How I Brainwashed Myself to Be Rich

Today, I want to share with you how I brainwashed myself to be rich. I went from a broke state farm salesperson to the CEO of a $50 million lawn care business in 10 years. If you don't know who I am, my name is Mike Andes, and the founder and CEO of Augusta Lawn Care and Homeworks, a CRM software that allows home service business owners to grow without breaking. Last year, my company was valued at over $30 million, and I did it using the same principles I. I'm about to share with you. Listen, I didn't come from money. I didn't come from a big city or a family of entrepreneurs. I grew up in a small town of 6,000 people. Blaine, Washington. My memories of childhood are mostly of my parents worrying about paying bills and how we could save money that week. My dad is a minister, and we struggled. We were delivering phone books, we were delivering newspapers just to make ends meet. So when I was younger, the most unfathomable amount of money I. I could imagine was making $100,000 a year. In my mind, that was rich. That was the dream. And for that reason, I thought I'd be a pilot or a financial advisor, because if I could just make six figures, that would be rich. But wealth isn't built by what you earn. It's built by how you think. And These are the 10 principles that changed how I think. The 10 ways I brainwashed myself to be rich. Number one. Stop. Stop taking advice from people who've never built anything. If someone hasn't built something, their advice is built on fear, not facts. You'll hear it all your life. Be safe. Don't take that risk. You're crazy. And I heard these things when I dropped out of medical school and started Augusta Lawn Care and pushing a lawnmower myself. But every time I listened to someone who hadn't built anything, I lost time and confidence. I started asking myself one question before taking advice. Would I trade lives with this person? If the answer was no, I stopped taking their blueprint. Their opinion held little weight, because in life and business, following the wrong advice is one of the most expensive mistakes you can make. It's like having a faulty compass. If true north is actually south, you'll end up at the wrong destination. Many people wonder why they never reach their goals. The reason why is because their direction is constantly changing. If you want to get rich, stop listening to the advice of poor people. With the Internet, it is easier than ever to find mentors and successful people to learn from progress over perfection. Money loves speed. Wealth Loves systems. Perfectionism keeps broke people busy. Think about that. Perfectionism keeps broke people busy. They'll spend six months tweaking a logo when they haven't closed a single client. Make reversible decisions fast. This is things like pricing or logos or a flyer design. Marketing campaigns make irreversible ones slow. This is partnerships, a marriage, leases and getting into debt. Speed compounds learning, systems compound wealth. But here's the nuance. As you grow, don't confuse speed of execution with speed of decision. Big businesses still move fast, but they think deeply before they sprint. Number three, attention creates income. You get paid in direct proportion to where your attention goes. And if your calendar isn't filled with revenue generating activities like selling, following up, leading your team, hiring, promoting your business, you're not broke, you're distracted. I see this all the time. Owners spend their entire week supporting operations and fighting fires instead of building revenue. They're playing defense. They're wondering why they aren't scoring points. They're playing defense and not offense. They wonder why their businesses revenue has stagnated. Move just 20% of your time away from saving pennies and towards creating dollars. I know the scarcity mindset, especially if you were raised poor. But to get rich, you're going to have to put things at risk. You're going to have to put it all in the field and you're going to have to play offense. People run away from sales because it has a bad name. But you'll never save your way to freedom, only sell your way there. Get off the truck, get out of daily operations, get back to leading, create training systems, find great employees, figure out marketing and double down on sales. Frugality forces innovation. Scarcity creates sharper thinking. I drove a company truck from day one. When I started my lawn care business, I didn't have a personal vehicle or on the weekends, go out with the guys on my motorcycle. When I franchised Augusta, we couldn't afford much, so I lived in the closet of the training office. That frugality allowed me to invest back into the business that became the foundation of a franchise network now worth tens of millions, has over 200 locations. And how did that happen? Frugality. Throwing money at a problem makes you lazy. Constraint makes you creative. This is why many startups backed by venture capital go bust. Money is never a problem, so they never figure out how to stretch every dollar. Look at your past of being poor as actually your strength to now figure out how to make every single dollar work for you. The best solution is rarely the expensive one. It's the simplest one that scales simple scales fancy fails. It's not a slogan. It's the math behind every profitable business. 5. One month of revenue in the bank. Then scale. Cash on hand equals mental freedom. When you know payroll is covered, you can make bold, rational decisions and not fear based ones. I tell owners all the time, build at least one month of revenue in the bank before you go on offense. And a lot of times people are like, well what about like three months worth of operating income or certain amount of payroll? And although that might be more accurate, most people don't know what their payroll is per week. Most people don't even know their expenses per month. But they do know their revenue. And so make sure you have at least that much cash on hand in the bank before you aggressively start to grow. Money buys courage. Courage buys opportunity. When you're anxious about cash, you cling to bad customers, bad employees, and bad deals that you know you should cut ties with. That's not loyalty, that's fear disguised as generosity. Cash gives you clarity. Cash is oxygen. I've said that before. And humans don't think clearly when they are oxygen deprived. If you climb a big mountain at the very top, oxygen is scarce. You get oxygen deprived and your brain start to make dumb decisions. The same thing is true in your business. Cash gives you confidence. You are more willing to make changes when you know you will be able to provide food for your family. Number six, if you're rushing, you're losing. Creating urgency in marketing is good. This is like deadlines and expiration, making sure customers contact you by a certain time. You know, call us today if you want to get in. However, urgency in wealth building is deadly. I've watched owners sign equipment loans in panic, buy trucks because this deal won't last and regret that decision for years. If a deal can't survive 24 hours of thought, it's not a deal. And I made this mistake so many times early in my career and signed leases that were three or five years long and had to pay the price of 70, 80, $100,000 to get out of those deals simply because I acted on impulse. And instead of taking time to think things through. Wealthy people don't buy under pressure. They buy with clarity. If it makes sense tomorrow, it'll still be there. If it doesn't, you saved yourself thousands of dollars and years of a detour. A bad financial decision made on the spare of a moment can take months or years to recover from. Number seven, treat money like a tool, not a trophy. Money is Not a prize, it's a tool. A hammer, if you have one at your shop, doesn't make you proud. It builds something you can be proud of. Money is the same. Use it to hire great people. Use it to buy back your time. Use it to invest in systems that multiply value. Use it to build your community and family. Those are things you can be proud of. Don't hoard cash, deploy it. A lot of the billionaires that you know actually don't have a lot of the cash sitting in a bank account. They deploy that cash to build things of value because money is a tool. Artificial intelligence or AI. Don't mind me. I'm just brainwashing myself so I can get rich. But if you like this, all these inputs and things happening in your business and sales operations and admin every single day, and you're like, I just need something to focus on. That's why I created Copilot CRM, soon to be Homeworks. So you can grow without breaking, without filling all these inputs and real focus on your key performance indicators, your close rate, and the things that actually matter in the business. Go check it out. So you too can grow without breaking. You're never going to be able to rebuild your every dollar should be working harder than you are. If you could spend $1 on ads and make $20, you would keep using that tool. Like, I'll take that hammer right off. I'll use that again. If I could spend $1 on wages and make $50 back, you would keep using that tool. Money that works grows exponentially. Like an old pastor. Mine would say, I would rather wear out than rust out. Don't let the tool of money that you've acquired in your business rust out. Use it and build something great. Number eight. Measure everything that matters. If you don't measure it, you can't multiply it. Your bank balance isn't your scoreboard. That is a lagging indicator. That's like using your gas gauge instead of your speedometer to drive. Like if you're driving a car, you need real time metrics. You need to look outside the windshield and actually see what's going on around you. The gas gauge will tell you how far you have drove. It might tell you how far you can continue driving. But you need to know speed, tire pressure, the temperature outside the oil temperature, and many other metrics to drive a car. And the richest business owners I coach at Augusta look at their numbers every single day. They know their KPIs, their key performance indicators every day of the week, avoiding Numbers because they're stressful is like refusing to step on the scale because you're overweight. Math doesn't care about your feelings, but it will fix your future. When it comes to sales, that is getting the work, operations doing the work, admin getting paid for the work. So when I think about sales, the two metrics I really need to know is customer acquisition, cost and close ratio. In other words, how much I have to spend to get a customer. How many customers do I convert after I get a lead in operations doing the work? I really just need to know if are customers satisfied? My customer satisfaction score is that good and is the work getting done efficiently? So my efficiency score, which for us in the field is budget hours divided by clocked hours. That tells me how efficiently the work is actually getting done. When it comes to admin and getting paid, I'm tracking two things also, my profit margins and how much cash is in the bank. Those six numbers, two for sales, two for operations and and two for admin, will tell you everything you need to know about your business's health. Everything else is noise. Number nine. Play the game of money. It's not evil. Money flows to people who create value. It doesn't discriminate. Stop confusing wealth with wickedness. Money simply compounds what's already inside of you. And so for all the people you see on the news that are rich and do horrible things, they were horrible to begin with and money only compounded and made it possible for them to do even more horrible things. But the same thing is true if you're good and you want to do good in the world and you want to serve the people around you. Having more money, having more tools allows you to build something bigger and do more and serve more. Poor people spend all day thinking about survival. Rich people can spend their day thinking about service. This was a huge mindset swap for me when I heard someone say that that poor people are selfish. Originally, as a poor person myself, I immediately pushed back and thought that was horrible. However, I started to think someone who's poor all day thinks about feeding themselves, making sure they pay their rent, that they take care of their family. Where someone with abundance, someone that is rich, is able and has the capacity to think outside of themselves and the people that they are directly responsible for, they're in the mindset of being able to give to others. The Bible never said that money was evil. It said the love of money was evil. In the parable of the talents, the servant who multiplied and actually gained more for the master, he was given more to rule over. He wasn't treated badly. If you treat money as a good steward, it will compound. If you hate it, it will hide from you. Money is the scoreboard for the value you create, not not your worth as a person. Number 10 sacrifice or regret you choose. You can either sacrifice now or regret later, but you don't get to skip both. Don't act rich early. Those ahead of you are not impressed by fancy gadgets, cars and watches. They're impressed by work ethic. And if you don't have the skill and the experience, work ethic might be the only thing you got. Buy tools and assets that serve both your current goals and and your future ones. A pressure washer that saves labor hours pays you twice once in time today and once in profit margin tomorrow. Skip the luxury truck. Instead, buy the CRM software. Skip the Rolex. Instead, start your ads campaign. The goal isn't to look rich. It's to never have to look busy again. I didn't brainwash myself to crave money. I. I brainwash myself to create it ethically and consistently. From a broke insurance salesperson at State farm to a $50 million company in 10 years. You can build the same thing, but only if you start thinking like someone who already has it. So stop waiting for permission. Start building proof. That's how you brainwash yourself to be rich.