How to Build a Business Empire and Become a BILLION DOLLAR company

Hey everyone, my name is Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care. We have over 80 locations around North America today. I'm talking about how you too can scale your business using multiple locations. So if you want to just get bigger and bigger and bigger in one location, that's great. But this video is for someone who wants to have many locations, maybe a chain. You want to have four or five locations, maybe you have a hundred, or maybe you want a franchise like we did, or maybe you want to use licensing. Regardless of how you want to scale and the method and the business model, today I'm talking about how and what you need to do to go from one location to over a thousand. And what you're going to be struggling with at every single stage of growth along the way. Now, the first one is the one that 95% of people struggle with. And it's just building one very successful location, one that does really well, very profitable and really making a profitable one location business. So one location, what are you going to need to make this happen? You're really going to need to focus on sales. That's going to be the thing that you need to make that one location super successful is the ability to sell. What? Whether you are selling landscaping and lawn care services, roofing, construction, or you're selling things online, if you're gonna have one location and you're gonna have a retail location selling those products and services, you're going to need to focus on one thing that's sales. How do I get marketing and ads and all that to generate more revenue and therefore then can go on to the next stage of growth, which is, hey, I wanna get my second location, I wanna keep growing, I wanna get up to 10 locations. Now at this stage again, you have to have some systems in place. Because as soon as you go from one location to stage number two where you have two plus locations, you immediately cannot be in every location at the same time. Therefore, it's required for you to have systems. Because you physically cannot be juggling all the balls at every location. You can either be at one or the other. It's binary. So therefore you're going to have systems to get to number two. And at this stage when you're going to have between two and 10 locations, all you nearly need here is a really good manager. This is someone who's going to be your number two. This is going to be your operations manager. This is going to be someone that's really good at managing people. You need a good manager at the stage for Myself, this was Liz, she's my operations manager now. She stayed with us. But you need someone like that that's nuts and bolts. Can manage people, hiring, firing, creating systems around the vision that you have for the business. If you're gonna get beyond two locations, no longer can you be at every single location doing everything. You need a good manager and that will get you to 10 locations. You don't need a lot of crazy software or anything super fancy. You can get to 10 locations just having good sales and a good manager. Now if you wanna 10 to 100 locations, this is where we're at. We're currently at 84, 85 locations. Now to get this to 100, you're gonna need infrastructure. And this is the part that we've been battling over the last 12 months as we were scaling out to 100, is building the infrastructure for that many locations. Cause you need backend support, you need people answering the phones and doing emails and billing. And then you're trying to train this entire backend support team. Massive amounts of infrastructure, lots of capital is required at this stage to go from 10 to 100 locations. And you're gonna have to scale everything. What worked at 2, 5, 10, even 20 locations is not gonna work at 80, 90, 100. It's a massive step up in infrastructure. Phone systems, websites, you need everything documented in training materials and documentation for the trainers to train the trainees. Like, massive amounts of hiring is gonna go on in order to support the infrastructure required to actually get the to 100 locations. Now, if you're gonna get past 100 locations and you're gonna scale up towards 1,000 locations, you need one thing, and that is an unfair advantage. This is something that separates you from everyone else in the competition. Everyone in your marketplace, everyone in your industry is what's the unfair advantage that you can do that no one else can do. This is gonna be something, for example, like with Augusta Lawn Care is we have command center, we, we have all the website done, we have all the marketing done, we do that all. So that way there's an unfair advantage for the franchisee to be able to scale their business up and not have all these hurdles. That's our unfair advantage now. And at the end of the day, you need an unfair advantage if you're gonna get past 100 locations. Because if you just have a good system in place, good infrastructure, good managers, really good at sales, you can get to 100 locations. But if you're gonna go past 100 locations and get towards 1000, you're going need something that is very. You basically can beat your competition. They can't compete with you because you have an unfair advantage by being part of your brand. Now, if you want to go past 1000 plus locations, and this is the goal for Augusta Lawn Care, and it's something that we have not done yet. Because right now we're really focusing on this unfair advantage part, right? We built out the infrastructure. As this year comes into play, we're really focusing on how do we create a moat, the unfair advantage around Augusta Long Care. And that's gonna be our focus because we've gotta go from where we're at now 100 locations all the way up to 1,000. It's gonna be a few several years of us building out that unfair advantage. But if you wanna go past 1,000 locations and really scale up your business, and there's definitely franchises that do this, there's also private independent restaurants and things that are owned by one person or a group of private equity. They're not owned publicly, they're not franchised, and they get over 1000 plus locations. In order for this to happen, you need a unrepeatable process, which means no one can actually duplicate what you've done. For example, subway has like 40,000 restaurants. No one will be able to compete with them on price when it comes to sub sandwiches because they have such a massive infrastructure. They have massive amounts of management and sales, and they have all this money being governed towards the fact that they're kick anyone out, buy them out. There's an unrepeatable process, whether it comes to price advantages, marketing advantages, or simply awareness that no one else is able to repeat. And if you have created something that has an unrepeatable process, meaning no one else can do it because you've gotten so big and you are the Goliath that will wipe out anyone else. If you get an unrepeatable process, no one else can duplicate it, regardless of them like, oh, that's a great idea, I'll just do it. They can't simply because you're so far ahead of them. If they tried, it'd be a lost effort, It'd be a waste of time. And the only way you can get past a thousand locations is literally, literally having a process that no one can duplicate. Because if they try, they're gonna waste so much money and time and you'll be so far ahead of them, they will not be able to repeat the process and follow you because you're so far ahead of the game. This is exactly the step by step that we're using in Augusta Lawn Care. But regardless if you're wanting to go one location or 10 locations or 15 locations, this is every stage. All five of these stages is what's required to go. Multiply location and you can look across the board. If you have smaller franchises or independent chains of restaurants, for example, a lot of them can get usually to the manager role. This infrastructure one is the hard one. Getting to 100 locations is typically we start to become profitable as a franchise or even having a chain of locations, because the massive amount of capital required to build out the infrastructure, that's the bottleneck we're hitting up against right now. And as you begin to grow, you've got to be very disciplined about what's the goal, why am I trying to get more locations? And these are the things I'm going to be facing and butting my head up against as I begin to grow the business. I hope that was helpful. My name is Mike Andes, the founder of Augusta Lawn Care, and I hope that something was said was helpful as you scale your business. Check out mikeandys.com for more information.