work and they came and then they left. So I was like, I don't know what the deal is.
And so when they leave, is it a function of them not working out? Like you're firing them or they're just, like, not showing up?
They don't show up, and then I fire them.
Right.
So it's kind of both.
The last constraint in the 4L framework is lean leadership. And right now, Eric is just a really nice guy. But sometimes that can be interpreted as weakness or a pushover for new employees. And then they show up when they want, they do what they want. They take breaks like they want. They don't ever follow the systems. In order for him to be able to grow, scale, and grow this business profitably, he's going to have to keep employees that stick to the systems and work efficiently, even if he's not in the truck with them.
So what I would do is I would create incentives that you can take away. So instead of beating people up, because you'll never do that, and, like, in terms of being, like, really harsh with them and, like, holding people accountable, it's probably the thing that you will struggle with, is holding people accountable. What you can do, though, is you can create a system of incentives that you can take away where you're not, like, you don't have to berate them. You're just taking a $300 bonus for that month. That hurts.
Yeah.
And so I think even from, like, the get, you could have certain incentives that you just take away from people. So, for example, if you had $50 per week, and then at the end of the month, 300, if you showed up every single day, that's a great.
Incentive that you then get to take away if they are late.
Or so, for example, you could tie it to, like, being late and not having any callbacks, and I would bump that number up. Like, if you. If I told you, you will not have a single part time, you're ever.
Late, and they never have a callback.
Would you pay someone five grand or more a year?
Absolutely.
So, like, why not give them $500. Yeah, okay. It's $500 bonus per month. If you show up every single day and don't get call back and it's $50 per week.
That's one thing. Sometimes the wife's like, why would you pay them extra for doing what's already expected? And I was, I'm saying like, at this point it's hardly expected, you know?
Yeah, well, it's more a matter of. It's something that you can take away, that you don't feel bad about. It's not you're taking away their main paycheck. It's not like you're firing them. It's not like you're helping them making a performance improvement plan. I don't think you're gonna do that stuff because you're just too nice of a guy. But because you're too nice of a guy, they're just walking all over you.
Yeah, I could see it.
We will not be able to scale.
Yeah.
Because then it becomes your crew rolls out and whoever is the latest and it starts to affect the entire team and it affects the whole business. And because it affects the business, then you can't afford to give them the things they really want, which is like ability to move up inside the company, ability to have benefits. Like you can never afford that stuff if you don't hold people accountable.
So it serves them better to be.
Like that than you got to act in the interest of the team. Yeah, it's like, oh, I gotta, I'll have to fire this person. Really hurt them. Yeah, it is. But you have to cut out the cancer in order to preserve the body.
If you're a bit more passive like Eric and you're, you have a really hard time holding people accountable. One way to do that is instead of beating people up or firing them or giving them performance improvement plans. Instead of that, take away incentives. So give incentives to show up on time, Give incentives to do the work without any callbacks in high quality, and then take incentives away if they don't.
Perform to that standard. So in the six week plan we have, we gotta know budget hours. This would be another thing. In the middle of like after the off season, go through all of your visits and determine budget hours.
I think I can do that like on the, on the truck. Just like after the job, just.
Well, yeah, just take, take the, whatever you're charging them and divide it by 70 and there's your budget hours.
Oh, okay.
And in terms like our scheduling, the only thing that really matters is the Budget hours. Right. So if it's 10 budget hours and 4 yards of mulch and 3 yards of gravel and all this other stuff, I just need to know that there's 10 budget hours and then ask myself, okay, next week our capacity is 90 budget hours. We have 70 on the schedule. We can put that project next week. Yeah, we have the capacity for it. Number two service pages on the menu of your website and actually having a different slash service name in the URL for each of the five or ten services we offer.
Then the big one is selling winter.
Service services by the end of the season. Realistically, in the next two weeks, 50 conversion. This whole core aeration thing, if you bundle it in, you will sell a lot more winter services because there's a huge amount of value there. I know it's scary to leave a couple thousand dollars on the table.
Yeah.
When it's low hanging fruit.
I'm fine offering something for, for free. If I can get the recurring consistently.
And here's the thing, to make it more safe for you, this is what I would do. I would make the free air RA.
Aeration in next spring, charge this one, but then like get a free spring with it.
Yeah, exactly. And they just paid you 300 bucks. It's like, hey, the value of that is 300 sign up for our winter services when we come next spring.
Free coration.
That way you don't have the fear of, I do the aeration now for free and then they leave me.
Yeah.
Midway through the winter.
Okay, cool.
But there's real value attached to that. So in your breakdown, your video show that as the like 300 plus 600 for a cleanup is usually 900 for your spring kind of cleanup and getting things started. Here's all the value. And then I'm gonna give you the 300 bucks for free. And now what this does is it pulls all those spring cleanups back into your winter so that when spring comes, you actually have the bandwidth and the budget hours to go get new customers.
Yeah.
Right now it's filled up with a whole bunch of your existing customers wanting all the services during the peak season.
Last thing is job notes.
On every visit, I would just ask yourself, like, what do I say to the crew when we show up at this property? What are they calling me about? Like, this is a really good test. You get new eyes on a property, all the little issues come up back up to you. Everything needs to go into the CRM. In the past, you had this great, stellar employee that knew all of those things. We can't build a business on having people that stuck around for forever are super incredible. Work 12 hours, seven days a week, no problem. Like, we can't build the business around that because it's not dependable. You're not going to get people like that most of the time.
Yeah. Because they can't just know everything. Like, off the bat.
We got to be able to dumb it down so that the average team member that joins and is fresh can get to a property, knows what needs to be done.
This is a personalized plan, you know, to what I need to do and gives me like a clear path. Like just walk this path and then, you know, you'll see super, super valuable just to be able to be like, this is your business. This is the constraint of your business. If you do these things, you'll get here. This was awesome. It was an amazing opportunity to be able to have somebody come in personally coach me, especially Mike. I think I'm going to work with the things I can do quickly first and quickly do them like really fast if I can, and then start working on the sales and everything because I could. I'll probably find myself taking forever on the sales stuff. And then I'm like, oh, I never even got to the other things. So I'll knock out the quick ones first.
Let's see. He has some notes on here. Two weeks worth of projects. I've got two weeks worth of projects and having winter services in with that kind of keeping us a little overwhelmed. I let go one of my guys. So I guess as far as labor goes, he put a note for 50% close ratio on winter services. I did not get that at all. People were a little confused whenever I was pitching it. But I was able to get at least 50% of my reoccurring clients on other winter services to some capacity. Whether it's just leaf removal on a recurring basis. I told them that we can get trimming and then mulching done. So basically kind of like timing out different projects and services throughout the rest of the winter. But then that still leaves January, February a little slow for us. And then leadership time. I do have more time now. The reason it was at that time an issue is because I had a buddy who I go to church with. I was showing up like with the work trailer to the church parking lot. But yeah, now going into the slower part of the season after the sun goes down, it kind of puts me back at home regardless. So that has been, you know, sort of freeing. I found. I found some time earlier in the Day by just waking up earlier, I can get a little bit more done.
Go to the gym and everything.
And it seems like by the time the sun goes down, I've got most of the things done and I could spend time with the wife. Budgeted hour capacity Yeah, I was thinking that I can do about 30 hours per person of capacity and now I know that that's of kind, kind of like given load time, commute time and everything. As far as budget hours on the job, that's about what we're looking at. Optimistically, if I got a denser route, we could probably get that a little bit higher. That was his first note. Just the budget hour capacity on the top there. Service pages with menus that I was actually. I don't like doing that at all. Building a website was fun. I did it for a college class and I ended up just kind of tweaking it a little bit as I. As I was growing the business, I got into the software and it just seems like I'd rather pay for someone to do that and just keep it updated throughout the year. I did a little bit of it. I built two pages for the services that I'm offering now and I was just like they still don't look great. You know, I don't know how to compress the photos and I don't, you know, I'm still working in the field so I figured I'd just pay somebody to do that if I can get a few jobs off of it. It might just be worth worthwhile to have a professional take care of that. Selling winter services he wanted an 80% conversion.
Ratio.
Conversion possibly close. No, I've gotten services done or I've gotten services scheduled for a lot of my customers but not for the recurring bi weekly renter services. That, that was a little bit of a struggle. So I ended up talking to them and they were thankfully you know, willing to just do like a. An hourly rate. Just relief removal. So that was nice. Nice job notes on every visit I've gotten job notes on since he was here. I've gotten job notes on all those visits. But there were some like one off project stuff that I'd like to have templatized just so that whenever we show up we kind of have a good understanding of what's going on and then I can just make tweaks on this specific property themselves. Price increase at 125 recurring. I think we'll probably see that next season because he. You guys came towards the end of the mowing season season. So the recurring just started dropping off. So I think probably early next season we'll see that implementing the price increase that will probably be early next season, March, April is, is what I'm predicting because we were only a dozen yards away, recurring yards away from that, that 125 mark. The last note was one standard video to show price. Oh, that must have been for the winter service videos. I did did that and it was.
It was funny watching myself see how.
Much I can stumble on simple words.
And just recording myself watching myself say the same things.
But once I got a decent script down, sending it out wasn't as nerve wracking. The customers, they accepted it very well. The ones that didn't were very nice about it, but then again like asked about different services. So I did that. Using Loom was a neat experience and I think we're going to use that for training next season.
