His Mental Breakdown SHATTERED Their $3M Business

I turned down an offer from Hermosi.

Out of curiosity, what did he offer you?

You can't pay money for us.

Today we're in Texas visiting Landon and Hailey from Aurora Lights.

This is where the fire happened. I'm functioning off probably about 2 hours of sleep.

Y'all do checks in cash or no?

Never. That's why you have $200,000 in receivables? Yeah. Their permanent lighting business made $3 million in revenue last year.

If I sold the business right now, I could retire. Q2 is not profitable. Q2 mergers us. I'm overwhelmed. There's so many things to fix.

There's so many hats to goes nowhere. $2,000 customer acquisition cost, we make no money on that. But due to a mental health crisis, Landon had to step away from the business for 5 months.

Haley and I are going to therapy, and it's bringing up a lot of difficult things that we need to work through. I know what it's like to stare down suicide. I think there's about 6 months there that I hardly worked, if worked at all.

It revealed cracks in the company's leadership.

We're probably short about half a million in profits. That's a big, that's a big hairy problem. What happens if this all comes crashing down? I can't provide for my family.

Yeah, sometimes it's difficult because When I'm talking to an owner, I actually feel like there's personal issues that are causing the business issues.

I think part of the reason this hasn't worked out is because you have been closed off to it.

This is the Business Turnaround Show. My name is Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care and HomeWorks software. I travel the country fixing struggling businesses. That is your margin. So if you can get rid of that, you're able to double your profits. That's a big hairy problem, but on the other side of big hairy problems, we got good things. Our goal is to give Landon and Hailey a strategy to turn around the company in the next 6 weeks.

I mean, this could be groundbreaking.

We could stick the landing, then this becomes, uh, this becomes everything. There's nothing else like this. Yes, I'm in the trenches. Yes, it sucks. But man, sometimes those trenches are beautiful. Yeah, the implementation of this is gonna be nuts.

Oh, it's gonna be nuts. Alright, we have touched down in Houston, and tomorrow morning we are going and visiting Landon and his wife that have built Aurora Lights.

Hey guys, Landon, co-owner of Aurora Lights, and we are here out in front of our manufacturing facility.

They build and manufacture lights here in Houston. They're very proud of that.

We manufacture everything ourselves here, um, and so that's been our, our competitive advantage. We're Texas made, built in Texas, made for Texans.

So we're going to help them tomorrow. It sounds like there's been a fire at their shop recently, and so a little bit of chaos currently.

We're not able to go inside and take photos of it. Uh, there was a fire A fan in the bathroom malfunctioned. No one was present. Thankfully no one got hurt, but it did destroy a lot of this place. Yeah, this is where the fire happened. If you want to look at this side too. So this was covered in ash right here. Oh, and it was all flooded. Everything here was flooded, but things had flown up and over and then fell down and burnt everything up over here.

I did actually have a coaching call with Landon and his wife about a month ago and already told them a lot of things to do around pricing and several elements of what they're doing right now.

So what we got out of that call is we were going to, you know, a recommendation of our previous marketing director was, hey, look, CAC's super high. What we can do about that is differentiate ourselves from the competition. So we were planning on starting a second company and then mingle the two services so that we can offer things that no one else does and lower the CAC there. Talked to Mike, he said, don't do that. You're setting up 15% of all your leads. Fix that and you'll triple your business easily. Don't start another company to solve the problem.

That was huge for me. I was like so grateful for Mike Andes when he's like, yeah, focus on what all the things that are happening right now in your company and then you can scale that. I'm like, yes. And now I don't have to do the startup of the other company. So I was grateful for it. I was feeling really relieved after the call actually.

So yeah, they do permanent lighting. So this allows you to not just do Christmas lights, but also Easter, Fourth of July, Halloween, Halloween, game day, all of that sort of thing. So there they are, let's go. That's Landon. I think it's Stacy, is that her name? Haley. Haley, Haley is her name. So Texas manufactured, family owned, let's go. Cool, I love it.

So there's no electricity. But yeah, so our manufacturing facility, we keep it super organized. Everything's labeled, everything's color coordinated. So everything will have its own color to tell you what room it's in. And then it's labeled as well. And then it's pretty clear, you know what tool goes where. This is our conference room. We have the big ROR lights on the wall. We have glass everywhere for our whiteboards, so you can write at the table, write on the walls. And then we have our door hangers. Ooh, they're covered in ash. Your website was awesome, by the way. Is it? Thank you. My wife built that. We've never built a website before, and she just hopped on, and within, uh, What, it was 3 days. She, 3 days after, after hours, she coded that and built it and put that together.

Although I can't really read this, change your home's look with a tap. It'd be nice if I could see that text a little bit better. So they're pricing on here. They can calculate your cost. They charge between $20 and $26 per linear foot for lighting installations. I don't know if you can see this on the screen, but this is a duplicate of the same line. That's kind of interesting. Okay, so we get what they do. Oh, that's cool. You can put how many linear feet and it kind of racks up the price. I don't have a buy now button. Please don't take me to a quote. Oh man, I want to buy it right now.

I don't know what to define my role. I do the accounting, the admin work.

She still wears a million hats.

I do the automations for the company, the CRM stuff.

I built our website. Yeah, CRM. Yeah, she's— we were getting quotes for websites like $50 grand, $10 grand for a website. It'll take 6 months, 8 months to do. And she stayed up after hours after taking care of kids every night for 3 days and she built our website.

Okay, so when I look at the profit and loss statement, they made just over $3 million in revenue in 2025. He's saying $3.5 million, but that's just because they might have realized and earned more of that revenue the year before. That's fine.

So our business is seasonal. Q4 makes us all our money. We did not make the profits last busy season that we should have because I was off, and that's going to roll through the rest of the company because we're probably short about half a million in profits from that. And, you know, half a million in profits is— that's a lot of money. There's a lot you can do with that.

He's running on a 13% profit margin right now, and so for some people, like, they see $400,000 in net income, like, That's amazing. 13%, if you are trying to grow and invest in business, can feel like nothing because you are making orders of $200,000 or $300,000 worth of lights and materials and they have a big manufacturing facility and like you might have no, no available cash and cash flow might be actually really tight.

Yeah, we just have $100,000 of raw materials and then we have our machines, which are everything to us. So we got to fix that. This whole place was flooded, so drywall is going to have to be taken out. So in order to— these baseboards, the water was up to here on the baseboards. You can see that line right there. So that's where the water was. And so that means if there's mold on the carpet, there's probably mold. We have to figure out what's behind the wall and what damage was done there. So that has to be ripped out. Ceiling would obviously need to be ripped out. AC unit needs to be— so the fire happened right underneath the AC unit, so that thing's cooked. And then like, so it knocked out our power, obviously, and then it knocked out the water line that ran there. So with all that damage there, we need to start cutting wire. So I don't want to cut all that and then the landlord say, okay, I didn't okay that expense. If it's going to be our responsibility, then I'll do it my way and I'm not going to pay anything that you did.

You might have no available cash and cash flow might be actually really tight at a 13% margin business. So we'll be interested to see what his goals are tomorrow. But I feel like a lot of this is going to come down to leadership and whether or not he can actually attract a team of managers that want to work with him.

We're both in leadership, so we have a sales manager and then an operations manager. We had an office manager, install manager, but we recently— our install manager is not with us anymore. And that, that office manager was pretty much already doing like ops.

So he wasn't doing his role and she was covering for him. So we just promoted her and switched things around. Right when he left, culture had taken a huge hit, but that's because he had started a separate company. He was planning on leaving already.

Yeah.

So, so that took a hit and that's where we lost the half a million in profit.

We were losing good installers as well, and it was because they had issues, which everyone does. They have concerns. And it was being brought to him and then it wasn't being really brought to us and we had no idea.

Yeah, that's what it seems like.

And we lost a really good— we lost some really good guys and we just didn't know until the end when they were already like frustrated, you know, and everything that it's like, yeah, so we lost some good guys there with him.

I'm never a huge fan when an owner is talking about their managers so much, like it's always their fault. Like he said 3 times, it was like, "Oh, those managers." I don't like that mentality because you're the leader. And so if you consistently have bad management, it's actually your fault. And so I happen to believe this is gonna go in the direction of this being a leadership problem. And he's allowing maybe his past or things he's trying to figure out in therapy to affect him showing up to the business.

We needed to take some mental hiatus from end of last year. And then that led for people in our company to, you know, things got loose, things got, started falling through cracks.

Yeah.

And, We're paying the price for that.

So y'all, both of y'all took a break at kind of the same time?

I've never taken a break. I've just been here.

No, she picked up for me.

Yeah, he kind of took a little bit. We have 2 kids and so, but yeah, he took a little bit of a break. I mean, he still worked, he still worked a little bit, but not as heavily as I.

I think there was about 6 months there that I hardly worked, if worked at all.

Yeah.

Now I understand there's things you go through and for the past 5 months he's been absent from the business, but I have a feeling The P&L and the balance sheet look very different now than they did back then because he had to step away.

The bottleneck— so we have several bottlenecks. I think there's 3 general categories, I'd say, for our bottlenecks. Leadership is what's going to keep us from scaling. Right now, things have to be, you know, we have to jump in, make sure everyone's accountable. If we're not constantly going, checking back in with the leadership team, we've seen that they'll make their own judgment calls, and it's from a very narrow focus. Hey, we want this done, or I want this done 'cause it's easier on me, but I completely screw up the next guy down the line.

What I have found when people have a whole bunch of list of constraints, or things that they think are hurting the business, usually the actual prob, the thing you're looking for is like, what's the one thing? 'Cause if they can change one or two things in the next 6 weeks, they can probably knock out 90% of this list if they just fix the big domino. So, when I have a list of a whole page of different things that needs to be changed, I'm immediately thinking, what's the 1 or 2 things that if we just put all of our time and attention would actually get across the finish line and see the biggest impact and probably solve most of these other problems? I happen to believe at this size of business doing over $3 million in revenue, relatively profitable. This is a constraint of the leader. And fortunately, Landon has been vulnerable enough to say it in his application video. So my hope is that we can pull that out, deal with the problems, and create some infrastructure to make sure that that doesn't keep the business from growing. We are headed to the shop space for today's turnaround, and it turns out they recently had a fire at the office, so everything is a mess. Nothing really— no one's really working, so we're gonna go just meet them at their house and do the coaching there.

Wow, what's going on, Mike?

Dude, new house?

Got a Homework shirt on you today. Shout out to Homeworks. Sense for us, fire stopped happening.

Yeah, right, dude. What happened with that?

Uh, fire.

Just like, what, like, how did it start? Do you know?

It was the bathroom fan. No! Yeah, the tenants next to us, they were like, hey, there's water coming in our building from your side, and we didn't have anyone there. And we were like, oh wow. And so our operations manager went over there and the sprinkler system was going and And then she noticed there was a fire, and thankfully the fire was out. Um, and we were calling like the building landlord, and he's like, we don't have a sprinkler system. And so we're trying to turn off the water.

Clearly there's one, our place is flooded.

Yeah, we're trying to turn off the water and stuff. And anyway, um, the fire melted the pipes, and that's what put out the fire. And so it could have been way worse.

Landlord refuses to pay for any of a even though the contract says it's his fault or his responsibility. We've had instances before where the sewage backed up and it flooded this whole place, and then I, I went ahead and cleaned it because I'm not gonna let my guys work in black water. That's pretty awful. Um, but, uh, yeah, they— that at that point it was their responsibility as well, and we just covered it because I wasn't— I wanted it done quickly. I wasn't gonna nickel and dime this.

It's gonna be his problem eventually if he moved out.

Right? He said we're responsible for all of it.

What? The contract says that if there's fire damage, he's responsible, whether it was our fault or his.

Yeah, it does say whether or not our fault or not.

And then that will be arranged like separately. But yeah, so we just need to get an attorney.

At least it didn't happen like October, November.

That's true. Yeah, we just kind of rolled with it. It's, uh, we're still producing, we're still installing.. It does slow things down. We're not going to be able to hit high capacities for busy season by any means. Yeah, right now it feels like it's, you know, when it rains it pours. It feels like it's just pouring. Like all the things are hitting at once. We're running some bottlenecks here. So we've hit our— we keep running against the same issues. So it's hard to get past this point.

Yeah, we scaled pretty fast. And then right now I feel like we're just kind of stuck. So, but we also had some, some things that blew up like at the end of last year and we're kind of paying for that now. I feel like we would have had a better offseason now if those things didn't happen.

So how did you get originally started doing the lights? Like, what was the original impetus?

Yeah, so we both in finance. So Haley's an accountant, she works, she does, uh, she does tax work. And then I did, uh, financial services, so financial advising type, type of thing. I was pretty miserable, I was really depressed, and then Someone, one of my clients called me and was like, "Hey, you know, doubt you wanna look at this, but one of my friends, he really needs someone to help run the Houston department for this company." And they do lights. So I did that for a while. I ended up getting really, really good at sales from that process. We were pretty successful there. Hailey ended up quitting her job and she supported me in that role. I was, you know, I quickly became the top sales rep in the company there. As far as I'm aware, I hold the top sales records in the nation for this industry. We had made an agreement, I'd be, compensated about a million bucks, and they negged on that deal. We did a handshake deal on a million dollars, and they said at the end of it, hey, thanks for flying, thanks for traveling around, starting up these locations, helping us build, but we're not gonna pay you.

And that was all exterior lights as well.

This is exactly what we do now.

Oh, okay, okay, cool.

And then, uh, yeah, so that— they didn't pay me, so I left. So we ended up actually just figuring out how to manufacture ourselves. Yeah, we made it work, um, literally in our garage, like from our garage.

We say that and our competitors are like, no, they, they didn't start this in their garage. We did.

But yeah, so we— our first calendar year we did over $2 million, and then these date— these numbers, there's, there's some inaccuracy there. Um, we do have currently over somewhere around $200,000 of accounts receivables. Like, there's things that we still need to be paid out on, so it should be higher.

There's also some collections big deal, right?

Yes, there's some tracking that is missing from this, so it should be higher, but this is a pretty good picture. Just scale everything up, I think. I think there are 3 areas where we can grow, so I'm curious what he thinks is our number 1 is. I personally think profitability-wise, our number 1 bottleneck is going to be busy season capacity install. In busy season, our CAC drops to the floor, our capacity, um, and if we can increase our capacity, there's a ton of money we made there. So that's our off-season issue. Our goal is to scale. And so I think that's where Mike's uniquely positioned to help us. But how do we create systems and structures that are scalable and we can just go nationwide? Because I'd love to have over 200 locations.

Yeah, he has big visions for us. As you can tell, he's the visionary. I'm the integrator.

So, yeah, Haley's superpowers include that.

He has great, like, great visions, great dreams for this company. It's like, I mean, I'm just like, okay, I just need direction and then I know I can do it.

But no one can do operations like Hailey.

My thought though is like, it can lead in Q4 when the leads are so cheap. 'Cause if I remember correctly, correct me if I'm wrong, it's like $100 customer acquisition cost during fourth quarter, right? Less, but yeah. And then like way more this time of year.

Yeah, like up to $2,000.

$2,000, yeah. So like, do you think we can, how, if you offer someone Hey, we'll install your lights in 4 months. Yes, they're not gonna like that, but if you offer them $1,500 discount or $1,000 discount, will they take it?

There's a lot of players coming in the market. Everyone's trying to build capacity for Q4, and no one fills it. Everyone is drowning in leads.

So can we just, instead of turning people away, can we book them 6 months from now?

I don't think that they'll book 6 months. I think we can get 4 months out. That's my personal belief. Feel free to break that, but that's where I'm, my gut's telling me.

Something that I'm just remembering in November of '25, we were booking out and promising, hey, you get this discount and you get spring install. But then we had no more work for our installers.

For the average ticket, is it like 5, 6 grand to install lights?

It's like 45, 55.

And so basically if we have to market during spring or summer, and spend $1,500 or $2,000 customer acquisition cost, we make no money on that.

Yeah, we make no money.

And so, what I would love to be able to test, at least, is an offer when the rush is crazy and they can't get anyone to come show up. It's like, well, if we can't get it done this year, we might as well get a huge discount and have it done next summer.

Yeah.

And I think that if you have unlimited demand and you can sell leads for 3 years, you have enough for that, We just create an offer, it's like, hey, do you want spring? Okay, great, here's a discount. Do you want next summer? Here's a bigger discount. Because in their mind, they're like, hey, I'm not gonna get Christmas this year. It's booked out, everyone's smashed, no one's gonna be able to get this in time. Great, I know I want next Christmas, I'm willing to wait till June, July, or August, and if you're gonna give me $1,000 off, which could potentially be 20 or 30% discount, awesome. Because I would rather spend every marketing dollar when I knowing it leads for nothing, assuming I've greased the offer to be able to book them out in the summer.

Yeah, I'm all game for doubling down on that and pushing to fill the rest of the year. I see there's no loss there. How to execute that, stick the landing, I think there's, I wonder, yeah, I wonder how well we're gonna be able to execute. Great dreams. Totally. And then when it comes down to it, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.

Totally, and I think right now, the punch in the face is we get all these leads and we basically turn them away.

Yeah.

I would love it to where we go into the season and we already have the funnel. It's like, hey, we're booked out, installers are done. All right, ads are now redirecting. And we have that flow ready to go.

It's a low moment. I think the bigger moments that are low isn't that, hey, everything's on fire, because we've recently had a literal fire. Those I think we handle pretty well. It's outside of our control. You know, one foot in front of the other. I think the low parts are, here's the big hairy problem. I don't know how to solve it, and I feel really alone in that process. And the direction, not having a clear direction, or feeling I even have support to get to the next stage, that's a pretty low moment as well. The other thing that, so what I see that shifting is our capacity from installation, we're pushing off the capacity for installation. Now we're gonna run into a capacity for ability to sell that many jobs. I need to sell like 1,200 jobs in a month if I wanna book the rest of the year. And then so, yeah, Q4, I have a month or so to sell 1,200 jobs. I don't have enough sales reps to fill that capacity.

If we have so much demand, we're already constrained on installers. The next constraint becomes, okay, well if we gas marketing, and we have this other flow, from an ads perspective, now we have this problem. We can't get enough salespeople there. That becomes the next bottleneck. I understand we can only install so much. That's a constraint. We can only sell so much in person. That's a constraint. But if we can say, hey, when leads are literally 5% of what they're going to be otherwise, we should probably spend as much money as possible during that time, which means our close rate on the phone, even if it went to 10%, is still going to be $100, maybe $200 customer acquisition cost $2,000. And so I'm okay with a 10 or 15% close rate. And if you're able to gas this much money and push more of this towards that time and just remove the constraint of salespeople, because now they don't have to sell in person, and then we remove the constraint of installers because we're booking out to next year, that should allow us to move that demand forward. I think you can figure out a system because we sell almost all of ours over the phone. We don't do any in person. It is a lower price product. Ours is like $1,000 to $1,200, yours is $4,000, and we're doing the Christmas light thing. So it is a higher-end product. I also think though that if you train someone on the phone correctly, they are able to say, "Oh wow, that's way more." It's like, "Well, here's why," and then also have that downsell in their pocket now for that more price-sensitive customer. I'm not going after the price-sensitive customer though. That's why I'm okay with like a 10 or 15% close rate, and that's what we see even with Christmas lights on the phone, it's 10 to 15%. But if I can get leads for $9, which is what we get on Facebook ads during that quarter, gas the thing. The solution that I'm talking about with Landon about this off-season is actually one of 5 ways to solve the off-season in any home service business. It is the Achilles heel and what makes home service businesses usually a pretty pathetic business is that we lose money for 3, 4 months out of the year. If you want to solve this for your business and figure out the other 4 ways to solve the off-season in your business and your specific industry, go to mikeandes.com/workshop or go down in the description. There's a link. It's completely free. It's a workshop that will guide you through how to solve the off-season in your business.

I started out in sales as the career I've done the last decade and a half. One thing that I found is that it's actually not so crazy that someone will dedicate their entire life just to mastering one subject. It's not even crazy that they'll write it down and sell it in a book for really cheap. What is crazy is that you'll have these people that are experts, they dedicate their entire lives to conquering one problem, they write it down, they sell it super cheap, and what's crazy is no one reads it. So today, having, you know, Mike Andes come out for the Turnaround Show was around, you know, channeling and, you know, acquiring those skill sets that someone spent a lifetime developing, you know, world-class people. I can gain knowledge and perspective from all around me. Particularly someone who's done this before, that's pretty appealing to me.

Yeah, my only concern with that is that the footage, like, what if the footage is off and we quoted them this amount?

Just use Google Maps. Is that what you used before?

Mm-hmm.

Like, it's got to be super close.

The peaks is where it's really hard when measuring.

The competitors do Google Maps and that's how they do it.

Yeah.

There's times that I'm showing up and these guys are 70 feet under. There's times that they're significantly off.

But have you measured? Have you used Google Maps and measured?

I have. We should just do that where I measure it on Google Maps, you go measure it in person.

You should not go measure yourself.

No, measure it on Google Maps.

I get it, I just don't think that's a good use of your time.

So like, I think first things first is to even go this route, we have to create a whole system around selling over the phone. And I understand it'll seem way less close rate. It will be, guaranteed. You'll close less over the phone than in person. But I think all the ingenuity that you all have put towards manufacturing and your ability on sales can come together with how do we make a killer over the phone strategy? 'Cause I know you can measure and it'd be accurate. I know that. I also think your guys' permanent lighting thing would kick our pants because you can show other stuff besides green, yellow, and white. Right? Christmas colors. You can show the other stuff and send it to them live on the phone. Look, even though a lot of our leads come from online and from the website, and so important, that's why we have Home Service Web Design. Still, a lot of people want to give you a call. And the reason is, is because they just want to talk to a human. They want to ask a few questions and gain confidence on that call enough to give credit card information. On a web form, most people will do that. But there are still going to be a big chunk of people that want to call your office, want to talk to a real human being before they give payment information. And if I can do that and provide that service and yes, have a little more overhead, having someone answering the phone, having a web form that might cost me some money or using AI, these things cost me money, but a whole lot less than having an estimator or salesperson driving around the Houston area, which is huge. You might get 5 or 6 estimates per day. When those same 5 or 6 estimates could be done in 1 hour with someone over the phone from the comfort of their living room. So like the way that you frame this on the phone is really important because they don't get to see your face. They don't get to have that personal connection.

I'm intimidated by the virtual sales.

Yeah, I've been trying to talk him into it and he's like, I'm every time I'm like, I don't do it.

What part of it? Just that you— that it can close.

I've just never closed that way. I close 70% this way and I close zero that way.

Our process last year, the end of last year, was lead came in, too many leads were coming in, we're like, okay, let's do a virtual sell. So the office would book that, our sales manager, they'd put it on his calendar and then our sales manager would call them back.

80% of people won't even, like, those never work.

But then our sales manager was getting help from our install manager, 'cause our install manager can just look at the house and kind of estimate it. So there were so many people in it and things were getting lost.

—That's where the drop is off. So we, way back, I used to do similar. It's like, hey, if they want an estimate, tell them I'll call them back. And I'd call them back, I never could sell anyone. But as soon as I got to where when they called, they're on the phone and they do value their time and they're like, hey, if you can just give me a price right now, I'm locked and loaded. Like, that big drop-off going from like, hey, let's book you an appointment, which is a phone call, versus let me just take care of this now, is like huge, huge.

What I'm hearing you say is that transition lets out all the momentum.

Well, yeah, 100%. What you have here gets digested down to what does someone on the phone need to know, and in 3 days they go through the course, they're trained up. This is exactly how you do it. You're— they could literally get a commission on square footage based on the square foot that they sell the customer. They get a commission, right? A very low base. You can do minimum wage You could train them exactly how you do it here, but when the customer calls, they can solve the problem. They can get them on the schedule and everything. They have the ability to get them the 15% discount for spring, 25% off next summer if they say price. They have the ability to be able to give the cost comparison per day. They have all this baked in as tools in their tool belt. The ability to send them a text message with a picture of their house. You give them all those tools, and there's not an 80% drop-off, which is always what we see when you say, hey, Hey, let me book an appointment and I have an estimator call them. In general, for almost every home service business, fixing the off-season is the unlock. If you ever have a month where you dive by more than 50% in revenue compared to your best month, we have a problem. And they were dropping like 75%, 80% plus per month in revenue going from their best months, November, December, down to June, July, August. And so that was going from like $500,000 in monthly revenue all the way down to under $100,000 in June, July, and August. And that's where they're losing money. And so if that's happening in a home service business, that is the only thing to focus on. I don't care about lead attribution. I don't care about hiring and getting coaching. I don't care about hiring someone that has a bunch of experience with phone calls. It doesn't matter. Fix the off-season and get leads from when you're busy to the time when you're not busy.

Yeah, what I'm hearing is that we have off-season, we have in-person appointments being ran. Busy season we have this one team that pops up. What does that person do for the rest of the year?

Right now I would see this as a gate. So it's like, when our estimates are booked and we can't, we swap it. It's like, hey, now ads are no longer flowing to this, like, we book an appointment. It is call us or go to our landing page. And then the second thing I would say is, I think eventually you will get so good at that you will not even want to have the in-person. During busy season? Anytime. Anytime. Yeah. Okay. That's where the real juice to this is, because if you can figure this part out, like this is the hard, big, hairy problem, this is what scales. 'Cause now this person can sit anywhere and sell, and this becomes very much of a model that can go in a different city, it can move. The thing is, 15% right now of your revenue is going to salespeople, and it's going to them driving around, and all this other stuff. That is your margin, so if you can get rid of that, you're able to double your profits. And make it a much more, a model that can scale so much better. And if you put half of their money into your marketing, you'd make up for the fact that yes, it's a lower close rate. It is. But if there are people struggling to close at say 25%, you're at 40% 'cause you're an all-star, but they're at 20 or 25%, and they've got experience and they're paid well, like scaling that is a lot harder than how do we get someone who makes $14 an hour and has incentive on the phone to answer these questions and give these offers, which are tools, and now you've given like the downsell thing. So if it's really price that's their concern, now they have something to give them. I also think you're so good at creating sales processes, you just have to hone it in now for phones. I think that's all that's really required. And if you— the lower level of skill that you can get someone to actually be efficient and do the job, the more scalable this is.

Really big motivations for me is we pay above average. We pay above market rates. When I was coming up in the company, when I was coming up in other companies, honestly, I've never had anyone train me on how to sell. I've never had anyone coach me through how to be a better leader. I don't want that to be different. Real pay, real potential, with someone who cares.

If I'm relying on all-star salespeople, or training them to the level that you're at, we are, we're gonna be constrained by that. That makes sense. Versus if you can take a phone agent, and it takes us about a week for us to get them to where they can answer the phone, and sell a job over the phone, Over the phone.

Yeah, I've trained 3 people ever to get to 50% close rates in this industry, and I've trained a lot. You know, there's been a lot more that have come through my doors that have never gotten close to that.

And if in the past— That's a big hairy problem. That's a big hairy problem, but on the other side of big hairy problems, we got good things. Yeah. And that is a scalable model. It is something that I actually believe all of your sales ability, your ops and admin side, if those things come together, you are able to sell on a landing page and over the phone.

Holy shoot, that's a huge, huge skill set to get access to. We have someone who has hundreds of home service locations. Wow, that's a huge— Those have been big breakthroughs for me is finding the right people that can help adjust our company.

It's very difficult when I'm not a therapist and I don't claim to be a therapist, but when they're getting information from someone that is not business-minded, and it's like pulling them away from the business to rehash things that went on in the past. I don't necessarily agree with that. However, I don't have full context, so I'm very careful. Like, I don't push too hard to get nosy with someone, but also that is very important information to help from a business perspective because it affects directly how you lead. And so as leaders, a lot of times the way we show up in our personal life gets directly reflected in the business. And yes, they're different, but that's why sometimes I gotta ask these questions and dig a little deeper to understand the personal side, 'cause it's making them show up as a poor leader. The last thing I wanted to really go over is like, how do we prevent that from happening again? Like, you have to step away from the business. Was it stress? Was it a matter, was it a one-time thing? What can we do in the business to make sure like 5 months from the business it doesn't happen? 'Cause like it can. It can, if you have the wrong general manager person in place, put everything to waste that long.

Yeah, I mean, we're not expecting me to keep taking hiatuses, but I mean, unfortunately right now Haley and I are going to therapy and it's bringing up a lot of, a lot of, uh, difficult things that we need to work through. So that's not planned. I don't know how you work— how you want to work around that, but that's Fires happen. Yeah.

And has that yielded some benefit for you though? Just from a stability, leadership perspective?

I think we're getting the fruits of this now. But it's taking its time. And to your point of how we keep this from happening again, I just don't know. Keep doing the maintenance and I don't expect this to ever happen again. Certainly don't want to put myself in a place where this would all happen again. That's the goal. I know what it's like to stare down suicide. I know what it's like to stare down self-harm and to have life feel unbearable that no life seems better. There are low moments. And for me, it's been recently my journey has been about connecting with myself. All emotions are data. When you're feeling overwhelmed and stressed, those are just data points. And I think we need to pause and give space for our emotions and for ourself to exist. Push, push, push, grind, grind, grind is the mantra I've lived by. You know, I've always envisioned myself as, you know, gasoline on the fire. I don't know where this thing's gonna go, but man, it's gonna go there, it's gonna go fast, it's gonna go big. I don't think I've been authentic to that. My true self. That, hey, look, I'm overwhelmed, and it's okay to take a moment to say this is scary. And so from there, you can take your emotions and sit down and have an honest conversation around this fear, this, this anxiety, this, this overwhelmed levels that you're having. Like, what message is that trying to speak to me? Okay, fear of losing everything, that makes sense, that's valid. From that place, you then get to make reasonable decisions. You gotta say, hey, how likely is that? What support do I need to not feel this way? I don't need to listen to any of those things. All I need is the next step forward.

I think too, like, even with making the sales virtual, for example, having the more level revenue throughout the year, it makes the business more defensible in the event that something does happen.

Yeah, if we have a crappy Q4, shoot, how many crappy Q4s can we survive?

Right, yeah, like I've had my family a lot with, mental health stuff. And I don't know if that's exactly what you're going through.

Yeah, something like that.

But like where it just wipes you out for 6, 8 months. And it every single time just wipes the family clean of money. Businesses are gone, real estate, houses, like everything. Like we have to get that first because otherwise all of this just is whatever. So like I would say this all takes a backseat to you as the leader being able to be good. That has to be foundational to then build the business on top of. And so like, whatever anyone is saying to you, like, you have the skills and you have the abilities. And I think like, the confidence that I want to see in you is what allows this business to grow. Like, you do not need to hire some $300,000, $400,000 person to come in and run this business, or tell you how to do marketing, or tell you how to do sales scripts. You know how to do it. And so I would just like, encourage you strongly to like, lean into your skill. Like, you have so much more experience than you give yourself credit for. And like, I want you to believe in yourself fully. Thanks. And sometimes, like, the, the apprehension to like, okay, well, I need to go find a trainer, I need to go find a company who's going to develop this, is just simply a lack of confidence in yourself. And there's no reason whatsoever for that to be the case for you. You have all the evidence that speaks otherwise. And I would also say every time that you have taken the path of "I need to get someone else in here," it hasn't worked.

Yeah, I don't think any of it's worked. Hormozy honestly wasn't— I don't feel like it was all that impactful. Alex Hormozy's marketing director left to come work here.

Uh, yeah, we let him go. Um, it was recent, it was like last month, I think.

That was a big mistake. We overspent for probably $60,000 a month, which is no small amount. He was a W-2 with us. He was full-time. The agreement was he's, you know, 40 to 70 hours a week. He's like, I'm a workaholic, I'll do it. He gave us his 90-day, and he created his— Mike Andes, yeah. We just gave the department to him. We dumped it and said, hey, you clearly are talented, we'll give it to you. And he's working all these other jobs and all these other companies. He spent very little time in our company. It's like, okay, we didn't realize that. That wasn't— that's great at pulling this. That wasn't happening. We ended up finding that he was like, okay, this isn't working. So we switched over to back to the person we had before him, which is Kyle.

Kyle. Yeah, Kyle.

And he's working out wonderfully.

Kyle and Jacob.

And but yeah, they found like all these holes that were like, hey, you're not doing the basic stuff.

But I think, I think you are undervaluing your skills. And I don't know if this is like a long-term thing and it's from stuff in the past, but like you do not see your skills as valuable and as valuable as they should be, in my opinion. Your confidence is way too low and you are trying to make up for it with like by taking a resource you have, which is money, and saying, I will go buy the skill, but you have it. And so when someone else comes to the organization and tells the people that you're leading how to do something and then they leave, they're looking at you and like, okay, so Why? And you're like, well, 'cause they said so. 'Cause they know what they're talking about. But they want you to be able to say no, 'cause the data tells us here's why. This is exactly why we're doing this. And here's why it's worked 1,000 times, and here's why I was able to sell 50, 60, 70%, and I know what I'm talking about when you say this is what you say on the phone when someone says that objection.

So when we are giving them prices all virtually, so are we just doing, you know, House A, House B, House, you know?

You could do small, medium, and large if you wanted to. Okay. You could make it, like the easiest— That seems scary. Yeah, it's scary. The easiest level of this is call us, 'cause then you just have to make OTP, and so, or sorry, over the phone. So you could have it where one of your ads are going to calling right away. Another one I would do the VSL, educate them, do the whole comparison of price, et cetera, and then call us. You could do it that way. I would really—

Both call us, one is an optional VSL.

Yes. Gotcha. And then the secondary, like, 2.0 version of this is, can I get to actually I sell on the page? Everyone knows that when they choose a house like that, you're not looking at their house. They're inputting everything. And so when we change prices, we don't have any kickback to it. It's like, hey, you said you were a medium, that's great, that includes up to 150 feet. You're actually 165, so here's your actual price. We don't get any pushback because they know they selected the medium.

And so is your preference to not do the VSL?— and just go straight to the phone?

Yeah, that's my preference.

That's your preference? And then— 'Cause you can turn the handle— You wanna switch to all online shopping?

I just want, I want you to split test. I want you to say, what happens when we pick up the phone, we sell them? Mm-hmm. And what happens when on that webpage they put their information in, select small, medium, and large? Like that's how we sell lights right now. Small, medium, and large. We have ranges for all three, and they pre-select, accept the estimate,, and then we confirm the bid. They have their card information up. What's that? How do you confirm the bid? So we say, hey, you select medium, that's fantastic, that includes this range of square, of linear feet, you're within that range, that'll be your price, let's get you on the schedule.

Do you charge them when they put it all in initially?

We just store their card.

We just store the card.

Yeah, that way it's easier for them to put a card on file, especially if they come from an ad.

There's less trust there. Do y'all do checks and cash or no?

Never.

Yeah, that's what we're trying to do.

That's why you have $200,000 in receivables. It's like, yeah.

We're thinking about cutting that. Yeah, cut that. Yeah, really, we gotta get a magnifying on every part of our business, dude. There's like holes.

I don't, every business has holes. Every business has problems. Mine has plenty of problems. Hundreds of problems I could tell you about right now. But there are usually just one or two things that if you'd solve, a lot of those other things would go away. And for you right now, that is, figuring out to where as you double, triple, and 10x this business, you don't 5, 10x the amount of sales reps you have. And secondly, we fill Q1 and Q2 with leads that are really cheap during 6 to 8 weeks of the year. And right now we're saying no to— Yeah, like how you were raised has a huge impact on how you handle money, how you treat your employees, how you handle customers, how you think about growth of the business, investing in the business. And that's fine. I have my childhood. We all have our childhood where things were bent in a certain direction. That is no excuse as to why we can't change. And so we all started from someplace. Some are higher, some are lower, whether financially, skill set, predispositions for success, etc. But where you end up is completely in your control. And so I believe that he has the skill set to be able to grow this business without having to depend on tens of— he keeps spending money on these areas of coaching and it's causing him to have this shiny object syndrome. So when he went and hired someone that was way overqualified for his size business to run the department and then now had to fire him, it was simply a function of him not feeling like he was capable of doing it himself.

I love it. If I want to buy shoes, I'm like going online, I'm going to buy shoes. Or if I wait, I'm like, oh, that's actually too expensive. Maybe I shouldn't buy the shoes.

We should go in person. I'm going to go out on a limb and say you buy stuff on Amazon and you go to the mall.

No, I don't shop.

You don't shop.

One of my issues I've learned is I have a huge fear around money. I'm terrified to not have money. And so I hate spending money. We have a part of our relationship is I refuse for us to buy French fries because the margin on French fries are 90%, sodas and French fries. So I refuse to buy them. Here's the interesting though.

She spends money. Yeah. She likes virtual. You don't spend money and you like in person. What type of customer do I want to sell to? The person who doesn't want to spend money? Yeah. Or the person that wants to spend money? I think it goes back to the fact that, like, how he feels. Like, a lot of times when you've gone through trauma, you always default back to how you feel in terms of, like, the logic that's in front of you. The logic is the people he is selling to are like his wife, who likes to buy things online and buy over the phone and solve the problem as fast as possible. He is selling to the version of him that has been hurt, which is lack of trust. I need to see somebody and it is— I'm predisposed to not buy things online or not buy things at all. He is selling to someone who is not like him. He is selling to people who have discretionary income, multiple houses, enough money to spend $4,000 on lights on their house, for crying out loud. And yet he's concerned about how he would want to buy. He's not the target customer. This is the biggest thing for home service business owners that have been raised in a place of scarcity or not with a lot of wealth. Is that we are not selling to a version of ourself. So we take it through the lens of like what we think is affordable, what we think is a good price, when in reality, you are not the target audience. You're selling it to someone who has less time on Earth remaining, likely, and way more money than you. And they're gonna see their time and they're going to see the value of your service very differently.

And she's trying to provide the opportunities like I am so people don't have to be in those situations.

So yeah, it's nice to be able to do that. And I feel like if you, if you do good to your employees, I mean, like, because customer satisfaction, that's our top priority, right? And so it's like, if we're doing good to them, they're the ones that are customer-facing, right? So it's like, you know, we want them happy to be here and we want the customers to feel like Okay, they like their job, they're happy.

So here's the deal. Hailey is responsible for this because she's gonna sell to herself. Yeah, you, you are the entrepreneur and figuring out like vision and even like the sales. You already figure out how to sell it, but she knows how to sell it to herself. You have a hard time selling over the phone because you would never buy it over the phone. You wouldn't even buy lights because you don't buy stinking fries and Coke do the 90% margins.

I've come such a long way. We are in a house that we bought.

Which freaks you out. Which freaks you out. I've worked on it.

I'm better, but not completely better. Better being improvement made, not journey complete. But yeah, it's, I hate money, dude. I hate spending money. The car I drive, dude, $4,000 cash. We have no debt in the company. No debt anywhere.

It's the best. Well, you notice on the 4L, liquidity's the first one that usually on a turnaround roll over, 'cause like, We have mounting debt, we have no cash. You guys have plenty of cash in the bank.

Yeah, I turned down an offer from Hermosi to join our company because I don't need someone's money. I want to scale this thing, scale it fast, and I just didn't feel like we aligned on how that was going to work. I will voice that this was a peaceful process. I didn't feel invaded. It didn't feel like it was something that was being probed. So that I could set my boundaries of what my vulnerability levels were, and that was okay. Everyone's been super polite, super nice. Anything that we've said, hey, we'd rather not show, has been respected. This is probably where we'll stop. I don't want to show manufacturing equipment because we did custom make all that, and it's our, it's our huge edge for the company. But yeah, this is essentially the, the setup. There are values to having experts come into the organization and break it down in a simple way. That was my experience today. Very kind, generous people that weren't pushy, that had no agenda, that were here to help and serve. That's been my experience.

Yeah, sometimes it's difficult because when I'm talking to an owner, I actually feel like there's personal issues that are causing the business issues, but I also don't want to probe or like make them feel uncomfortable.

But let's be honest, I have spent spent tens and tens of thousands of dollars getting into small groups with key players, and this was better than all those. So I will— I have done the Alex Hormozy, I have gone to Grant Cardone, I have done the, you know, gone to experts in different fields. This was something that was free, that wasn't invasive, and I got a lot of direct experience, a direct applicable knowledge out of it. So that's been my experience. That sounds like something you want, then I would encourage you to do it. I've had to take a look inside and be really honest with myself, and now I'm recognizing that, wow, I thought I was a very confident person my whole life, and really I'm actually a very insecure person. You know, I need the business to show how successful I am. I need the family to be okay to show how good of a parent I am. I need all the things that reflect who I am. And all that is, is an insecurity.

Okay, let's recap, because I know you gotta go. Video sales letter and a virtual process to be able to sell, and over-the-phone sales. So 1 and 2. Basically, virtual sales, I'm calling Mike Andes a landing page. OTP, or over-the-phone sales, Hailey's gonna do that, because I genuinely believe she will just sell to herself. She's the type of person that you will— are probably selling to a lot of already. And so like whatever she says in terms of like the framing of like, I don't know if we should say it like that, like we should send them the photo here because that's going to hook them in before here. For example, I would really bounce it off of each other and AI to come up with like the perfect solution. Creating that together would be super useful. And then having the offer for, hey, if they say it's too expensive, we're immediately, hey, 15% less if you book in spring, 25% less if you book in summer. We now brought our price basically comparable to what they're getting a Christmas lights installed for. But we're willing to do it because I don't wanna spend money in marketing and spend $2,000 customer acquisition cost. Last thing is, whatever you're doing right now, keep doing it, but this is actually the kicker, which is you as a leader just getting confidence. And I think some of the decisions we've made in the past that are quote detrimental, we have a great business, so like that's why I say detrimental, to the business is 'cause of your lack of confidence. And so whatever you're doing now to gain that confidence back and realize that you are capable of running this business, keep doing it. 'Cause you have the skills, the only thing you'll have to learn is the soft skills of managing people.

Yeah, Mike talked about today, look, maybe you should be a little bit more confident in what your skill sets are. I've been in the lighting industry for 7 years. I hold some probably world records in this industry. Maybe that means more. Maybe you don't need to have someone else come in validate that. So now we're in a situation where my business isn't growing to the speed that I would like it to, and bottleneck has become an insecurity of mine wanting someone else to validate that you are good at sales, and this is how— you are correct, and this is the right sales process to take. And so we are seeing now that insecurities are affecting the business.

Out of curiosity, we can get this out, um, out of curiosity, what did he offer you?

Uh, so he didn't make an official offer on it, so he wanted— he said, okay, we're looking at 50, 70% of the business. Oh wow. He owned the majority by then. And from there I was like, okay, well why would you need so much? What are you trying to do? He's like, we want it our way. Like, okay, can you kinda explain what that looks like? Really? He would've done this.

I can guarantee you he'd be selling stuff virtually over the phone. Oh, definitely. And scaling it. 'Cause then once you can crack this code, you can get customers for cheap in the fourth quarter and then figure out how to get them to to install later in the year, that's when you're able to go get installers on 1099s and you scale across the country. My heart's in growth.

Like, that mission statement's where I'm at. I want to see my people grow. I want to grow. I have enough money. Honestly, if I sold the business right now, you know, had one more good season in me and sold the business, I could retire. That's within grasp right now for me. I have no interest in that. What would I do? What would life look like? For me, I want to push. How far can I take this? What can I accomplish here? It's not going to happen overnight. Yeah, the problems happen, the axle breaks, the, you know, we have, uh, this last birthday is when all this, you know, therapeutic trauma came about. We have these big low moments that everything feels like it's falling apart. If I'm being honest, Man, I just love the journey. I want to see what the next step is. The views that I get from the position I'm in are incredible. The opportunities I get, the experiences I have, like, you can't pay money for this. There's no— there's nothing else like this. Yes, I'm in the trenches. Yes, it sucks. But man, sometimes those trenches are beautiful. Yeah, the implementation is going to be nuts.

Oh, it's going to be nuts. But like, you just, if you do it 100 times over the phone sales, you'll start refining it. Which ones worked, which ones didn't. You could literally take the transcript. Do you record your calls right now? Uh, all the office stuff.

Great.

I mean, you take the transcripts of the ones that sell and you take the transcripts of the ones that don't, feed that into AI and tell me which are the difference between these two calls. And then you just, you keep refining your script based upon which, what's working, and then the other ones, these don't work.

I mean, this could be groundbreaking if we, if we could do virtual sales. Like, it—

I mean, this would be insane if we can—

yeah, if you can grease Q4, if we can execute, if we can stick the landing. Yeah, that's a huge— that's a huge ordeal. Yeah, we can stick the landing, then this becomes, uh, this becomes everything. That's been, uh, really nice, spend time with family, uh, and then we're trying to get a few of the, the business things together. It took a long time to get the, uh, the manufacturing facility back up and running. That was a legal battle and all sorts of headaches. It was, it was a nightmare. We had our attorney look at the, uh, our lease. Like, our lease says that even if it was our fault, it's his responsibility to repair it. So I guess what it says in the lease, just back and forth and back and forth. And I was like, dude, if you can prove that it's my fault in any way, shape, or form, I'll pay for it. You gotta prove it. And eventually he, he gave up. He was like, okay, it was my fault. Like, yeah, it was. And he cut corners fixing it, and so it's not put together properly. There's mold all over the walls. He painted over it. He like wiped it down and painted over. I was like, that's not how you deal with mold. I can't have my guys stay there, so we're getting out and going to a new location. So Mike talked to us about creating a, uh, a new pipeline basically to go instead of all in-person sales appointments but doing virtual. You know, we could do a VSL that then drops into, you know, call this number for instant quote, um, or we could 'Put, you know, call this number for instant quotes.' So there's two different ads. We have both of those created already. We haven't launched them because this is the peak, or I guess the bottom of our slow season, which you call it. But we do have those ads created and we're just testing out measuring and SOPs regarding virtual sales. And so we have our sales manager testing those out. That's where we are in that process. We do have the ads created. We do have, you know, the copy written. We have the general SOP created, but we want to stress test that before we, we implement Hey, if you buy now and get installed in June, per se, we'll give you 25%, 35% off. So we're— that's the, the offer on the virtual sales for if they don't close then and there. Like, hey, you want to get installed now? Great. Here's your price. Oh, that doesn't work for you? Then we have this next offer, which is, you know, 15% off if you want first quarter. But if you wait till second quarter, we're going to give you 35% off or something crazy because we're already spending ludicrous amounts of money to close deals during that period. So instead of spending on during June, we're going to spend that in form of a discount when leads are the cheapest they possibly can be. Yeah, still, you know, I think there's a lot to work on there. I've realized that I'm a fairly insecure person. I always want to produce and do more that way. Maybe people might value me more. I've struggled a lot with depression, so I am— since y'all have come and visited, I've gotten on depression medicine, which I see as being helpful. And then, yeah, just Taking that journey a little bit at a time, you know, it's been something that I've seen improvement on, and I'm still yet to arrive at the completion of that journey, which I don't think there is one. I think it's just day by day. Finding support is really critical. I mean, it's easy to feel very alone when you run the company and you have to manage ops. You have to be— you have to protect yourself. You can't be completely vulnerable with everyone. So getting a support group, super, super helpful. Finding, you know, having people that you can surrender and talk to about all all those other components in your life, uh, being seen there. And those are the people that, that can give you true advice because they know the other pieces of the puzzle.