How I Run a $43M Company (Systems You Can Copy)

Running a company with 120+ employees in over 200 locations is chaotic. There are always problems, people issues, customer issues, things breaking every single day. That never goes away. The difference is I'm not the one managing it. In this video, I'm going to show you the systems I use to keep the business moving forward, even when things are messy. How I structure my week, what I actually pay attention to, and how I decide what matters so the company can grow without me getting pulled into every single problem. This is exactly how I run a business valued at $43 million and what allows the company to scale without everything falling apart. All right, so it starts off when you wake up. And for myself, I'm really trying to protect my psychology. I think the way you set your day in the first 15 or 20 minutes really sets the rest of the day up for success or failure. And if I want to avoid being reactive, then I can't be reactive in my first 15 or 20 minutes. The worst thing you could possibly do, in my opinion, in the first 15 or 20 minutes of your day is look at the news because it is full of clickbait headlines and information that is designed to make you reactive, designed to make you mad, designed to get you triggered, designed to make you reactive to the environment you've been put in. And I want to do the exact opposite. As I've grown my businesses, I've realized that the less I am reactive and the more I am proactive, usually that leads the business growing faster. So maybe not a bigger business, but the rate of growth is usually inextricably linked to how much of my day am I proactively doing what I know I should be doing versus just reacting to problems and fires that are inevitably going to happen, but my attention on them. And so if the very first thing I'm doing is looking at headlines of things I cannot control— the news, politics, the economy, economy, et cetera. And there are things that are going to make me mad. They're gonna get me agitated. It's gonna start my day off on the wrong trajectory. So what I try to do is just get information that I need at the very beginning of the day to prevent me from being reactive. I don't check everything. This is something I used to do back in the days. Like, I'd check every number and go into bank accounts and all the rest of it. Now my objective is just to get a pulse across all the different channels that we have in the departments. So we use ClickUp, we use Slack, we use email, we use WhatsApp for the different departments. And so this is actually a really good use case in my opinion for AI, and that is to kind of give you a CEO snapshot or a pulse on the business. And so I might not be in every Slack channel. I might not see most of my email, probably only about 10% of my email do I see. However, the pulse is designed using AI to be able to ensure that if I miss anything or if there are important conversations or incidents or big problems being faced, or a huge customer problem, it's at least surfaced. And so I'm aware of it, but it doesn't mean I need to fix it. When it comes to my email, a lot of times as the business grows and more and more people have your email, I— this is why I purposely do not have company email addresses. Inside of Augusta Lawn Care, they have an email address for myself. But outside of that, you can't just like take the company name, put Mike before it and expect it to go anywhere. And I've done this on purpose. I've kept the same email, my very first email I started when I went to college. I didn't have an email before going to college and somehow I survived. And then when I was 13, I went to college and my first English 101, they're like, you need an email address. I'm like, mom, dad, I need an email address. I got a Gmail account and to this day I still use that same one. Over 90% of my emails are filtered out and I use a specific app and I'll share some of the tools later on that I use. However, you can set up filters to remove most of the emails that you don't need to see. And the whole objective here is to reduce the amount of inputs so that when you give an output, it's clear. This is also referred to as noise versus signal. And there's so much that is going to clutter up your inbox, whether it be Slack or email or WhatsApp or ClickUp or whatever you're using. Name the tool. All of these tools have been designed to constantly notify you and push notifications and emails and dings. And but I need to make sure that those inputs are reduced as much as possible as the businesses grow. And as you grow the business, it'll inevitably become more and more dings, more messages, more notifications. And we have to reduce that noise so that we can clearly make decisions that are based upon the outputs we want to achieve instead of just constantly just drowning in the noise. And so my goal when it comes to like my, my morning pulse is to be problem aware, but not to manage the problems. And so I want to know if there's an incident happening in the software. I want to know if there's something on the tech stack at Command Center, that's a problem. I want to know if views are down on the media side. I want to know what's going on in the day, but I don't necessarily need to be managing those problems. What I have found, if there is something urgent, it usually surfaces to the top. If it's not urgent and it doesn't need my attention, it can wait. And this is why I don't check the news, is because if the news is really that important and it's gonna actually affect my life, it will probably bubble up to the people around me that will mention it. And so my whole goal is to protect my psychology reduce the amount of inputs in the first 20 minutes of my day. I'm not looking at the news, and I'm going to use technology. And this is one of the best use cases of AI, in my opinion, is to synthesize huge amounts of data and huge amounts of inputs and then say, like, these are the 3 things you need to focus on, or you should at least be aware of going into your day. And so I use this a lot because there are so many inputs, and there are literally hundreds of emails and messages that are coming in every day. And by the time I wake up, They're all there. And so to avoid them ever getting in the way, I reduce all noise. There's no notifications. You'll never hear my phone. This will never ring. This will never beep. This will never buzz. It'll buzz for one person, and that's my wife. When it comes to the metrics that I'm actually tracking, I have reduced the amount of things that I'm actually measuring on a daily basis. It's super important to have metrics in the business and be able to have dashboards and know your numbers. I have found that the bigger the business has got, the less numbers I actually need to know, but I need to have really good clarity in terms of what these few are. And so I think of it as a funnel, and I think this kind of works regardless of what size business you're at. At the top of the funnel, you're gonna get clicks. You could also just say that this is traffic, whether this is from people seeing your trucks, whether this be from ads, videos, et cetera. And this is something that we're just starting to work on a lot with even the content is like tracking clicks from every single video, What platform and where's this click coming from? And then I'm tracking book calls. You could also call this estimates if you're doing in-person estimates, but how many people are actually getting a book call? And then I'm trying to track my close ratio. So what percentage of those book calls become paying customers? 'Cause at the end of the day, I just want at the bottom of this funnel people to become paying customers. So traffic, you could also just say that that's going into leads. So I use both sides of this just so you can kind of translate it to your industry. And then I'm tracking on this side, I'm also tracking my revenue. So I have traffic, they become leads, this becomes revenue. So I need to know how many clicks are coming in, how many leads or estimates am I actually booking? And then how much revenue is that creating? In other words, what percentage of those book calls or those estimates are actually getting closed? This is mostly what I focus on because these are things I can control. And a lot of these will be the determining factor of downstream effects of the business. So like number of subscribers, the amount of new franchisees we have at Augusta Lawn Care, the amount of websites we sell at Home Service Web Design. All of this usually just boils down to this funnel. Again, there are a lot of other important numbers that I will look at maybe on a weekly or monthly basis, but on a daily basis, this is really all I care about. And I have one dashboard that I can quickly see all of this for each of the departments of the business. At the end of the day, clicks and traffic to your site do not pay the bills. Awareness does not pay your bills. Prospects don't pay your bills. Leads don't pay the bills. At the end of the day, customers pay the bills. And so a lot of times I see people go two different directions. Either A, they only care about vanity metrics, i.e., traffic and clicks. All the door hangers I put out and everyone calling me and their online reviews and everyone says I'm number one in my market and whatever else. Those are vanity metrics. And then other people will only track the bottom of the funnel. In other words, how many recurring customers do I have? How much revenue did I make this month? There has to be a funnel from the top to the bottom, and knowing the inputs all the way to the outputs is super important. And so I try to zero— zoom out for each of the departments, the franchise, media, and for the software side on these three categories. A good example of this is actually using the media side. A few years ago, we were making videos that we would get hundreds of thousands, if not millions of views. And a lot of times it was a customer complaint or a customer going crazy on the phone at Command Center. 'Cause we record all the calls, we could take those and you could just react to a customer freaking out about the littlest stuff or just being completely sensational over the dumbest stuff. We have thousands of phone calls come in every single day from Command Center at Augusta Lawn Care. We were able to take the worst ones and the ones where people went crazy and share those on YouTube. And we got so many views. Like this one of our videos got over 100 million views. But the problem is that was a vanity metric. That's traffic, that's clicks. It didn't actually lead to any revenue or any customers simply due to the fact that the people watching that, the audience that was brought to that video, didn't translate into people actually caring about software or Homeworks or the franchise, nothing. Like it was just vanity metrics that boosted numbers at the top metrics, but never actually flowed through the funnel. And so if you only look at traffic and clicks, it'll guide your business in a certain direction. That might not actually lead to the best outcome, which if your goal is to grow the business, you need revenue, you need to have close rate. If you're only tracking the bottom of the funnel, then you'll constantly be at the whim of someone else telling you whether or not your business is going to grow, like an agency or someone else giving you the traffic or the clicks, and they hold the keys to you being able to grow the business. And so I realized that, okay, a video that does 300,000 views or 3 million views, might actually bring less revenue and less closed customers and less booked calls and less leads than a video that has 3,000 views, but is me going over in-depth video content for home service business owners. That is my ideal customer profile to join Augusta Lawn Care, the franchise, home service web design, pay for performance software, and everything else I offer. By zeroing out of all the different metrics, 'cause we have 3 departments, Every single one of those departments have a ton of metrics. Everything from your CSAT score, that's your customer satisfaction score, to your NPS score, your net promoter score. You have cash on hand. You have what our cost per lead is. All of these things for every one of those departments can get overwhelming. And I usually know those numbers on a weekly or monthly basis, but on a daily basis, this is what usually is the input to everything downstream in the business. And so I try to boil it down to What are the traffic? What's the clicks? Top of the funnel. Where's that flowing through the middle of the funnel with leads or estimates or book calls? And then how much revenue is that producing and closed customers or actually converting them into a paying customer? This is what I look at now. What I stopped looking at is every single bank account. And I'll say this, if you're just getting started from $0 to $1 million in annual revenue, looking at your bank account every single morning is probably a good thing. That scarcity mindset, though, that serves you early on because it does serve you well. And trust me, like you looking at your money every single day and be like, there's not enough, there's a little bit, I'm going to work harder. It pushes you to go to do more. Here's the thing. As the business grows and you look at how much cash is in the bank account, whether you have $1 million or $2 million of cash sitting in a bank account is probably not going to change what you do today. I have found that as I've grown the businesses, the biggest obstacle is reducing inputs. Because if there's too many inputs, then the output becomes cloudy. I think AI is a great synopsis how the human brain and as leaders we should be operating. And that is if you just dump tons of data onto AI that's not organized, it's not in markdown files, it's not clearly stated with like titles and headers. You just dump a ton of data. It will give you a lot of output. In other words, it'll be very productive. It'll give you a huge output. But the real hack to be able to get a really good response from AI or a good output is to have very clear inputs that are organized. And so I want to reduce the clutter. I want to organize the inputs that are coming in. So then the output is actually efficient. I don't look at every bank account every single day. And when I first got started, it was helpful. It pushed me. It allowed me to be able to operate based upon how much cash was in the bank. Because if you have $20,000 versus $20 in the bank account and you're just getting started, it is absolutely going to change your behavior for that day.. It is absolutely going to change whether or not you buy another piece of equipment, whether you hire someone. As the business grows, understanding that what inputs aren't actually going to change decision-making today allows you to get clear with what inputs you actually need to remove from your visibility so that you can get clear outputs. So I don't look at like Stripe payouts, daily transactions. There are thousands of them every single day, probably tens of thousands across the franchise, across the software. Across the media every single day, hundreds of thousands of dollars, millions of dollars going in and out. My attention on that keeps me distracted from making good decisions. Again, to be clear, if you're doing under a million dollars in annual revenue, it's likely that you're doing what I call bank balance accounting or bank balance decision-making, which is I look at bank balance and based upon that is whether or not I will hire someone, whether or not I will buy another piece of equipment. And that is required when you're smaller. As you begin to grow, constant attention on things other than the inputs required to make the decisions you need to make is just noise. And shifting from noise to constraints is the deciding factor of whether you— whether or not you go from $1 million to $10 million. And so I started realizing that looking at bank accounts, looking at all the transactions, looking at every single number was noise. It wasn't actually the constraint of the business. And looking at a bank account isn't going to be a strategic move for the business. It doesn't give me any insights that anyone else in the organization can't get. And so as you start delegating the functions of operations, I can have an accountant look at the numbers and tell me what's going on. You can have a CFO, you can have an accountant, you can have a bookkeeper tell you what's going on from the numbers. Me spending my time on those inputs is likely to keep me distracted from making solid decisions when it comes to the actual constraint of the business. Now, it's super important still to know your numbers. And I still have a bookkeeper and accountant that are going to make sure that on the 15th of every month for every department, I am going to have a profit and loss statement and a balance sheet that's reconciled with my bank statements. I use Home Service CPA and allow— I allow the public to use it as well. The reason I need to have those numbers once a month is to be able to strategically know and have that as an input. But I don't need to know every single day. I don't need to see every transaction. I don't need to process every single check. Back in the day, I used to know the compensation of every single team member that I hired, whether it be contractors, whether it be virtual or remote, whether it be people in person, every single person in command center. I knew the comp for every single person. I could— you could just tell me their name. I would tell them how much they're getting paid per hour or if they're on salary or whatever it might be, what their benefits are. I used to know that stuff and I had to retrain my brain as we begin to grow, especially as we cross like 80, 90, 100 employees. In the past, I'd idolized entrepreneurs that were really deep in the weeds. And there are certainly examples of entrepreneurs that stay so in the weeds around these little minute details around things like comp for their team. All power to them. Let's go. Personally, I do not have the capability to keep all of that data, but then also know very clearly what my customer needs, how to solve it, and to be able to deploy attention towards it. And so being very clear in terms of what metrics actually matter, the less noise and less inputs, the better. I had to retrain my brain because that used to be a point of pride to me is like, I want to know every detail. I wanna know every customer complaint. I wanna know everything that's happening in the business. And that works. And you will be reinforced for that behavior up until like $1 million, $2 million, even $3 million in annual revenue because you have been the person that has taken pride and your identity has gotten wrapped up with being the fix-it person. The person that anyone can call, customer, employee, vendor, anyone. Anyone can call you and you can solve the problem because you know everything about the business. I had to strip that identity away and realize it didn't serve me going from $3 million $10 million. As the business has grown, I've realized that my job really comes down to just a few things. I'm trying to remove bottlenecks for the team, things that are frustrating them, things that are slowing the team down. I'm trying to fix that. If it's a roadblock, if it's a speed bump, if it's a speed bump for 20 people and I can remove that, make them 10%, 20% more efficient, high leverage use of my time. The second thing I'm really trying to focus on is setting the vision. Like, why are we even doing this? And as the founder or the leader inside the organization, there's really one thing that sets you apart from everyone else, and that is you have visibility to all aspects of the business. And so being able to stay at that 30,000-foot view and then keep everyone going in the right direction and setting the vision for like why we do what we do and the whole mission for this business becomes the main priority. And so every week when I go into the week, I'm trying to find the main constraint. Where can I remove bottlenecks? And where can I allocate resources? And so it's a matter of like from a 30,000-foot view, making sure everyone's going the same direction. If they have bottlenecks getting in that direction, I'm trying to remove them and I'm trying to allocate the resources that I'm able to, to find the next constraint, to just make sure we have like full horsepower going down this path. I can think of it like a river, as much gallons per minute going in the correct direction. I don't want a whole bunch of trickles because people are like going off on tangents. They don't understand clearly the vision. I don't want it to be where there's a bunch of dams being built in the river. Those are bottlenecks. I'm trying to remove the bottlenecks, remove the dams. I'm trying to actually force everyone going in the same direction by having a clear vision, a clear mission. I see that as my main objective and my job in the business. By doing this, I only have usually 1 to 2 priorities every month. Everything else in the business usually has to take a back seat and go on the back burner to these 1 or 2 major priorities. And I used to think I could do 100 different things. And I realized that I had a finite amount of attention. It's very easy to confuse tasks versus priorities. And there are hundreds of tasks you might need to do, but there are usually only 1 or 2 priorities that if you were to focus on those things, it would solve all these other tasks. And tasks can come up as urgent huge fires in the business. But I have to realize that if I tackle these 1 or 2 major priorities, the big domino in the business, a lot of times these— the downstream effect of solving these big problems is that these little problems get taken care of. But a lot of us get so distracted with all the little problems that happen every single day and all the little tasks that we need to get done that we do need to get done. But by focusing on them, we don't deploy our energy towards the 1 or 2 major priorities. I've realized that there are constraints to different seasons of the business. For the past several years, the infrastructure at the franchise level has been a big constraint. We built Command Center now 87 agents. That's a lot of people. And every single stage, like 10 people, 30 people, 50 people, every single stage Command Center had to be rebuilt, whether it be going from generalists at the beginning, people that could kind of do everything in admin, where now every department that might have 5 or 10 people is very specialized. There are people that just do QuickBooks. There are people that just run payroll. There are people that just do email management. And so as we grew the organization, the franchise level to over 200 locations, that was a huge infrastructure play. And that was a huge constraint. Figure out how do we organize this using software, using AI, using— how many managers do we need? Do we do virtual? Do we do remote? Do we do in-person? What's the blend that needs to be perfect to have 24/7 coverage? That was a lot of time and attention. And my main priority was infrastructure. At Command Center. Over the past couple of years, it's also shifted towards homeworks and building out that team. A huge realization for me was realizing I did not have the technical chops or skill or experience to be able to lead the organization as it scaled. And so being able to recruit and find really talented people and bring them together was the constraint I focused on over the past couple of years. My current constraint, now that those two things have really solid leadership teams, is demand or leads. And so my focus right now is actually this top part, and that is getting more leads, getting more views, converting them into paying customers because everyone focuses on this top part, which is like customer acquisition. Everyone focus— that's what this, this funnel is. But once you have this, you now have operations like you got to actually take care of the customers. You got to ascend the customers. You got to make sure the customers are happy. You have customer satisfaction, you have customer journeys. There's a whole bunch of stuff down here. And so if you just gas customer acquisition, usually you'll have a whole bunch of problems in operations and doing the work starts to get sloppy, quality starts to drop, your leadership team is frayed, they might be underskilled. And so the last several years, I've actually focused most of my time and attention on this bottom part. And so it's only now this year that I've actually started to focus on this top part, which is like, okay, We need to get better videos, better media, better clicks, better traffic inside this funnel, and then grease the gears of this lead acquisition, tracking book calls, making sure we know where every single click is coming from every single video. That's customer acquisition. But before I did that, I made sure operations were solid, and I spent the past 5 to 6 years building a franchise and the software with infrastructure and leadership teams to make sure I could then go back to the top of the funnel and be able to dominate this. And if this looks familiar, this is very, very close to the 4L framework that I talk about on every single turnaround show, where it's basically I have liquidity, then I have a lead constraint, then I have a labor constraint, then I have a leadership constraint. And then once you figure out leadership and you have overhead and you've hired the team, you have liquidity. And then what do you do with that money? You go get more, more customers with leads. And so this is just the cycle of the 4L framework. And every single time you get through the 4L framework, you grow the business. And currently I'm not tied to this being my constraint forever. Right now I'm focused heavily next 6 to 12 months on the top of the funnel and customer acquisition. But if I was to 10x the amount of acquisition that we got, I would probably then need to reallocate and prioritize building out the infrastructure again. And so I think of building a business very much a matter of we grow with height and then we build out infrastructure. If you just focus on building massive amount of infrastructure, you'll never actually grow the business. 'Cause everything's gotta be perfect, I've gotta have all my dashboards, everything's gotta be ironed out, I've gotta have the perfect protocol and SOPs, and you just built all this infrastructure and you have all this overhead of admin folks and operations people that actually don't generate any revenue. And that's a problem. The other problem is you only focus on customer acquisition. That is, I'm only getting new leads, I'm only getting more customers, I'm only growing top-line revenue, But if you never prioritize then building out a leadership team, building out training, building out systems, building out SOPs, slowing down decision-making so people can actually create training inside the organization. This is the ebb and flow, in my opinion, of growing a business that doesn't feel chaotic. Is I grow and then I systematize. I grow and then I systematize. I built infrastructure after then getting the leads. And it is a cadence of going back and forth. And so to think that your current priorities that you're so focused on is going to be your priorities forever is delusional. 'Cause as the business grows, the constraint moves. Just like it does in the 4L framework. As soon as you get a bunch of customers, you have next constraint of getting more laborers. And once you get a bunch of laborers, you need more leadership. And so the same thing is true regardless of what business you're in. The constraint or the priority for you to focus on constantly evolves as the business grows. Now, I've made a bunch of mistakes. And a couple of the ones I have made is being way too involved, far too long. This comes from a good place. I like to feel helpful. I like people to be able to look to me as a resource. I've found that this actually slows everything down. It frustrates people tremendously. And if people need you to do their job, you are the bottleneck. And so if every decision is coming through you, I like to think of it as if we go back to the analogy of trying to increase the throughput of a river. If you're the bottleneck, the flow, the gallons per minute of that river strictly depend on your capabilities. And so if the organization is looking like this, this is the bottleneck and this is you. And this is why I usually say that every business, the ultimate constraint is leadership, because for almost every business, including my own, we cap and limit the output of this system based upon us being the bottleneck. Our ability to have skills, our ability to be able to lead better, that is actually the constraint. 'Cause nothing, no matter how many leads, no matter how many customers, no matter how many all-star employees you have, no matter how many funnels you build, no matter how many Facebook ads you have and Google ads and LSA, everything pouring in, most of the time, I'd say almost every time, the founder is the bottleneck to the organization. Now, if you have this happening and you're the responsible for every single decision, every single purchase, every single sale, these are just decisions inside the business. If you're the bottleneck for every single one of these things, this will be capped. And so if you're wondering, why is my business not growing? And why does it seem like I'm plateaued? It is almost always because you have bottlenecked the business. And I did the same thing. It's really humbling to realize that you are the bottleneck and you are the reason why your business is not growing. And I had to realize the same thing. I did not grow software because I did not have the skills of technology. I did not grow the franchise because I did not have the skill of leadership to be able to lead other leaders and very high-caliber individuals. It's one thing to hire a technician that's entry-level and be able to lead them. It's different to hire a multimillion-dollar business owner and be able to lead them and be able to make them more successful. And so what I realized is that I need to get people that could identify a problem, identify a solution, and then go ahead and execute. So this is the 3-step process that I look for to be able to reduce me as the bottleneck. Because if I can get other leaders inside the organization, what I'm doing is I'm building out this bottleneck. No longer am I the bottleneck. I am increasing the throughput of the organization because there are people that can identify a problem. There are people that can identify a solution and they can execute. And trust me, here's the thing. Everyone's like, yeah, I'm really good manager because I can identify problems. No, if you can just identify, problems, you are what we call a cancer to the organization. Because it doesn't take a rocket scientist to identify a problem. And if all you do in an organization, or all people in your organization do as a manager, is identify problems, they are a waste of space. They are constantly gonna drag the organization down. They're gonna slow everything down. They'll never be able to adapt. They'll always look for problems and issues in every single aspect of the business. They can find the problems. Now, you need these people, to identify problems. But a great manager can do all 3 of these things. On the flip side, there are people that can execute very well, but they're not good enough at being able to be introspective and look at a system and find the problem because they're so optimistic. And there are people that are so optimistic that they cannot identify a problem, but they can do great execution. And so I realized when it came to a manager, I was always expecting them to do all 3. But sometimes people can only do one. Now, the best of the best, Managers and leaders that are able to increase the throughput of your organization can identify a problem, say, that's a problem. They got, you know what, here's also a solution. I'm not just going to bring you a problem. I'm also going to bring a solution that I think can actually fix it. And then they can actually take the solution once you've signed off on it or you got approval and they can go execute on it. That allows you to now, this is why it chunks up to where the only thing you as a leader do is decisions, because really all you need to do is say, hey, I find great people that identify problems. They identify the solutions. They run it by me. I make the decision, might refine it with them, and then they can go execute. Now, the only part of this process that I need to be involved in is the decision. This is why you get people like Jeff Bezos and leaders of that magnitude that say they just need to make a few good decisions a day 'cause they have really good people that are already identifying the problems, identifying solutions, getting the input from the leader, and then being able to go execute. And so this is the simplified method I've looked at and I think about. And if I am doing anything besides this, we have a problem. It might be that the manager is underskilled. It might mean that I am micromanaging. It might mean that I did not give someone the correct information. I did not give them all of the input. I did not give them all the resources to be able to identify a problem, create a solution, execute. If someone consistently finds problems but then just dumps them on my plate, I'm never gonna be able to grow the business. I'm just going to constantly be firefighting and doing their job for them. If you're looking at managers and you're trying to figure out, are they good? Are they great? Where can I use them in the organization? Can I use them in the future as the business begins to grow? If they can do all 3 of these things, fantastic. Try to remove yourself from the problem finding, the solution creating, and the execution, and only help them with decision making because this is something that can happen very quickly, whereas this could take weeks, months, or even years to fully fix the problem. This simplification has really helped me because before, there'd be a lot of approvals, waiting, overthinking for myself and my managers because if I started getting involved in the problem, they'd start second-guessing themselves about the solution. And then if I started involving myself in the solution, I would spend so much time with 5 different options and testing it and beta testing and split testing and A/B testing it instead of just being like, hey, you identify a problem in your department, you identify a problem in the business, you bring me a solution, we'll decide on it very quickly together, and then you go execute. This has allowed me to probably 10x my output. And in the past 12 to 24 months, the biggest change has been getting great leaders that can do this whole process and then allowing me to only be involved in the decision-making. This allows people to act faster and emphasizes speed over perfection. And I've always said progress over perfection. And there are times that you will have a manager come to you with a problem and a solution, and you might not actually think that it is the right move. Or you might disagree with it, but you still allow them to go execute on it. The reason I do this is because I have found that my own self, if someone tells me what to do, I'll do it if like I'm supposed to, or I have to, or they're above me in rank. Like if the government tells me I gotta go a certain speed limit, I'm gonna go a certain speed limit. I'm going to comply with it. However, I would rather when it comes to my managers and my team, that they come with a problem, they come with a solution, I might disagree with it, but I would rather them execute with full steam and discretionary effort. Discretionary effort is they are not required to give, but they will if they believe it's their own idea. Discretionary effort is always the ideas that they get in while they're driving, while they're in traffic, while they are in the shower, while they are running and exercising. That discretionary effort around execution only comes when they believe it's their idea. If I tell them what to do, if I've done this whole process for them and then just given them marching orders and commands, they will comply, but I will not unlock discretionary effort. And so I still remember a time when a manager came to me with an idea that I wasn't like 100% sure it would work. And I didn't really want them to deploy a bunch of energy towards it because I was like, man, there's other things we should be focused on. But by allowing them to go and try and say, hey, look, I'm just going to say yes. I don't know with 100% certainty if this will work, but I want you to go prove me wrong. Like, just go do it. Take action. The amount of discretionary effort they unlocked towards that was like tremendous. I still remember thinking like, I'm getting like messages from them on the weekend. It was like 11 o'clock, getting messages from them and being like, wow, they're definitely unlocking discretionary effort towards something because they had an idea. And so I would encourage you, as the business continues to scale, allow your managers and your direct reports specifically to be able to take more shots on goal. By having this process, you get more feedback loops and you get faster decisions to be able to win. The throughput of this system is increased because faster decisions win and you get more feedback loops, you get more tests, you get more shots on goal when your entire team can go through this process and iterate much quickly. And it's not always depending on you finding the problem, creating a solution, and then going out and executing on it. Another problem that I've had to learn and focus on as we've grown the business is communication. I've realized that I can't talk to everyone inside the organization all of the time and, and create personal connections with all of them. And so I've had to lean on much more is leveraged communication. Now, leveraged communication in a home service business, for example, could be something like making an estimate video inside of Field Force, inside the mobile app that we have for HomeWorks to be able to communicate with leverage to multiple people. The lowest form of leverage is you remembering everything in your brain, and then it might be you going and showing a crew of 3 or 4 people a job. And just telling them what to do, walking them around the property, telling them what to do, giving them instructions. Above that leveraged communication would be making a video when you're at the estimate so that the crew, when they show up, don't need to walk around the property. And there is this source of truth that everyone can look to without needing to talk to you. And that would be like an estimate video. We talk about this a lot. The same thing is true for me. As I've grown the business, I'm always looking for ways to create more leverage with my communication. Whether it be making a screen recording like a Loom, trying to replace my meetings. So instead of typing for 20 minutes or talking, having a big meeting for 20 or 30 minutes, can I just make a 5-minute video that can be watched on everyone else's time and asynchronously? Loom is great. Little video myself in the bottom, screen record something, have a workflow that could replace 10 conversations. It could replace an hour's worth of my time talking to people one-on-one or or typing. We also use leveraged communication when it comes to the franchise. Every single day, we have what we call the Mike Minutes Mastermind, where I talk to all the owners inside of Augusta Lawn Care. And this actually came as a result of feedback that I got from someone that inside the franchise that didn't really like me and had a lot of problems with what was going on. And we had about 30 or 40 locations, but it was probably the best feedback I've ever received and implemented. And that was just have a daily livestream with all the owners of Augusta Lawn Care. So that way if there were any problems, it just immediately rose to the surface instead of it being festered over the course of 3, 4, 5 months and then people acting out of order in 3 or 4 months later once they're mad, once something has completely gotten overblown versus just like you have direct access to me. If you have a question, bring it up on the Mike Andes Mastermind. And then we also have quarterly roundtables where we get on a live call like a Zoom or Google Meet, the entire organization. This is leveraged communication because I can't communicate with over 200 owners every single day and expect to know everything about their business, everything about their personal life, and have a full understanding of what to do next in their company. But what I can do is leverage my communication. And so as you grow the business, moving up the amount of leveraged communication you have is important so you can still stay visible and you can still be able to point people with a vision of where the business is going. But it doesn't take all of your time. As the business grows and you have more leveraged communication, a lot of times you'll eventually just chunk up to where you feel like a broken record as the leader of the organization, because the main objective that you have is just to guide everyone towards the common vision or mission of the business. We have 3 missions. One for Augusta Lawn Care is to change the level of professionalism in the landscape industry. For the media side is to make home service business owners rich. And then for HomeWorks, it is to help home service business owners grow, without breaking. Those are the three missions. Every piece of leverage communication is usually guiding in that direction. Now, internally, when it comes to communication, it's the same thing. I'm trying to get everyone guided towards the exact same vision. But a lot of times I find with communication internally, it can just become noise. So what I've tried to practice is that I'm not going to send communication unless I expect behavior to change. What I've found, especially as an organization grows, especially of mid-level management, especially as you have multiple layers of management in a hierarchy inside the company. As that happens, it's very easy to have a lot of FYI messages, a lot of FYI meetings, a lot of just like, hey, I'm just informing you what's going on in my department. This slows the team down. And I have found that if I send those, I can really slow the organization down. If I'm just like, just want to share, like there's certainly an element that it is nice for people to have more insights to the organization, but it is your job to have full insights. And to be able to get everyone rowing in the right direction. And if you constantly are telling people throughout the company everything that's happening, they're just going to get distracted. It's going to slow them down because they're going to have like little bits of information around the whole organization instead of just knowing the information they need to change behavior today. And so the same way that I am trying to govern my own personal psychology and my own inputs to be able to be more efficient, I don't want to be the cause of constantly slowing down my team by giving them all these little FYIs that don't make a meaningful change to how they're going to conduct business or change behavior today. I see this as bloat inside of a larger organization. As multiple tiers get added and multiple departments get added, is everyone just giving FYIs to each other? And all of a sudden, 50% of our day is wrapped up just like getting caught up with everyone else's department versus just what information do I need and how does what you're sharing with me connect with what I'm supposed to be doing today? The problems I'm trying to solve, the solutions I'm trying to create, and the execution that I am taking. And I don't wanna slow people down in the organization or be the cause of giving them too many inputs that they also become the bottleneck to their own output. Now I wanted to give the specific tools that I use, some software that I use to make some of these things easier. And I'm no way affiliated with any of these softwares, I could spend probably hours talking about 100 other ones that I've used or am using, but these are some of the most common ones. I use Superhuman. It is basically just an email app. You can do the same thing on Gmail. All it is is creating tons of filters and using AI to figure out which emails actually need to be seen. And what I like about it is I can filter emails really fast just with keyboard shortcuts. But ultimately a lot of it just ties into like the backend of your email and creating filters. And so there's one filter I'll tell you right now that you can cut out probably 40% of your emails that you don't need to see. And that is if it says the word unsubscribe, just archive it. That alone will keep so much clutter out of your email inbox. That's just one filter. I have over 250 filters based upon who's sending it, what time of day it is. And I'm also batching it to where I will get a whole bunch of specific types of emails at certain times of day when I, on my time blocks, am supposed to be governing that aspect of the business. For example, most recently I've made sure that all my emails that have to do with the media team come in at 7 o'clock and 3 PM. So 7 AM and 3 PM. That way I just know that can line up with my calendar as to when I actually look at my email and when I can actually respond back to the team. So Superhuman is the software I use for my email. I don't recommend it for everyone, especially if you have multiple people in your email inbox. Might not be a great idea, but for your personal email, if that is slowing you down, If you're waking up to 30 or 40 emails in your inbox, there's a high likelihood that you need to take action on 1 or 2. And so the entire— if you get anything from this video, I'm trying to reduce my inputs so I can focus on my priorities and have clear outputs. And so Superhuman, I use that. I use an app called Whisperflow. It basically just uses AI to turn what Siri should be into a better voice dictation tool. And so when I'm at the gym, when I'm walking on a treadmill, when I am driving, If I'm at my desk, I usually have my microphone and I'm just talking. I try very, as much as possible to not type. If you type, say, 80 to 100 words per minute, you can just double your output by just talking to like 200 words per minute. If at all possible, I am always trying to talk instead of type, whether it be using voice notes or using an app like Whisperflow that converts the words into a formatted text. That's really what I'm going for. So whether it be Slack messages, email, responding back to people in any form of communication, I have one button on my desktop and I have a keyboard on my phone that I just talk into and it'll either put it into text or I'm sending out voice notes. When it comes to other apps, honestly, the Google ecosystem is pretty solid. Same thing with Apple, they've created really good ecosystems with like the Notes app, the Calendar app, and the same thing is true when it comes to Google. I've stayed inside the Google ecosystem mostly because I like Google Tasks and Google Calendar and I can drag tasks from the sidebar directly into the calendar. So I use that all the time. I also use Trello. I use Trello 'cause it's a free app and you can just create columns. It's a really basic app. Think of it like sticky notes moving on a Kanban system from idea to in progress to done. I've created 6 different columns that basically allow me whenever I have a genius idea in the middle of the night, when I'm in the shower, whatever, if I have an idea of something I could change in the business that could improve it, I just put it on my to-do list inside Trello. Now, once every 6 weeks, I have a 6-week sprint and I can decide what are the 2 or 3 things that I'm going to focus on during this sprint. And that's when I go through my to-do list. What are the things that I thought was a good idea? This forces me to not take action on every good idea. Again, you've been rewarded for this. I've been rewarded this in the past. When you, by yourself as a solo operator, 1 or 2 employees, you can move very quickly. You're very nimble. And so it's very easy to take like a little test of like, Hey, this week we're going to try this and it doesn't really work. In a bigger organization, a little like, let's try this. I had this idea this morning, could very well derail tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars, as well as months of energy deployed towards something that's not right. And so what I have found to be very helpful as the business has grown, you know, everyone's like, oh, it's a Titanic. You got to take so long to turn. Yeah, but I'd rather be on a Titanic than a rowboat in the middle of the ocean. I think that as the business has grown, I've realized that every good idea I have is not a good idea. The ability to be able to judge myself and my ideas has improved. By having the Trello board, I just put all my to-dos and all my ideas there, and then I have what's called a chopping block, which means this is where good ideas go to die. Meaning if they don't make it into the to-do column, they go on the chopping block. Over the course of 3 months and 6 months and a year, all of a sudden this to-do that I thought was a genius idea is now going on the chopping block. Meaning if it stays in the chopping block for one period, it's gone. Like, it's off. It's— it will be removed from Trello. And the objective in doing that again is to focus on my priorities. Many times a lot of the entrepreneurial distractions that we have throughout the day can be removed if we just add time. And that's why I use the Trello board to keep my ideas and all the things I want to do in the business in one spot, but force myself to not take action on them until the next, next 6-week sprint. You might have been saying like, hey, look, you've been talking about speed and now all of a sudden you're talking about adding time. I think of it like this. I want execution to be fast. I want the problem and solution to be well-defined. And so many times we get jump right into execution because we love it so much as an entrepreneur and we never clearly identify the problem or clearly identify the solution. And this is one of the biggest things I've learned when it came to software is it is so easy to get wrapped up in features and ideas and how we can make it better and building out the product instead of let's clearly identify Is this a problem? And if it is a problem, let's clearly identify why it's a problem and then how to solve it from all different angles. I have found more and more my time being focused on let's clearly identify a problem and the solution before we start executing, because execution, as the business gets larger, gets very expensive and it can erode trust with the rest of your team as well as customers. If you deploy a whole bunch of execution towards things that are not actually moving the needle for the business. And so the chopping block where good ideas go to die has been my friend over the past couple of years. So people think that scale and growing a business means more complexity. You got to do more things, more tasks, when actually it's fewer decisions and faster execution. As long as you have the right systems and the right people, this is possible. If you want systems like this and you're smaller, you're growing from $0 to $3 million in annual revenue, I'd recommend checking out Homeworks. It's going to lay the foundation for this type of thinking. To be able to scale the organization using systems. And if you need any sort of business education, I do it all for free. Go to the links down below and be able to watch the workshop and all the other video training that I have.