how I deal with stress (running a $75M business)

I want to talk about how to deal with stress. And if you have a home service business, whether you're at $100,000 in annual revenue or you're doing multiple millions of dollars in annual revenue, there's been times that you want to quit. There's been times that you want to throw in the towel. There's times that you think about going back and getting a job, or you think about going to a new industry or in some way, shape, or form quitting. And so I want to talk about how I've dealt with this. I don't think this is the right way to deal with it. I think that everyone has to cope with stress and stressors in their life and things that are happening. However you need to cope with that to get through and not quit, there is no right or wrong. But I want to give you the frame that I've always used because there have been many times throughout my journey that I've wanted to quit. Recently I made a video about the 6 different times throughout my career specifically that I can put my finger on and say during that low moment I wanted to just throw in the towel and stop doing the franchise, stop doing media, stop doing the software, and I'm glad today that I did not. And so I want to walk through the framework that I use to get through stressful times or times when I want to quit, and hopefully it's helpful for you. And I would be very interested down below how you deal with fear, stress, uh, times when you want to give up, so that is helpful for everyone. How I think about it though is there's like this range of emotions that we all have towards our business. One day you love it, you wouldn't you would rather do nothing else. And if someone gave you $1 million or $10 million or $100 million, you don't care 'cause you love the business. You love the people, you love your employees, you love your customers, you love the progress, you love the feeling of progress that you're making in the business. And you would do nothing in terms of selling no matter what the price was given to you. Some days you feel that way. And the sense of accomplishment and you're able to be reflective and like, man, I have come so far. I am so thankful. I am so blessed. I am so grateful for all these things that have been given to me. I'm thankful for the money. I am thankful for the team. I am thankful for the customers. I'm thankful for the equipment. I'm thankful for the vehicles. And then there's other days on the other side of the spectrum that you would give it all away at the flip of a coin for 10 cents. If someone would just take this off my hands because the customer's complaining, employees disgruntled, a customer leaving bad reviews online, bad things are happening in the business constantly, things are breaking, there's low cash flow. bad profit margins in the business, and you would just give the business away for basically nothing. And I believe that every single day we wake up and we have emotions 'cause we're humans, we are somewhere on that continuum of I would never give this thing away, I am so grateful, I am so blessed, I am so happy, and over here, I am so stressed out in my mind, I would just rather give up and give this business away for free to anyone that would take it off my hands. And so I think of it as a range. And I think the time that we want to quit is when the desire to give up and throw in the towel is greater than our goals that are pulling us in the direction of staying in the game. And so on this side of being so elated and happy and so thankful, the reason that I, I feel that way many times is because I feel like I'm making progress towards my goals. I'm moving in this direction. And when that that pull towards your goals becomes less than the inevitable pull towards mediocrity and quitting and failure, that's when you just want to give up. That's when you— so giving up happens when the fear of failure is greater than the pull that you have towards your goals. And I think that the fix to this is to simply— because a lot of people are like, well, you should fix the business. Yes, you can. I think though that your goals And the vision that you have for where you wanna be, what you want to achieve, what you want the business to become, what you want your life to become, those goals becoming very clear and/or larger is the thing that keeps you in the game. Because as your business grows, you're gonna get closer and closer to your goals. And this is where some people get complacent. And they're like, well, I'm doing pretty good and I just don't feel like getting out of bed today. And for a lot of people, they're like, Seriously, you're so soft. Like, I am over here struggling at $100,000, can't get leads, can't get employees, and you're at $1 million and you're saying you don't feel the desire to like get up and get after it? When in reality, it's because that million-dollar business owner is potentially so close to their goals of what they set out, or they've passed $1 million, they don't really have much to do, guys are out in the field working, but they haven't clearly identified what the goal of the business is for them. What's the mission? What's the purpose? Why do they keep going to work? And every single time I've ever wanted to quit, it's because I've gotten closer and closer to this middle ground of fear of failure, wanting to just throw in the towel, and the goals that are pulling me in this other direction, and I'm moving more and more towards this side. And so if you're in that place, reiterating the goals that you have, getting clear on what those goals are, and then potentially even making those goals bigger so that the pull towards them becomes greater. The interesting thing about goals I've found, and you've probably heard this from other entrepreneurs, is the bigger they are, they cause you to think differently and they cause you to usually increase your motivation. And the way that you have to attack the problems in your day-to-day changes when the size of your goals are bigger. And so for the person that has a million-dollar business but can't get the motivation or lacks the motivation to get out of bed and get after it, it's very likely they have either came so— they're likely the— wealthiest person they know, they're the only business owner in their family, they are super successful to everyone around them, and the delta, the difference between where they're at today and their goals is murky. It's like, I don't really know where I'm going. What's the reason why I'm waking up every single day and dealing with all these problems and issues when like, I don't even know if I wanna grow the business? Like, all this extra liability and now I'm getting lawsuits and more and more customers leaving. All of these things are happening in the business and they have gotten so close to their goal. That it doesn't actually pull them to continue growing the business. And for that person, I would say resetting the goal to something much bigger, much harder, likely having more impact on something other than just dollars and cents in your bank account, 'cause that likely doesn't motivate you anymore. And again, for the person that's just getting started, you're like, oh, that's so bad for them. They have a great business and now they've lost purpose. And I'm just out here trying to get my first few customers. Having clarity on why you do what you do every single day is what gets you through moments when you want to quit. And for the vast majority of us as entrepreneurs, we have not sat down and done the hard work of defining how big of a business do I need to have in order to reach my goals? Because if we do not have the end in mind, if we don't know how big of a business, we are just wandering in the wilderness of, I should grow because I hear that online, I hear people talking about marketing and leads and hiring and— I guess I should just keep growing my business. Why not build a business that serves you? In order for the business to serve you and your goals and your family and the purpose that you have for the business, I need to clearly identify what size of business do I need? And in my personal opinion, I think the vast majority of people would be well suited with 6 to 8 technicians, the owner-operator being in daily operations, and being able to run a business that is $800,000 to $1 million in revenue, being 20, 30% profitable. I think that's very doable in home services, and the vast majority of people would actually, it would serve their purpose. And it would maximize the happiness that business brings to them if they just optimize for that. But if you just grow that size of business and you don't really know why, but you just keep growing it, there's this treadmill of I'm just keep, I add more employees, I keep adding, I'm supposed to be spending money on marketing, I should have a better website, like I should get more trucks, like I have all this extra money, like maybe I should go get into some real estate, but why? And that's why successful business owners will still quit is because they, have no longer defined or have the pull towards their goals in this direction, and one day they just decide, I'm just walking away from it. And so oftentimes when you're first getting started, you're pushing yourself constantly. Physically, emotionally, financially, you're pushing and you're pushing. And the thing that I hope and desire for every single entrepreneur is that one day your goals are big enough to pull you instead of you constantly pushing yourself to accomplish something. When you wake up out of bed and you don't feel like going to work, but your goals pull you in the direction. Not, I gotta push myself, I've gotta make myself, I'm gonna make this happen, I've gotta put more effort and expend more sweat, blood, sweat, and tears into this thing. And trust me, there's a certain period of time when that is required, but the next level that I hope that every entrepreneur can get to is where you've defined what the goal is, how big of a business do I need to build, and then how this is going to directly correlate with the goals that I have for my life. 'Cause the vast majority of business owners They serve their business. The business does not serve them, their family, their goals, their community. And the reason for that is 'cause we have not clearly defined the mission and why the business exists. Because if we defined that, we would then be able to reverse engineer how big of a business do we actually need to build. And then when it came to the time when there's hard times, inevitably, regardless of the size of business, every single stage of business I have been at, $100,000, $1 million, $5 million, $10 million, we had $100 million, There are times that you will want to quit, but in those moments, the only reason you'll continue going forward is because the goal is— that pull is greater than the pull to just throw in the towel. Because the beautiful thing about quitting is you have immediate relief. If you just quit today, all of your problems would go away immediately. But we sacrifice that temporary pleasure and the immediacy of solving the problem in the short term for the much longer term of the goal. But if we have not clearly defined what that goal is, we— and it's murky, and the vision, we don't know what that is even going to look like, what size of business, why we need to build that business to that size. That's when people throw in the towel and that's when they give up. And so I wanted to share that with you. I had talked to some owners previously, earlier this week at Augusta Lawn Care about this, and I thought it was a helpful frame. So in the comments, I am happy to answer any questions. This weekend we are headed out to Texas. Next Friday, so 6 days from today, the very first Texas vlog is going up. So this is live for whoever just asked that. I am live. I am answering questions. I'm on Instagram, on Facebook, and YouTube. So if you have a question, drop in the comments. In 6 days from now, I'm gonna be headed out to Texas. The first vlog will drop in 6 days, and I'm happy to answer any questions. And it's gonna be fun. Now, in the meantime, I would love if you joined HomeWorks because we're giving 2 months away free. We've never done this before. And the reason I'm doing that is because as I build automations and use AI in my business in Texas, I would like you to try it out yourself. It's completely free. So you can sign up if you're on Instagram, it's right here, the link, or just go to homeworks. And when you go to the— when you're creating your account, there's gonna be a code and you can put in there TX20. So Texas, TX26. If you put those 4 numbers and digits in, TX26, you'll get 2 months for free. That's $1,000 of value if you're using the enterprise level, and that will get you everything you need to be able to follow along with me on the homeworks, inside of homeworks as I'm building out the Texas Challenge. And so I'm building my business and doing automations, and I'll have a dashboard. All of you can see my annual recurring revenue live. You'll see how many customers I have, my annual recurring revenue. You'll see my customer acquisition costs. All of it will be live pulling from my MCP and my API, from Home Works. And so if you would like to follow along with that, you can get Home Works for free for 2 full months. And if you're thinking about joining anyways during the offseason, this is the best time to do it. So if you're thinking, oh, like November, December, I'll join, just do it now. You get 2 months completely free. Just go to home.works. When you sign up, use the code TX26. Alright, I'm answering questions. I'll jump between kind of like Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook. Unfortunately, Instagram is pretty difficult to actually Follow along with. So let me start there first. Um, Landon Vanoff, just wanted to say your videos changed my life. Thank you, I appreciate that. Okay, I'm going through Instagram. All right, hello Eric. Walk, walk, walk. Go for a walk with nothing but my mind, always allows me to find new thoughts. All right, let's go. All right, I'm gonna swap over here. On— there we go. Uh, any questions about the Texas trip specifically? Uh, feel free to drop those in the chat. We got a lot of chat coming in on YouTube and Facebook. Okay, I think the fact that if I don't figure something out, I stop growing and forfeit that progress or profit. Great point, great point. Again, like, when it comes to fear of failure or wanting to quit, I think everyone sort of deals with it differently. So again, in In the comments, feel free to share what you've done to deal with that. Mike Andes, I had all 3 trucks break down within 2 days, 3 mowers and 2 hedge trimmers, during low cash flow moment. Hendrix Mowing. I'm usually motivated and happy with my business. Last couple weeks I've been frustrated. Hopefully, uh, what I said there at the beginning is a little bit helpful. I think focusing on goal— this is great. It's all about focusing on your goals and knowing Where you are going, 100%, and why you're doing it, right? And so if you're running a marathon, as I like to think about, if you drop yourself in the middle of a marathon and you're running, your feet are hurting, you can hardly breathe, your lungs are hurting, why would you keep running unless you just quit? You can stop at any time. Well, until you realize that you're at mile 25 of a marathon. And you have one more mile to go. And so the reason so many of us wanna get off the treadmill is because we don't have a finish line. It is a treadmill 'cause there is nowhere we're running towards. Whereas if you're in mile 25 of a marathon, usually you have so much adrenaline pumping through your body because you know what that finish line looks like. You know what that feeling of elation's going to be when you cross the finish line. You know that sense of accomplishment and you have clearly defined that at 26 miles, 26.2 miles, you're done. And so, this is what I hope for every entrepreneur to be able to clearly define what that mission, that goal, that purpose is, and know how big of a business they need to build to get there. I'm burnt out. Advice on how to focus my mind back to the work in front of me? I think first off, realizing that your goals might be far, but that there's only one thing you can work on at a time. And so, once you've clearly defined what the goal is, so say, I need this size of business, I wanna be able to provide for my family, I wanna be able to put my kid through school, I wanna be able to buy my own house, I wanna change the, generational poverty in my family and everyone inside of my family. I wanna be able to provide for them. I wanna provide for my parents. Whatever those goals are that you have, reverse engineer back to where you're at today. 'Cause it's one thing to have big goals, but if your goals are so big that it causes you to get crippled and not take action, then that's also a problem. And so you gotta take the goal of where you wanna go at, create the finish line, but then back all the way to mile 1. And so if your goal is mile 26 of a marathon, I've gotta have mile 1, 2, 3, 4. I gotta clearly define that 'cause that keeps my head in the game. And so have the big goal, but then reverse engineer those mile markers all the way back to where you're at today, and then just focus on the next mile in front of you, the next step in front of you in that marathon, getting to the next rest station, getting to the next mile marker, and that's what keeps your head in the game. And so reverse engineering it back to, oh, today I need to go out and get more customers. Today I'm gonna go put out door hangers. Today I'm gonna make these changes on my website. These are the little things that I can do, the next step step in front of me on my way to the finish line of the marathon. I love all of your videos. I've been planning on going back on my own after working for a large 200-employee corporation for 15 years. Your videos have helped me with planning over the last year. Awesome. Let's go. What is projected net profit from your million-dollar revenue goal? Great question. So I anticipate at the end of the year, the goal is $1 million in revenue, 20% profit. And so, the reason that I can say that is because it's not going to be that for the whole year because all the money I'm pumping in at the beginning is cash. I'm not getting a bunch of debt. I'm not leveraging the business. But when we put it into profit mode between months 6 and 12, depending on when Spring Rush hits, I expect us to be able to hit the marker. When we do, when we turn it into profit mode, that's when I expect us to be well over 20% profit. And so, that's not going to be that in the next first 12 months, I'm gonna be 20% profitable. It means that Once we go into profit mode, I expect us to be over 20% profitable. Hendrix said, I need a business turnaround from you. I've watched all your videos. I literally fall asleep to your videos. I watch them so much. Never seen you do an actual small startup, usually big companies. Hendrix, just yesterday there was a $100,000 business we did, so hopefully that's helpful. It would be a great— where you're at right now in terms of overwhelm and stress would be a great, fantastic episode for you to watch. It's with Crystal from Grounds to Gardens. Really, really solid. I think people confuse stability with money. Is that true for you? If that were true, why did you grow an empire? Why didn't you stop at a million-dollar business or $3 million? Because the goal and the mission that I wanted to have, I have, requires me to grow a bigger business. And so I thought when I was younger that building a $1 million business was all I wanted because I thought at that time I would then make $100,000, which to me was rich. $100,000 a year in profit, and I would then go probably do missions and philanthropy, et cetera, and mostly traveling and sharing about Christianity. That's what I thought I was going to do. And so after my accident and realizing that my business didn't make any money, I worked 89 hours a week out in the field and realizing that I believe there was hundreds of thousands of other people in home services that had the business just like mine, that they didn't have systems, they were running ragged, tons of hours, not making any profit, and if something happened to them, their whole family would be wiped out in terms of bankrupt. They wouldn't have any money, they would have no provider. I got a lot of passion for that and I realized in order to have the impact that I want to see in home services, I need to build a massive business. And so that's why we're gonna move for 6 months, Brianna and I, to Texas to make this video is Half of it, the vast majority of it is to document systems for Augusta Lawn Care for those that are wanting to scale faster. And then the other part of it though is I want to be able to ensure that there are people that watch the videos and can avoid that spot where I was at in life, which was a business that didn't make money. I was working crazy amount of hours, and if I had a family and if I had a wife and I had kids, if that accident would have happened, it would have likely meant very bad things for the people that were depending on me financially. So that's, that's that, that vision of what I'm trying, I'm trying to achieve is big enough to where I know I need to build a big enough business. And so that's why we have Home Service Web Design and have a school community and we do the software. Those are all big things, but it is a very long-term horizon that I'm playing because the mission is big. Like, I gotta reach hundreds of thousands of business owners, and that's my goal. Sometimes when you get close to your goals, it's time to recalculate and set new bigger goals to keep you motivated. 100%. and ensuring that they still serve you, right? 30 to 40 customers, 3rd year in at $150K. Let's go. It's also good to set goals that are bigger than yourself and it focuses your team to have a purpose that can change other lives beyond their own. I agree. Let's see what this thing is on Instagram. Turn on reactions, use hand gestures. No, I don't wanna do that. All right. Yeah, I agree 100%. For a lot of us, when we are raised without a lot of money, we usually start our entrepreneurial career in the place of deficit financially, and we see everything through a financial lens. And then as you begin to reach those financial targets, you start realizing that that is a finite game, and these are numbers that once you hit them, it's like, okay, well, I can provide for my family now, I can take care of my food, I'm not ever gonna go hungry. And then it's like, I need more purpose. And so if you can ever get to the place where your purpose and your vision is greater than just making more dollars and cents, it is very useful, especially when it comes to talent acquisition and talent retention, because other people also, they might say, hey, look, I just need to provide for my family, but I would like to have a vision that when I come to work, I'm working towards something big. I would like to see my work have an impact on other people. And for the vast majority of great A talent, once they make a certain amount of money, that is the thing they're looking for. And so a lot of times, not only having clarity helps you keep your head in the game, it also gives you the ability to be able to get great talent, and that great talent unlocks the business to grow more, and that business growing more potentially allows you to stay in the game when times do get hard, 'cause you have systems and people in place that when you are down or when you encounter the inevitable obstacles of growing a business, there are really, really good people around you. And so it's a double-edged sword. It's like a function of, yes, I need to keep my head in the game, but I also need to keep everyone else that I am leading, the people on the bus, I need to keep them all going in the right direction. Because if you don't have a clear vision, you don't have any sort of clear reason to why the business is growing, and your goals are not big enough for them to fit their goals inside of, as they expand their skill set, their experience, eventually their goals get big enough to where they can't fit inside your goals and they have to go leave to another organization. Why a van and not a box truck? Mostly cost would be a big one. We are doing solo routes, so if the cost per vehicle gets too high, it starts to make it a lot harder to make sense of having solo routes. And the reason we have solo routes is because the guys are taking the trucks home. And so if the vehicles were $100,000 per setup and we're getting SUV box trucks or like super trucks or something like that, then economically it would take too long to recoup the cost of that. Mike, with lawn care and landscaping dominating 10 months, what should I do with employees for the other 2 months? Would you keep paying them or lay them off and hope they come back next spring? So I made a whole workshop on the off-season. It's completely free. Just go to mikeandes.com/workshop. It walks you through 5 different ways to deal with the off-season. One of them is, yes, laying your team off and giving them a return to work bonus in the spring. But there's 4 other ways, tracks that you can use during the off-season. That workshop's completely free. You can check it out. If I'm an existing member, do I get 2 months free? This is for people that are just getting started, if you're talking about Home.works. So if you go to home.works, you can get 2 months for free. And this is for people that are thinking about joining. They think about joining most time during the off-season. I'm doing it now because I would like people to join and then follow the automations and the systems that I'm building inside the software and be able to test it out. So it's just for new members that are thinking about joining. Hey Mike, curious your thoughts on the copy and paste locations from different locations, or how I believe Connor has had it in North Carolina with serving multiple locations but from one central shop. Yeah, so like when I start my locations in Texas, for example, our goal is to do multiple locations. I will also start from one quote-unquote hub. We don't have a shop space though, but then what's happening is as I grow into a new service area, I will then break them off as they pass 6 to 8 technicians. which is usually around $1 million in revenue. And so we do not have a central shop. So that's the difference here. But in terms of how I'm growing, I'm growing from one area and as we expand and we have one spot that has 6 to 8 technicians, about $1 million in revenue, I break that off, turn it into profit mode, raise prices on those customers and in that market reduce my marketing spend. So. Is there a business doing over $1 million of revenue and 30% net profit, and are they using a paper system still? How does switching to CRM increase productivity on an already successful company? Um, there are so many people that will point to the exception to the rule and think that for some reason that's an excuse as to why they do not embrace a new technology. For example, Back in the day, when it comes to mowing, for example, there were reel mowers only. And all of a sudden gas-powered came along and there were people that still had really successful businesses that were using reel mowers for years until finally it's like, it hurts me so much in my business, I have to use gas-powered mowers 'cause it just makes things so much more efficient. And so there are successful businesses that do not use a CRM or do not use software. And they've been around for a very long time, many times. And when I say successful, I mean larger-sized businesses. There are also businesses that exist today that don't even have a website. Just because they have done that does not mean that is the rule for everyone. The likelihood of becoming large or becoming successful or very profitable is much greater when you use the technology of today. And the technology of today is software, AI, it is, in the future will be robotic mowers. And so regardless of the fact that existing entrenched competitors are successful despite not embracing new technology, that does not mean that newcomers or people that want to grow faster should not embrace the technology. They are the exception to the rule, and they already have entrenched moats of brand awareness, customer referrals, etc. If you want to grow quickly though, you'll have to embrace new technology. And so if you look at Any of the biggest companies, so I'll use Tommy Mello for example, the reason that his company got a 7x multiple on profit, or sorry, on revenue, and over a 20x profit, 20x multiple on profit, is because of the technology they use. And so when you look at enterprise value, many times correlates to just overall, like, is this business worth anything? And so when someone puts a $2 billion price tag on a garage door company, you ask why, and then you look and see all the systems and the software they use for hiring and for recruiting and for training and for pay for performance. Like, they just use software throughout. And so just because you or one or two of your biggest competition doesn't have a website, doesn't have marked trucks, doesn't have uniforms, doesn't use software, does not mean that doing those things will get— will make you successful. It means that they are successful despite those things, likely because they have huge brand awareness, they've been around for a long time, or they do such an incredible high-quality standard of work It compensates for their lack of embracing technology. I've recently switched to larger accounts, estates, commercial, office parks. Since then, I've realized I tend to be better at scaling that model. What risks do you tend to warn people about this model? P.S., Go users. I think the biggest thing is cash flow when it comes to the larger jobs and commercial, et cetera. Says, burned out, fall is coming, burnt out, winter is coming, burnt out, summer is coming. The cycle of life. Hire quality guys and build a system. I agree. Let's go. Thank you. Also curious, you're at about $300K. Would you recommend a call center, or should I go overseas, VA, or 90% recurring services? I generally just don't want you managing someone in the office. 'Cause everyone looks like what I say about sales, operations, admin. Admin being usually the lowest leverage task for you as the owner to do, operations doing the work, and then sales. So the higher you move up on that trajectory, typically the bigger of a business you're going to build. That being said, what people don't think about is the fact that, oh, I delegated admin, but you're managing them for 10 hours a week. And that's the exact same thing as doing admin. And so be very careful. This is where I think a lot of people are getting sucked in with AI. They're like, I am doing AI. I saw this a couple weeks ago. There was an acquisition of an HVAC company that fell through, or delayed I should say, for 6 months. The reason is, is 'cause they vibe-coded their own software and the potential acquirers said, hey look, we can't manage this software. You're doing it. And so as much as you think it's so cool, we need you to move back to a CRM. And so what that tells me is that owner for 6 or 12 months was building this thing that was useful for them, but actually became the bottleneck of their business. And I'd say the same thing when it comes to like, VAs or hiring office people, be very careful at $300,000 for you to be like, I gotta grow my business, I'm gonna grow to a million. You will get to a million dollars by focusing deeply on operations, hiring operations manager, and then moving towards sales. That will get you to $3 million. What many people will do is they'll spend so much time systematizing and creating admin systems when that's still, your time is being focused on an admin-related function of the business. Just 'cause you're not answering the phone or doing email does not mean you're not training new admin people, then they turn out, and then you're doing quality control, then you're setting up an AI system to do their quality control and then they're running transcripts through it. All of that is still admin work and still the lowest leverage task in the business compared to operations, going out and getting great employees, training them really well, and then sales, going out and getting more customers, thinking about your marketing strategy and your website. That's so much higher leverage. If you need a turnaround, feel free, mikeandes.com/turnaround. You can always apply there. Further I climb, the loneliness grabs me more. It's true. Mostly just because it's just likely a probability, like, there's less people. So if you build a million-dollar business, you're already in the top 9% of business owners. If you have a profitable million-dollar business, you're probably in the top 4 or 5% of business owners. And so when you start climbing higher, it's just a function of that percentage getting smaller and smaller. And business owners in general are already a small piece of the population. So you're talking about, that's why most of the time, You'll become the wealthiest person in your circle of family and friends, usually once you hit $1 to $2 million. Hey Mike, hope you go about pre-hiring. I think he meant how. How do you go about pre-hiring before the spring rush while not affecting the hours of your current team? Trying to train multiple people before the rush can be tricky with less work. Yeah, your goal here is to be able to hire people, put them on a bench. So basically saying, hey, I anticipate you to need to hire someone within the next 4 to 12 weeks, or 4 to 8 weeks. Tell them on the ad so they're not surprised. Tell them, make sure it's fine with them during the interview. And then your best applicants already have a job. They don't need a job tomorrow. And so you just say, hey, look, in the next 4 to 12 weeks, I'm expecting somewhere within 4 to 6, 4 to 8, somewhere in there, I'll be, give me a call and then I'll get you on the team. So that way you can feather in the workers instead of having 4, 5, 10 brand new people right at the beginning and a whole bunch of inefficient labor. They churn out because of bad onboarding and bad training or bad, they do bad quality work. So you wanna feather them in as much as you possibly can. Also, what do you find to be the biggest struggle of opening a second location? First location is 1 to 2 years from automation. Second location would be within 1-hour drive, so I can still serve the first office if need be if a GM falls through. I would say the biggest struggle is that your first location is not in profit mode and is not simplified. What I mean by profit mode is not constantly adding more customers adding more employees, it doesn't have a huge marketing budget. Instead, it is mostly just profiting on word of mouth and customers that are already inside the pipeline, and when they hit capacity, they're raising prices. If you do that, it just makes it so much easier to hand that off to someone versus trying to find a unicorn that's gonna constantly keep growing it once you leave. 'Cause you're the entrepreneur, you grow businesses, that's what you do. And so, if you're starting a second location, I would highly recommend from the sake of Ease to find someone that can keep that business operationally efficient, very profitable, and constantly make tweaks to make it 1% better, but they don't have to be doubling the business, going on getting more trucks, figuring out marketing campaigns. That's, that's very difficult to find that person. What advice would you give to guys in the $600K level managing 3 employees plus myself? I've definitely had higher lows, higher highs and lower lows managing the guys, equipment, scheduling, invoices, client, plus working the field. Sometimes I feel like a failure when I drop the ball on some of those things. Ultimately, it all falls on me as the leader, trying to put all of these fires as quickly as possible, but sometimes they still burn theoretically. Growth sucks cash, growth creates chaos, and chaos causes you to feel like a failure. And so I would say that this is a feature and not a bug of growth because you're constantly challenging your skills and the experience that you have with new problems, new obstacles, and new challenges that you've never encountered before. And so if you're keeping the business the same size, I would start saying, okay, let's really zero in. And I think you should. I think you know the things that need to be improved. But when you're growing a location like you are, McKee, and you've been growing it the past couple years, this is somewhat of a feature and not a bug. And so I would personally be trying to get to the point where you know, okay, this is the size I need to grow to. Once we get here, I am going to focus on these optimizations And I'm going to not be growing as fast. 'Cause again, if you're adding a new truck and a new employee every few months, that starts to get very taxing versus you being able to really work with each employee. I almost always start with operations when it comes to feeling like this, like your hair's on fire all the time. Because if your technicians are trained better, if they're onboarded better, if they believe in the mission better, if they're compensated better, they typically reduce massively the amount of effort you as a manager have to— Deploy every single day to manage them because they are self-sufficient, they are well experienced, they fully buy into the vision of the company, they care deeply about the team, they're compensated on the basis of the business doing better, them performing faster and more efficiently. And so assuming those things are true, then I'm focused on growing the business to the point where then I can finally stop focusing on new employees, new customers, 'cause most of your problems happen the first 90 days with an employee. Most of your problems happen with the first 90 days of a customer. And so the reason I say that growth sucks cash is to be able to take on new customers and new employees, I need more capital. In order to be, 'cause I need to buy trucks, equipment, et cetera. I'm also usually doing marketing. To take on new employees, same thing, I need more capital because now there's inefficient labor for weeks on end for the trainer and for the trainee. So growth sucks cash and now I'm creating chaos in the business because of the new customers and the new employees. 'Cause that's when the churn happens, that's when mistakes happen, that's when callbacks happen. That's when customers complain, that's when customers churn out, and so that chaos is what you're feeling right now. And so the goal is grow to the point where you can stop that and really start to settle, or reverse engineer it that when you slow down, you really drive deeper with your foundation, and that usually comes in the form of better training and really simplifying things with your team. So whether it be reducing of services, simplification of the truck setup, simplification of what trucks you're using, Using processes in place where it's the same thing, the same way every single time, reducing the anomalies where 20% of your services or 20% of the things that you do cause 80% of your problems. So where 80% of your headache is, is likely 20% of your tasks throughout the day. Cut those things if possible, or realize that they're a feature of growth and it's just gonna be something that you're gonna have to deal with until there's an inevitable down the road where you hit capacity and you raise prices instead of buying more trucks hire more people and continue to grow. The more focused, the narrower the road gets. What are you guys spending per day on Meta ads for Homeworks? I know it's been 3 to 4 days, but have there been any signups? Are you cold reaching out? Cold reaching out? We're not doing cold reachouts, we're just running ads. I'm running ads just for the next 6 days up until I'm in Texas. And so my goal is that if someone's been thinking about joining Homeworks, that they join now so that when I start the challenge next week, that you're able to just implement. Like, I already have like end-of-day reports to my general manager around operations. I have end-of-day reports to me mostly on like the performance of the ads. I also have an end-of-day for them to— and this is all through the MCP access that is in HomeWorks. It sends a report of all the initial mows for the day because we charge a per-minute rate for that initial mow. And it tells them if they need to go into the dispatch board and change the price. And we're doing auto-charge where once they complete the visit, it just automatically charges the card inside HomeWorks. And so I'm also running at the end of the day, it's gonna reconcile that with Stripe and make sure everything went through. If there's any bounced cards, someone has ACH that didn't go through 4 days later, it's gonna reconcile all that. I'm using the MCP and API for all of that. So when I do that, I would like for everyone that's watching not just to be passively watching me do the challenge. I would like you just do the things, like rip off my scripts, rip off the prompts that I'm using, 'cause I think it's useful in your business. So that's why I'm doing it for the next 6 days. So the ads that you're seeing on Facebook, et cetera, will go away next Friday at 12 o'clock. And so if you would like to join, it's 2 months free. We'll help you with all your onboarding. We will import all of your contacts, and it's 2 months free for the software. And so just use the coupon code TX26 when you sign up at home.works. Like when you go through the registration and creating your account, there'll be a spot to put your code TX26. You'll get 2 months free and we'll do all your implementation calls, onboarding, et cetera. We're all burned out right now. Hopefully that first 10 minutes or so helped you there a little bit. Let's go. Thank you, Rico, for encouraging. I think it was McKee you were saying. Let's go. Hi, Mike. How do you lead quiet employees? I think as entrepreneurs, most of us are a little more extroverted or focused on sales, but a lot of your best operations people are more introverted, and they're also usually the most steady. They'll stay around for the longest because they're very comfortable being a technician. They're very comfortable being an employee. They don't need the next big thing. They want to work 9 to 5. They do not want their phone ringing in the middle of the night. They don't want to have to deal with things on the weekend. And so I think from a leading perspective, I make sure that the vision is very clear, and then who joins on that ride is really up to them. And so this is why having a really clear vision is important, because if you have a clear vision, and you have clear, like from the vision you can derive which values this organization needs to have in order to achieve the goal. And if you have those values clearly identified, that will attract and repel the right and wrong people. For someone that is quiet, I don't need them to be quiet to hit the goals of the organization. I don't need you to be loud in order to make better pay for performance, profit sharing, be more efficient, have high-quality service for the customer. I don't need you to be loud. I only need you to be able to talk. And so the vision being clear, the values being derived from that vision, and then asking yourself, do I need people that have these characteristics in order to achieve these values. And I personally don't need someone to be loud or be able to talk really well in order to achieve things like constant improvement, which is one of our core values. Revenue is good for us. However, we have turned away roughly $700,000 in snow work due to sidewalks. What are great incentive ideas for sidewalk crews to be in early morning at any given time? I'm very— I'm just hesitant to move forward as I am truly bottlenecked in the business. I really think you could do a pay-for-performance model and really tie this to callbacks, specifically because of snow. People have a very small threshold of how long they're willing to wait. And so I would be tying performance pay for the sidewalk crew to the amount of people that call and like, hey, where are you? Where are you? That level of satisfaction. You could also do surveys to customers and just give them a— what's called a net promoter score, and give incentives to increase that net promoter score, which inevitably one of the biggest things that comes to things like sidewalks or snow is how fast do you get to the house. I'm a solo operator and I am about to cross the next threshold for growth. I'm just curious if you think there's actually any benefit to knowing the Muffin Man. I don't know what the Muffin Man is. What are your thoughts on remote positions for your corporate employees? There's pros and cons. I'm much more of an in-person type of worker myself. I really like to be able to have fast interactions with people. However, when you get really skilled people, if you are limited by geography, you are either going to have to pay double to convince them to move their whole family, or you're going to just allow for remote work in order to be able to increase the scope of talent pool that you're drawing from. And so if you're going after your city, let's call it 20 to 30 minute drive from your office, You are limited to who can work for you. Whereas if you say, hey, okay, now I'm going to 5,000x that in terms of the talent pool, it's likely you'll get better talent. And so for me, the desire to have better talent is greater than the desire to have the in-person interaction, which I would much rather prefer. Our payroll at peak is over $500,000 per week, and the company is losing management left and right. Due to poor ownership and management, loss of vision. They forgot where they started. Sorry, man. Brutal. Do you think having the employees taking trucks home and not meeting will impact the culture of the business? I think I saw your question on YouTube before. I 100% agree it will. To your— to what we just talked about when it comes to remote work, it's a big reason why I would prefer people in office. Um, we can— like, there's so many benefits of in-person work, it's not even funny. Um, I, I would much rather prefer it, but when it comes to talent and the talent pool, I, I would rather have a much wider net to cast. When it comes to employees taking their trucks home, 100%, you're gonna be looking for a different type of technician, because if someone relies on having constant feedback loops from their peers, it is likely they're not going to thrive in this environment. That being said, if they're tired of corporate bureaucracy, if they are tired of city work, if they're tired of really low-performing employees that drag them down throughout their day and they'd just rather go out and get the work done, and they'd like to make more money on pay-for-performance where we give them a percentage of the labor revenue, that they will love that. If they want— they're tired of other technicians breaking their equipment, doing a poor job, them getting blamed for it, lack of performance, lack of efficiency, and they're just tired of that, they would like that kind of place of work. It is probably less likely to be a good place for green, brand new, entry-level technicians that have no experience, because those people typically need more fostering of a culture similar to like an office. Usually the people who suffer the most from remote work are the entry-level team members compared to those that are in office. I think the same thing is true when it comes to technicians taking their vehicles home. And so Like when we're hiring, we are hiring for people with experience that can— that have already been in the industry, they know what they're getting into, etc. Why a van instead of the normal pickup truck with ramp racks? Mostly because we do not have a shop space. The vehicles are going home with the employees every day, and it's easier for them to lock up the ramp on the back, put padlocks on it, and not have the equipment exposed. Typically your technicians are going to be living in the suburbs or outside of your service area where your customers are at. which is usually not going to be the million-dollar homes. And so I wanna make sure that that equipment is secure and not gonna be, someone's gonna walk away with it. I can't get Meta ads to work unless I run a discount. Don't want to keep running a sale forever. What do I do? Well, there's several things you can do. First off, if you know that offering a discount is the thing that allows you to be able to get a whole bunch of people, at the very worst, if you know this is a fact, which I would challenge that assumption, but assume That this is true, assume that what you just said is 100% fact, that you can't get leads without doing a discount, I would increase your price and then do a discount. So I would increase your price from $49, your price starting at $49, and then you're getting a discount, say we're starting at $69 and we're doing a discount. The discount's higher, it's the exact same price, but if this logic that you're saying is true, then you would just do that. If doing a discount is the thing that does it. Well, no, like, it's the price. Well, I don't think that's the case because you're saying it's the discount. So you just move your price up, have a greater discount. What was your budget for the new location? I have a video coming out in a couple days. It'll show the whole budget from top to bottom. And as I'm going throughout the whole challenge, I'm gonna have this being updated live on a dashboard. It's just the pulling from the API from my HomeWorks account and my QuickBooks account. It's pulling all my data in. So you'll be able to see customer acquisition cost, close rate, number of customers. You'll see 'em on a map. It'll be as transparent as I possibly can. But the first video that launches before I even get to Texas is coming out next Monday, I think. Monday or Tuesday, somewhere. And it'll go over my whole budget. What happened to the location opened up north? I still have the one in Bellingham. That's where I'm at right now. I'm still in Bellingham, Washington. What would be the most important thing you look for when hiring a new employee, especially being the first employee? I'm getting ready to hire my first employee. You're mostly just looking for someone that you can trust to get started and just be your hands to double the output of your labor. Because right now, you could essentially double the revenue of your business just by having one employee. That being said, if they're a really good keeper, you wanna invest in them as much as possible because your second employee will usually rise to their level and no greater. And so I wanna make sure my first employee, before I hire a second one, is locked and loaded, super experienced. I've trained them really well. Because typically, your second employee is gonna look to them as the standard. And so if your first employee is like, a B player, and then you, you know, you leave them going out and doing estimates, for example, and that person is now responsible to train the second person, there's no way the second person is gonna rise past them typically. They're gonna rise to the standard of the first person. So if they're late, if they do a low-quality job, etc. What happened to the location in North Carolina? I just remember you saying something, you were getting sued because your employee hit someone. I sold that location to my general manager, and so that one's still being ran in North Carolina. Hey Mike, wondering how you would implement P4P on snow removal. We charge a subscription cost and don't know how many times it would snow that month, so it's hard to estimate labor revenue. What would you do? To be perfectly honest, when we offered snow, we did not do P4P on it because it was the one time where any damage case was so incredibly high that I didn't want anyone going faster. And so if you do services infrequently, first off, it's a good sign you should cut it, which we ended up doing. But back when we did do snow, we did not offer P4P because we only did it 2 or 3 times a year. So first off, I think most times if you do things 2 or 3 times a year, you should probably cut it. If you don't, I would be careful about incentivizing your crew to work fast because they're all new to the service typically. If you are going to do this, so for example, I worked with Stefano on— He's trying to implement P4P, and they're gonna give like, I think it's, I shouldn't say that. He's gonna give a percentage of revenue, and then it's going to be a bonus, uh, every month based upon how many callbacks or damage cases they have. CRM frees up time to get more, get more work, more organized. Yes, great. Okay, cool. Thank you all for the comments. I know there's a ton in here. I will try to do more live streams while I'm in Texas. I'm gonna cut it off here. We are literally packing up today Next week, we'll be headed out to Texas. In the meantime, if you have been thinking about joining HomeWorks, for just until next Friday, the next 6 days, we have the opportunity to join HomeWorks completely free. Your first month is free, and then put in TX26 when you sign up. You'll get your first month free, and you'll get your second month free once you complete onboarding. So it's basically 2 full months, all your importing, all your onboarding, everything free, 5 implementation calls with the team. So if you've been thinking about joining, this is the time to do it. So if you're like, well, I kind of think December I'll do it or November, do it now, please. This is the time to get in. We've never done 2 months for free ever. And so highly recommend getting in now. And then that way when I get to text and I'm rolling out a lot of these automations and how I'm setting up my software and how I'm setting up automations and auto-charging and my MCP and my API and I connect ChatGPT and Claude to it, When I'm doing those things, you'll also be able to implement it in your business. So highly recommend, go to home.works. When you're going through registration, just put in TX26. You'll get your first month free right away. It's immediately free. And then your second month you get free as soon as you finish implementation. And that's just calls with our team in one week. And we will make sure you get fully implemented, all your contacts imported. We'll do all of it for you. It's white glove onboarding. And typically that would cost over $1,000 to have us do all of that, but we're gonna do all of it for free. 'Cause I really want everyone to join before I go to Texas, not in the middle when we're already of size and pretty big. So highly recommend it, go check it out today. Just go to home.works and on registration use TX26 and get your first 2 months free. Alright, love you all. Next time I'll see you, I will probably be in Texas. That's all I got for today.