How to Build a $3M Exterior Cleaning Company (Coaching Call)

In this video, I'm going to give you a case study of a home service business that's going from $1 million in annual revenue to $3 million in annual revenue. And they're using all the playbooks that are contained inside of my book copy and Paste millionaire. This is actually going to be a coaching call, a one on one call with Zach from Downspout Exterior Cleaning, where they do pressure washing, house cleaning, soft wash, gutters, as well as Christmas lights. And we're going to be figuring out how he can take his business from a very profitable GM Ryan location with him kind of juggling everything to actually delegating roles around sales, operations and admin so he can grow to $3 million at his one location, but then make it the hub to the hub and spoke model where he copies and paste $1 million locations around the East Coast. Without any further delay, let's get to Zach from Downspout Exterior Cleaning.

So, to be honest with you, Mike, like, I'm at a stage in the business right now where I wrote out a business plan about two years ago and I didn't think I would be this good at calling my shot, but I've kind of called my shot and we're at a million bucks. I have a general manager who has honestly taken over a ton of the role of admin. He sold like about a quarter million bucks in sales this year and manages a great job managing the schedule. And I'm at this, this inflection point where I feel like, all right, how do we get to that next step? Um, so honestly I, I put together that briefing to kind of give you an idea of where we're at. But I wanted to share with you, like, my goal in order to get to that 3 million mark and then on to 5 and then 10, I hear. I get a lot of advice from a lot of people. I'm very fortunate to have an awesome core group of guys that I can refer to guys that own that roofing company. They do like $10 million a year. And I think they're, I think they might have gone a little bit past that this year. My friend started a franchise called Launch Trampoline Parks. I don't know if you've heard of them, um, but their total network value is around a hundred million. Um, then now he sold that and now he started the fencing company, like doing installs and whatnot. And I have another friend of mine who built up a PT practice that now he just goes around and buys other PT practices and does like a corporate Roll up model. So therein lies a perfect example of like the roofing guys doing more of a corporate grow organic model franchise model similar to like what you've done and then the corporate rollup model. So I feel like I'm in this, this span and I want to make sure that we get all our systems and processes really dialed in before I start to say, okay, let's get to 3 million because that won't happen, you know, per year copy and pastebook if we don't have everything dialed in. So I wanted to see, I wanted to get your eyes on the P and L, if that's possible. I have it up here and I'd honestly like you to kind of like ask questions and be like, hey, what's up with this? And like poke holes and things because that's where I get my indecisiveness is where I don't know where to put and allocate funds, like when I take distributions, when we can hire and properly maintain good talent. Like I've been working through my GM's compensation plan all this year, all this past like couple weeks over the holiday. So that's just me throwing a whole bunch of stuff at you. I know we don't have a ton of time, but I figured I'd start with that.

Yeah, totally. And so are you, are you set on a specific scaling strategy? Like are you like, hey, I'm doing corporate or I'm going to do franchising or I'm going to do multiple locations or I'm going to do like a 10, 15, 15 million dollar. Like do you have a specific path you already want to travel down or are you kind of open to possibilities right now?

I'm honestly open to possibilities. Like I just finished your book copy and paste Millionaire like probably last week. Love the hub and spoke model. That's honestly how I was kind of trending as I was building it out. And when you laid it all out on the line, I was like, oh wow, this makes like perfect sense. But I mean my lifetime goal is to get to like $100 million company. Like that's my lifetime goal right now. Within the next five years if I can get to like eight figures, like doing 10 million doll, short term goal is to get us to a million dollars in EBITDA, which I think we can do between 3 and 5 million in top line revenue based on our margins that we're seeing now. The biggest decisions I have to make right now are like hiring a sales rep and then hiring an admin because I don't have an admin. Dan has been doing a phenomenal job doing admin. He's definitely underpaid and overworked at this point. Sales rep. I need to get out of the residential sales and focus on the bigger ticket commercial sales. That's where I think I need to be open to suggestions on how to grow and scale and open to suggestions on when to hire those people too.

Yeah, you're definitely like, that 1 million to $3 million phase is like the most precarious because you're still involved a little bit in lots of aspects of the business. And so finding those key people early is going to be the thing that, like, you just lock those whole departments down. So, like, the thing I don't really talk about in the book is a big reason why we franchise is because I knew I'd leave my best admin, my best salesperson. And that was like Lee and Liz, if we didn't do something, if I didn't challenge them. And so I think you're profitable enough and if you're okay with having a year where, hey, we don't make more profit, but I go out and get to like, absolute, you know, killers that can just take these departments away from me, that would probably be my recommendation. And it sounds like you have a really good network too, that you could also tap into and be like, hey, I want like, the best admin person you know, and then your current admin person, or you move your current admin person up into that role. Like, they move up and they've got to have. They're gonna have to learn new skills of management, be able to take their admin skills and duplicate them, and you'll create an LMS learning management system for their admin team. Same thing with the sales side. Like, you don't wanna have to be training the salesperson down the road. You want them to step in and be like, oh, these are like 10 different ways you could do it better. And then, by the way, I can train a whole team. When you have those things, like, taken off your plate, then you can scale. Because I see a lot of people. The reason it won't get past 3 million is because you're the best salesperson. You've got to teach everything to that person that you hire for sales. And then you get an admin person. You got to teach them everything about admin and then, then they get people coming along and they have no idea how to manage. So you teach them how to manage them and then you're actually managing Their direct reports. And so that's where people stall out around that $3 million marker. So either investing into your current, you know, admin guy and finding an excellent salesperson, that would be the unlucky. And you have the profit margin to do it. But if you, if you were able to lock those two down and then go after an operations person, probably like next year, that's what, that's probably gets you to 10 million. Just, just getting three solid people.

Yeah. Now do you think that 10 million. I don't know if we, I mean, here's the other thing is too, is like Rhode island is a very interesting market because it's super consolidated and we have massive amounts of people in homes. And also very high end. Like I just did the, I just learned that the, the per acre Rhode island is the highest per acre cost in the United States. 385 grand. So like we have like this almost like this triangle of wealth between Boston, Providence, Rhode island and then all the way to, you know, Manhattan basically.

Yeah.

So, you know, at what point do you say, okay, Rhode Island's tapped out, like, can Rhode island get to 3 million? I don't know, can I get to 2 million? Or now we go move into Connecticut? You know, like that was kind of my plan for next year is like slowly start to matriculate into Connecticut because we already serviced part of it. So we kind of have a book of business over there. Um, but the other part of that is like getting our recurring revenue here so that I feel like we can then copy and paste that over into Connecticut.

So like how far is the drive over there to Connecticut now?

So our shop is like perfectly centralized where it's like 30 minutes to Connecticut and it's actually around 30 minutes to Providence, Rhode Island. So it's honestly like we can either stay in Rhode island or we could go to Connecticut and time difference really doesn't matter.

Yeah, like if you, if you can lock down the operational side like sales ops and admin, have a solid person each of those, that's when you, your whole mission is just like either a copy and paste like multiple occasions or for especially the first hub going straight into Connecticut, like would you be going like Milford area?

We probably stick like New Haven and then east.

Okay. Okay. Yeah. So like you would just start moving into that market. Like you'd focus on all the aspects of growth in those new areas. But if you able to get the first location to say 3 to 4 million by going into Connecticut, that's when it starts looking really Interesting. Can you start breaking this off at like million dollar locations? Because like four to five employees with a GM is like the perfect model for the copy and paste millionaire. Now the thing is you've got to, you've got to create the hub. Like the hardest part about the entire book is creating command center. And that's where like your admin person, if he's a savage, I would lean into that and give him a very clear outline of like, here's what's going to look like. We're going to do multiple locations. You're going to be have to create an admin team below you. You're going to hire them, you have to train them, you have to create like if that's the unlock, because you have a very high margin service and if you can do it with four or five employees, do a million dollars. Like that's a model that now it's not like, let's move into this market. You would just be like, okay, this is an hour away, but I don't want to drive. I know immediately I lose all my margin. So I'm going to just plop a location over there. And you just have this like rollout strategy of like one at a time. That looks really interesting to me given the margins that you've been able to and give a good brand. Like it's really good. Like it's actually pretty rare that I would be as, as positive about someone being able to actually do the copy and paste method as what you have here. And so the thing is, like, I think there's value in building that hub and that's why I'm encouraging that part for the next couple of years. But I think the current model is actually what you want to copy and paste because if you notice, like as you started saying, hey, we're going to go above a million, like your margins started compressing and just simply because now I need a salesperson, now I'm going to build an admin team. Like if you can just build this one hub and Maybe only does 20% margin because you have like a full office, like you'd have to really build it out. But then when you plop these in, you know, an hour away, an hour and a half away. Yeah, exactly. You get a cheap little shop space, throw a GM in there, you have a launch strategy to spend 30, 40 grand in marketing, immediately get up to a certain amount of recurring revenue. All of that's being done over the phone or through your office so they don't have to worry about it. We Kind of do where it's 90 days with the owners hands on. And then the whole objective of that is to get the recurring base high enough to where we get break above, break even. Then it can go, it can start moving a little slower. Because if you throw a new GM into a growth location that is just every single day getting 2, 3, 4 new recurring customers like it just, they, they usually can't handle it. But if you can do it for 90, 90 to 120 days, where you get in there, you scale it to that point, then you hand it off to someone and then it starts growing a little bit slower. And if that location, you do million dollars in a second year with 25, 30% margin, like you're off to the races.

Yeah. When it comes to. Because like that's one thing that have been hard to crack is like the recurring revenue model in this space. Like mowing. I get it. Grass grows every week. Like you got to go cut it. But like here we've been trying to do with windows to kind of lock that customer in. But what tends to be the issue is like windows is low margin, you know, or it's just like low ticket, I should say.

Just, it's just like mowing. We don't make any money on mowing.

Oh really? So you guys are like the fertilization stuff is like where you guys are making your money.

Mulch, bush trimming, interesting leaf, leaf cleanup. Like all that stuff is 60% margin. But everyone thinks they need mowing and that's what they search. And so like I, I think it all comes down to your upsell process both before and during and after the window cleaning and any other service, really any service. But because windows is. So like do you guys usually inside too or just outside?

Most outside we've tried inside. Inside is a nightmare.

It's a nightmare. So like most of the time your clients are home, right?

Yeah, I'd say 80% of the time.

Cool. Yes. Like, I would create a really solid upsell strategy with your crew out in the field, like and like package all the other services. You know, you make money on with the windows services. So you'd have like, you know, your windows. Do you already do this? I'm assuming you probably do sort of.

We upsell.

I.

We upsell like all the time. My techs haven't sent buys. Like they get 5% commission on whatever they upsell when the customer is, you know, if we already bought the customer. So yeah, we do some of that, but we haven't packaged it and Productized it. That's like package struggled.

Yeah, you can just make a really solid offer to where like any upsell the tech gives is overshadowed by a package that is just killer. Like, it's like, here's all these things and maybe you have three or four things. You know, you're always going to be able to give them as an upsell. By the way, if you just wanted this monthly subscription that we do it like you can make the cost look so different when in reality it's just that the frequency of service is so much greater. And then you just package the bundle up. You call it something really cool. Like you just integrate your. Like you'd have your downspout package, which is basically like everything above. Like you could really make it like a 1, 2, 3. It's 99, 149 and 199amonth. Here's the things that you're getting, here's the guarantees that come along with it. Or you do you want a $500? We just. You just paid us 500 bucks. What are you paying? 100 bucks a month. Like you can make it really a slam dunk offer. And then you just make your text like be like, hey, present these first. And then your downsell and is this thing. And then if they accept one of these, be like, oh, by the way, with this promotion. And then it will save you even more money.

Does it sound crazy? Because I've thought about the. So if I use pay. Let's pay like a 1200 bucks for the house wash. Like that's typically. Our average ticket is like four is like 1340.

That's good. Really good.

Really good. Thanks. Yeah, I mean, I think that's why.

You have good margins most of the time. That's not the case in softwash. So. Good. Good job. No, yeah. No, 12, 1300 is not common. Like you're also in a higher market like to larger houses, etc. But you know, I, I see way too many softwash guys going at 5, 600 bucks now. It's. It's crazy.

Oh yeah, we're not leaving the. We're not leaving the shop for that. No. Yeah, that. So like if you had a 1200 house wash, like house windows, the whole shebang, and you just paid 120amonth or 100 bucks a month for the year. I mean, is that, is that crazy to. To try and sell that? And then at what point do you start to what. At what point do you add that in? Because now you're also. Now I'm Also worried about cash flow. Right. Like, we're so used to having those $1200 tickets come in every single month, but now we're only having 120 bucks. And yeah, that looks great over when you amortize it out, but initially it's going to kind of hurt.

Yeah. The thing is, if someone washes their house every year, like, they don't need it. Like, correct me if I'm wrong, do they need to be cleaning their house every year?

No, not at all.

Right. And so that's what you're going after. You're going after the fact that the second, the third, the fourth visit is a fract amount of time and that every time you show up, you're selling them another thing. And so what, what's so nice about the service is it probably needs to be done three to every three to four years, like to look really bad, depending on obviously, like the property. But if you can get them on once a year in their mind, you can compare annual versus the monthly. In 2026, we're trying to give away 100,000 copies of the copy and paste millionaire book that I recently wrote. It's the blueprint from getting from zero to $3 million in annual revenue for any home service business. Now, as part of the hundred thousand book challenge that we're trying to give away, we have two ways to be able to take advantage of this. One, you can get the free audiobook, ebook, the course, and a physical copy of the book sent to you for free without paying shipping. If you go to mikeandy.com cpmcourse now if you're like, I don't wanna take a course. I just want the book shipped to me right away. You can go pay for the shipping at $6.50 for a $35 book. I'll cover everything else. Just go to mikeandys.com 100k Our goal is to get this book in the hands of 100,000 home service business owners.

Yeah.

And so you can be like, hey, you just paid $1200. Great, let's do $99 per month. Twelve hundred dollars. It'll save you $200 a month, even the payments out. And if you do that, you get this other thing for free. You're going to have this other thing for free, being so good and so juicy, which, you know, is like 90% margin and just takes your time and you just do it when you're there already. And that, that, that would assume we just want to do it around the softwash like I Would be really interested in creating another bundle around like, hey, we do your lights, we do your gutters, we do your softwash, we do your windows, we do everything. That would be interesting to me as well. And that's like your $99 package is like the very simple, hey, you just pay us 1400 bucks. Why would we make that $1200 a year? Just even out the payments and you get this thing for free. Second option, 199. But you get lights, you get all this other stuff. And that's the one where you start to make probably more margin on. But the thing is, the nice thing about having the first one, even if you got $1200 for a service that you get1400 first off, you get them for the second service. And in my opinion, like the whole objective is get them from one one time to just a second one. And then if you can do that, you just double at least their lifetime value. Yeah, like it's really the scheduling aspect. You're able to have way more schedule flexibility when you get the most annual thing because right now they all come barreling in in spring rush. And then you've got to like figure things out. When you, when they're on an annual subscription, you can just like, yep, this is going to be your date. And you'd actually just move all your subscription out of spring rush, thereby increasing your annual capacity.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you can put more money into one truck by 100%. Yeah.

So you might give them 20% off according against a one time visit, but you're able to move them outside the time when you're otherwise basically turning on lead, turning away leads.

Yeah. Has anyone. Do you know of anyone that's done this model in this space?

There's quite a few right off the top of my head. I'm talking to what's his name? Give me one second. I can actually find a name for you. I'll try to connect with a guy that's local that does this and they do a great job. But I think it would 100% work. It's all about how you train your upsell, like your technicians on that and how you incentivize them. But I would like. If the one fear that you have is like I'm putting a $1400 ticket down to $1200 and I'm losing my margin. I would think of it as one I'm locking in. There's, you know, doubling of lifetime value. But more importantly, you have scheduling flexibility, increasing the amount of revenue you can do per year, per truck. Like, I would. I would just be like, okay, these four months, I know I'm getting crazy amounts of leads. None of my subscriptions are going in there. I'm pushing them all off later in the year.

Yeah, it's kind of like the early bird Christmas light installs, like, if you install in September. Great.

Love it.

Yeah. I mean, and then, you know what's funny, Mike, Is like, I thought about. Well, you could just literally copy and paste just the Christmas light business. I mean, that's almost like its own separate thing. So part of the. What I was thinking about in terms of scaling and tell me if I'm crazy is like, we actually. We added a fourth truck this year. I'm sorry, a third truck this year just by renting one for, like, 2500 bucks. And then we sold, like, 70 grand into it. And then I just, like, turned it in. It was great. I put a ladder rack on. It was awesome. Like, this coming spring, this coming fall, the plan would be to go and drop a truck in Connecticut with. I have a friend over there that said he'd be willing to kind of manage, and he's a sales guy by trade, so I think he'd be able to do it, Drop, like, one or two trucks over there, test the market, and then when we go to move into Connecticut, we already have that book of business there. I mean, is that. Is that, like, a crazy way to try it or test it, or is that kind of, like, a waste of time? Would you just say, focus on Rhode Island?

I wouldn't say it's a waste of time. I would say I. I get some concern leaning on a system of, like, I have a friend, because, like, when you do the second, the third, and the fourth one, you won't have that. So duplicating it there or, like, proving the model there doesn't do you any good because, like, you have a friend in every market. And so I would do the harder work of, like, I've got to not lean on that system in order to be able to figure out the back end. Like, the hub needs to work on the back end without that being the case. So that when you do in second and third and fourth, you already have the playbook. You just. You just can copy and paste it.

Yeah. So this year, I guess my big. What I kind of want to take away from this call is, like, where should my focus be if neck? You know, if the goal is, like, 1.82 million, where do I need to Be like right now in order for me to get there and then scale into 3 million like in the next two years.

Yeah, I would say the most basically anything on your plate that's not sales needs to be delegated. You have the margin and as you get to that full time GM level you have to do that. A lot of times that's what people stall out on. One to 1.2 is there's too many admin and operational tasks on their plate. And so I would say solidify. It sounds like you have a really all star admin person. I would solidify their role. I would create a ramp for them so like you can retain them over the next five to 10 years. Explaining the direction of the business but like really emphasizing the importance of what the command center needs to look like, what they need to be able to do for training. Creating an lms, hiring admin staff underneath them and like they are. It's all them. And like that, that includes giving them like a budget for first development. So they might, they would go get coaching from people that have built like call centers or admin. Like there are people out there, LinkedIn, whatever or go to a conference is like they got to learn how to hire but you can't think about admin at all. And it sounds like you got someone that's like, just needs to have like the pay ramp and like a bit of a vision to go do that. And then operations, same thing. Right now I kind of have.

It's my guy does like ops and admin the sales and I'm like he's. We're losing things at this point because it's just too much.

Yeah. So like the delineation of those three roles is the most, is the most important now like if whether he's admin or operations like you'd have to figure that out and it honestly would come down to whoever you hire. If you hire a strong, strong admin person that's just like absolute A plus. He might be like hey, I'll move it ops. And then just like we need clarity around that. And I would have the conversation with him be like, hey, do you prefer one of these two roles? Because the one that you don't want I'm going to go higher for and if you're completely indifferent, I'm going to go hire somebody and it's going to be one of these and then we're going to some delineation here and then you're going to focus on sales. If you do that, you'll get to 1.5 to 2 million. Like if you just do that one thing, like just delineate the rules, find two all stars that you can lean on, you have the margin to pay them well and then give them a ramp. That's very much dependent on being able to make the hub work. Because that hub is going to be where you train people like your operations and it's going to be where you also do all the admin side so that you can copy this $1 million model elsewhere. But we've got to build this Hub to like 3 million just to make it worthwhile to keep that office I got you now.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You have to scale in order to do drop and do million dollar markets.

Because yeah, otherwise what happens is people like, I'm going to start copying pasting $1 million and now they have three shops doing a million bucks. But because they have an office just anchoring it all down with overhead, they don't make any money. I want that one location to be at 20 to 25% margin at 3 million. But it has a full office. It has a training center, like basically a room where you can train admin or sorry, train operational people, train GMs, etc. And then you just start going to new markets. Like, where's the new market? Can I get a really cheap lease in a good, like very centralized area? Find a great general manager. All right, great. You go to training and my ops guy is going to train you how to do it. And you do all that during your off season. Yeah. Right. So like this is going to be something you will probably be chomping at the bit to do this time next year and it might be the year after that you actually do it. But that is, you will bring people, your GM prospects to your. You train them up, you got admin coming in and that person is training, but it's all at the hub. And then the spokes is where you spend all your time on, which is like, I want to ramp this thing up. Bunch of marketing dollars. Ramp this thing up, hand it off to gm. Ramp it up, hand off to gm.

How do you go about. Because like right now we finished the year off like 170 grand in the bank cash. I've been taking a $70,000 salary just to like. And I have a rental property. So like that house was paying for a bunch of stuff. Like I, I'm fine. Like I'm a very. I try and stay pretty frugal during the summertime. Every once in a while I'M a boat captain by trade, so I'll go run a yacht for someone and I'll make like three. Three grand. I'll be like, okay, cool. I don't have to, you know, think about all the other ancillary bullshit, but I'm really trying to, like, this year focus fully and like, get all the distractions away. I bought that property a long time ago. So it doesn't. I mean that's things like runs on its own. But how do you get through that? Like, almost like that fear of like, all right, there's 170 grand in the bank. We have to allocate XYZ like, I just bought another truck. Because with three trucks we can get to that 1.5, 1.8 and maybe 2 million depending on where we are with gutter installs. How do you get through that? Like, because margins are now going to go down. Right. I hate that. Like that. That's a pit in my stomach, you know, Like, I'm happy with that 22 to 25% margin that we're at right now. And I don't necessarily like to hear that, but I know it's just the reality of it. So, like, how do you deal with that in terms of like when you're building. Well, what was copilot at homeworks and you know, for the longest time, like watching your content, you're like, we're not profitable. Right. Or going through those first like locations with Augusta. Like, what's your. What's your strategy? I guess.

Yeah, like, that's why if you look in. I think it's chapter six or ever the. In the book, it's. It starts with 90% of people just stop here, which is one location, 20 to 30% margin. Let's go. If you're going to hold your breath and go to the next level, that's where you're going to see compression. And that's where it does get scary. I think you're in a spot though, from a cash perspective where how I would rationalize this is you have cash in the bank to be able to justify hiring two solid people paying their entire salary for the entire year and being okay. And if you do that and you get two solid people consuming the right people, when you wake up in a year, you'll have a business that's twice as big the valuation of that. And yes, you will have. You'll be cash poor, but your net will have doubled and you have created the. The playbook to 10x the thing. And so the holding of Your breath from one to three is why we, most people won't do it. Although, like venture into 1.2 and then come back, like back to 1 is like, forget this. Like, I just don't want to be at 1512, 8% margin. But like, that's why if you just focus on one location getting a 3 million, I do think you can still be at 20% margin. It is that one year where you're going to have to go a bunch of overhead in the form of a salesperson, an operations person, and an admin person. Is the infrastructure required for then for Zach to be like the guy that you just go starts and starts locations, finds great general managers, pops them back to the hub, trains them up like that creation of the model is expensive. And so it just depends on like what size play. When I say, when I hear, you know, 10 million, 100 million, and like you're comparing yourself to these, these people are doing that size of thing. Like, I want to do that. That's what's going to be required. There's no way you're going to be like, this one location. We're going to do a million dollars and somehow we're going to make 10 million in profit. Like, it's, it's not going to happen, right? So there, there'll be a, there'll be a bit of a chasm there. And the next year, year and a half to two years as you build up the hub will be very boring for you because it'll be mostly just doing the same, more of the same, and then finding two to three really solid people. But if you do that and they come in and do what you're not even thinking of, which is what a great hire will do, that's what sets you up to, like, probably do, I think is probably your strength, which is going from zero to a million. And you just keep doing that one action over and over and over again. What people do too often they'll read the book and like, oh, I should just start doing it now. And then they, their, their margins go completely to zero because they don't have the hub being profitable once you start adding the admin and everything. So I like, I want you to be able to build that out and make that profitable and then start copying around that.

When you say hiring that admin, like, how much of that role is almost completely autonomous? You know, like, I have a tendency where if I hire someone, like, I almost kind of like, I train them up as best as I can. I always give people like a Good amount of leeway and be like, hey, make this role your own. And then I'm just like, that's done. You know, like I'll, I'm going to come and check in, but I'm not, I'm not going to be over you. And that's kind of. Sometimes it bit me in the ass, but sometimes most of the time it's worked out with an admin role. Like right now, Dan, who's my general manager, manager, that's just kind of the role. The word that we've been using to encapsulate his role is like he does a little bit of sales. He does all inbound, all the outbound, dispatching trucks, making sure collections are done, scheduling the guys. Like, he's got a lot on his plate. So right now, as we're sitting like January 5th, would you say go, go find that admin, train that person up and then delegate all of Dan's role off to him or her and then go hire that sales rep? Or would it be sales rep first and then admin?

So I always want to start from lowest leverage task up, right? So admin first, then operations and then sales. And so if I was talking, because what's funny is like you and him are kind of doing basically together building business, right? Like you're breaking. That's where I would just both sit down. Like, hey, we know that this is working, but we're hitting up against the fact that to your point, you said some things are starting to slip through the cracks. I think he's probably pretty frustrated by that. If he's a really great operator like that, there's nothing more frustrating than like little things slipping the cracks because you know that just simply delegation and like role definement. So if you just say, okay, we're going to sit down and we're right. Everything in admin, operations and sales that we both do and you just start categorizing it and then you simply say, we've got both got to choose one of these categories and then we're going to hire for the third one. And then he's going to be like, no, I really like working with the guys. I like training them. Great, your operations, that means everything. In admin, I'm going to go hire someone to get. And then you both come to this agreement that like, which of these three roles are going to let go of. I happen to believe that it is higher. It is easier to hire an all star admin person than all star operations person because it's simply because it's a higher leverage task. So if he's doing sales, operation admin, I feel like the, probably the, the most common path is you in sales, him in operations and then you go find an admin person. Because the admin person can just needs to have skills of admin. It's very cross industry. Like they just need office experience and they need to be like a high level executor. Like that's it. And then that way it's very clear in terms of like the things that they do that Dan does. Is it Dan?

Sorry, Dan.

Yeah, Dan does not need to do. And the things that he is going to eventually get off of his plate and you just be like, hey, it's going to take a three month ramp but eventually all these things will be off your plate. You can focus on the team and then by doing that you now have operations and admin off your plate. You go focus on selling. That's how you can scale it up.

And then at what point do you say okay, go hire a sales rep.

When you're going to start doing multiple locations.

Oh, so right. So like this year you would say, Zach, you're still doing all the sales.

I would say so yeah, yeah, yeah. Like you're at that size, you're not going to go get a salesperson yet. And because you've been sharing it with someone else, like I feel like there's going to be a whole bunch of juice to squeeze once you get in the role and just start thinking about sales. I think you could easily get to 2 to 3 million with that model of you sales. Great operation. They should be calling into him when they're sick. Everything should be handled operationally, training everything from him. You should hardly know anyone before they're hired. And then admin side, same thing. They should take every system you give them and just make it ten times better. You give them all very much incentives around when you do multiple locations. They should be pushing you towards that. But then you go like, hey, we've got to hit these operational and KPIs. When you hand admin off, for example, having the KPIs of every little thing that you and Dan agree on is the part that allows you to step away from the role. So when you say hey, answering phones. Okay, great. What does a good answering phones look like? Number of answered calls, what's the wait time? What percentage of of them have a booked appointment? Like figuring out those KPIs next to the role is a thing that then you can then step away with confidence and Axio focus on sales, and then down the road copying and pasting locations. It's the KPI part that you will probably have to flesh out a little bit because you and Dan have just been juggling it together and doing a great job.

Yeah. Yeah. I feel very blessed to have Dan. I mean, we wouldn't be like. I mean, we. We've been in business for less than two years. You know, I mean, technically, the LLC has been open for more, but less than two years, like million dollars in rev and then profitable at the end of that. I feel like is pretty. I feel good about it. I thought. I figured you were going to say, like, sales, but that's where my mind immediately goes. Like the next time, like hiring salesperson.

Yeah. Well, I think you're really good at sales. I think it's harder to find a really good salesperson than it is a really good admin person. And it sounds like operationally, Dan's solid. And so I think that unless you went to Dan, he's like, I just love sales. I love talking to people. I just want to do that. Okay. That's when you. You might adjust a little bit from what I said. He thinks. Yeah, I think the clarity. I think the thing that he's going to like, because he probably likes. I'm just guessing, he probably likes having a little variety. It sounds like he's pretty entrepreneurial. The thing is, he's extremely frustrated by the fact that things fall through the cracks simply because he has so many things on his plate. And so you just be like, hey, I'm giving you first dibs. I will adjust to whatever you want. And so which of these three roles. Now we've clearly defined three different roles do you want to fully exclusively focus on as we scale the company so you can just dominate this thing and I can create KPIs for every one of these things that we've talked about. Because anything with admin, you're going to do operations like efficiency, score, you know, number of completed on time, number of upsells, like, you're going to have all these things from operational perspective, you're going to. To be measuring as well. But I think he would like it. And if you bring him in the conversation early and just be like, hey, it's up to you, like, which of these three we're gonna get someone to. To fill the third role so we can all, like, dominate in our individual categories. Yeah.

Interesting. Okay. In your. In the book, you mentioned that you should. Or actually not. It was in the book. It Might have been in the book I Can't Wait on one of your podcast episodes. You're like, when you're in grow mode, which, correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like I'm in grow mode right now. Based the gm, which pseudo Dan off of percent of top line versus instead of being bottom line profit. So I built out his, I built out his compensation program and then I base it off of 1% of top line revenue with a base salary of 70,000 and then his ability to sell and get a 5% commission on anything that he sells. I mean, does that sound crazy or does that. Would you rather see it based off of, you know, profit?

Yeah, I, I don't think this location is in growth mode now. It's past a million. Like you were optimizing it. Also, he doesn't have full control of if he's not going to do sales, he doesn't have control of top line revenue. And so like that's where when we say GM, I'm saying someone who runs a 4 to 8 locate person location and does like what is happening now. Like I would say he's a GM now, but he's not going to be a GM if you start getting a 2, 3 million and you have an admin person and he's gonna have to choose one of these roles because like you're just never gonna be able to have where you, both of you are just juggling all three until 3 million like it's just not gonna work. I think he would recognize that. But what you want to be careful of is giving him the role of like you are operations, but you're getting revenue or money based on top line revenue. Well, now it's just based on how you sell, right? It's based on how you price. And so as soon as someone does not have full control like an actual gm, like what you just described is definitely what I would say. The past two years would be a great model for him because you've been growing really fast and it's like, you know, just pedal to the metal. Let's go. He's been involved in sales. Cool. That model, what you just described will likely work down the road when you copy and paste for the first year compensation model while you're in growth mode, you're buying trucks, you're doing a bunch of marketing, et cetera. Once you're past that though, you want them on distributions like distributable cash. So if I was you, I would probably look at Dan and even the person you Hire on the admin side, I would probably give them a piece of distributions. But then just say, hey, I know we're expanding quickly and so I'm going to put some incentives around us getting to one and three locations, like a second location and a third location. Interesting because then they have, they have to create the systems for an admin assistant. A operation like creating the curriculum to hire general managers would be Dan's role if he becomes the operations manager. Right. And so they should be incentivized on the multiple location thing the same way you are from a net worth perspective. But then they need that extra layer because you doing all these like infrastructure building is going to cost the main company a huge margin compression.

Right. So then how do they, I mean, how do you articulate that to someone where they're like, well, we're not going to be as profitable right now, so therefore I'm not going to get paid as much. Right. Or that I not read you right on that one.

You're fine. So I would, I would say I would give them a higher base than what you might be thinking now. And then I would give them. Their base would jump based upon when you have first our second location and a third location. Those would be base jumps. So that's like strategically long term, they just want to get there. Then I would give them a piece of the hub in terms of profit sharing. Call it profit sharing, distributable cash. I would give them a chunk of that. And ultimately I don't really care how much I give to them in terms of like a lot because I know it's going down the percentage. And I know that like my net worth is wrapped up in the multiple locations, not in having one big location. No one cares about that.

You're saying because that's the more sellable, having multiple locations.

Yeah. Like all your net worth is tied up. And can you do this 10 times? Not if you can make one location to go to 3 million.

Right.

And so, so you give them the base like directly. We know where we're going. We want to start copying and pasting the model that we have built in the first 24 months. We know we can do that over and over again. And we can use the GM model, which is finding more dance. Right. We can do that more often. Great. We know that will work when we're an hour away, two hours away, hour and a half away. Great. We're going to incentivize base pay for those top two people on getting to the second of the third location. But on the hub. On the hub, that main one that they can actually tangibly feel and you can pull up P. Ls. I don't know if you saw that video I made on Saturday about on target earnings. Like I would heavily rely on that. Yeah. So on. On Wednesday. Yeah, yeah. We kind of show how we do it with ours. I would highly recommend that for these two people. Because you have a PIL with good. Yes, exactly. Okay. Whether, whether you're giving one 8% or one of them 12 or whatever it is, you're going to show last year's numbers and be able to give a very good idea of what the hub is going to supposed to make.

How do you. Because one thing that I've been learning is, you know, leadership is like become a huge component of this and I like, I don't know if you know. Well, you're a gym guy, you know Sorenex, you ever heard of that before?

No.

Sorenex Thor next.

No.

Oh, you'd like them. Check them out. So Sorenex exercise equipment, they're all made in the United States and Lexington, South Carolina. And I got tied in with them because a buddy of mine is Brown, the Zack Brown Band. He's the COO for Zack Brown. So he invited me to this event and it's all outdoors and there's like shooting and guns and like tactical stuff and it's just fun. Right? But like the co founder of KIP folks, the co founder of Under Armour has been there. Like they. And it's all got like you're just sitting around a bonfire with these guys, you know. So I get there the first year, I'm like, what the hell am I doing here? And honestly I don't think if I went there I would have created downspout. I don't think that would have happened happened. So anyway, long story short, like I'm going to this event come the end of the month and you know, I guess the question is like Dan is a great gm, but he doesn't have that like wanting to get better, like personally better type of mentality. He's really good at what he does. He's excellent thinking through problems. But for me, I'm always so like, I create like I. That's why I booked the call with you.

Right.

Like I crave this kind of type of stuff in order for me to get better and it comes out on the back end. So when you have someone like that, like when do you know to I guess change that person's role or if that person continues to grow with you or like when do they start to kind of fall off?

Yeah. So two things. One, there is definitely a time when you outgrow people. I also think that there is a huge benefit to having people that don't need new things. They just are like happy doing exactly what you tell them. Give me the list, boss, I will knock this out. And you just confidently know it's taken off your plate. There's this notion that a lot of us buy into that. She's like, you need to have leadership and management in order to be able to move up inside the company. Want to be careful of that because there are individual contributors, individual contributors that are extremely valuable evidence of this. Recently how Meta has been paying billions of dollars for basically engineers, individual contributors. Not even managers, not leaders, just. You are incredible at doing the work. And so I think the thing to be careful of is always as you scale, just you, you basically incentivize people. Just keep managing other people. And that's what leads to bloat in terms of management layers is just the fact that it's like, oh, like if you manage other people, you get more money. So I would say that yes, you can like motivate them. Like Jocko's event would be really good for Dan. I feel like leadership training and tactics would be a good book for him kind of thing. But like there's also times where like they don't really, they don't want to change. They're like, hey, like I'm happy where I'm at and like I was execute. And that's where I think why I kind of pushed him in operations. Cause I kind of thought he would be like, whereas like sales, you need to be on the hunt. You're going, you're growing. But if you can just be like, hey, you might need to help him create the checklist, create the systems. But if he's a great executor and he's like, hey, I'll make the 1% optimizations, but you've got to give me the framework. Great, you can work with that. He just has to be in operations, he cannot be in sales.

Right?

Yeah, Right. So I think you can work with them that confines of someone's skillset. And then I also say that if you have five or 10 locations, there's a good chance you have a sit down with them. Like, hey, either A, I need you to step up or B, do you me to. Hi, you're going to help me hire your boss?

Yeah.

So someone that can like develop curriculums hire multiple GMs at the same time, travel out and go start their location. Like I need someone that, that's that level and if you don't want to that's fine. But that that's going to be required in probably 12 to 24 months as we've started to do multiple locations.

Right. Do you open up one location at a time or do multiple.

One per year. One per year. Start that as your cadence until you have a solid team. So I usually say from one to six when you get your first regional manager, you're gonna do one at a year, one per year. So that usually looks like you being there for three to four months, being very hands on, then slowly merging off the gm getting you're really focused on ramping up to where it's above break even, then handing off to them probably doing 50 to 60,000amonth in revenue. Them getting it to 80 to 90 to 100 over the next following eight months. But it's a slower growth curve. And then, and assuming too the reason why I like the one per year for the first six is you don't have a regional manager in place. And if someone goes down you're going to have to be go right back to square one which is finding a general manager scaling up. So I bake in there that you're going to have a GM churn per location, right. So like you're going to get someone up in two months, they don't work out, you're going to get someone else great. You're just going to have to stay there longer and be more hands on with that location.

Gotcha. I know we're kind of tight on time right now, but when it comes to. I guess the one concern that I have paper with pay for performance is people will have anybody know how much I make. How do you get over that hurdle?

P4P or open book management, you mean?

I'm sorry. So I guess like if it like Dan, right. I want to be like hey dude, here's where, here's where the profit's at, here's what we're doing. Like is that indicative of saying now you know what I make? Here's where we're going like does that, does that ruffle feathers? Does that make things awkward? Like what do you think about like how's. How have you overcome those types of situations?

I guess yeah, like I can guarantee you he already, he has a pretty good idea how much you're making and usually that number is higher than what it actually is because I'LL look for proof, like new trucks, etc. So when you. When you open up the books, you have to give him a piece of the piece. And so that's why I would rather you go after distributable cash. Because if he starts looking at the bottom line, when you show him a P and L, he's like, ooh, $250,000. That looks juicy. And you say, okay, well, yeah, you're going to be getting 10% of that as like, do you really think he wants that number to go down? No, he wants to go up. Right. And so you just got to give him a piece of the action. If you're doing good, you want a piece of the action. If you're doing bad, it's like the rallying cry, you know, middle of the halftime game show situation with the coach, pep talk. But, like, when you're doing good, you've got to give him a piece of the action. And so if you walked into him now and like, hey, we're going to figure out which of these three roles, we're going to sound like he can do operations. Let him come to that conclusion. And then, okay, great. I'm going to go find an admin person. By the way, your new comp model is going to be from a bonus perspective. You're going to get X amount of whatever's on the bottom line. You can see last year's. This is the piano. So on target earnings, if we do exactly as last year, here's what your pay would be and have a scaling spreadsheet. So if we grow, and this is our margin, you just have a few variables. Like the one on Saturday, the video will show you. You just got to have a few variables that change. And he could quickly do the math. Like, okay, if revenue goes to this, our margin goes to this. Okay, that's our distributable cash. Boom. I'll get 10% of that, whatever it might be. Once that's in place, then it's just a function of his base pay being tied to the direction of the company, which is when we do a second location, your base pay goes up also. The reason you do that is because he's gonna have to take more off your plate, and he's gonna be much more involved in the hub. And so you want him to have a piece of that action because you're gonna be outgoing.

Yeah. How do you determine what that distribution is?

You want it to be meaty. Right. Like, he's not going to wake up every day and give A discretionary effort over five grand. And so I'm just gonna like, let's say he's making 70 grand or 80 grand now. Like I'd be trying to get him to 100 grand with the distributions. And again, you can run the math pretty quickly and know like, you're like, well, what happens if, if we decrease. Decrease in margin? Well, then it's going to decrease in his pay. Like, so you need him and the other person that you get an admin, always thinking about the bottom line, like that's, that's all you need. So anything besides distributable cash gets very tough for you to go focus on other location because you need them guarding the hub for an operation and admin perspective. Like you'll get it in a year and a half, two years to where sales is pretty easy there. It's very much on autopilot. You've dialed in all the systems because you'll have full time on it. You'll get a lot of it online, a lot of it going through the office, et cetera. And so. So that will not be as difficult. It's the operations admin you need to unlock when you leave. And the only way to do that is distributed cash where you can share all the numbers. And they really have a vested interest in like the rent, the insurance, the fuel, every little thing.

Yeah. So open book management really is the best way to scale.

Yeah. And if you're like, I want to decrease, you could always tie your compensation up higher into wages and just like roll it all into wages and increase your pay. You could do that. Or you say, hey, you're probably underpaying yourself. Great, let's give yourself $120,000 salary that's now in wages and that's just all lumped in with the other 400,000. You could do that. I, I generally don't. I don't mind my team, my salary. But like, if you're like a little bit cautious, totally fine, just throw in the wages. No one will ask you a single thing about it. And then you can absolutely warrant the fact that you're worth 120,000 as the CEO.

Right. Yeah. Interesting. All right. I mean, I don't. Do you offer any other coaching?

Not really. Sorry. I do this mostly just for like, I know people like you. Like, you're like, hey, I can't do a Q and A and call in show. I need like some a little more time. That's really why I do it. I just don't even know how long I'LL be able to, honestly.

So if I developed like a. Is there anyone on your team that. If I developed, like, a comp plan, like, someone I could, like, pay to, like, have a look at it and, like, be like, hey, this looks good, or.

Yeah. Well, I usually recommend is, like, when you're at this point, like, I think you pretty much have the. The roadmap for 2026. What you need, like, finding the people, creating the comp model, getting the point where you get to that two to $3 million marker. You focusing on sales will do that just by itself. But to do focus on sales, you need the admin operations role. Like, that's the actual thing that gets you the next level is you focusing 100% of your time on sales. To do that, that you got to get these two solid people. If you do that next year, you're like, okay, I'm ready to copy and paste. Like, what's my next step? Just book another call. Then that's what I would say is, like, you just need marching orders for the next little bit. You sound like you're really good at executing. And so that's how coaching should be, is like, you just need to know, what do I do next? And then you go do it and you come back for more. Instead of like, yeah, what about this? And could you go get five other people, tell you to do something different? It's just like, what's the actual. Yeah, yeah. So it's just like. That's the part where it's like, execute on this and like, hey, if you wake up in a year and a half, you're like, I don't want to copy and paste. I'd rather just keep going bigger with this one location. Great. You have a $3 million business. We can make it happen. But if we get there and like, hey, like, Dan needs more. He's hungry for more now. And this administrative super. Great. How do I make advantage. Take advantage of, like, great, get you out of there, and let's go copy and paste. And I'll give you much more tactical around that part. Like, we kind of glanced over that part because that's still a little ways down the road. But just, just, just book a call then. That'd be fine.

Yeah. What about your course that you come out, like, the two day and then in Washington?

I think it would be helpful. A lot of what we talked about here is what we talk about. Would you gain something? Yeah, seeing the command center would be helpful. I've been pretty prescriptive with you, though. Like, in terms of, like, hey, this is the stuff you need to get done. Yeah, that. That's basically what I'm trying to get most people when they come here. And so would it be beneficial probably to some degree, even just seeing the team hearing from my. My people that do those tasks, But I think you probably got 95% of the good here.

Okay.

All right. Sweet. I don't know why my screen did my. My video freeze on you.

No, you're good. You're good.

Okay. Mine froze on my. On. What's up? Sorry.

Weird. No, man, this was awesome. Like, I. Super helpful. Like, I'm. I'm very. I'm a very coachable person. So as soon as someone's like, go do this, like, I can get far with that. And then I just. I need another, like, reset. If you had to, like, I don't know, leave me with anything in this journey, what would you. What would you say?

Yeah, like, long term, you know, kind of generally what you want. The challenging part is there's so many ways to get there. So instead of focusing on, like, that, I would just focus on the next 12 months. And, like, regardless of how you get to. Let's call it 10 million or whatever, down the road, you know, you'll have to find two solid people. It's like, that's. That is the constraint is like finding those two solid people with a great comp model for them and you focusing 100% of time on your sales. If you do that, you. The world will be your oyster in a year when the business is doing is twice the size and you have role clarity and you feel like you've actually nailed sales. Because that would be the determining part. The reason I need you to focus on sales is because that's the determining part of how quickly you can scale to a million at the locations in the future. Because operationally, an admin like. Like the. The blocking tackling, you know how to do that. Getting from zero to a million as fast as possible at those other locations is the bottleneck once you start. Like, because you could start doing two locations a year, three locations a year, all dependent on and hinging on how quickly can you ramp them. But that's like a different topic. And like, right now, it's like, get these two people, get role clarity. That role clarity is what's needed. Even if you, like, stopped at 3 million, you're like, I just want to make it profitable here. You still need those two people.

Right?

So I would just, like, just focus.

On that one constraint and Then in terms of like the model, would you just hinge more on the subscription stuff rather than just one offs?

I would look as a percentage of revenue. So I would be looking at, as the location matures, I want to move more and more of my revenue percentage towards the recurring stuff. Knowing that when you start a location, you might, might have 10 to 15% of revenue being recurring after three months, but that in year three and four, I want that number being 50, 60, like the higher the better because the higher that number, the less I have to do in marketing and the more, less volatile my schedule is. And that's ultimately what you can copy and paste and hand off to a GM is a less volatile schedule, revenue that's more steady and cash flow is steady. And so that's the objective. But like you create benchmarks for like year 1, 2, 3 and 4 of what percentage of revenue is from recurring. And so by you getting 100% of your time in sales, you're gonna start nailing what's the package one, what's the package to offer? What percentage can I convert if I, if I text them 60 days after, can I convert more? Like what's the follow up look like to my upsell? You'll nail all those things. So, but I, I'm pretty confident in saying that like you might have 10 to 20% the first year, 25 to 35% the second year. Your goal is to get that like 50 to 70% though of recurring revenue over the course of time. Because that is so easy to hand off to a gm. Scheduling is easier, makes the operation like training and hiring easier. That's a model that you can really replicate. Yeah.

And when it comes to the like the off season right now most of our season's spent with takedowns because we have to do takedowns, but gutters is kind of offered gutter cleaning, like the occasional washes. Because we live in an environment that's like not soup, it's, I mean it's cold, but it's not like, you know, it gets above 40 like we're fine and no other company is out is open this time of year. So we kind of have that advantage as well. Would you say offering another service like air duct cleaning is something we should do or. I just don't want to get too far out of the sphere and then all of a sudden start to like branch off and create a whole another brand. Because if you're offering air ducts cleaning with, in January, February, you have to offer for the rest of the Year.

Yeah, I don't think air ducts would be the move. It's going to follow a similar, like, seasonality curve. And honestly, the air ducts is the same thing in which, like, the whole objective would be to try to get them on a recurring service that then you can push the air ducts to a time you know you want it, but they don't think about it. Then, like, they think about it during the spring, too. And so you just increase your spring rush. If you add that service, I think it could get interesting where you add other stuff to your recurring package. So that way you can do it. Like, basically any service that you can do during your off season could be in the recurring package. Right. So, for example, you might offer air duct cleaning to. If they like, that might be the freebie. It's like, hey, if you sign up for this annual thing that you just paid fourteen hundred dollars for, pay night, 99 bucks a month, twelve hundred dollars. So you save a little bit of money. We do it every year. And by the way, when we come out, we're also gonna do your air ducts. Right? That starts to look interesting to me. Or you put all your air ducts during, like, the cold season when there's no snow on the ground. Like, we can still do this. That looks very interesting to me. I just wouldn't offer as an incoming service because it offers no value to get more leads when leads are already pouring in during that time of year.

Right. Now, on top of that, 90, 900 bucks a month, $99 a month. Would you also offer like a. A quarterly window subscription, a part of that, like, to keep the guys going on?

Yeah, I do like. Yeah, I would do like, the one that, like, I try to do like, the $99 package and like, you know, the pricing stuff, like either 149 or 199. And in the package, like Windows in there, I'd package other stuff in there. And then that way if someone does Windows, you have a package to sell them. If they do gutter cleanups, you have a package to sell them. Like you always are trying to get these people into this, like, full package, like full service packages. And whether that be like package one is really this annualization of revenue. Like, you're just trying to spread it out and you're trying to give them something, exchange for better cash flow. Package two is, I'm trying to double or triple their annual customer value.

Right, right.

By packaging other services in there. And then me knowing that I can put those services during my off season.

Season makes sense. Yeah. So, like, right now, would you say if we offered Christmas lights, like, we have a whole book of business, go to them, be like, hey, we can do a subscription. You're gonna save X amount of dollars. We already own the lights. So now starting from January, you know, February 1st, until basically it's 200 bucks a month. Like, would that be a good play to kind of kick off that subscription type model? That way you have some annual, like some revenue percent already attached to that 10% goal.

Yes. I think the packaging of the packages is so important. It needs to be where, like, you just know cold what they all include. It's very clear the value proposition between the three. And I think the level one is basically annualization of revenue. It is. You get one freebie for the fact that you commit to this on a monthly basis. We come back in 12 months, you get a little bit discount. Like, you know, that's a solid plan for you to be able to move the schedule accordingly. Package two is like, we add maybe one or two extra services. Package three needs to be the thing that is your price anchor, which is probably like a 399 per month package. Like, what can you do for four or five grand? Like, that's your price anchor. And you would offer that first. Like, hey, by the way, for 4.99, we do like Christmas light install. We will do your vents, we will do your gutters. We will do wash your house. We will check your route. Like, you just layer that bad boy on and then you downsell them into 199. And then like, everyone should be walking away with $99 a month afterwards because they just gave you 1400. And for some reason with. With housewatch, people think they need it every year. It's just great because you can just annualize it and make it look like a good deal.

Right? That's a really good idea. So I think, yeah, hiring those two people while moving Dan into his role, hiring the admin, prioritizing and packaging sales.

You'Ll do because you'll have sales. Like, you'll be 100% on sales. So I know you're smart enough. Like, website stuff. How do we start making that instant quote stuff? How do I have it when, like, what's look after a job is complete? How do I. How do I incentivize the technicians on the upsell? How do I track the upsell stuff? Like, you'll figure all that stuff out.

All right. I feel like I got my marching orders now, which is helpful. Dude, yeah.

Good stuff, man. Well, best of luck in 2026, man. I really appreciate you.

Yeah, thanks, Mike. Really appreciate you. The content's awesome, so keep it coming. I'll keep consuming, and then hopefully this time next year, I'll book another call, and we'll be like, all right, how do we open the first location?

Let's go. You're the man. You have a good one, brother.