How I Run 3 Companies & 200 Locations without LOSING CONTROL

In this video, I'm gonna show you exactly how we communicate across 200 locations without losing control and how you need to change your communication style as you grow from managing doers to managing leaders. A few years ago, one of my locations started losing money and it took 6 months to fix it. 6 months. And we had to replace most of the team. We had to rebuild the culture. We had to reimplement systems that should have been followed in the first place. And the worst part, we didn't see it coming. By the time we stepped in, everything was already broken. Now fast forward to last year. Same location, same early pattern. The GM started slipping, not really paying attention. Things started slowly drifting off track. But this time we caught it early before revenue dropped, before it showed up in the profit and loss statement. We had visibility into the health of the business on a weekly basis. We had the data, we had the signals, and we made a leadership change, made a few adjustments, and the business stayed profitable every single month. Same type of problem, completely different outcome. That shift came down to one thing: how we communicate with leaders and how we use data to guide that communication. As we franchised Augusta Lawn Care and scaled to over 200 locations around the world across different climates, different markets, different owner types, the old way of management and leadership stopped working. We used to do one optional coaching call per month. If something broke, we would react. If someone reached out, we would help them. Now we build a system that meets people where they're at. Daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually through calls, dashboards, AI, video, and data. The numbers show we are doing something right. Our net promoter score for Augusta Lawn Care is over 80. Average location revenue, 100,000. is up 18% year over year. Leads per location is up 51% since last year. So let's first talk about why communication breaks as you scale. So when you're small and you have a few employees, communication is simple. You simply are telling people what to do. You're giving them their orders and they go out and do them. You're usually talking directly to technicians. You fix problems as they come up and it works great. And then you grow. Now you hire managers. Now you have leaders inside the organization. Now you have people who want to think for themselves and they don't wanna be told what to do all the time. They want autonomy, they want ownership, they want to make decisions. The mistake I see all the time is trying to scale the same communication style that worked when you were small. You just try to do more of it, more meetings, more calls, more check-ins. And what happens is it turns into noise. People start to tune it out, they do their own thing, and you slowly lose control of the business. And so this is where reactive leadership versus prescriptive leadership starts to take place. This is the biggest shift I made at Augusta Lawn Care over the past several years. Now, before we were reactive, whether it be my location that was losing money and we reacting once it hit the profit and loss statement. In reality, we should have seen it 6 months before. Or at the franchise level, when it came to coaching, we were reactive too. If they had a problem and their business was crashing, we would step in. We had a 6-week emergency plan, but ultimately we were reactive to problems in the business. Because for the franchisees, we had one coaching call per month and we would wait for the owners to reach out if they had a problem. And if they didn't book a coaching call, we just assumed everything was fine. And then something would break and we would step in, we'd get command center, we'd try to fix the problems and all the issues that probably started just with a couple degree of error 6 months or 12 months prior. That meant problems showed up in the numbers first. It would hit the P&L, it would hit cash in the bank. Oh my word, we have no money. That is a downstream effect of decisions that were made and systems that were abandoned months, if not years prior. Back to my example of my location, that general manager is exactly what's happening. The business would slowly decline, the culture would break, and the team wasn't performing. And by the time we would step in, it took 6 months to fix everything inside the business. But now we operate completely differently. We don't wait for problems. We look at leading indicators. And this is what I would recommend you do if you're starting to scale an organization with multiple levels of management, as well as multiple locations and multiple departments. I'm looking for leading indicators, not having to step in once the entire building is on fire. Some of these leader— leading indicators could be cash on hand, payroll percentage. In other words, what percentage of revenue is going to wages? Efficiency of my team out in the field, estimate volume, the inputs. If I don't have any estimates going out or it's declining, that's going to show up 3 or 4 or 5 months down the road on the profit and loss statement. I don't wanna wait for it to show up when I have no money in the bank. I wanna nip it in the bud when we're slightly going off track very early on. Now we have a dashboard that aggregates all of this data from QuickBooks, from HomeWorks, and from our internal systems. Nick, our owner success manager, has built software on the backend that pulls all these numbers together and creates a health score for every single location. So instead of guessing who needs help, We know. And instead of reacting, we're prescriptive. We reach out before things break. And this is why coaching is so important. This is like when you go to a doctor and you're getting a checkup. It's not because you have cancer. It's not because you have some huge health calamity happening. You check your heart rate, you check your pulse, you check the vitals to be able to make sure you prevent a bad thing from happening. And the same thing is true in your business. Having coaching, having data, having dashboards allows me to triage far in advance of a problem happening inside the business. That's why last year, when a general manager starts slipping at my location, we caught it so early. We made a small corrective action instead of a massive overhaul to the business. When it comes to how do I then communicate with this different level of team member, no longer a technician, now someone who's actually a manager, they're making leadership decisions. How do I ensure that I'm able to scale communication effectively as we grow? Because at scale, You cannot run your business off conversations. That's what's so easy when you have 1, 2, 3, 5, 10 employees is if you see a problem, you just go address it with a conversation. Now, as the business begins to scale, you have to run it based upon signals. Signals are things like financial data, operational metrics, trends over time, leading indicators that predict success or failure. If you don't have that, you're really just guessing. And if you're guessing, you're reacting. And this is why having your systems connected matters so much. This is why you need a CRM. You need to have a financial system. You have operational data all feeding into one place. This, by the way, is where APIs become super important when it comes to software, is being able to connect QuickBooks and your CRM, every other part of your business that uses software, into one dashboard where you can see the numbers of the business, far in advance of it actually affecting the bottom line. Because now you can actually pull the data, manipulate it, and turn it into something useful. And then on top of that, we layer AI. So the AI takes transcripts from all of our coaching calls, all of our training content, all of our academy videos inside of Augusta Lawn Care, all of our office hour videos where on a weekly basis we have live calls with our owners. We combine all of that with the actual performance data of the business. So— So now it doesn't just show the problem, it tells the owner what to do next. And when you're listening to this and you're thinking, well, I don't have that level of visibility. That's the gap. Most businesses have the data, it's just scattered. If you're listening to this and you're thinking, I don't have that level of visibility into the inputs or the leading indicators prior to it being a big cataclysmic problem, that's likely why you're micromanaging or holding on to sales, operations, and admin in the business because the only real way for you to feel in control is to have your hands on all aspects of the company. Without that visibility, you'll feel like you constantly have to jump back in to fix every little problem in the business. Most businesses have the data. It's just scattered. It's— some of it's in QuickBooks, some of it's in their CRM, some of it's in a notes app, some of it's over here in a spreadsheet. And that's actually why we built HomeWorks. It pulls your numbers together. It shows you the health of the business. Your efficiency, your budget hour capacity, and helps you understand what to do next without guessing, including things like raising your prices or when to send out a bulk email to all of your customers to upsell them. And now we're opening up the API so you can pull the data and info you need and connect it to your custom reports and dashboards. Having the data is one thing. Being able to pull that data into a report that is actionable for you as the owner is another thing. 'Cause if you don't have Signals, You're just reacting. And if you're reacting, you're always behind. So if you want to move from reactive to prescriptive, that's where I'd start. How do I get good data? And then how do I put it into a measurable report that is actionable for me and for my leaders to communicate effectively? And this leads me to how to communicate and what cadence should I be using? 'Cause once you have signals, now you layer communication. This is where most people get it wrong. They think they need more communication. Yeah. And that's not the goal. The goal is to deliver the right message in the right format. At Augusta Lawn Care and for our owners, this is what this looks like. We have a daily cadence where I do a live mastermind and answer questions from the owner. This is high-level thinking, direction, strategy. On a weekly basis, we have GM scorecards. We're tracking individual KPIs, efficiencies, and really the operational aspects of the business. We're tracking performance. Also on a weekly basis, we meet with all the owners on what I mentioned before with Nick, the office hours, where it's a live call, it's more tactical, it's in the weeds, a lot of support for the owners and the general managers. Then on a monthly cadence, we have the one-on-one coaching calls. We have performance reviews, we adjust, we use the data from their scorecards to be able to use AI to tell them what to do next. On a quarterly basis, we have a roundtable, which is a live call with all the owners inside of Augusta Lawn Care. Annually, we have a conference where we all get together in person. The goal is to match the communication style and cadence to that of the leader. And so for some owners, they really enjoy being on WhatsApp groups or being on an office hours call live with Nick helping them every single week. For others, they'd rather just tune in live while I'm talking daily and going through questions. For others, they like to get an email and a summary of all the information. It's not doing more communication. It's just taking the cadence and style of communication and matching it to the leaders that you're trying to lead. Yeah. Because in addition to all the things I've already mentioned, we're doing email newsletters, we have dashboards, we do recorded videos, we have an academy, and we use all this AI. The key is this, I'm not increasing communication volume. I'm taking the same core ideas and distributing them across different channels so people can receive it in the way that works for them. Now, here's the hardest part, and that is leading leaders. This is where it gets really difficult because the people you are leading might not like constraints, or systems. Now I'm going to use the example of Augusta Lawn Care and all of our owners. Some would call them franchisees. I see them as owners inside of the business and how I communicate with them. My objective is that you, as you get leaders inside your organization, you realize that any high-level leader, you'll have to change your communication style and the cadence at which you're communicating with them. When it comes to Augusta Lawn Care, I am dealing with entrepreneurs, people that are probably the least likely to be constrained by what to do in life. Entrepreneurs want to do things their own way. They want to push boundaries. They want to try new things. And that's good. It's also dangerous. It's tough when you know it works and you see the systems and what they should be doing. You already have the systems that have been proven. And so the challenge becomes, how do you get someone to follow the system without forcing them? Because if you force them, they will resist. This is human nature. You're like, Why isn't my manager doing this? I'm just gonna like completely tell them exactly what to do. If you tell them what to do, if you force them to take action, they're gonna resist you. What we try to do instead is guide them. We try to coach them. We try to help them come to the same conclusion themselves. I'm not gonna try to prove them wrong or go against them. I'm going to guide them to the right conclusion. And sometimes that takes a little longer. It's a lot easier to just tell someone what to do. But many times, someone will stall at $1, $2, $3 million in annual revenue 'cause they never figure out how to lead managers and lead leaders instead of just leading technicians or people that are willing to take a bullet list and just work through them one by one and taking marching orders. The reason I'm trying to get them to come to that same conclusion themselves is because when they do that, they actually commit to it. They put discretionary effort into it. That's the difference between compliance and alignment. If I just tell them what to do, I might get some people to do it. So, So my objective is getting them to the same place, the same positive result, but them feeling it is their idea, it was their conclusion, because now when they're in the shower, when they're driving, all of their discretionary effort, the effort they do not need to put towards it, is channeled towards figuring a problem out, making a solution happen. And that sort of alignment between the goals of your leaders and you in the business is what allows a business to scale fast. Now the risk that starts to happen as you scale and you get a whole bunch of managers is that your communication, there's actually too much of it. This is the real risk with all of this. It happens in Augusta Lawn Care. It's not undercommunication, it's having too much. 'Cause we have calls, we have dashboards, we have email, we have AI telling them to do it, we have training, we have in-person training, we have offline coaching, we have WhatsApp groups and Facebook groups. It can become overwhelming. And so the goal is not to add more. As you add more leaders and levels of management inside of the company, it's very easy to fall fall in the trap of just adding more communication, more Loom videos, more one-on-one meetings, more all-hands meetings. All of a sudden it just starts to become more and more communication. The goal is not necessarily to add more, is to take what you already are saying and deliver in multiple formats. Same message, different delivery. So whether someone learns through listening or watching or reading or interacting with data, they still get the point. Recently on the HomeWorks Mastermind, where I talk on a weekly basis with all of the owners inside of HomeWorks using the software, He was asking about video training for his technicians. And this point was very valid. Why would I not just have all the videos training someone how to mow grass, do landscaping, everything they need to know, and just have them sit down for the first day, watch all the videos, and have quizzes? The reason, in my opinion, this has never worked for technicians is because most people that wanna work outside don't want their first day on the job to be sitting behind a computer just watching videos and filling in paperwork. They wanna go out and get their hands dirty. And so I've gotta create systems of communication, which are important, onboarding, training, safety, very important. But I wanna be able to meet their communication preference with the way that I deliver the information. And so instead of just having a bunch of videos, maybe you have a 30-minute, 60-minute orientation that is video and you do have a quiz around things like safety or protocol or software that you use inside the business. How they can get time off, how they can get ahead, et cetera. That's fine, but I'm gonna probably meet them where they're at because if they're applying for a position that they want to work outside, there's a good chance that me putting them out in the field and doing training hands-on and then having a system that they learn certain things, they have a trainer sign off on it, and within a matter of a couple weeks they get to the next stage and they get passed through that training, if I'm able to meet them where they're at and use the communication style and method that they prefer, there's a higher likelihood that they'll actually absorb the information. So what should we do next? If you're trying to grow past a million, $2 million, $3 million in annual revenue, if you need leaders to help you grow the business, the biggest shift you need to make is this: stop managing doers and start leading leaders. And that requires a completely different communication style. Here's where I would start. First, build visibility. You need a simple dashboard with your key numbers. If you don't have that, you're flying blind. Second, focus on leading indicators. So when you get that data, let's not just focus on revenue. Let's actually figure out what predicts success or failure. This could be response time, follow-ups, efficiency scores, lead count, and any outbound effort that you expect that leader to have. Third, implement a weekly cadence. This could be scorecards, some level of accountability between the leader and their manager. Monthly is too long. If you're waiting an entire month, that whole department or location could be completely wiped out or be way underperforming and take months to fix if you don't have a weekly cadence. Fourth, change how you lead. Ask questions instead of just giving answers. Guide them to finding the solutions. Instead of being the genius with all the ideas, align the business's goals with their personal goals and help them hit their goals. And fifth, reduce the noise. Focus on signals. If your leaders leave a conversation with you on that weekly cadence and don't know what to do next, that's a problem. I wanna empower them to be able to cut out the 100 things that are screaming for their attention. I wanna empower them to let small fires burn so they can focus on the one major constraint. At scale, control doesn't come from being involved in everything, in all the sales and all the operations and all the admin. It comes from building systems that guide behavior. The goal isn't more communication, It's better signals, better systems, better alignment with your team and with your leaders. That's how you grow a massive company without losing control. Watch this video next for the exact system I use in my manager one-on-one meetings to increase performance and morale of the team. Thank you.