Get Rich in 10 Years: No Fluff, Just Facts

I have been poor and I have been rich. In this video, I will show you exactly what I did to get rich over the course of 10 years so you can repeat the same exact actions.

Ten years ago, I started Augusta Lawn Care. Today, Augusta Lawn Care will do over $50 million in annual revenue. Five years ago, I had just two lawn care locations. Today, Augusta Nation is over 155 locations, strong and growing quickly. Here's the roadmap to get rich in 10 years without any fluff. Just Facts. Trucks are not Assets if you talk to any accountant or you look it up on Google and you ask whether a truck or a piece of equipment should go in the asset column of a balance sheet, people say yes, it's an asset. However, I like to think of trucks much more as tools. I need them in order to get revenue from my customers and perform the services required to fulfill on the estimate that they accepted. When I was a young entrepreneur, I was told by a friend that anytime I had excess cash available to go buy equipment, and they said that it would eventually pay off. Eventually I'd become more efficient and I'd be able to grow the business. What I quickly found though, is that my asset utilization was very low. In other words, a truck that could be used for 40 or 50 hours in a week was only getting used for 15 or 20 or maybe 25 hours in the week. In other words, I could have sold almost half of my trucks and equipment and and still got all of the same work done for my customers. My revenue would not have decreased, but yet I would have been able to make by with less than half of my trucks and equipment, and all that money would have been in my pocket. Somehow in this industry, we've allowed equipment manufacturers to convince us to squander all of our profits at the end of the year. And we do it under the guise of saving on taxes and doing a section 179 and bonus depreciation. When reality the whole point of getting into business is to make profit and to put it into your bank account. And instead of buying into the logic of the vanity metrics of buying more trucks, buy into the vanity metrics of how high your bank balance goes. The reason I don't like to think of trucks as an asset is because I like my assets to either hold their value or produce cash flow. Something like gold or precious metals will retain the value of the asset. Real estate or quality stocks, they will actually go up in value. They're appreciating assets and can produce cash flow. A truck is A hunk of metal that sits there and unless I use it, that is a tool, it it will never make me more money and if I leave it there long enough, it will eventually begin to rust and the value of that asset will decrease. I think it's asinine that we constantly are going into debt to buy depreciating assets that hardly get used. Follow the incentives of those you follow. I truly believe that you can get ahead by following mentors, having a community, learning from people online, your local competition, going to conferences, reading books. But be very careful of social media influencers who have a plan B to their business, whether it be in lawn care or in landscaping or any other home service. Realize that the gross margins or how much profit per dollar is made on brand deals and sponsorships are extremely high. Realize that sometimes the advice that these influencers are giving you is actually motivated by the fact that someone is paying them to promote their products and services. I have looked under the hood of many social media influencers businesses and realized that their actual business that they're promoting doesn't make money. What makes money is the brand deals, sponsorships and the media plan they have in the background where they're selling courses, selling memberships, and selling access to private events. Now, I love every single one of these creators. I'm a creator myself. I have products online as well. There is nothing against them. I'm simply saying they are competing in a very difficult industry. If it's so easy, everyone can go become an influencer. It's not that way. It's extremely difficult and takes a lot of time and effort before you ever see a single penny or a sponsorship or a brand deal. However, those influencers, once they've got to the size where you are watching them, they have media businesses to fall back on. They have a Plan B. Whereas if you're following them and you have a home service business, you likely do not have a Plan B. If that fails, you have nothing to fall back on. You have a mortgage, you have debt that you've taken out to run your business. It must be successful. Also, most home service business owners don't have an additional stream of income or passive income coming from a course or other sponsorships that they may have. And many times I see the actual home service business of an influencer simply being propped up by free equipment and the margin that come from their media company instead of actually doing a great business. Realize that anytime you see an influencer promoting a product or service, there is many times behind it some sort of incentive and that's why you want to follow the incentives. If I promote my book or if I promote lawn care web design or I promote Copilot CRM, I have an incentive. I own those businesses. And if your favorite social media influencer promotes a certain product or software or package or training, this is likely that they have some sort of incentive. And that's not bad. Just keep this in mind because many of the people that I see training and giving advice, their fundamental underlining business model is actually flawed and if followed would lead to low margins or even negative profit margins if it were not for their media company. Stop Impressing poor People. This one took me way too long to get through my head. When I was 18 years old, I was going to medical school. I had been to college and started very young. When I was 13 I was 1 of the youngest people to ever attend the college that I went to. However, when I dropped out of medical school, a lot of people were disappointed and there was definitely a chip on my shoulder of wanting to prove them wrong because I went from that to mowing grass and starting Augusta Lawn Care and it worked out in the long term. But those first few years I had no evidence of success whatsoever. It was very easy to fall in the trap of trying to impress other people. How do you impress other people? You hire a bunch of employees and you buy a bunch of trucks and the only people that impresses is poor people. I have found consistently the way to impress a rich person is to work hard and have high levels of work ethic. I have never one single time had a richer person than I. Tell me that I work too much. Look, if getting more trucks and hiring a whole bunch of people that you don't need is going to impress your friends, I would encourage you to think less about your friends and more about impressing your banker with with your incredible balance sheet and profit and loss statement and the bank balance that you have with them. Ultimately, business is extremely boring. It's not flashy, it doesn't impress people very much. It's stacking money in the bank, it's raising prices, it's investing in marketing, it's having a lot of meetings. It's investing in your people. It's building systems, it's making sure that you only get into debt if you have a battle tried true tested model to get return on investment. This is not flashy. This is pretty boring stuff. But ultimately that's what will lead to business success. Social Media Rewards the first few reps gains come from the last few reps which no one sees use time to make money and then use money to make time. I found that you either have time or you have money. When I first got started, I did not have a lot of money, but I had lots of time. And so I would spend time door knocking, going out and putting Facebook posts on every single local group. I was constantly investing my time so I could make money. As time went on, I have realized that I need to invest more my money in order to buy back my time. For the first three years of starting Augusta Lawn Care and franchising the model, I realized that I would have to live on very little in order to be able to invest back in the business. We were losing almost $2 for every $1 revenue in the first couple years of franchising Augusta Lawn Care. In order to make that work, I made sure that I scaled back all living expenses. I hardly went out to eat and I slept in a six by six little closet inside of my office. During that period of time, I didn't have a shower and I would go to the gym in order to be able to get changed every single morning. That was not fun, that was not exciting, but I was doing was trading time for money. As time went on, I realized I needed to trade that money for time. And in order to do that, I did several things. I'm going to break down the cost of buying back my time. First, I got a house cleaner from merrymaids. Cost me $150, probably saved me two or three hours per month in terms of just cleaning, cleaning my apartment. And I moved into a one bedroom apartment. So a little bit of an upgrade. I also got grocery delivery from Instacart. Now I live like less than two minutes from the grocery store, but I still was spending about three hours per month doing a weekly run to the grocery store. And I'm not very good at finding the groceries. I'd be walking up and down the aisles. I would usually spend 30 or 40 minutes just getting my groceries, checking out and driving home. I also got a laundry and folding service that cost me around $200 per month and saved me probably five hours per month because I'm not good at folding laundry. And the apartments where I live, there's a shared laundry facility. So I have to walk down there, put all the laundry clothes in and then come back and then put them into the dryer and then go back again and then pull them all out. It was a bit of a process. And every single evening I have to make sure I was caught up on Laundry probably save me about five hours per month. Now, even though the revenue inside of the businesses were getting to a million dollars in monthly revenue, I was still making sure every single transaction inside of QuickBooks was being reconciled and that was fine. I was doing that twice a week and I probably saved about hours per month by handing all of that over to homeservice. Cpa.com that cost me twelve hundred dollars per month, but well worth it for Brad, a CPA to be doing that job instead of me. Also, I actually ended up getting a small little tiny house that is on a property I own and I ran out to tenants. It's out in a farm and allows me to be able to escape and focus on creative work, whether it be videos or the workshop for conference. I'm able to spend time there on the weekends and really lock in and it cost me about 150 to $200 per month to maintain and make sure that the utilities are paid. Now that one doesn't necess have any sort of time savings but does increase my creative output. And when I feel burnt out in the office or my apartment, I can go there on the weekend and feel a bit of relief while I'm working on creative topics. Now I ended up spending $600 per month on a boat membership from Freedom Boat Club and what's cool is they have hundreds of locations and I can use any of the boats unlimited amount of time for about $600 per month. Now although there was no actual time savings from getting the boat membership, it did allow me to spend quality time with my family and I ended up doing a lot of team exercises, workshops and meetings on the boat. I also in the past couple of years I've decided to spend about 20 to $25,000 every year on taking my entire family on a vacation and we've done some really cool activities that we could never have afforded the past. Now I say all of this not to brag and it's a little bit weird sharing some of these numbers and realizing that I have someone to come clean my house and do my laundry, etc. But I wanted you to realize this. It cost me about $48,000 per year in order to get all of these things. And the reason I share that is because in my mind in the past I thought in order to have like this great lifestyle, I'd have like a private jet and make millions and millions of dollars. I was able to spend $48,000 and be able to get a second house, a boat, be able to Take my entire family on a vacation and I was able to save over 216 hours in the year because of doing things that I otherwise would have been exchanging time for money. This equates to about five weeks of full time work that I'm able to get back every single year. And the goal is that during those five weeks, I make up for the fact that extra cost of the 48,000. Now, let me be very clear. I do not regret the years of being extremely frugal. Without that, I would never been able to afford the lifestyle I have today. Even though it's not lavish, it's definitely something I never thought I would have been able to have. Food prep, grocery delivery, house cleaning, laundry. Spending a couple thousand dollars each month will save you weeks to focus on your business and making more money. Once you're making over about $40 per hour, it makes a lot of sense to try to exchange your money for time and then use that time on something productive. If you just use it extra time to chill, watch Netflix, and waste your time on social media, it's probably not a good use of the money. This leads me into the next thing I've learned in the past 10 years that's made me rich and is look at the recipe, not the aroma. In other words, when I make a really good loaf of bread, the aroma smells amazing and I can be enthralled by the aroma. But if I want to know what actually made the loaf of bread, I need to look at the ingredients and the recipe that went into the making of the bread. The reason I say this is is because there are rich people and successful people that you will look up to and the aroma that they put off is balance. Doing what you love and what you're passionate about and having a cold bath and a morning routine. But if you actually dial it back and look what went into the bread that now makes them smell good, quote, unquote, there is no evidence that what they're talking about actually works. If you go back many times, the recipe, the ingredients include excruciating levels of hard work, excruciating levels of discipline and work ethic. And that's what no one talks about. And I don't believe they're actually trying to falsify or they're trying to embellish their story or make it seem like it's not as hard as it was. I don't believe that. I believe that when really bad things happen to us in our life, we literally try to forget about it and it diminishes in its impact over the course of time is what I call the dig, build, bury. When you build a business, you first off by digging, you dig the foundation, you go down, it's hard, it's extremely difficult. And then you build the foundation only to then one day bury the foundation and you never see it again. These successful people, they forget at times what really went into making the bread, the recipe and the ingredients and all the pain and the hard work and the sacrifices they made to make the aroma down the road. When it came to business, one thing that really helped me was ORA O R A Onboard, retain and Ascend. In other words, there are three ways to make more money in a recurring business model. Get more customers on board, keep more customers, retain and then earn more from your customers or ascend. If you're always asking yourself when you're trying to fix something your business, you're trying to improve it, ask yourself, what part of the business is this affecting? Am I going to onboard or get more customers? Am I going to retain or keep more customers or am I going to ascend or get more from the existing customers that I have? The worst part, the worst part about home service industries is that we have a pre installed 15 to 30% churn rate every single year. You can answer your phones immediately, you can have an extremely high quality of service and safety and train your team and have a great website. Everything is just dialed in. And yet every single year, 15 to 30% of your customers leave. Why? Because about that percent is how many people sell their house. Your base of customers that you have in your database are constantly turning at least by 15 to 30% every single year. Even if you do absolutely nothing wrong, I've got to make sure that I have systems in place to retain my customers. So at each point of onboard, retain and ascend, I want to make sure that I have systems in place. I have systems for onboarding, systems for customer acquisition, systems for getting more customers and getting more leads and getting them sold into my services from my website and on the phone. That's the onboard part. And a lot of us, we fall in love with that part. We love it. But honestly, a lot of money is made. The best home service businesses, the highest profit margin businesses that I see, are the ones that focus not only on onboarding and getting more customers, but retaining their customers, doing an amazing job, having a high level of service and then making sure they upsell their existing customers. So instead of them getting $1,000 per customer, they make two or $3,000 per customer. And guess what? If you do a really good job of retaining and ascending customers, you make so much money from customers, you can actually do a pretty lousy job of customer acquisition and advertising. But you can afford it because you make so much more money from every customer that comes in the door. I see most businesses focusing on onboarding customer acquisition, advertising. Get more leads, get more estimates sent. The next shiny customer is always appealing and taking your attention when reality There are two other elements of this puzzle that if figured out, will solve so many profit problems. And this is why we're spending an entire day at Blue collar summit in January 2025 focusing exclusively on upselling, cross selling and getting more revenue per customer. If you want to make 2025 the year that you change everything in your business and completely re your profit and loss statement, go check out blue collarsummit.com and book your three day event today. And heads up, it's gonna take 10 years. If you think about getting rich over the next 10 years instead of 10 minutes or 10 days, the likelihood of success is much greater. Now, people don't like to think in terms of 10 years. It seems like an eternity, especially if you're young. However, if you think in terms of 10 year swings, you realize you actually have 5, 7, maybe even 8 swings in your career. If you're going to live to 80, 90, 100 years old, you have solid 5, 6, 7 swings where you can actually go and make some mistakes. There's plenty of examples like Colonel Sanders from KFC in their 60s or 70s, their fourth or fifth swing, they became successful. But I happen to believe that if you spend an entire 10 years and dedicate an entire 10 year decade to a specific endeavor and and really swing and go all in on something, the likelihood of success is much greater. Some people will listen to this and they'll be like, well I've been hustling for 10 years but they've started at 05 times. Every time they get started they hit a roadblock, they hit a hurdle. Way more work ethic is required. Way more time is required. So much more difficult. The market is find or hire people and they come back to zero and they start another industry and they start a different market and they make a move and they go online. I've got to try something different. We spend 10 years spinning our wheels instead of just dedicating 10 years in one direction and taking a solid 10 year swing. I have found that it takes 5 years just to find any evidence of success that reinforces your decision to keep going, which means in year one, year two, year three, I'm not going to see any evidence of success that my 10 year swing is actually going to pay off. And this is why so many home service business owners quit within five years. Because you have nothing to point back to say, oh yeah, I'm more profitable, I'm growing, things are becoming more systematized. The first five years is just so much hell, you don't even think about 10 years. And having another five years of pain is inconceivable that we could ever even make it. And for this reason, most people will never get rich. And that's why the title of this video is get rich in 10 years. Because you focus on one thing and you do it well. I've determined that home services is my core competency. Whether it be home service web design, whether it be home service cpa, whether it be Augusta Lawn Care, whether it be Copilot, CRM, the book. Everything is about home services. It's the one thing I'm focused on. And remember, don't compare the year three version of you to the year ten version of someone else. Because success is exponential. Which means at the beginning, the first two, three, four years, even five years, you have no evidence of success. You look back and you see absolutely no proof of success whatsoever. But in 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10, I see an exponential increase in success. Higher revenues, better profits, more systemization. But imagine if the business owner would have quit in years three, four and five, when everything was falling apart, when they had no evidence of success. They would have never made it to years 9, 10, and beyond when success started to seem evident. The chasm between good and great is vast, as it should be. And if you can hustle like it's gotta get done tomorrow and yet have the patience that it will take a lifetime, you will have an unbeatable combination. If these tips were helpful for you, watch this video here where I go over some brutally honest truths for every home service business owner.