Hot Takes, Trusting AI & Starting Over

Most business owners are not entrepreneurs. They're just people that created a job.

We saw almost a doubling of our AI traffic and leads coming from ChatGPT. People saying that on the phone, like, I saw you on ChatGPT. And because they get so busy, it hides the big problems of the business, like bad pricing, bad cash flow, bloated payroll.

The most sophisticated winning companies are going to shift back to a mode of go get the client I want.

In hindsight, looking back, it's like this is exactly the life we build. And so for anyone that's like in the 5 years, one day you will look back on this. You probably won't change much, assuming that you get through that and you start to be able to build a life with optionality.

Try way more stuff and just like see what works. There's so many different ways to live life.

In the same podcast, we talked about trying new things and like as many things as possible, but also being like, stay focused on your industry. Don't get distracted. Like head down for a period of time where it is grind mode. And so I think there's that dichotomy of like, you might set aside 10 years, but okay, here we go. 5 for 50. Like you put the 5 years for the 50 years of that life that you want to build.

Hey everyone, welcome back to the show that Mike Andes and I don't yet have a name for.

And we're open to suggestions there.

We are. We're open there.

It's like naming a child. It's like we have to name ourselves. We have to name the podcast.

Yeah, we need lots of names. And then I think this is number 5, right? Yeah. Am I correct on that? Number 5. We initially said we're going to do 3. We'll see if we both like it. We're still doing it. So I guess we're going to keep going. It seems that way. As long as you guys keep telling us you like it. So today I've got another new one for Mike Andes, and I of course gave him a heads up on this one so he could put a little bit of thought into it. So we are each going to give you 3 hot takes. What I'm looking for is, do you have a reaction of wait, like, wait, what? Like, do you have that kind of reaction? Like, what did they say? We're not going to defend them. We're not going to explain them.

Brianna said she thinks you're trying to get me canceled on this one.

I am not trying to get you canceled. I'm giving 3 as well.

The notes for this was like, make sure it's, uh, what was the word you used? Uh, like, uh, some of the people would be like shocked about or something like that. I was like, oh man, here we go.

Well, I don't know, maybe I didn't even go too far with the shock. So anyway, they're just, they're just contra, uh, takes that maybe not everybody would agree with.

Okay.

That's where I'm going. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. You kick it off that way I can temper my mind if we disagree. Okay. There you go. All right. I'll, I'll kick it off. So, so here's what we're going to do. We're going to do 6 of them, 3 from me, 3 from Mike. I will now go first and I'll, it's, we're going to number them like 1, 2, 3. The reason for that is if something grabs you, you're like, wait a second, I'm not sure. I want to know more. I want you to comment below with the number.

Yeah.

So if we get a bunch of comments on one, we'll go into this in another episode.

Yeah. JP 1, 2, and 3. MA 1, 2, 3 down below. Give us your feedback.

That would, that'd be perfect. Okay. So I thought about mine. Um, all right. So number 1 is the right business partner. Is one of the most significant competitive advantages you can have in business. And everybody telling you that a business partner is bad just hasn't had the right one.

Very good.

All right. My second one is most business owners are not entrepreneurs. They're just people that created a job. Okay. All right.

That's pretty good. That got a little more edgy. We're going the right direction.

Yeah. Yeah. This is where hopefully I didn't make you make yours too edgy. We can always try this again and I can always try to step it up. All right.

We'll calculate how edgy it is based on how many unsubscribes we have on this, on this video.

Yeah. I didn't, I didn't take any political or religious stances here. I was, I'm out here.

Oh, okay. All right.

All right. Very good. Well, next time I may have to step mine up. All right. Number 3, how you treat your body is how you run your business over the long-term. And most owners do not get the connection.

Yeah, that's good.

All right, those are my 3. Okay. All right.

All right, Mike, what? I'll jump into mine. All right. All right, my first one, I did take some edge off of my, uh, third one. All right, so my first one is, um, someone with one-sided staunch political beliefs is a red flag to me. So if I'm thinking about partnership or hiring, like someone that really like, doesn't matter what happens, this is the way I see the world because X, Y, and Z.

We have a red flag. Okay. Uh, that is not, that's not too, not too strong.

All right. Number 2, the lack of humility keeps people poor. And my, my third one is, okay, this one's a little longer cuz I had to think through it a little bit. So big business, big businesses will use fax machines. Like there are businesses today that are huge that use fax machines, but big businesses were built on the back of the phone book. And I believe that you don't scale a business using old technology. So like if you look at technology, it's been like telegrams, USPS, like the mail system, you know, like figure out the phone and then fax and then internet and then email and then building a website and then SMS. And now it's like we've gone to mobile, AI, future is probably robotics. And I think for those that are listening and trying to grow a business, being on the edge of that is important, even though there's evidence that there are big big businesses that are still using old technology.

Um, so that, that was my— that last part, that last part is probably the statement.

Yeah. I had, I had a much more different one. Something along the lines of, uh, AI boomers of today are the fax machine artists of yesterday. I had some other creative, more edgy take on it, but say, say that one again for me.

I didn't quite comprehend it.

Yeah. Well, there are still people today that will look at AI and be like, hey, I'm not using it. I don't need it. I have a big business. And I'm still doing my things through fax, or I'm, I do it through email, the old-fashioned way. And because they have a $20 million business or a $50 million business, someone else will look at them like, oh, I need to do that in order to win. When reality, they were the first one to adopt, let's just call it AAA Lawn Care because it ranked well in the phone book. And that was the, that was the modern AI of their day. And so just because now they've built a big business and have the fax machine does not mean you should use the fax machine to grow the business.

Anyways. Yeah, very good. Okay. All right. So those are 4. You're going to rank on his first 3. So again, in the comments, if anything grabs you, nothing has to grab you, but if it does put JP1, JP2, or M1 or M2, you get the idea.

6 comments, you know, just give us 6 comments.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. So Mike, what have you been working on the last week?

Okay. So we've been working on creating a good rev share program., for Homeworks. So we've never had like any sort of referral program. And so I've been working on it because I didn't want to do the classic, like, hey, give a month, get a month kind of thing. Uh, and so we're going more the affiliate route, which is revenue share. So we're working on how, how does it actually work on the backend to where if a member gives a month for someone else, but then they get 25% of revenue on an ongoing basis. And so we're just workshopping how does that work. Oh, okay.

Um, how do you try to— For Homeworks?

Yeah.

Yeah. Or the software?

Okay.

Yeah. Correct. Okay, so affiliate program makes perfect sense.

That's what I've been working on.

What do I— have you arrived? You don't have— yeah, and I'll answer that. You don't have to give out the economics, but have you figured out the number that you can realistically give out for the long term?

Yeah, we, we— right now, again, I'm doing this prematurely, but you don't have to say it. 25% is what we're working on right now. I kind of was like, where was the point where I would wake up and be like, I want to share this message? Especially for people that have like some audience on social media or they're in a group, like I was like, okay, a month free doesn't do anything for anyone. Like we're talking about a few hundred dollars, but if I can build up a kind of like the side business almost as an influencer, like it, it makes sense if I can get 25% of the revenue. And so, um, we've gone back in February, we bundled up users into our subscriptions, so it raised the price when in reality it just bundled the users, but that kind of allowed us the extra margin to be able to do the program.

Okay. Unlimited user bundle, like If you have, no, just 10 and 20.

Yeah.

There's two tiers. Okay. So tiers. Okay. All right.

How did you think about that when you guys did Service Autopilot? Cause it wasn't unlimited. You had just individual users.

Yeah. We, we did the individual, but I think if I were selling, if I was building a new Service Autopilot today, I would think about it completely different.

Would you basically like $1,000 a month, but it's unlimited or how would you think about it? Cheers.

I still think about this stuff even though I don't have it. Like when I do think about it. Yeah. So, so what I originally thought I was going to do a new Service Autopilot. Uh, my idea was that we would start at $1,000 a month. There would be no lesser, uh, concept. It was a, it was a whole new idea. It was a new approach, everything. And in that scenario, I wanted to just bundle in all the users., but where I got stuck and I had never like had a reason to figure it out was like, wait a second, for the very type of client that starts at $1,000 a month, like some of these guys might have 150 users and that's a real cost to us over time, especially as you start to implement imagery and just some other cool things, video. And I, I was, uh, I had been brainstorming and kind of testing this idea to, uh, be able to take pictures of things and have it translate into the different languages.. And so I was like, is there a different model than having somebody type into a mobile app? Um, it, I won't get into the weeds on that. And so some of that stuff would come with an additional cost. And so I wasn't sure that my idea of unlimited users would work, but that's what I would want to be able to sell. Like the dream would be, could you just sell one price, right? Build whatever you want to build. It's one price, but there are legit costs that come with doing that.

Yeah. Um, so the video thing has been for us, like, cause like, we now allow, it's like a 12-minute video can go in, um, 500 megabytes. It compresses down to 50, but that's the real cost on servers and storage and all the rest of it.

It adds up over time. It's incredible. Yes, you will, you know, and we'll figure out how the data just builds and builds. And so what have you been working on?

Go ahead.

Sorry. Yeah. So the last week, a project that I've started and stopped over time this year, and frankly, probably last year too. Was really nailing down a very sophisticated thematic marketing calendar for City Turf. And it doesn't sound like that big of a deal to do it and build it out, but I guess it has been because I just keep procrastinating. It's generally been framed out and generally thought through, but it just wasn't production ready. So I've been trying to get that wrapped up this week. I've got a little ways to go on that one. And the marking calendar to me is this imperative critical item that dictates projects and timelines and everything else. And then some, somewhat paired with that is something else that I already made a massive amount of progress on. I think that was towards the end of last year and I'm trying to get it done now. I've kind of brought it back and it's this idea of moving away. I don't know if we've talked about this or I've mentioned it to somebody else. This idea of moving away of thinking about roles in a company and thinking about tasks. And one of where that was motivated, and I'm just thinking about it right now on the marketing side of the business. What motivated that is when I started getting back involved in City Turf to work on marketing, my premise was me, one employee, and all contractors, and instead of a building out a marketing team like I would've had at Service Autopilot. And so now I'm thinking about it though, it's like for every task you have, there's really 3 different types of solutions. There's an employee, there's a contractor, and there's an agent. Mm-hmm. And so I'm trying to go through and literally document every single thing that has to get done at, at any interval level from weekly to once a year. And then it's assigned to an employee, a contractor, or an agent. Very cool. And that's, that's a lot of work. Yeah. More than it sounds.

Yeah.

For the, to think through all that.

For the calendar, is it sequencing and timing or the template, the creation of the templates and the, I guess, copy itself for the marketing calendar?

On the cal— on the calendar, it's the deliverables. Okay. So it's this campaign needs to drop here. Step, step 2 needs to drop here. These things need to be loaded on the truck. Uh, this is the theme of the period. Uh, a theme would— might— because all marketing needs to be coordinated, like it needs to stack. So in other words, this is the month that we're really talking about deep root feeding of trees. So that needs to message across social, across door hangers, across rec— what we call recommendation door hangers, across postcards, every— whatever the touch is. That might hit the market, whether it be client, new acquisition of clients, or it be expansion of existing clients, growing the value of the account. There needs to be these theme, themes to what's going on. So in other words, everything's being supported. Mm-hmm. If you are getting an email in your inbox and you're on Facebook, I want you to be seeing similar messaging from us. Yep. It's all support. It all makes everything work better. So, uh, there's more to it than that, but that's the gist of what the calendar does. And then the last thing I'll say is the calendar. If you, if it's deadline driven, then for each of those activities, the way I've got the calendar built, it would say this one needs to start 4 weeks in advance. I built my own tool. Can't help it with Claude Code. I built my own marketing calendar system. And so I can flip it where I can look at when things need to start versus when they need to deliver. Very cool. So yeah, so that's, that's the project.

Let's go. Yeah. The, the challenging part for like us on social and marketing is because we create the creative for all the owners, the organic content is very difficult to time up with their individual markets based on the, yeah, like their emails and text blasts might be individual, their market, but like how do I create organic that goes on 200 Facebook accounts? That's somewhat right. So it's kind of like, that's a, it's a totally different problem. Yeah. But, but AI is gonna be very helpful with that. So, um, because yeah, they'll have like their background looking, uh, local to their area.

Yeah. Yeah. If you, if you basically train your model or your agent or whatever on every individual market's timing and pain points.

Haven't got there yet. Haven't got there yet.

That was a, it's a lot of work. This stuff is so easy to say. It's so much work to build it, but, but you could see where that could go. Like once you train it, it could automatically figure out all the dates for you. Yeah. So yeah, again, easier said than done. All right. So I got 5 things on our docket today. And the first one I dropped on here, and I know you've seen it, is this idea that there's this risk of price commoditization coming to the market. And the example I would give is that, and I want to get your thinking on this. But the example I'd give, and you're kind of a little bit in the middle of this in the sense that if you can price online, quote online, close online, that's a risk factor for price commoditization in the sense that if a lot of people are doing it, they might be making a decision based on price. And I think a lot of companies have that dream of, I just want to sign, sell you and sign you up online. I don't want to talk to you. And then what also has inspired this, and I've not had personal experience with this, but I've been hearing a little bit more about it. And I'm curious if you have any experience with it. It's this new Google feature functionality that they're testing. I've heard a couple different names for it, but one of the names I've most heard is Ask, the Ask for Me, or like it's where they go out and get pricing. So you can go to Google, you want to get a price on lawn mowing. It will literally go look up pricing. If it can't find it, it might call the company and get the pricing for that service.

Call or message. It'll actually message you, like text.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So that's a game changer. If this becomes— it's not that big of a deal when it's just a couple companies doing it, but when the market as a whole moves this way, and if Google finds that this works significantly for them, Meaning they'll implement it then. Uh, yeah, this changes how we sell. So how are you thinking about this stuff? You're right in the middle of it.

Buy Google stock. No, I'm joking. Um, yeah, I have a lot of thoughts on this because it's something that I felt we were going to get here anyways, eventually. So we've been planning for it for a while. I think first off, for those that are afraid of what's going to happen, I think a lot of us. We sell out of our own pocket. This is what Alex calls it, and that is we just assume people want the lowest price because that's what, how we've always operated. And we're not the ideal customer profile that we're actually trying to sell to. And the reason I say it is 'cause price is just one piece of the buying decision. I think that overall we should, we should just embrace this. Like again, technology's gonna keep moving on. If I'm gonna go against it, I'm not gonna put my pricing on my website. I'm going to make it really difficult for people to get pricing. I'm gonna be opaque as possible. I think you're going to lose. And I think giving the algorithm what it wants is important in this case, especially because so much traffic does come from Google. They're going to reward the websites that are doing this. And so like recently at Augusta, for example, in our FAQ sections for every location, we give the exact prices that it's going to be for a small, medium, or large property. We give the square footage ranges because if they, if their agent knows their address, it can actually give them pricing. Based upon just that. And I think what's really important is to make, as we look in the year or two ahead, I think people are gonna start giving their agent a credit card and allowing them to actually check out. 'Cause right now, with the Google feature, it will call, it will communicate via text, especially around local service, Google Local Services, it's really baked well into that feature. And right now, it still requires us to give a price or it requires us to have on our website for the agent to go, it's not checking out. And I'm interested to see if that level of trust with an agent is ever going to happen with home services, uh, because I think it's different when it comes to price checking, say, something on Amazon or an e-commerce or DTC product versus home services. Because I always say this, like, when someone walks up to your door and delivers something on from Amazon they stay on your driveway and they do not get on your lawn. They do not go inside your house. Home services, inevitably for most of our services, it requires us to get in areas of the property that the customer has to have a certain level of trust. And that's where I think this gap might exist. And it might take some while, a while for the market to adjust because we, I'm very much okay if I want Nike Jordans to just go in here and be like, hey, yeah, find me the best price, ship it to my address, here's my credit card information, let's go. I also think that the reason I would do that and trust my agent is because I have brand equity with Nike. I know that Nike will send me good shoes. And so I think that this is going to only compound the importance of brand and why I think brand in all of this is going to win because branding equals confidence. The same way I see the Nike swoosh, I just immediately can, can, I can have confidence in my agent. When I get that delivered to my house, it's going to be a good shoe. I think the same thing is going to become true for home services is like if they've seen your trucks, if they have seen you're on social media, if they see great reviews, then when their agent says, "Hey, this is, it's $70 per week. Would you like me to go ahead and purchase that?" They say yes. Because I do believe there's gonna be more trust and confidence required for a home service product than a D2C or a hard good that I'm gonna have shipped to me from Amazon. So that's kinda like my general thesis. But like, I do believe the biggest thing we have to be prepared for is agents checking out. Right now, the thing that you also, for those that are listening, it's like, oh, I do instant quotes. Be very careful because if that pricing is behind them having to put their information, the, the most of these AI tools will not see it. And so this is why putting like an FAQ section or having a pricing page so they can actually see the information will be important.

So that's really good advice right there.

What about, what about from your perspective? Have you, have you played with it at all? Played with the, the Google Ask, like, ask prices?

I haven't. No, I haven't.

It was funny actually.

I, I was just— how do you play with it?

I haven't. Yeah. Just type in like a service near me and most of the time it'll show up in local services.

So, okay.

Under local services where they're promoting currently the most, by the time this comes out, it'll probably be different. But like right now under local services, cuz they've always had the call and the message. Now right above that, there's a little badge that says get prices for me. And then you, okay, you put in what you want and then it sends out the message to those and it sends it back to you whenever they respond. Um, I think though that the agent is the part that like you've talked about in the past, like our agents will be doing its own thing and then like verifying. I, I think when people start getting comfortable putting a credit card with their AI, that's when this will really take off. The thing that actually was interesting, Jonathan, is I, I actually thought of you when I saw this on the docket when you had mentioned that, that moving company, they stole like $80,000 worth of stuff when they moved your house.

Mm-hmm.

I think one burn like that is what causes a homeowner to be like, I'm gonna check the reviews myself, I want to go look at their website. And that's where brand will start to come into play. And this is where I think the destruction of the contractor model could come in, because like, they don't have a brand. They change their, their business every 3 or 4 years to get away from bad reviews. So I actually thought of you when I saw on the docket, because someone like yourself, even though your agent might say, hey, this is the cheapest option, that's not the biggest buying decision for you. And so I think our, our ideal customer looks at the price as a data point, but is also having a lot of other parts of the decision that come into play. And for the person that's just gonna go shop my price, I don't want them as a customer. And so I think, I think it'll really divide, like the, the middle ground of home services might get ate up here, but the people that go premium, they're not competing on price now anyways. Uh, and the people who go low, they will win. They'll get all these very low, cheap prices. That, you know, the AI can scrub.

Several things you mentioned, a good way to play with it. Was there a service or a trade that you're noticing it used on more right now?

I haven't played with enough different industries. I've played with maybe 4 or 5.

I've been okay.

Definitely play with lawn care and landscaping. I did painting and fencing. Those are the 4 I know I've been playing with, but it's changing. Like if you go into incognito mode versus Safari versus Chrome, See 3 different experiences where they're putting the badge. Yeah. Like they're doing so much testing right now. So whenever they do testing, I just know that there's resources being deployed towards this. Yep. And, uh, I think it's gonna be very interesting how your website looks. You actually alluded to this in your last video, is like in the past, SEO is the main thing. This is like, can your website be easily digested by an AI agent will become the, the most important part, I think, going forward.

Yeah. Yeah, I agree with that. And then the other part of it is you've got to support— there's going to be a period here where you've got to support— actually, maybe forever, but for quite a period here, you're going to have to support multiple ways to convert. So you still have to convert by phone. I still think that's going to hold up for a long time. You're going to have to— you have to consider agents. You're going to have to consider maybe selling via text and email. You're gonna have to consider, uh, they're getting a pro— like the model you're running right now where you can get a price online and sign up. There's a lot of different models that are all gonna have to work at the exact same time. And one of the challenges that it's frankly always been a challenge, and I don't know what the solution is right now, is it's always, there's always been the problem of balance, balancing SEO optimization with conversion-focused copy. Yep. And design and just design and design. Yeah. And design. 100%. And so, and I mean, from my experience, the more you go towards quality conversion copy, the lesser your site performs and ranks. But if we're going to live in a world where we're selling online and they're making a decision online, not necessarily just through an agent, then conversion matters in a massive way. Yep. Conversion quality, copy quality. So This is a really, really challenging one to navigate right now, and I'm trying to figure it out, and I don't have that answer. One of the questions I have about the agents, so I'll say I've got some thoughts, but I will generally say I don't think I had any points of disagreement with what you said. I'm completely aligned. One thing I don't know is how fast, and I guess none of us know, how fast are these agents really going to happen? Is this my robot prediction again? Like, is it the, hey, I think, you know, in 5 years robots are going to be a thing. And we're like, hey, I think in a year agents are going to be buying for people. It's like, yeah, they will, but for 3% of the market. Like, how fast? I don't, I'm not saying that 3% is a real number. I don't have a feel for how fast my wife, like Tiffany, is going to let an agent start buying stuff for her. I'm just not, I don't know. I, I, my parents, not a chance in the world. Um, you know, it's like, like, so how, and different markets are going to be different. My market is a more affluent, uh, tech-forward market. There's a lot of people that move to this market where I'm at that are maybe a little more tech-enabled or like tech a little more than say other markets. Okay. That market will probably adapt to this a little quicker. So there's so much going on here. This one's a complicated one. When you— so way back, this goes way back, like '15, '16, 2015, '16, '17, some testing that I was involved in. This is around pricing tools, some testing I was involved in. Also, I can't remember all the companies, but because of Service Autopilot, everybody that owned one of these Uber for lawn care companies or anybody that had a price would price online. A lot of it was Uber, Falun Gong. They all wanted to in some way deal with us at Service Autopilot. They wanted to buy us, they wanted to partner with us, they wanted, they all wanted to. So I got to talk to all of the big names. And one of the things that I learned over time back then was that a lot of the business that was coming through the online pricing was for mowing specifically tended to be a little bit more of the biweekly work, a little less of the weekly type work. Is that still true in this, you know, here it is in 2026. What do you see?

I can only, I can't speak for those services. Um, I can only speak for like the instant quotes I'm seeing. It all comes down to how you position the weekly versus the biweekly. And so if you have a, an, if you're like, hey, I want the weekly services, great. You're just gonna have to promote that from a pricing perspective so that when they're comparing the two, if becomes the obvious choice. And then there's other owners are like, I don't care about the weekly or the biweekly thing. I won't have any difference between the cost of weekly and biweekly because it's just normal in my market, for example. Um, but yeah, what's really interesting with all this is like, we— I can see the data across all the sites on ForGusta as well as like all the home service web design stuff. It is so interesting, that percentage, that ratio of like Google search where I'm getting click links, and then what's coming through AIO or like ChatGPT, et cetera.

Yeah.

It's so interesting cuz you would change your site, it actually adjusts very quickly. Like we can, we can, it's faster than SEO. I, I'll say that.

Mm. Like, okay.

We were able to make several changes for Augusta this past spring and like I'd say within 6 weeks we saw almost a doubling of our AI traffic. Um, and leads coming from ChatGPT, people saying that on the phone, like, I saw you on ChatGPT. And so I, I agree that there's gonna be a period of time before someone puts a card on file and lets their agent go buy lawn care, but they're still gonna search on Google and Google's going to prioritize who's giving the information, like who's giving me the clean data to be able to present to that user.

Yeah. And they're gonna ask ChatGPT and Claude and everybody for the recommendation. I was sort of separating more the, they're gonna use their agent to make the decision and sign up. That I was separating that part. That's a good clarification.

I think what would be super cool is like, hey agent, like give me the 5 prices, but then compare like other benefits of the different services. How long have they been in business? Are they part of a, a national chain? Like these are the other aspects I think as a consumer, I'd be okay with my agent giving me the information, but I don't even get to play the game if I'm not showing up on that board. And that's where I feel like the people that's like, I'm gonna hide prices, like because the, the instant mowing quote thing I just launched, people, a lot of people were saying this, like you're basically commoditizing the industry, bringing all the prices down. Oh really? Yeah. Because now we are, we're all gonna have these, you know, everyone's gonna be seeing their prices. They have to remember I have probably 1,000 people out of 600,000 landscapers on the pro— on, on that thing right now.

Yeah.

Um, but, uh, I believe that you have to show up whether or not the agent's gonna buy. I have to show up in those, in those few categories. And, uh, it's very interesting to see the, the percentages over the last 7, 8 months from ChatGPT, um, and even just people saying on the phone that they're, they're looking on those places.

I do think it's changing where you, I agree with you on that topic too. You're just not gonna be able to hide from this anymore. It's something on my, my planning calendar for City Turf in terms of, in fact, there's a little bit of a project we're working on right now that will expose more of our pricing, but it's a hotly contested conversation internally, but this, I'm with you in the fact this is where it's going. My hope has been that as we publish pricing, what the market will do is adjust to our pricing. Like instead of them like, oh, hey, I'm gonna be $2 cheaper, which they might, it'll give them the courage to raise their prices to what they need to be in the market. And so we know what pricing—

and brand is enough to be able to take a $5 t-shirt and I pay $100 for it. And so the delta between the average price in my market and what people are willing to pay will come down to brand.

Yeah. So my biggest thoughts coming into this, to finally get back to that, were for us at CityTurf, we lose one of our single biggest competitive advantages. We can win on the phone. And so that's a disappointment. We've built the business around being able to do that. So we'll just have to figure out how to, like, you know, win this one. Yeah, you'll figure it out. So, uh, but it's just, it's unfortunate, you know, anytime you have to change, it's like, ah, this is a bummer, but this is the world we now live in. So that, that was point one. Uh, the other one was, can I make a counterpoint on that?

Can I make a counterpoint?

Yeah, please. Yeah.

Yeah. I actually think the people that have conquered and figured out the phone will dominate in this, this area because now if the agent is making the decision and someone else doesn't call them right away and doesn't have an upsell motion once they've already seeing the price, for example, um, I think that person will still lose. And I still think we want to buy from people we trust and the, and the relationships are important. And if you figured out phone calls or you figure out a way to have an in-person meeting with customers and do quality control, it'll still be the winner. Um, and so even for our phone agents, like again, like we have all these agents and they're like, hey, what's happening here? Are we just gonna be processing everything through the agents now? Like, hey, look, As soon as they get accepted job, we're calling them and making that connection. And that's what someone else can't do. So I still think, um, it's gonna be by having the phone team.

Yeah. Yeah. I would not, I would, there's no chance I'd eliminate my phone team. I would, you know, I would, uh, continue to use them. The more you touch the client, the more you win. I mean, I might, I am convinced that the fu— a future, uh, that's heavily dominated by AI is a future where experience and relationships and in-person starts to matter more than ever. And that becomes the biggest differentiator of all. Everybody wants AI to make everything easy and allow them to be invisible, and that won't be the winning strategy. It's my, my bet. I agree. It'll, yeah, I think, yeah, I, I'm not gonna go there. I'll get off topic. My number one was exactly what you said. It was brand. That is the strategy. When I started City Turf, I didn't believe in brand. And what I mean by that is I didn't think I could create brand. I had, um, and so I, I had really been led to believe that by Dan Kennedy, and I agree with what he said. I 100% agree. I probably generally agree with what he said in that, like, a brand is a byproduct of something that happens over time because you just keep doing the right things. I didn't think I could go out and buy brand. I didn't have the money to do it. I couldn't build it. It would just happen over a period of time. And so my theory was the way you build brand over time, and I think it's correct is you just, you do what you say, but doing what you say means there's— means exactly that. But it's about quality. It's about customer service. So in the beginning of CityTurf, the bet was on customer service. We always overspent the office. Today, to this day, we're probably overstaffed in the office compared to most everybody, but I just believe that's part of brand. And so that's where we've invested, and I believe that's was the right bet and I would double down on that bet moving forward. So everything you said about brand was exactly my thesis. And then the other one that I think about here is, and this is more than just about pricing being commoditized in this world that we're moving into where the future might not be 10, 20 links on a page that I can scan and pick from. It might be 3 results coming back in. ChatGPT. It might be an agent just giving the answer and signing you up on a credit card. That's a very scary proposition, even for a company that has a lot of money, because if you have had any experience with SEO, you know that anything can take you out of the running or drop you down that list. Like, there's a lot of— it, it moves around. And so that general belief, along with this pricing commoditization and commoditization I think it's just a fair world— word, but we'll see. I think we shift to a market, uh, or a, a world where you have to go— we go back to the old school. We go back to you go get the client. You shift back to more stuff in the mailbox. It's not the only thing you do, but the most sophisticated winning companies are going to shift back to a mode of go get the client I want. And that means you have to use like the old guerrilla marketing techniques. It means you bring back the old school marketing techniques. You show up in the mailbox, you show up on the door, those types of things. So I think there's gonna be a resurgence of those types of activities for the companies that are dominant and strong.

Yeah, and I think it's a, a good caveat too for people listening to this. I wanna be really clear, between 5 and 15% of traffic, depending on how well they're doing it, is actually coming from AI right now. We are still seeing. The vast majority of traffic coming from Google search, people finding your site organically off your truck, et cetera. So I put it as a caveat because I think some people will hear this and be like, "I'm gonna blow up everything, the site's changing, we're putting—" It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, be very careful, especially if you do have good SEO and especially if you do have a good strategy that's working right now, because it's not where all of your current leads are. However, it has doubled in terms of the percentage over the past 12 months. Across home service web design. Um, and so I'd just be like, it's, it's on the hockey stick, but it's still a very small part of your business.

But a meaningful 15%, if it's that high in some markets, is a meaningful part. So I think the word there would be iteration. Yeah. That's a really good call out.

And it's both, right? Like you gotta do, you gotta be on the door and your site's gotta be dialed in for an agent.

Yep. Yep. All right. Second item I had for us was One that's come up before, and you can make this as narrow as you want. I've given this one some thought as well. So it's this conversation we've had about why do businesses, why do they fall apart? Why do they collapse? Why do they fail? And I, you must have hit a nerve and it's not like there's a million comments on this, but the word divorce got used and I saw divorce come up in the comments. It's like, must have, I don't, people picked up on it. And so I'd like to give you an opportunity to talk about this, like from your experience over all these years with all the different companies you've worked with, all the shows you've done where you've seen all kinds of problems, bucket a few of these items or, or take it in any direction you want, but bucket a few of these items that you see that you feel like are common now, common reasons why people their business won't work out. That would be warnings for people to be thinking about as they're going down this road.

Yeah, I tried to kind of bucket into like just the most common theme. So what I actually did yesterday is I looked at all the turnaround shows and then I looked at all the locations of Augusta have closed, and then I looked at all the locations of Home Service Web Design that we've seen them close their business. So I tried to actually bucket them somewhat. So the first was, I tried, this was a tough one to like label, but it was mostly just confusing revenue growth with success. So like this treadmill of like, I need more trucks, I need more employees, I need more jobs. And because they get so busy, it hides the big problems of the business, like bad pricing, bad cash flow, bloated payroll, especially as they get past a million. All of a sudden they're hiring a mechanic and 3 office people and an estimator and a salesperson. So that was the first one is like a lot of confusion of what revenue growth means. It is not directly attributed to success., and just basically getting beyond their skis. The second one was they grow past their ability to manage, and so their fast growth exposes weak systems. So whether it be they start hiring the wrong people, they don't know how to do job costing, um, there's no lack, there's a lack of accountability on the team, so they, there's no roles or departments, but ultimately it was the lack of the manager to stay up with the business. And like we talked about last week, hey, that is something you can improve. You can increase your personal capacity, especially as a leader, as a manager. But a lot of times, like, I have to just be honest and be like, they grew the business past their personal capacity as a leader, whether it be they grew too fast or they just had idiosyncrasies or issues or ways of leading and managing that caused people not to want to work for them. It repelled customers. Um, and unfortunately I still see that as like a big reason people fail, especially as they start to really grow, is they just don't have the skill of leadership. The third one is that you kind of mentioned that, you said the word divorce, but I kind of buckled it, bucketed it into the owner's personal life starts leaking into the business. And this could even be around health stuff. If you're 150 pounds overweight, it's going to be harder to grow a business when it's stressful. It's also going to be hard to do that when you also have some conflict at home or between the family members, or there's an emergency in the family, there's some conflict. Like, those things together, the personal life starting to leak into the business, a lot of times I see it stall the business, and worst case scenario, I see it cause it to go under. Um, a divorce ultimately, if a business is bigger, especially if it hasn't been set up correctly, is almost always a death sentence. For a business that's doing under $3 million in revenue. Not only because of like legally the 50% separation, it's the distraction of the entrepreneur and the leader not being on the business for 6 to 12 months and depending on how ugly it gets. Uh, and then a lot of times if it's like you gotta settle for a certain amount of cash, the business doesn't have that kind of cash. You take on a bunch of debt, you leverage the business, it just gets really messy. Um, and then the last one I came up with was, um, was debt. And, and using debt to hide problems. So we talked about debt last week. Good debt, I think, buys more capacity to be able to grow, but bad debt, I feel, covers bad pricing, bad labor, um, slow sales. You can just juice a bunch of ads and you'll get more leads. Um, also bloated owner lifestyle, like the lifestyle of the entrepreneur is so bloated, or it's built so like it's sucking all the cash out of the business, and then you use debt to basically make sure that it can sus— be sustainable. And so those were kind of the major buckets I threw it into. Uh, and eventually it, it catches up, um, with someone if either of any of those 4 buckets are overleveraged, or whether it be personal, whether it be the debt side, uh, whether it be someone above their skis from a leadership perspective, in the long term, it kind of catches up with them.

Doing Service Autopilot, doing academy, I've seen a lot of stuff over the years like you have. And I tend to think about things as predominantly in two buckets. And one is debt, but I'm going to give a little bit different take on debt. And then the other one is burnout. Those are the two things that, but it's, it's, we'll use debt as my example. So when you hear debt, it might be like, okay, this person, this company went out and they financed their trucks and they financed their equipment. Then they got into a line of credit. Then they didn't build up enough money going into winter. Their line of credit was already tapped. They get in trouble. They're on the credit, they're hitting the credit cards. That's probably what most people would picture when I talk about debt, but debt is a result of many other things that were happening. And so, and you touched on a number of those, like the one around personal lifestyle is a big one. Like if you're, if you have $100,000 on your line of credit, And then you're subs— you're in some— it's either a business problem or you have too big of a house, too many car payments. Like you're taking too many vacations. Like if you have $100,000 on a line of credit and you just went on a $12,000, $15,000 vacation, you basically financed that vacation because you have a line of credit. You could have paid that off. But I think debt a lot of times is less about— I also have one that I've seen that results in debt is the buying of accounts or businesses to get started. And eventually you realize, oh wow. I way overpaid for that thing. A lot of people make it work. Some people don't make it work. So that's been one. But the debt, from what I've normally seen, when I think about it, is it's debt made possible not fixing something. And so it happens gradually. And I've seen some really— and I've seen this now too many times. People go under because they don't pay their payroll taxes and they don't pay their sales tax, or one or the other, and you will be destroyed over that. The government doesn't let you out on that stuff. That's a version of debt to me. And so there was a symptom that preceded you not doing that, much like there's a symptom that preceded this accumulation of debt. Pricing didn't get fixed. You did too many things. It's all the stuff we talk about all the time. And it— and what happened is one day when you find yourself in a tough spot, you, and you have access to debt, whether it's just financing the trucks or financing the equipment. Again, I'm not saying those things are bad. You can do that and say, there's nothing wrong with this because this is what everybody does, but it doesn't set off a fire alarm in your mind to really ask the question, why are we doing this? Are we doing this? Because we're really growing fast. A lot of people say, I'm investing in my business. I'm growing fast. I'm like, Are you really growing fast? I mean, like adding another crew is not that fast. Like, you know, it's like, it, it's just not. So what are we talking about? We say growing fast. So a lot of people will say they're growing fast or I'm growing the business, I'm investing in it. And the fire alarm was never set off. And so they never went through a checklist of all the things that could have led to them needing to do that. So just because you're financing your trucks or you're using a line of credit does not mean something's broken. But I think because that stuff is so widely used, so acceptable, it doesn't make any of us think about, was this even necessary in the first place? And so that's how I, when I'm talking about debt, that's one of the biggest ways I've seen people get in debt. It's not that somebody said, hey, I'm just gonna finance everything and grow as fast as I can. It was little micro decisions that built year after year where they didn't go back and fix stuff, analyze things. They made wrong decisions and it all stacks and you end up with debt. And then you end up with new kinds of debt. Like eventually you're into the line and then eventually you're into your credit cards and then eventually you're into the Amex and Amex says you gotta pay the bill. Like it builds.

I've seen that a lot. You could almost say all, all business failures actually an accumulation of debt. Just what type of debt? Like you could have physical debt, like you have not worked out. For years, you have not slept well for years, and eventually the, like, the bill comes due and you're being rushed to the ER. Or same thing with like a relationship. It's like, yeah, divorce is the end result of an accumulation of relationship debt that's accumulated over the course of time.

Yeah. Yeah. And so it just sort of dawned on me when we were gonna talk about this, it's like, I wanna give a little more color and context to debt cuz it's just so easy to picture it as you bought, you financed some trucks and et cetera, et cetera. Like, no, how'd you get there? Right. And, and really think about that. And that's, that's what I see. It's this slow rolling thing that happens where one day you're just too much debt. And I've argued, probably said, I don't, we've only done 5 shows now, but I probably said it here. I just am so convinced that that ERC money bailed out so many people. It, it's the, it's a perfect example for this. If you got a giant ERC check. What did you do with it? Did you buy some cool cars? Did you upgrade your house? Did you, uh, did you just pay off debts? Like if, if that's, if that's the extent of what you did, nothing changed. So whatever the stresses were, the frustrations were, whatever the debts that had been accumulated were, if they haven't already built back by now, they're going to come back because nothing changed. And that's what I think most of America did with their ERC money.

And then it gets addictive. So then when it, that runs out, you'll probably go into debt. Yeah. To sustain that lifestyle.

Yeah. Yeah. And again, I want to be super clear here. Just because you got ERC, just because you have them down and stuff does not mean you have a, a lousy business that's going to burn down. I don't mean that. I'm just saying this is what happens to really great people. They're running so fast. They're moving so fast. It's like, okay. Yes, let's just finance the trucks and you're onto the next thing. It's a little bit, you know, to this idea that we've talked about where it's like, okay, there are seasons. You've talked about seasons. There's the go for it, foot on the gas, we're building season. And then there's the cleanup season. Like, are you doing the cleanup stuff? Are you looking at like how we got here? Because when people don't look at how they got here, one day you wake up and it's gone. That's, I just, I, That's why I'm so big on the debt thing. It's like my hottest button because it's the accumulation of bad decisions that results in the debt, not so much a strategy. And then the other one is this burnout, which is also the accumulation of bad decisions. Like it's what you said about, you know, like around management, not learning how— I don't remember how you worded it, but not getting the right people in place, not learning how to lead and manage properly, not doing all these things. Going too fast. There's all these things, doing too many things, getting excited about somebody else's business, say, wow, they're making all that money over there. I'm going to do that service too. It's like all that adds up to just complete and utter burnout, which might ultimately also result in debt, which furthers burnout. Like, so these are the two big ones that I find, I believe most people end up living in. So those are my two.

Yeah. Like the burnout one's tough. Even when it comes to like mental health, I know you've seen it a few in a few people I've seen. It's like, it's one of those ones that's so unique because sometimes it might— their business was fine, they actually built it just fine, and then all of a sudden a chemical in their brain goes out and they're burning out. Like, all of a sudden their personal capacity just gets whacked. And that's why, to your point, like last week, growing is so important to a certain size where it can run without you. And that's where I'm a big advocate of, like, sometimes the best way to prevent burnout is make sure you're not doing those level, low-level tasks for decades on end and building to a point. And yes, you maybe you take on a little debt, maybe you put a little more risk into the business to get it to the size to where something like that happening, whether it be a personal thing, a physical thing, doesn't wipe you out. Um, and that's where I'm more of the pro, hey, we should build a business to a certain size to prevent that burnout potentially from affecting the business.

Yeah. Yeah. The, you made me think of. You know, I'm a, I am all up. I've always been the guy. It's like, I'm perfectly happy to outwork you. I mean, I'm definitely, that's my mindset. I will outwork you. I've always liked this concept of the slightest edge. Like if you don't, you could look it up if you don't know what it is. Like, I just like, I like, I will do whatever it takes. I will win through sheer force. But as I've gotten more mature in business, it's like, I don't know. I mean like yes and no for seasons. And so I think, and then you take somebody like a Gary Vee and there's so much, it's like the hustle culture concept. Like there's some really good lessons in that, especially for younger people. But then there comes a place where it's like, okay, that had a season and that makes sense. But if you're still living in pure adrenaline, all in, whatever it takes all the time, it's kind of like the debt thing. It's like, wait, if I'm still having to live this way after 5 years of business or 7 years, Maybe that should set off again my fire alarm analogy and say, well, why am I having to do this? What, what didn't we build quite right? What am I not doing? Because there are other people that do not live this way. And so that's, uh, just something else that I've also noticed. It's so easy for all of us to say, back to my debt thing, we're investing in the business, we're building the business. This is okay. And you can make the same argument with just never-ending, all-in hard work, outworking everybody else, the hustle culture, things like Yeah, that's good, but is there, there should come a point where you could let off the gas a bit and you could still win. Yeah. Does that resonate with you at all? Yeah. Or how do you feel about that one?

I feel like I've kind of made this transition the past few years because realizing that you can't outwork a problem is very humbling, but realizing that the decisions you make is the highest leverage thing you can do in a day. And then realizing that when you overwork or you're hustling all the time, you make poor decisions. And so having some really public failures when I made bad decisions probably was a result of being the hustle. I'm gonna work all the time and then making a decision after not having sleep, slept for all night. Like, so I, I've purposely been much more a matter of like, decisions are the highest leverage task I can do. If anything goes against that, as the business has grown, I need to protect that at all costs, which means I have to sleep.. And if I don't sleep, yeah, no decisions the next day. I was talking to Nick, one of the, the leaders here, and he was, he, we were talking about some stuff. I'm like, if I don't sleep well, I basically, it's like there's no decisions being made today. Like there's no consequential 6-week, 2-month commitments happening because I understand now that a poor decision could have huge implications for the organization. And that is the most highest leverage task for me. And like, this really came as a result of like Jeff Bezos says like he makes 2 or 3 good decisions a day.

If I make like 3 good decisions a day, that's enough. And they should just be as high quality as I can make them.

And like his morning is like the most chill like wake up and everyone can rag on that all they want. But the reason he's at where he is at today is because he's realized that making 2 or 3 good decisions is the highest leverage thing for him to do. And anything that would prevent you from being in the right mental state or physical state To be able to make those decisions well is bad. And, and that hustle culture kind of goes right up against that mentality of being in a state where I make a good decision.

Yeah. Yeah. And, and the story of life is it's never black or white. It's never either or. It's like a little bit of all of it. It's like, yeah, there's a time for hustle. Like, absolutely. And you go, yeah. So I agree with all that. Uh, let's move on. All right. You ready? Okay. All right. So I think this is an important one. Okay. If you're using AI and you're asking your model questions, how much— what, Mike, what's your opinion on how much trust should a person put into Claude or ChatGPT when they're asking for business advice? You could take it that way. You could even go a layer deeper and say, hey, I'm working on marketing strategy, I'm writing marketing copy, or How do I have this conversation with a team member? Whatever the scenario is, how much, how do you think about how much you believe the answer you're getting back? Is it truth? Is it the best strategy?

What do you think? Yeah, I, I look, look at it much more as like it's giving me direction. It's giving me directionally correct information. Um, like you mentioned, I think a couple weeks ago, like AI is a guessing machine at the end of the day.

And what I always like to think about, a prediction machine.

Prediction machine. Yes. And the, the, the output of that, of what it gives me is trained on the internet, the aggregate of the entire internet. So if I take everything the internet says and take the average of it, that's what AI is giving me, especially if I don't give it any contextual data. And so I believe that like the output that I get from it is only as good as the input I give it. And I think the business that have organized data, organized numbers, contextual data, they'll be the ones that can make use of the AI. But if you just give AI like a random question about your business, you're going to get a 50 percentile aggregate of what the world thinks on the internet. And who knows what someone's saying on the internet that it could be trained on. And I think it gets really dangerous when owners are seeking validation instead of actually seeking the truth. Um, do they, do they really want to know the problems in their business? And why the marketing strategy won't work, or are they just saying, hey, this is what I'm thinking, and then the AI validates it. Now they have more confidence in the wrong decision. And I see a lot of times, yes, you can use a prompt or a, a way of making sure that it doesn't just validate what you say. And you can tell, hey, can you be my sparring partner? Find holes. That's where I feel the most value in AI for me is like, here's what I'm thinking. Here's my, you're, I want you to find the holes. Why will this not work? Because it's, it seems to have do, do a better job at finding holes. Than finding the one specific way that I should go and thinking of it much more of a sparring partner for what decision I'm making and refining it. I think that's really good, like refining. But if you just blanketly say, "I wanna grow my business this year by double, what should I do?" You're going to get the most average output ever. And if you don't have organized inputs in terms of like, what's my close ratio? What's my P&L look like? To give it, it's also just gonna be even more generic. And so I think in general, I like it as more of a honing tool and a thought partner. I think putting into the prompt, I think everyone should have a master prompt so it has full context of your role, what your objectives are with the business, the financials of the business, your personal why, so it can optimize its response around those things instead of looking at the internet. I think most people just don't give it enough context to actually make it a useful tool. And therefore they end up just gaining more confidence in their bad decisions. But from your perspective, have you found the same thing or how do you use it?

Well, I'd agree with everything you said. A couple of things I'll add to it and I could kind of answer how I use it. I'll just reiterate first what you said, like the way I most like using it is I want it to argue against me. I want it to make a case, the opposite. I want it to take a stand against. My position or my thinking, and I want it to tell me why I'm wrong. I want it to argue both sides, or I would ask it maybe like, how would this person solve this problem? Like that kind of a thing. Like use other personas to see, and maybe have it give me the answer from 5 different personas. Or I'll ask it to take a completely novel approach that it doesn't think anybody would ever do or use. Like basically it's everything you said. You're trying to get it via the prompt to give you completely out of the norm, not average answers. And that's when, so I'm looking at it as a brainstorming partner to help me think through things. And, but I'm still gonna have to make the decision. I'm still gonna have, I have to constantly challenge it. I have to push back on it. I want it to do the same to me. So you had said that, that's like, that's core. To the way I would use it. Another thing I would say is for important stuff, I run it through multiple models. I just, I, and I do everything I just said through multiple models. So everything takes more time, but I feel like you end up with much better output. At the end of the day, I would remind you, you've got to make the decision. I see it in myself because I use the model so much and I'm doing so much work right now and thinking about so many things. It's really nice for it just to say at the bottom, I would go with this one. I would go with A, or like, you've probably experienced that if you use it a lot, it'll give you a list. It's like, I would use A, A's the best one. And you just, so I find myself being tempted to take its, uh, answers a lot of times because it's easier. It like brings down the mental load. I was like, I just wanna get this done. I wanna make a decision. And I, and, and all, it's not that I don't necessarily agree with a lot of those answers, but you gotta be really, really careful. You can really get, um, because you want to go quick, you can really get into a bad place of like believing the answer and it sounds right. Um, and so I think you, it's not that the answers, like some answers are just blatantly bad. I still feel that way today. I constantly deal with stuff like that is unbelievably terrible advice. That, and so I've, I've, you know, I might've said it on here. I, I talk too much. Like, I'm so glad I'm not 20 right now. I'm so glad, you know, because if I was 20, I'd probably believe everything that it's telling me, but I've got enough context in life and I've done enough thinking and had enough experiences. Like, wait a second, that does not make any sense. You know, it's that kind of a thing. So that just constantly reminds me I've gotta be careful. Maybe one of the biggest points I would make is, and there are some studies around this, that the way you state your prompt can lead it. So if you say, this is what I'm thinking, or this is how I'm thinking about it, or this is what I've come up with, like anything like that where you've already hinted at this angle, like this is what I'm thinking, the studies show you're way more likely to get an answer that confirms it. And so I oftentimes, when it's important, will either take a completely opposite stance of what I believe and tell it to challenge me, or I'll be extremely careful in how I say it. But I'm constantly having it, you know, challenge me. I would say that's probably the takeaway. I am just, I just push back constantly. I, if I'm writing a marketing piece, I'm constantly rewriting and say, what about this? Like, you know, and just like, I always feel like I talk to it a little bit mean sometimes. Like I wouldn't even talk to the person like, like, And so I, I think that's how you got to use it.

Yeah, you know, back to my hot take, it's the person that can't challenge their thoughts and opinions politically, red flag. Same thing with AI. Yeah, yeah, but good point. Do you use it much like, um, when you're doing the vibe coding thing? Are you doing it much when you're working out or walking, or do you do like build your prompt using that and then you go and put into Claude later on? Are you actually in Claude like, uh, doing like Whisper Flow or talking to it, or do you usually build the prompt while you're running and out and about?

A prompt to do what? Are you saying to code something or a prompt in general? You had mentioned the other day, like the, uh, estimating tool that you've been building, all of that. Oh, okay. Yeah. So the real work happens when I'm sitting in front of it using Whisper Flow, but I love, I think Groq's still my favorite, but Claude has really gotten better with the conversational approach. Grok's not my favorite tool, but from a conversation flow, it's very easy. But I'm now, because I think Claude is so much— personally, I think it's better. I'm now having my convers— I've switched recently to now I have my conversations in Claude. That's— and so let's say I was out walking. I will have this thing I wanna work on. Like, we'll, we'll use the estimating system as an example. So I have this, I wanna work on this estimating system, and so I will have a conversation with it. Brainstorming the estimating system, what needs to be in it. I'll have it go out and do all this deep research, or I tell it to do deep research. She knows what it does. You know, I can use words like that. And so, you know, and I'll give it very specific. I want you to do this. I want you to go research here. I want you to look at this. I want you to look at these screens, these designs. I want you to do all this stuff. I want you to look at these feature sets across these products. I, you know, and I— tons of information. We just talk. And so maybe like sometimes I'll walk an hour, an hour and a half doing just that. And then what I'll do is I'll have it summarize that all of our decisions and all the things I said I agreed on, or while we're talking, I'll be like, hey, don't lose that point. I need that surfaced again later. Remember that. I have it then give me a final document. I like to do documents because the threads constantly compress. Like in Claude, you'll see if you're— I don't know if it does in the free version, but in the paid version, you'll see it compress. In ChatGPT, it's compressing behind the scenes or it's losing its context window.. And so you're losing all this knowledge you don't even realize you're losing. So I'm constantly having it keep, uh, either an MD file, which is just a Markdown file, it's like the native, uh, file structure for them, or I'll have it create literally a Word document or something like that. And I'm constantly uploading that or updating that document, saving it off to my computer, then sometimes dropping it back into Claude or ChatGPT so that it refreshes its memory, like where we're really at. That's a really important point. So to start, to answer your question, I sometimes, I'll just like, I'm inspired to work on this problem. It could be a code problem. It could be, I wanna learn something. It could be anything. I'll just walk and talk. And then all the knowledge, I will dump that knowledge into a document so it doesn't get lost. Now, if to answer the next part of the question, like let's say I was working on designing something, I sit in front of my computer running multiple agents. Just talking to it, iterating and trying things. And, um, that part, the actual design, I'm having it constantly change stuff on the screen and do it. That's how I'm— so it's a little bit different. Yeah. That was awesome. Did that answer your question?

Yeah, that was great. I just think, I think the, the building part for me has been really helpful is explaining to me how it's building. It's like for if someone's actually building something with AI, like for me to learn Hey, I don't want you just to go do it. I need to explain like, what are you doing in the front end? What are you doing in the backend? Why did this need to happen from a technical perspective? I want you to explain why this bug is happening and like, I wanna know why, what you're doing. It's been really helpful to even just like to learn the, the, the lingo of the engineers, a lot of it, uh, for me.

Yeah. And you definitely have to give it rel. So as an example, like let's just say you were building a, a website just to bring it down. So a lot of people, when they build a website, let's just say your website is, um, 10 pages and you'll build this file called like a CSS file. It's a, it's a style. It's a file that dictates the font sizes, the sizing of the headers, the, the, the font, the point size, the color. So it creates this structure for how the whole website looks and you can go upload, update this file and it will essentially update the whole website. Or another example would be you create a template and a template might say, hey, the header of my website looks like this, the footer of my website looks like this. So it's got a structure and you just apply that template every page. So every time you create a new page, like you have a, uh, an about page and now you add a contact us page, you don't have to go re— pro— recode the, the header and the footer. It just inherits that. Okay. Things you've gotta kind of watch out with, with these tools is they might, as they're writing your code, build a separate CSS file for every single page. Yeah, they, they'll do all these crazy things. And so you've gotta really talk to it and, and keep it on the rails. And then after you get an out— the output, you have to, you have to constantly go back. It's like where I talk about challenging it earlier. I was talking about constantly challenging it. You have to constantly challenge it and say, I want you to go do this, check this, check this. Did you do this? Did you make this mistake? Did you, did you lose anything from 3 designs ago? Like you have to just constantly go through that. And that's, that's really imperative to the quality output. And then if you're building something bigger, you need to tell it like what database you're using, what your data structures are. You need to tell it where it's going to be hosted and what if you're going to link in other products like so this is where this stuff starts to get a little more complex, but you've got to be very, very clear about that stuff because if you do the design and you don't go to that degree, then when you go to write code, it's gonna be, it's gonna be a lot of fixing. And in the fixing is where you're gonna end up with a lot of spaghetti code and problems. And so that's a little bit of how I think about it.

Yeah. And it's totally, it's funny because with Home Service Web Design, with all of this, it's very much someone can say, hey, take the site, copy this over in Cloud Code. And like we very, very much like, like let's just go, let's ship where they fall, where they may for Home Service Web Design. 'cause we've lost clients. They go build the same, and they just literally just put in like, copy this. And then we've had this past week, 3 people come back and it was a function of we saw their source code once they came back and it was like exactly what you said. Multiple CSS files, like the headers, like everything was messed up on the backend even though the frontend looked fine. I think that's where a lot of times when it comes to the code side, it's easy to fall into the trap of like, oh, I've built this thing. It's like, whoa, You've built a mockup and, and like there is so much more behind this. And they came back cuz within 3 weeks it was just like the leaves dropped off. So it, it's possible, but building it correctly I think is, is important. It is.

And we don't, we've kind of talked about this. We don't have to go too far down the road, but I, I mean, I think about this a lot because it's advanced so much. I mean, I, I, I even like, should I just build my own thing for City Turf? I know how to do all this and we've talked about this, but The problem is that I think this is the challenge that we're all just going to have to figure out what the right strategy is. Like on one hand, yeah, we're, it's only going to get better from here. So we're probably going to be able to build a lot of these things, but if I'm distracted or if Phillip was distracted or somebody else, that's, that's a massive distraction from just growing the business. And so that's a huge opportunity cost. Like, so yeah, while we're going to be able to do it, would that even make a lot of sense? And then the other one is if you kind of will use the spaghetti code example, or just as things evolve over time, it's like, it's not that it's pretty good. The tools are amazing about building something brand new, like from scratch where it's just a white sheet of paper. It's the going back and changing it. Regressions. Regressions are killer. Yeah. Yeah. And so I suspect, I mean, it will get so much better, but I, I just can't help but think even years out into the future, you're going to need a person, a human to get involved as well. And so back to a point I've probably made before, it's like if you could buy a piece of software for $300 a month and an IT guy is going to cost $150, $180 an hour or $200 an hour to do this, like one or two edits a month, I could have just bought the software. Nobody's having to worry about this thing. So I kind of feel like for a city turf or for a normal business, the only reason you're going to code most of these systems in the future is because your use case is so specific, or if there's something you're going to do that's such a huge competitive advantage that would never make sense for another company to build for you, then that might necessitate building your own tech. But other than that, I don't think it's going to make much sense. And again, we've talked about all this stuff, but I'm just constantly thinking about it, trying to figure out what is the ideal here. And that's, that's still where I live on this whole thing, even as amazing as it all is.

Yeah, I think back to talking for everyone listening, the use case of AI is likely much more a business sparring partner, and I think everyone can use it for that. Whether or not the 5% of people are actually gonna go code stuff and, and vibe code things is, is another case. But I think some of the things that we've mentioned in our, like, create a master prompt, giving it your data, like, uh, obviously people are very sensitive about the security and things, but like if you're P&L, like is going to be classified information. I don't know who you're working for, but like if the AI has that, it'll give you way better prompts. And if it knows the goals of what you're trying to do, if it knows how much you need to live, your personal budget so that you don't, like to be able to run through the idea of like debt, for example, we talked about that. The ability for it to poke holes in why you think you need the debt or need to go extend your line of credit or buy another truck is an excellent use case for everyone. Um, so I just don't want us to get in the, like the Claude Code situation. Yeah. Yeah. 95% of people are, they just need to think about how can I use AI to poke holes in my current strategies and ideas for the business.

Yeah. I'm glad you brought us back. I can get so excited about this stuff cuz I love that world and it's just, I'm thinking about it all the time. So, all right. Another topic for us is, it's kind of similar to an earlier topic. You've seen so many businesses, met so many people. Talk through what you think makes up just a fantastic business owner. Like what are the characteristics of the best business owners and the way that we might all think about this, or these are clues as to what we want to develop in ourselves and what we want to be thinking about working on.

Yeah, maybe I'll give one and then we'll bounce it back and forth. So I'll give one, then you give one, Virj, because I have a few listed.

I do too. I've, I have quite a few. Cool.

The first one I had was just patience. And I kind of defer, like, uh, Alex has a great working definition of, of patience and that is like, what do you do in the meantime? Mine is a high pain, a high pain tolerance for boring execution. So someone who thinks in terms of years instead of weeks and months. And so a lot of times people will be like, I wanna grow my business like next 6 months or 12 months. When I hear someone say like, for the next 10 years I'm doing this, or over the next 5 years we're gonna be focused on AI, like that's when I have a lot more credence to their leadership. Because I see the person that thinks in longer time horizons usually gets to the finish line instead of the person that is constantly finding a new finish line every few weeks. So my first one is patience and having that high pain tolerance for the boring execution. And sometimes the boring execution is not doing anything. Um, yep. Especially as the business grows, you have to let things play out. You have to see the data. Like there's a lot of things like even with AI now I wanna do and like, no, we need 6 months. Of seeing how this instant quote form works before we make another decision. And that's sometimes— that patience is sometimes the hard part.

Yeah, that's a good one. I can't actually believe I didn't put that on my list because that is like a core philosophy I have in life. So, but it didn't make my list. I think, and I've got a bunch, so we'll just volley back and forth here. Someone who is very outcome-focused versus I need the credit-focused. So you could take outcome-focused another way, but I think a person that is like, they need the credit versus I just want the outcome inside the organization and I want my team to win. I want them to look good. I think that's a big one.

What's funny is that's my fourth one. I put absorbed, absorbed criticism and pitchforks praise. So, so like the person that when, when bad things are happening in the organization, they take ownership of it. But then when good things happen, it's like, oh yeah, they're great. And that person's awesome. And they're amazing. I find the person that can do that usually attracts really great talent, which is, that's probably the reason why they're successful. But the, the thing that gets them to be able to attract and retain that talent is the fact that they absorb criticism, pitchfork praise.

I'll probably have a theme here for the first few, very people-focused. It's kind of, it's still got a similarity. You're really focused in investing in your team, helping the team grow. Uh, you, you legitimately care about where they end up in life, where they end up in the business. Like it's, it's It's, there's a real focus on the people inside the organization and getting the right people in the organization.

Yeah, this is boring cuz mine's very similar.

All right.

So my skip, so you, you skipped, but yeah, my next one was, uh, uh, leadership team stays with them long term and there's a, you avoid churn at the top of the organization.

That's a great one. I actually didn't have mine on my list, but I also believe that one too. This is why you could have a never-ending list here, but that's great. Yeah, I think like— was there anything else on that one or I cut you off?

No, you, yours kind of ties into mine. I think doing what you just said, which is investing in your team, caring about them, that's the thing that probably leads to the, the leadership team staying. But I think a lot of times it also has a downstream effect of like having a vision, being able to cast that vision and clearly define it for everyone, making sure it's big enough for them to fit their goals inside of correct compensation, like all those things. But yeah, the leadership team staying with them for a long time is—

I've seen that one be successful. Still another people one, and for anybody that listens to me often, you've probably heard this kind of a thing. It's like hiring people around you that fill in the gaps where you're weak and do the things you don't love. I think that's absolutely imperative. That's building, that's the building of a team to me. Like if you thought about it from a football analogy, you're not hiring 10 quarterbacks, you're hiring, you know, all these different positions. That's the same thing. You're very thoughtful about who's getting on the team. And you're thoughtful about who you are versus, you know, who you're not. Mm-hmm.

Hey, I got my last one. I say, uh, they're emotionally stable. And so like, I think that in part business has so many highs and lows. If you ride that wave, it just, you eventually quit. Um, and I also think that the person that's more emotionally stable attracts better managers and keeps them longer. Because they don't overreact to things. And this is something I know I've mentioned to you that I admire about you and I've looked at from afar, but the ability to take in a high-stress situation to bring it down. And then when there are times when everyone's euphoric, to be able to bring it down. When they're— when everyone's mad at you, to be able to make sure you're like not going too low. So like I've always said, like higher lows, lower highs. So emotionally stable would be certainly an ingredient of successful Entrepreneurs.

Yeah, I would agree. I'll give a couple more. I think— did you just have the 4? That's all I had. Okay. I'll rattle off a couple more. You could go down this list, but something I've observed in people, Mike, I kind of, I think I'd put you in this bucket. Um, there's, I'll just, I'll title it swipe and deploy. So this idea that there's, uh, like you could go read a book that has all this great wisdom in it, or you could watch a YouTube video from somebody that's clearly done it. And you take that idea and you just do it. There's not much of that actually. One of the things I've noticed is a lot of people, like, they'll hear it, but they don't do anything with it. Or they'll hear it and they're like, gonna change it in 90 different ways versus like, this guy is running a $100 million business. He's tested these things. Maybe just do it. Like, it'll just be done. And so like, there's this idea. I've really noticed that some of the people that move really fast, they'll like, they'll, they'll listen to the right source and then they'll just take the idea and do it.

And I think it goes, I think it goes back to the AI thing we were talking about though too, is you might have almost a risk if you do that using AI because you take what it says and you go do it and it might be wrong information. And this is like, Alex made a video about this yesterday, is like, you will still want to have the reputation of the person. Telling you that information or that decision-making process for them, and you will weigh out their credibility. And that's something that AI doesn't have. It is just a prediction machine. And so the ability to be able to listen to someone, understand their credibility, and then just take action on it, to your point, super valuable. Taking the wrong advice and taking a whole lot of execution towards it can also lead to a lot of wasted time and damage. Yep. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, I would agree with that. A couple more. I describe this one as the person that always shows up. Like, so I just so believe that it all comes down to being an example. You're an example at everything. Like, you're an example if you have kids, you're an example to your team. So the action is everything. It's like, so you could say whatever you want, you could train people however you want, but are you doing it?. And so the always showing up is knowing like you'll always come through. You'll always be there. You're not delaying. You're always on the meeting. You're like, you could just, you're highly dependable and you are running out in front of everybody else. Like you're who people want to emulate. I just think that is really critical because I believe in this idea of the example. And then, uh, two more. This one I think is just such a, And not everybody does this. I think this has been huge for me. I've seen some other people do it really well. And I think it's just a competitive advantage. And this is idea that you can borrow from other industries. So as an example, like let's say that we're all in the, in this example, let's say you're in the green industry, lawn care, the idea that you could look at HVAC or plumbing or something completely non-related, you could look at an e-commerce company and like think about how they do messaging and you're swiping these ideas from non-connected businesses and you're applying them to, to your business. That is such a competitive advantage that, um, I think some people are just masters at coming up with these unique business model approaches by doing that. And then the last one I have to put on my list, I think it's a person's good money because it's so easy to, uh, I just see so many people get themselves in trouble financially. And so the money thing, is really important. And I think earlier I made the statement, probably shouldn't be. I made the statement about partners. I'm not supposed to comment on that, but I think one of the biggest reasons why partnerships go bad is the partners aren't aligned on money. You got one that's careful with money. It's the same reason why marriages can go bad. And money is this really critical thing to ending, ending up with something great.

So that was my list. Okay. We're going down a rabbit trail. Alignment on money with a partner. I know we're deep in this rabbit trail here.

Uh-huh. A business partner.

Business partner could be even, you know, personal partner. Um, but how have you found alignment with money? Is it more in the picking process, like choosing the right partner, or are there, is there a cadence of meetings or communication mechanisms to make sure that the partnership does have good communication around money?

I think it starts with who you pick. I think you figure that out ahead of time. I don't, I just don't think. For so many. I like that statement. I don't know if it was from the book Who or, um, Top Grading. There's a book, it's like, people will be who they've been. I don't know, maybe that's a different book, but I just so believe that. I just don't— maybe it's the— I'm not a pessimist, but maybe it's a pessimistic attitude. But I guess I've been beat down enough over time. It's like, yeah, people are kind of who they are. It's really hard to create change. And so I feel like if I'm coming into a situation with a partner that is not money-minded in the way that I think they, uh, that aligns with me. I just, I think it's too risky.

What clues or indicators of that being successful or unsuccessful are you looking for?

Whether it be how they run their personal life. Okay. I don't know how to, I mean, that's one of the biggest ones is how do they spend money in their personal life? Um, yeah. Yeah.

Like when, when I got to, when I got to know Brianna, the first thing I was like, I was looking at her, how her mom handled money. Kind of knew that's how she would handle money. Yeah. It's like, that was a big clue for me, like an indicator of like, okay, how she looks at money is probably how this will be handled in the future.

If I had made that decision, I wouldn't be married.

You know, we can all overcome. We can all get through it.

Well, no, no, no, no. Yeah. Well, so, so Tiffany and her family was the saver. And they would make fun of her and say she was cheap because she saved. Uh, okay. And so if I modeled other people, we wouldn't have got married. It's like, if I was like, it was like, if I thought that's who she'd become. So I, some of these things I think back, cause I got married so young. I think back, it's like, man, was I thinking about this stuff when I was 20, 21 years old? I must've been because, uh, you know, but she was, she was wired that way. But then in, in my business partnerships that have not worked out, It's almost all been about money, actually, for me.

And when you look at their personal finances, is it like extravagant living? Is it like bad investments or just bad decision-making? What's the red flag for the partnerships that don't work out?

I can forgive bad investments because, you know, because we, you know, all learn and get better over time. But, um, it was the red flag is how they live in their personal lives. Um, I had one experience where nobody really had any money when the business got started. And so when money started being made, then you discovered how everybody lives in their personal life. And it was an example of where everybody just starts buying bigger homes, bunches of cars. And so the decision, it's like, it's what I call personal life starts driving business decisions. And, uh, and so that was one that's like, uh, that wasn't an ideal situation, but I didn't know it going into it because of the age and all that. So I think personal life tells every— it just tells everything.

How would you handle if someone is in a business partnership, or let's just even say a marriage, uh, partnership where they see their partner handling money incorrectly or having these bad habits, how do you approach it? Do we just break the thing off? Or like, is there a way to be like, hey, I don't see how this is going to impact the business or the relationship in a positive way because of these negative habits around money? Yeah, I think you can.

I think you can. Uh, I think it's all conversation. Like, I mean, if it's married, if you're married, I'm thinking like, well, you're kind of too late here. You're going to have to try to work this one out. But, um, but you know, going into that relationship, you know, that's where I'll go back a little bit against my people are who they've always been. I think there's a lot of stuff in life that can get resolved with a, with, through conversation or improved. I mean, I'll, you know, I'll give actually some kind of behind the scenes. So I, my situation was the inverse. Uh, I don't know if I've actually ever talked about this. So when I, I saved every dollar I made since I was 14, I was like, when I would graduate high school, I had at least $100,000 or more, the equivalent of, uh, like for sure. When I got married, I probably had almost $200,000. I got married at 21. And so, back in those days, and so I had a bunch of money and I was hardcore. So I get a software job at 19. Tiffany gets a teaching job when she's 20 as a teacher. We get married at 21. We didn't spend a dollar of her paycheck. So this is the opposite scenario. And I was just hardcore. I constantly made her feel guilty about spending money. I made her stressed about it. It's like PTSD kind of situation. Like, We had all these goals. I was gonna save the best. And so I think the reason I tell that story is that's an example where some conversations, you know, eventually resulted in me like dialing it down a level. And, um, and so I do think like that helped, like talking about it, understanding her perspective made a big difference. And so I do think you could talk about these things and you can make progress and you can set rules up., but it, like, in the business scenario, it's, it could be that, okay, the solution isn't just us talking about it. It's, we need to bring in a third party. The third party could be like a consultant or a coach, or it could be a, a really strong C— not CPA, but like a accounting business CPA kind of person. And that third party is the non-biased voice. So it'd be kind of like if you were doing marriage counseling and you both trusted the counselor and you were lit, you had, you trusted them enough to accept their insights. Like they, that person might be able to say something to you. Whereas your spouse, if they say it to you, you don't hear it. Like it just, you know, it's that kind of a thing. And so I think that's how I would probably approach this. If we had a division in our business, I would go try to bring somebody in that helps us talk through this and think through this thing and gives their professional opinion. That'd be my answer.

Another, another use case for AI. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I feel like you'll still argue like, how'd AI notice that it's wrong?

Yeah. It's probably pulled it from Reddit someplace, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Uh, well, you had a great kind of final question.

Yeah. Yeah.

Very thought-provoking. So go ahead and tee it up.

Yeah. I wanted to do something a little unique here. Not, it's, it's business related, but not so that, and I'll answer it as well. But the question that I proposed to Mike was, if you die and you wake up the exact same age as you are today, so every— the world, everything is exactly the same as it is today, but you have no money, you have no contacts, you don't have relationships, like you've lost everything. You have no stuff. There's— it's just all you have is what's in your brain. And history is the same as it was. You can't go like bet on Google. What do you, you know, it's like, like you didn't wake up 20 years ago and you get to make all the right bets. Like, what would you do in life? Like from a, like, what would life, what life would you create? How would it be different than what you've done? It's, it's that kind of a thought exercise.

I'm interested to see what you say.

You, you, you start off. Okay, sure. Um, so I only thought about it from a few stand, a few things. So, um, starting kind of at the business thing, I won't spend much time on this one because we've talked about it before. Um, I would be very attracted to figuring out how to wiggle my way into the private equity world in some way. Um, and, or because I don't have money, I don't know how else I would do it. Uh, because, but I just think there's a real angle with my knowledge around private equity focused on home services, applying technology. Sophisticated finance knowledge, like KPIs tracking, understanding the, the numbers that move a business, marketing, like really bringing sophistication in those areas to home services businesses. I think there's this real opportunity to buy 'em up and build something incredible. But if I were to go a different direction, which is really what then I would normally think about, the other area that I'm highly attracted to in this world is something around education and rebuilding the way people learn and modernizing that, especially as you get to younger people. Like, what could education look like for younger people coming up? I always think about it like in business education, because I'm so passionate about entrepreneurship. I just think it's like one of the great gifts if you get to do that in life. But I'm also, I'm just in general, like I, some other day we could talk about this. I took, Riley out of school when he was finished his freshman year of high school. And it's just one of the single best things we ever did. And so I just, I really rethinking, especially high school, but middle school and high school education would be absolutely fascinating. I could go to work on that problem with other really smart people. So that'd be one thing. Another thing I thought about, or the other thing I would do immediately I know nobody. I have no friends anymore. Um, I have no relationships, whatever the thing is I'm going into. I would go find a super— we'll just, we'll just assume I figured out how to pay for this. We would, I would go get in a high-level business. Yeah. Yeah. I owe you this. Yeah. That lots and lots of debt.

Um, future stock in whatever I make in the future.

Yeah. Yes, exactly. Um, so I would, uh, have you ever heard of this? Total derail like I do. Have you ever heard of a book called The Unincorporated Man? No. Yeah. There's this book called The Unincorporated Man. The first book is really good. The, or at least I thought it was this. The second book's pretty good. The third book, I started fading on it, but it's this idea that society changes. Uh, it has to get reinvented and everybody ha— there's basically every human is, uh, walking, uh, uh, equity. Like they, you can, your parents get 20% of the equity in you when you're born. People can make investments in you and they'll earn part of your earnings in the future. So the whole, it basically is making the whole world a bunch of capitalists and people are capitalists. It's, it's a fascinating concept. It's a futuristic book. Not gonna lie.

When you said uncorporated man, I didn't know where you were going with that. Oh yeah. Yeah. Going a very different direction.

Okay. Yeah. All right. Nope. All right. So I would go get into some high-level sophisticated business group to rebuild my network, my connections, and my friends. I think that'd be really interesting. And then something that's, again, maybe I went a little too far down the road. Well, no, this I'll give you, I'll use my example. So I wouldn't live anywhere. I'd float. I would, I would, uh, so there's this. Like, if I could never do this being married, but there's this guy that's a billionaire. We heard Tiffany can change.

We heard Tiffany can change.

Yeah. She won't go for it. She wants, she wants, I love my house. I'd have a hard time leaving my house, but she wants a nest. Like, so, um, but I could float. I could just live like, so there's this guy that, uh, I can't remember who the guy's name. I heard about him a long time ago. He sold every asset, everything he had. Well, asset's the wrong word. He kept investments. He sold all his stuff. Except for his airplane, and he just lives in hotels, and he has assistants pre-rent all his stuff. So he might live in a hotel for 2 months, and he just floats. I would like to try that for a period of time. So that would be the other, the other change I'd make is I would just try living in completely different places around the world and work the whole time. Um, and the only asset I'd own is a race car. One car would be a race car. You don't have any possessions.

You don't have no money. How are you going to afford that?

I know. Well, that's where, as I started talking through this, like, wait a second, I took this in the wrong direction when I was thinking about it. I still, I still associate somebody to it, but the big, the biggest one was the two takeaways would be I'd probably do something in education and I would float versus setting down roots and try to have a bunch of experiences I had never had before.

Well, I figured you could still have the race car as long as you wait a few more years. And the Ferrari Luce is sitting in a room.

No one wants it.

You can have that one.

I'll be able to get that thing for $10,000. That's right.

Oh, man. Yeah, so I asked Bree about this. And we tried to think through it. I think it might— our answers might differ a little bit because you have so much more experience. And those things would be a— larger drawdown, whereas I'm kind of like accumulating those things. Um, I'm early in those stages, I feel like.

Yeah. Yeah.

So I feel like we, we were like really racking our brains. We feel like it'd be a very similar, like what we're doing now. Um, I think, uh, one thing I've talked to you personally about what we're about to do is probably very tied to this notion though, is like, if we, what kind of life would I live if there was a blank slate is very similar to what we're about to do. Um, And then just like take bigger swings and trying to break up the monotony, kind of to your point about like moving around. I think I've always thought about, I heard this, I don't know who said this, but like life feels like it speeds up as you age because you just consistently keep doing the same thing. So when you're a kid, like summer feels like years, like massive. And then now it's like 3 months gone. And a lot of it's just because now as an adult, 90% of your day looks exactly the same. So it goes by faster. Whereas for a kid, every single thing is new. Like this room, this popsicle, this air, like everything is big. Um, and so to your point, kind of like the floating idea, but like you're putting yourself in new scenarios, new circumstances that breaks up the monotony and just trying to live as many lives as you can in one. And you can slow life, like how we phrased it was like slow life down by breaking up the monotony. Um, And that's probably the, the, the thing that we are navigating towards.

Yeah, I, I like that answer. And actually when I was kind of go, cuz I proposed a question first thinking about you when I put it on the docket and then it's like, okay, well now I have to think about this for myself. Yeah. And, um, my conclusion was, and I've thought this before, I'm just like so unbelievably thankful for the life I've got to live. Like I couldn't imagine in many ways doing it that differently. Like it's been. It's clearly not all gone to plan, but it's like, I just couldn't imagine changing it that much. I'm really like hap— but if I have to go a different direction, the blank slate was the novelty and trying new things. And I love— I think that's not everybody's wired this way, but I love that idea. Like you have one life. Like I think people should try way more stuff and just like see what works. There's so many different ways to live life.

I think it's interesting because like in the same podcast we talked about trying new things and like as many things as possible, but also being like, stay focused on your industry. Don't get distracted. Like head down for a period of time where it is grind mode. And so I think there's that dichotomy of like, you might set aside 10 years, but okay, here we go. 5 for 50. Like you put the 5 years for the 50 years of that life that you want to build.

That's exactly what I was gonna say. You got me.

I had to put the pitch in just right. Yeah.

Thank, thank you for doing that. Yeah. And that's why I believe today. You do the work to buy the optionality in life to get to try all this stuff.

Yeah. And I think whether, whether someone looks up to you or what I've done, it's like we have both done the 5 and we're, we have the privilege of saying I've done the 5 a few times. Yeah. Yeah. We've done that period. And now we have the opportunity to be able to say we wouldn't really do a whole lot different because we put that time in. And I think if you've talked to me or you've for me, not so many years ago, for you, several years back, is like, during those times, maybe we didn't feel like that. We was like, we would like have our life a little different, or like we would've preferred a little bit of a change of industry or a little easier time. But like, in hindsight, looking back, it's like, this is exactly the life we'd build. And so for anyone that's like in the 5 years and you're like, one day you will look back on this, you probably won't change much, assuming that you get through that And you start to be able to build a life with optionality.

I like to say, yeah, I'd agree with that. Any last thoughts before we wrap up?

Non-financial advice. I'll be honest. My non-financial advice was, uh, to not buy the Ferrari Luce. So I kind of let the cat out of the bag. What were your thoughts on that one?

Oh my gosh. I, uh, I don't really get on social media much and I try to be pretty focused. That stupid car screwed me all up.

Now your algorithm just like packed.

I was like, I mean, that I'm a, I've had 3 Ferraris. I got 2 of them now. I, uh, it's, uh, that's the brand. Like when I was 10 years old, Ferrari was like a motivating factor of how I've ended up here. I wanted that in life. And like, that car sucks. There's no other way to say it.

It was funny. I saw this comparison of like a Tesla and it was like a $99,000 performance Model 3 versus, and like it beat on every single spec.

And then price was like 99,000.

$650,000. It's crazy.

I know they've done some really cool technology things inside that car and it's all being lost because of the exterior. And I'm not even really that bothered by the interior. I think the interior is kind of interesting. Yeah. It's the exterior that drives me nuts. And I, the argument is they're trying to go after completely different model markets. Like, I don't know, but it's, it's shocking. I, uh, I texted my bro, my brother's in Florence right now. And he's renting 3 different Ferraris. Like, while he's in Florence, he has 3 different Ferraris. Like, he's trying them out. And so, I— and he's not really a car guy. He doesn't normally care about this stuff, but he's just trying them. And so, I texted him this thing, and my brother has texted me like 20 memes. And so, I'm constantly now being distracted looking at those things or going out listening to car reviews on this thing. But nobody's saying— everybody's saying the exact same thing. It just makes no sense.

So it's funny because they went out and got Johnny Ive to make it, right? And yeah, and so it was interesting to see like a non-car person trying to make— but to Brand's point, that's what is so damaging. Like, you make the wrong decision with something like that and all that brand equity— well, not just their brand equity, their market cap also gets hit hard. Yeah.

And so, yeah, the, the Johnny Ive, uh, so Andrew, my brother, has sent me a, uh, an AI-generated video And basically it was like Johnny Ive talking to Ferrari and he can't figure out what to do. So he just decides to take all his plans from when he was designing the Apple car, just turn them in as his Ferrari. And it's like, you know, that kind of, it does, it feels like that could have been an Apple car. Totally. 100%. I thought the same thing. Yeah. So anyway, yeah, that was a giant disappointment.

You're not any non-financial advice. I know I'm putting you on the spot.

Non-financial advice.

It can be financial or non-financial.

Okay. So any advice? You know, uh, I hadn't thought this through in advance, but the thing that came to mind to me, uh, for me, it maybe it plays a little bit on what I just said. So when I used to do Academy, which was the coaching group, if you won our competition, annual competition, we sent you on a $15,000 vacation. And I will say, and then also in Academy, we did 4 trips a year, 3 trips with the elite members. And I feel like a lot of the people in Academy, they're heads down working, building their companies, almost never did trips, especially outside the United States. And today, so many of those individuals travel outside the United States, do all kinds of trips. Like, it like broadened their horizons in a sense. I'm not saying It was just because of me, but they were just like heads down. And maybe I pulled that forward a little bit in their life because we'd go have this experience. You're like, this experience is so great. And then they brought into their lives. I would tell you that, um, that this idea that you pull some of this stuff forward in your life earlier is incredibly valuable for a couple of reasons. One, it's really good for relationships. If like, if you're married or, and you're just heads down all the time, getting away from the business and going and doing something with your spouse, I think is incredibly important. But also, it's this idea that if you're just go, go, go, and you never disconnect, uh, you lose, I think, a lot of the great ideas. You, when you come back fresh, you look at things differently. You have new ideas. Uh, there's so much value in it. So I'm not saying go do some 2-week vacation in Italy, but I am saying, Could you try to start engineering some inexpensive trips in your life? And they may start out as a long weekend. You leave Thursday night and you come back Sunday night. And eventually, could you eventually go do something outside the United States for a week or 10 days? 10 days is only a week gone from work. I think everybody that does this has a richer life. And, uh, so that would be my challenge to you is like, what would that be?

This non-financial advice is brought to you by Tiffany Patoschnik. I'm actually the one.

I'm the one. Like if, if my joke is like the other day, what she said is not true, but she's like, if we were walking last night, she's like, if you died, I'd sell the house because it costs so much to manage. Just like, you know, you can afford if I'm gone to pay for it. But my joke was to her is if I died, you'd immediately get $600,000 a year back because we wouldn't travel every year so much. And so I'm the one that does that. Like if it was left to Tiffany, she'd cut the, I don't know if that made sense. The point was. She wouldn't travel like me. It's like she loves doing it. She loves the idea of it. She didn't want to do all the planning. She would be, she likes being at home. So I'm the guy that's pushing that travel, travel, travel, but she loves it when we do it. So I love it.

Another episode in the books.

Did you give us, did you give us your advice? Mine was not buying the Ferrari. And that is the best advice of the show.

All right. We'll see you all.

Thank you for watching. See you later.