His $1M Lawn Care Business Fell into a Cash Trap

If the goal is to help the team, franchising's not it.

Eventually he wants to franchise, and I was like, this is just a job to me.

If we want to make more money, I'm on board with it. We just need to make sure that's the clear goal.

It was very difficult to admit that.

Today we're in Iowa visiting Devin with Creekside Turf Management.

You know, there is employee drama and it's everywhere.

The business will do almost $1 million in revenue this year.

I'm just going to throw out a revenue number of $1.5 million next year, but have him in my seat and continue to grow that.

But he has over 150 $50,000 of debt.

The hidden daggers in my own company I've kind of avoided.

His mowing crew makes less than $50 per hour. If I was you, I would aggressively raise prices on mowing. When you say aggressively, at least 20%. He needs to hand off daily operations fast because tomorrow his wife is due with twins. To replace you still would cost $60,000, $70,000, $80,000 a year. If we take that off of the P&L, we have no cash in this business to grow. 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. Our goal is to give Devin a strategy to turn around the company in the next 6 weeks.

Let's go.

This is my favorite turnaround of all time. It really is. We are about 30 minutes away from Devin's place. This is the latest turnaround we've ever done. It's gonna be 7:45 by the time we get there, PM. The reason is, as I mentioned before, his wife is going for a C-section tomorrow for twins. Is it, Brenna? So we just happen to show up the day before and we're gonna like fix the business, I guess. Let's find out what's up.

We've jumped from 8 employees to 13 this year, managers and stuff.

13 employees.

Last year was $500,000 and we'll probably do anywhere from $800,000 to $900,000.

This year.

13 employees, $800,000 to $900,000 annual revenue. You just do the quick math, you've got to have wages at $15 an hour to make that make sense of that. Per employee, you're only making $60,000 to $70,000. If you're paying them more than $40,000, like, your cost of goods are very high.

We are in the process of franchising our actual business and building that out.

Extremely expensive to set up a franchise, maintain a franchise, do all the registration and licensing fees. If he sold 10 of them to his team and they gave him some royalties or something, he you wouldn't even break even. Like, we didn't make any money until over 100 locations.

The franchise side of things, I'm using my personal income.

He did royalties. Maybe you get to like 30 or 40 locations, you can make it profitable. If you're doing a flat fee model like us, which is much more owner-centric, or like in this case, it's employee-centric, trying to set them up for success, then you would not charge royalties, and therefore you would not be profitable for much longer.

I'm submitting to the turnaround because I'm going through some business growing pains. Look forward to hearing from you guys. So thanks.

My family's out here. Wow, well, I've got Leah here. She's a project manager.

How are you?

Brianna, nice to meet you. How's it going, Francis?

Nice to meet you.

Hi, I'm Brianna. I'm Devin's mom. How you doing? What's your name?

Keen.

Keen, ops manager. Good to meet you, man. You got the whole gang. Mike, let's go. Good to meet you, brother.

My name is Devin LeBeau. This is our 9th season. We've gone from $37,000 in revenue to around $1 million this year.

Maybe show me around and then we'll jump into numbers and do all that fun jazz.

Obviously, here are our mowers. All of them are '60s except for— there's, I think, one '52 in this fleet.

Cool.

Oil room, kind of parts, whatever. We're a 9-month season business is what I built this around.

Are most of your contracts 12 months, like on the commercial side? Nick, so year-round, or how much of it is residential?

Clientele-wise, it's probably about 90% residential. Revenue-wise, 40%, um, commercial, 60% residential. Unfortunately, don't see any of the fertilizer equipment that we have.

You're good. No, that's at the other shop space.

That's at the other shop space.

And then that's funny, all of their signs.

Yeah, so it's, it's mainly customers, like if we're mowing and they someone else is fertilizing it, then we'll take them.

But this shop space is one of two that Devin runs Creekside out of. He lives on site, and after running into zoning issues with the neighbors and the county, they were forced to split into two locations.

Mowing is here, and landscape and fertilizing operations are, are out there. So you start to feel that cultural disconnect a little bit with two different locations, and I don't have all the time in the world to just pop over there.

Do you start over there and kind of get them? You come here. Got it.

When I'm on site, help mow, weed whip, push mow, like pretty much everything these guys are doing.

Do you have someone over there that's kind of in charge or just more or less virtually stand up?

So each division kind of has their main crew lead, I guess.

It's just cool seeing like everybody progress. 4 out of the 6 guys, they're brand new to this industry. I have all the faith in them running their own crew.

So our fertilizer division, which is our largest division in the company, actually has the least amount of people working in it.

Matt and Blake, they're the fertilizing guys and they make this company very successful.

And then we've got the most people coming here, what, 6?

Yeah, there's 6.

Yeah, 6 of us.

6 consistently come here to mow.

Got it. So 6 here and then like 6 or 7 over there then.

Is that right?

Yeah, roughly.

There are 3 divisions in Creekside: lawn care, fertilization, and landscaping. Before I identify the problems in the business, we need to establish the goals we want to achieve.

Like, what's your goal? Because like, I could— we could take this 10 different directions. Like, are we trying to optimize it for profit and you never showing up? Are we optimizing this for multiple locations and starting that second one? What is kind of the goal in your mind? And then we can develop the framework for that.

So the goal— and Kian and I have talked. Kian's been here since day one.

Since 2017. Well, no. Okay.

This is going to be my fourth year.

Couldn't even take the mower off the— Yeah.

Started from scratch.

Yeah.

And then now he, he can run our entire company.

So I showed up, didn't even know how to mow, almost break a water main. Devin comes up to me and he said, well, at least you got that out of the way. That's like a lot of what I'm trying to do with these guys is kind of what Devin did to me. Like, it's okay, you guys can figure it out, you know what I mean?

I'm just gonna throw out a revenue number of $1.5 million next year, but have him in my seat and continue to grow that. I'd like to be able to sit back and kind of evaluate numbers and, and make sure, you know, everything is profitable and, and get us to that maybe $1.5 million mark.

I've heard like you also want to kind of create a venue for the guys to become like a, like a GM role or like start their own location. Like, what's that about?

So my biggest fear was, you know, building a million-dollar business, having a GM, having an ops manager and crew leaders, and then I get an A+ player that comes in on the bottom level and they're like, well, I'm never going to progress. And that was always a big concern of mine because that was kind of my, my experience. Is Kian going to want to run a $2 million a year lawn care business in 10 years? Maybe, maybe not. But I want to create that vessel, you know, allow someone like him who is ambitious to get into this role. And feel like, okay, I don't need to just break away from Devin and Creekside.

He always has had like these big ideas, you know what I mean? So when he says stuff like that, it's kind of just like, oh, is it going to happen? At first I had no clue what he was talking about because it was like he said that on my first day, like eventually he wants to franchise. And I was like, okay, you know what I mean? Like, this is just a job to me.

We are in the franchising process right now with the FDD and funding that whole thing. And that's basically what I work on now. I'm outside of, you know, a handful of hours.

And then I kind of realized like, man, if I really stick this out, ask more questions, learn as much as I can, like I could really make this a career and potentially franchise, you know what I mean?

So that's helpful for me to kind of know what you want from the business. And then so as we go through these, I'll keep those things in mind. So like I don't optimize, like let's make this thing super profitable at $900,000. When you're like, no, like, that's not actually what I want. That's why I asked, because I don't really, really care what you do. I just want to make sure you get to that goal.

Yeah, yeah.

And then your role as it stands now is mostly spent on the franchise side.

You know, I'm expecting twins tomorrow morning.

Let's go.

I've worked very hard these last, really, 6 months to make sure that Kian and Leah and all the guys are, are okay if I have to step away for a little while.

Devin wants to grow to $1.5 million in annual revenue and delegate operations to Kian over the next year so he can focus on the numbers and franchising the lawn care division. The constraints to growth you typically see in a home service business fall under the following 4 categories: liquidity, cash in the bank, leads, getting more customers, labor or employees, and leadership. And this is the 4L framework I use to guide the coaching process.

From a liquidity perspective right now, Is it about $170,000 in equipment debt right now?

About $150,000.

$150,000. Okay, great. $150,000 in that. It's all long-term, like truck stuff. Like, so I'm not super concerned about it. Yeah, some Sheffield Financial for the mowers. Yeah, it's probably what, like $4,000 a month in payments around there. In terms of cash, this year is when it started doing a lot better, like in terms of just the overall cash flow.

Yeah, I mean, the cash flow has been impressive this year, but Also, you're right. I mean, growth sucks cash, and it is— it's been an eye-opening experience for sure.

Do you take a W-2 from the business right now?

No, I'm an owner. Owner's draw.

Okay, got it. Okay. That's the part where I feel it's— it is skinny from a liquidity perspective, is when we take 12% to 14% profit margin, and let's call it $120,000. If we take your salary out, then it starts getting skinny. Right now, the business is making a little over $100,000 in annual profit on the profit and loss. Cost statement. If Devin was to pay himself a salary as the owner for all the work he's putting into the business, it really wouldn't be making a lot of profit. So that's my biggest concern when it comes to liquidity. We take $1 million, let's say $250,000 to $300,000 of that is projects, the other $650,000 to $700,000 revenue. How much is that lawn? How much of that is chem?

Mowing will be $200,000 this year, and the rest anywhere from $400,000 to $500,000 in lawn.

Got it. Where's the profit coming from? You think most of the chemical? Yeah. Got it. And so that's making up basically half of the part that you're really managing.

Yes.

But a lot of the profit.

Our chemical division does like 45% profit margins and then mowing will be anywhere from 30% to 35%. And then our landscaping currently at the moment is sitting in that 20 to 25% range. Lawn chemical is our bread and butter. We love it, but it takes years to build, build that side of the business.

And then the leads that are coming in from the site, whether it be Google or just from the site organically, is that a pretty even split between mowing and treatments? Because it sounds like the mowing side is the one kind of took off this year too.

I mean, it is. It's a lot of, a lot of lawn apps, chemical side of things. So I think we've gained 17 new mowing customers this year.

17 or 18.

And some of them are quite large, probably 150 fertilizer customers this year.

So we build custom websites for home service business owners just like you, and you get a 15-minute free consultation about your website because our team, on average, when someone joins as a client, we increase the number of leads they get by almost double, 80%, within the first 12 months. In fact, if you go to our website, you can actually go through and see all the different websites that we build for a whole bunch of different home service businesses that have taken their business to the next level. Go check it out and book a free consultation call today. And with the current team and the trucks that you do have, are they pretty much being used every day, the trucks, or at capacity essentially right now?

No, we're probably down one vehicle. But during— I mean, from April 1st through September 1st, I mean, it was Nonstop. I mean, everybody was ticking at overtime, like teetering on that overtime.

For mowing, we're doing like $200,000 to $250,000 in revenue. Is that right?

Yeah, around there.

Okay. All right. And so that's like the lowest margin. Have you thought of raising prices dramatically on mowing?

We get pushback more than I would like for our mowing prices. And so, you know, I know bumping them, you know, 10, 15%, I'm going to lose a few. And I think that's kind of hard for me to, you know, especially my, you know, beloved customers that already give me a hard enough time of, you know, getting charged, you know, for 6 mowings in a month. Yeah, you're totally right. I mean, for the amount of manpower versus revenue coming in, I mean, we have 6, 7 people mowing every day.

With all the assets you're doing, like 40, 50% of revenue is with a fertilizer, like spreader, a couple trucks, and 3 employees.

Yeah, I mean, our, I mean, our fertilizing division is one truck and trailer running full-time with 2 machines in it with 2 employees, and then you'll be like a part-time third crew or second crew going out.

Right. Um, 7% is on the, of debt is on the mowing, but yet we do twice as much revenue on the chemical side and it's twice as profitable. Yeah. And so like the blended average net income before you get paid is 12 to 14%. I think If we literally took the mowing out of the equation, you'd probably make more money.

Probably, yeah.

All of the debt, all of these mowers, all of these trucks is for the mowing department that's not even making money. Might be that we have these massive commercial properties with very low rates. This is a trap a lot of home service businesses fall into where it's making up 40% of my revenue with a few customers and I can never lose those customers because I wouldn't have enough revenue to keep my crew busy. But you're not making any profit on that revenue. So option 1 is get rid of mowing altogether or option 2 is raise prices prices, do you actually make profit on that department of the business and want to keep that service?

I don't know.

I love mowing. I, it's what I started off at and got a lot of great customers.

If you look at how many man hours you're putting towards it, tremendous amount, $250,000 in revenue. If you look at the effective hourly rate, like how much you're making per man hour, it's like under $50.

Yeah.

And that's like, you'll never make money.

It's a psychological thing, you know, raising pricing aggressively. And we rose prices 20% in— you're going to hate me for this— 2022, 2023, 2022, or was it 2022 was the crazy like economy year?

2021.

2021.

So 4 years ago.

Well, I wrote— I rose them 20%, but I didn't. I did 10% on mowing.

Just because of— Oh, okay. All right.

All right. And so, but every other year after that, so every other year I raise 3% to basically compensate for inflation.

Do you know what your close ratio is just for mowing or even a blended average of all the estimates right now?

We're sitting in that kind of 30 to 40% close ratio. I think we could probably get a little bit higher.

But for mowing though, like if you had to guess, is that above the 30? Oh, it's way above.

It's way above.

Okay, so the mowings that you're getting, 50, 60% maybe?

Oh, easily. Yeah.

Okay. And then the one that's lower than 30, is that the projects or chem?

Chem, I think, is right at 40%.

Okay.

Projects is below 30%.

Got it. If I was you, I would aggressively raise prices on mowing.

Like, what do you— when you say aggressively, at least 20%. Oh man.

And to new and existing customers.

Okay.

The reason is because— and I would do it next spring. This is not in the 6-week plan.

Yeah.

Because we want to do it right when everyone is having to double cut. No one can get to their lawn. You raise the prices. Hey, it's 20% higher. Here's why we haven't raised prices in X amount of time and we're going forward.

You know, what percentage do you think I would realistically lose?

Less than 5%.

Interesting.

We've got to raise prices and we can't just raise it by 3% a year. You're going to lose to inflation. So in the perfect world, I'd either cut the complete department or raise the prices now. But in order to make him feel better, I want to raise prices next spring rush when they're overwhelmed with work, they're working overtime, they can't stay up with all the jobs. That's when you raise prices. And I believe if he raises prices on 90 of his 100 mowing customers, he will probably lose 2 or 3.

Should I notify all the customers like March 1st, your base price is increasing, you know, 20%?

You can do effective immediately. You could also give them 2 weeks or 3 weeks to find someone else. Yeah, I would say if you like, hey, they're—

there's like, what if, what if my biggest customer is like, Devin, we need to have a talk.

And I'm like, how am I gonna explain, you know, I don't make money and I need to make money so I can pay my employees and run this business.

Yeah.

And like, we— if you just come to peace with the fact that we don't make money in this whole division, which takes time, energy, money, resources, storage, training, equipment, We are not making money. Okay. Now I have a lot of confidence to go raise prices because I know I'm not making money.

Yeah.

And there's this other thing called chemicals and landscaping that we aren't even marketing for half the year that is making a lot of money. At least 90% of the customers have to be price increased.

Yeah.

And I would do it indiscriminate 20%. Again, I don't— that's not the way to raise prices. The way to raise prices, you look at budget hours versus actual hours over the past 12 months. You then say, what's our hourly rate? Measure it up to that. That will take you a couple weeks, and I happen to believe a 20% price increase still gets swallowed by all of your customers. And then we make this division now 20% profit. Yeah. Instead of zero.

Yeah.

It is literally being floated by the chem and the landscape. Yeah.

And probably has been for 8 years.

In the perfect world, I would probably want Devin to take an extra year in profit mode after raising prices on his mowing customers. Before he starts delegating a whole lot in the business. Because financially, it's still going to be really tight to just replace you, even though you work here, say, 30 hours a week and then you're doing the franchise stuff and everything. To replace you still would cost $60,000, $70,000, $80,000 a year. If we take that off of the P&L, we have no cash in this business to grow.

Yeah.

Now, if we add an extra 20% to a division that does $250,000, we have $50,000 of profit hit the bottom line. And that's how you get your ticket out. Yeah, because the $50 grand covers someone to manage the whole thing. How we could kind of think about it is like, I think of GM as even if the owner is inside the business and they're operating from a strategic perspective, they're giving— making systems, thinking about the metrics, I still think of them as the general manager. And then underneath that you can have, you know, Kian being your operations. And then I'm going to guess That underneath Kian, is there people that do like chem and then mowing?

Yeah, we have Matt, who is our kind of chem crew leader manager.

Okay.

He's very self-efficient though.

Yeah. Like he just needs no monitoring whatsoever.

And then do you kind of serve almost as that role for the mowing team right now?

Yeah, for sure.

Got it. So you're already here. I think it'd just be a function of like, Title doesn't need to change. He's already doing that for mowing. It's just more of a formal thing. Like, hey, when you guys are going to call out, you contact Kian. When you need something on the route, you contact Kian.

Which we already basically do that now.

Do you run team meetings right now?

No.

I mean, the mowing guys normally know what they're doing, so it's just I'm scheduling. And yeah, in the mornings I check up on them, just make sure they're good to go.

And who does hiring right now?

I do.

Easy hiring. Okay, got it. So like, that would probably be the one role I see from an operations manager perspective that would be moved. And that would be the thing that really frees you up to, to be more of a GM.

Especially being removed from operations, you know, not being exposed to, you know, my employees are gonna see this, but you know, there is employee drama and it's everywhere. It's life. It is what it is. That is very hard for me if somebody's coming to me about an issue and then I'm like, Okay, well, what steps have you taken to resolve the issue? You know, if I come, you know, ripping on somebody for whatever it might be, you know, I just feel like that, that is by far the hardest thing I deal with right now.

I know exactly where you're at because I franchised the business and I was in this weird spot where I was like, I was kind of still there in the morning occasionally, but like I didn't know who was getting hired and like someone else did the training. I heard some of the drama. Someone would come complain to me about their manager.

So what did you do to solve that?

You always go to your operations manager.

Okay.

So if you say he's in charge and they come to you, you say, go talk to Kian. And then if you see them making a mistake, you go to Kian. It's a very challenging thing because you're like, well, I see it. I know what to do. I will just tell them. It's like a tearing. It kills. And it takes all the micromanagement tendencies inside of us to be like, no, I put someone else in charge, I will go to them. They will then— like, it's inefficient. I can just tell them. Yes, you're right. If you don't, they will just keep coming to you. Tomorrow when he's having twins, Kian is now the operations manager and will be treated as such. So the crew is contacting Kian when there's problems in the field. They contact Kian when there is problems with clocking out or then they're calling out for the day. When they have problems out on the truck and the equipment's breaking down, they call Kian. The hardest part is when you know—

because I don't want to overwhelm him. Them too much, right?

Right.

Like, I— so then, no offense, you're really young. Like, you're in a unique situation, and at 23 years old, you know, there's not a lot of people that are in your position. And so yes, I do try to shield some of that a little bit because—

now, has that been requested? Have you asked for like less responsibility?

No.

No. Okay, so let me say this. It's 23. We just met from a guy this morning— was this morning or yesterday? 23-year-old running a $1.1 million business. Yeah, he's the owner. Yeah, Kian's fully capable. I've met— I have only talked to you a little bit. Fully capable. Excellent operations manager. I would put all of my money on him as an operations manager. And anything inside of you that says that you are trying to guard him, it is you feeling like I still need to be needed in this business a little bit when you don't. I've seen a lot of operations managers. I know when I can smell a good one. He's humble. He's approachable. He's willing to learn. He's locked in on me the whole time. He's very focused. He's not on his phone. Like, that's an operations person. You have to have trust that if he feels overwhelmed or he needs help or he doesn't understand something, he will come to you. That's the line of communication between the two of you is like, you have to be like, hey, I don't want you to be overwhelmed. I don't want you to feel like you resent coming to your job because I put too much on you. If that— if you ever think that, I need you to come to me and I will immediately step back in.

When I first started, I've always just ask a million questions. I want to know more. Like, I'm still young, I'm still trying to— I don't know everything, you know? Like, I'm gonna make mistakes.

I happen to believe though that if you let him run, like a thoroughbred horse, if you let him run, they just crank. The business will do better, the team will do better, and he will perform way above what you think if you just let him run. Yeah, like having the two kids is the great point because everyone gets it. It's not like always playing favorites. It's like, oh, he's having two children, makes sense. They're all gonna start depending on him more and more and more. When they come to you, you're gonna say, go to to Kian, and then it'll be much more smooth. Then next, next spring, you're gonna be hiring for the last time.

With him gone, it will definitely make me make more decisions, and I'll have to learn from my mistakes, you know what I mean? So I'm not going to be perfect, I'm not going to be Devin, you know, I'll do it my way. And yeah, I think it'll benefit everybody.

All your objective is to do is to get to capacity, raise prices by 20% on your mowing so it's profitable, and then you can move that over to Kian after the busy season. The reason you want the operations manager to still be able to do that is because whoever hires that person has a sense of a relationship with the interviewee. So they like build a rapport with you during the interview process and all this. And then you're like, oh yeah, that's your direct report and I'm not talking to you again. You never come back.

You're never going to see—

it feels a little strange. Yeah. Whereas if he's like, hey, here's my interview dates, admin person knows that they slot them all in for his schedule on certain days. He knows, okay, I get the crew out and then on these days I'm doing interviews. And then your goal is to make sure he has the systems to be able to run that model.

Yeah.

So how do you— what do we do? Interview? What do we actually say? What's the process? Which you already have. But like, now I was thinking, how do I hand this off? Yeah, there is higher leverage activities that you can do as the GM that steps away at a $1.5 million business. For example, I think a huge opportunity is the fact that you're running a bunch of Google ads that don't have any tracking right now. You don't know what your customer acquisition costs, cost of conversion. And that's why when you put $500 in Facebook ads, you have no idea if it worked or not. There's no tracking. No, we don't have Google. We don't have Google tracking codes and we don't have Facebook pixels. If the business is going to go from 1 million to 3 million and beyond in the future, we've got to actually track where the leads are coming from. Having tracking codes, super important. All right. I got the last one in my brain. Franchise. Okay. Why?

Why?

I do not understand this. I understand franchising. I've done the FTD. I've written the operations manual. It's a pain in the butt. It costs a lot of money. Yeah, I've dropped about 30 grand on it. Yeah. And you haven't finished. You're on it. 30 grand. You're not done yet. It's still a couple of years away. It's expensive. So like, why franchise? Because what I have heard so far is mostly about the team.

Yeah.

There's more efficient ways of doing that if it's just the team. Is there other things that you want to get done or is it really just you want your team to be able to start their own location under the Creekside name?

When I started the company, I worked for a pretty big lawn care company. I didn't like that atmosphere. You see all your other competitors out there and you start to wonder, okay, they look professional, you know, like what about them that is like, you know, why are those people working there? So then I discovered, okay, you know, that's a, it's a franchise, that's a franchise world. You know, our business, you know, is, it's not like I'm rolling in the dough right now, but it is changed my family's life for sure. You know, it's allowed my parents to retire and, and not have to worry about making ends meet entirely. And, you know, if I can set up, you know, maybe an employee that is a similar situation and help him build, you know, a life, it's not just about mowing lawns. It's actually about changing trajectory of your family tree, really. And that's what I'm trying to build.

He really does want to benefit everybody. He tells us, like, hey, we need to mow more. We need to just try to get all this done so you guys can make more money. You know what I mean?

Here's the good news. All of that can be accomplished without franchising. Yeah. Right? I do not believe that franchising is a good move. And I know that's hard to hear, but all of what you just said can be accomplished without franchising. And franchising is extremely painful. Financially painful. You will not make money on 20 to 30 locations. When someone says, even when they're making the FTD, like, we'll do 20, 30, 40 locations and we'll see if it works out, I would tell every franchisee to run away. Because if you quit, they all quit. And if it doesn't work out, they all lose. Franchising is, I'm doing this forever and I have to do it because if I don't, I will not achieve a certain goal. And I believe you can achieve the goal you have for your team without franchising. It's expensive. It does not stop at $20,000 or $30,000. It does not stop at FDD. It starts with registrations. It starts with licensing. It goes to the copyrights and to the trademarks. It goes to an attorney. Then someone challenges that trademark, and then you're gonna go into court. It goes crazy. We weren't profitable until we hit 100 locations. Last year at Augusta Lawn Care, the average location grew revenue by more than 27%. And we're on track to beat that this year. If you want to see why, go to AugustaLawnCareServices.com/franchise and watch over 50 videos and case studies of different owners that took their independent lawn care business and turned it into Augusta Lawn Care. The reason I hardly ever push so hard against it is because people think that if I say that, it's because I don't want competition in the franchise world. And that's not true. I don't want you to go through the pain that it would be to go to the franchising when you don't know for certain you can get to 50 to 100 locations very quickly. Okay. Because it is a drag. And by the time you get there, you've lost Keenan, which is the whole reason you did the whole thing.

Yeah.

I think there's a lot of opportunity to be able to do all that you want for the team without doing franchising. For example, you could do an employee stock ownership program so they can buy pieces of the business. An ESOP, it's called. Tax advantage for you, by the way, to be able to actually get some money, chips back off the table, but then give them ownership in the business. Yeah. Profit sharing for management. The ability to start second locations that you own and you finance it. Usually do it so you can use Section 179s and not pay a bunch of taxes from your first location that's been really profitable. You take the money, you invest in the second location, and then you give a huge chunk of profit sharing to your team. That is usually also how they'll make more money. A franchisee starting out that's not an entrepreneur— like, an entrepreneur is already starting their own business. They're not working for you. And so the amount of people that, for example, like, started Augusta and then become a franchisee is like 1 in 250. Yeah, like, my concern is that if the only reason we're doing this is for the team, we can get to that goal much faster 5 other ways. Yeah, you can create programs for your team to educate them on finance. Educate them on personal finance, investing, being able to save, doing budgets. Like, that's very fulfilling now. And impact 70% of them that actually care about it, because some people don't, versus maybe 1% of them that will actually join the franchise, right? Because a franchisee needs to have $50,000+ to give a shot, have a shot at it. Yeah. How long is it gonna take them to have $50,000, $60,000, $70,000 to go start one?

It might not ever happen.

It's like 1 in 250. Yeah. Unless there's other reasons as to why you want to franchise. Like, you're like, I want to become the next TruGreen. Oh yeah, I can get behind that. Let's go.

Yeah. Like totally. There's a side you're lying to yourself, especially as a business owner. If you're like telling the world that you're not in it for monetary gain of some capacity.

Fantastic. We have a clear goal. We want to make money. Okay. So now, now are we clear in the fact that this is for the team, but we also want to make a bunch of money? Can we say that?

Yeah.

Fantastic. All right. See, now we have a clear goal. We want to make more money. Okay.

It was very difficult to admit that, right? Like, yes, I'm in it to make a lot of money. It was really nice to have someone like Mike come in and kind of dig that out of me a little bit.

So now that we're going to franchise the business, because I'm okay with it, It's just a function of if the goal is to help the team, franchising is not it. If we want to make more money, I'm on board with it. We just need to make sure that's the clear goal.

When I first started, when I was 22 years old, I was like, I want a million-dollar company by the age of 50. So I got to this point and guess what? I feel the same. Why not try to ramp this thing up and and do something really fun. And to be completely honest, yes, I want my team to do well, but we want to make a bunch of money at the, at the same, at the same wrong saying that.

Let's go.

We want to make a ton of cash.

Yeah. I want to make a lot of money.

Let's go.

And I want my, you know, young children to look at their dad and, and, you know, be proud of what their father has has built. I don't know if that's a bad thing or not, but hey, I'm not judging.

I just want to get wherever you want your goal to be. If it's legacy, let's go. It's a kind of— we'll get you there. It's just a function of getting clear on that. Because if you say one thing like, hey, I'm doing the franchise for my team, makes no sense whatsoever. If you say I want to make a bunch of money doing this and I want to change my family tree and inspire my team by how much money I made and be able to say, hey, you can do the same thing. With or without this company.

I mean, to be honest, that's probably very accurate on my mindset. I just, I don't like telling people that because it's, you know, pretty self-absorbed.

You know how liberating it is to say I'm just in it to make a bunch of money?

Yeah. I mean, that's why I started a business.

Your boss coming in here every single day and telling you about how you should do your finances and you should be a better man. You should be trying to do this and improve this in your life and think about budgeting. You should want to become your own business owner or just my boss that I knew started mowing cutting grass a few years ago, becoming extremely wealthy and hiring a bunch of people and making a huge impact in the community and having freedom with his family, do what he wants. That's big enough of something that I'm like, I'll do whatever he's doing. And I don't need to say anything because they'll just pick up on the fact that, oh, he does show up early, he does work hard, and he does all these other things that led to that success.

I want money. There's no question. I mean, who doesn't, right? We all do in some capacity.

No one will listen to me. Me if I didn't have money? No one. Like, you need the money to have the impact. And you can have so much of an impact to your team when you just get really clear, like, this is the goal and here's why. The love of money is the root of all evil. Having money is not the root of all evil. The love of it is. I don't believe that you love money. You like what it can do for you and for your family and for the people that you love.

Yeah.

I guarantee you found out about me after I came to this realization. 'Cause everything took off after that. 3 to 4 years ago, I was like, oh, I'm just gonna be clear with everyone. Like, I wanna make a bunch of money and I'm not gonna hide it. 'Cause I happen to believe when I make a bunch of money, I'll be able to travel the whole country helping other people. Dude, it was super meta. I hadn't really thought about it until like we talked about it with him. So I got this notebook, I found it. It was from right before we started franchising. And I was like, hey, in 5 years we're gonna have X amount of locations. I forget what that was. In there I said, I said I'll be married. Let's go. But also I said, I said, we will travel the country and we'll help businesses that are struggling. And that only can be possible if we made money. The turnaround shows the result of us making more money. So like, why would I not make that the goal? Because everyone wants to help people, but they don't want to just get clear on the fact that you got to make a bunch of money before that. That's the unlock. Because if you do that, then you'd like, okay, forget the franchise thing. I'm just going to build this location up so profitably that I get 5 people asking me to franchise. People will beat down your door if you build a $1.5 million business that has $400,000 in profit. Distributions. Yeah, so don't worry about the franchise thing, right? All of your time, attention, the architecting of this business to make tons of money. For me, it's like I want to change the level of professionals in the industry. So when there's a big problem inside of Augusta and there's a big revolt and a bunch of people are against me, I just have to ask myself that one question. Yeah, what decision will get me closer to this? The challenging part you have right now is you have an express goal and you have an internal goal versus just being like, I say and think the same thing, and that gives you clarity. Because you don't have to think, okay, well, this is what I have said, this is what I actually want, and I have to like split between these two things. Just like, I want this and that's all I'm gonna focus on. Like, the reason we hit the franchise and the reason like I did that, that painful process, is because I wanted to change level professional in the industry and I need 1,000 locations to make it happen. So like, and no one listened to me on YouTube. No one. They always just like, oh, it's a nice idea, that's good, like great little videos, you're such a YouTube influencer. I'm like, forget that, I'll compete with all of all of you. And so that was like my North Star. So that's what made it very clear. Like, I need to franchise. I need to start this. I need to wear the same uniform as these people.

Yeah.

And then they'll listen. Being clear about why the business exists is the thing that gives you the clarity to execute quickly. Yeah.

I'm battling these two different things. I'm the bottleneck in the company, right? But now having like that clear vision, it's— I'm beyond excited right now. Like, I can't wait to start implementing things and moving forward. So let's go.

This is my favorite turnaround of all time. It really is. Basically, that's all I got. Only 4 things. Raising prices. Ops manager, Mr. Keon. We're refining the hiring process. We can hand things off to him in the spring. And then you're focusing on things like tracking ads, upsells, techs, getting into Copilot, all those architect things that he doesn't want to focus on. You do those.

Yeah.

Instead of actually doing 20% on only mowing, we decided to do 20% on all services. And, uh, he was about right, you know, 5 to 10% is what we've lost so far. And we couldn't be more thrilled with how responsive the customers have been. I had kind of done a poor job at not really making him a concrete you know, middleman, you know, from the employees, field workers to him to me. We addressed that. Now everything runs through Kian. He did a fantastic job being able to kind of manage everything. So the next thing was refining our hiring systems. You know, we're kind of in the process of working on that. We haven't hired anybody for the next year yet. It's kind of still a work in progress. The final part of the plan was kind of upselling our customers. We're upselling kind of some premium package deals and stuff, and that's actually going really well. It's totally changed the way I've looked at things since, since I've met with him. I've got a lot more comfortable in my personal life just talking about my goals. And the things that I've implemented into the company now are going into next year are monthly sit-down meetings with all the employees to to, you know, show them exactly, you know, where the money's being spent and where we're making the money, where we're losing the money. Being more open about everything and not being afraid to tell people, yeah, we're trying to make $1 million this year, or, you know, 20% profit margins. We want to eventually try to franchise, right? I knew we weren't ready, um, but it was something that I wanted to, to work towards. And him being able to dig out of me, you know, get the correct mindset before taking on, you know, an endeavor like franchising. Basically get your head on straight before you try to, you know, sink thousands upon thousands of dollars into something that's not guaranteed. Let's get our location extremely profitable and desirable. Once we're ready, we'll know that we're ready. And then you know, we can kind of slowly ease into it and make sure that we're, we're doing this the correct way. Sometimes you need to hear the hard truth. Sometimes that is being on camera and someone who is vastly more successful than you coming in and kind of dissecting your business and seeing what is working and what's not working to kind of really reignite that fire.