How to Build a Landscape Business in 2026 (FULL COURSE)

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn care. We did $54 million in revenue last year and today I'm actually going inside the studio and I'm going to be recording a long form video talking about the off season. I truly believe for every home service business, this is the Achilles heel of our industry and that is the fact that during the off season for three or four months out of the year, we lose money, our revenues drop off a cliff, leads drop off a cliff. And today I'm going to solve that once and for all. I'm going to give you five options, five different ways to solve the off season crisis for your business, regardless of what home service industry you're in. So stay tuned. This one's a be a long one. There's gonna be a PDF document, a workbook that you can work through with me as I'm doing the training. But I think it'll be super helpful. So without any further delay, let's head inside and knock this out.

Hey everyone, welcome to the workshop. I look forward to sharing this the next several hours of something I think is extremely important to the home service industry. Now, before we get started, on the screen you're going to see these two icons. Now the discussion icon assumes that you're able to take this workshop with someone else inside your company or even a local competitor or other home service business owner. I think that's really the benefit of doing this with two, three, four other people that you can pause the workshop whenever you see this icon and actually go ahead and discuss this actually role play and do the activities highly recommend this, whether it be your general manager, your, your spouse, other business owners, it'd be super beneficial whenever you see this icon on the slides, the discussion one to stop and actually do the activity with me. Now, the workbook is you're gonna see this icon. Also whenever you see this icon, you're going to be able to go to the PDF that's been attached to the course and be able to fill it out. Now you can print that, that PDF off. It's around 20, 22 pages. You can print it off and go through the workbook as I am going through the workshop. I. Or you can just download it, use the PDF and use any sort of editor like Preview on a Mac or any sort of Adobe product or PDF editor. You'll be able to type in it as well. I do recommend printing it off or having an iPad so you can draw on it and fill in the blanks and just make it your own. So let's go and get started. You're really going to get what you put into this workshop. And so when it comes to the discussion, when it comes to the workbook, if you're not going to participate, you probably won't get out as much as you could. If you actually paused and, and did the role playing exercise, you actually filled in the workbook. So I know it's easy to get distracted because you're obviously watching this on a screen, but I recommend turning those things off, just getting really, really focused and actively participating with the workbook and the participation around activities. Even if you're watching this by yourself, pause whenever you see the discussion and actually do the role play, actually create the script, actually present as if you're going to be selling this to a customer. So the reason that I believe in discussion, I believe in participation, I believe that the people that will get the most out of this workshop are the people dealing with others in the room is because this is really what the greatest performers do, the greatest athletes, the most successful people, they practice, they take notes, and they're actively putting things out on a workbook. They're comparing what they did in the past to what they're doing today to make sure they get optimal performance. So really, the workbook and the skills stack on top of each other. So I recommend if you're watching this in one go, in one solid day, like I'm just recording it, I recommend that you really just lock in. If you fall behind, go back. What's the nice part about having as a recorded course, go back 10, 15 minutes and redo a part if it doesn't make sense to you, but stick with me because it does build on top of each other. As we move through the workshop, we'll be required to take the early elementary steps of the workshop and use it later on. Now, again, the workbook is your roadmap. So I don't want you to leave this workshop having a whole bunch of information and not having actionable steps. So the workbook is really going to be your roadmap, your game plan once you finish this workshop to know exactly what to do inside of your business. So let's go ahead and get started. So the story really begins in February of 2024 in Las Vegas. I went out to acquisition.com and I met with Dr. Kashi, who's my coach, and then Alex Hormozi. So Dr. Kashi is also the editor for, for Alex Hormozi. All of his $100 million offer $100 million leads and his books. And he's just a fantastic human being. And I was able to talk with Alex about Augusta Lawn Care, which is the franchise that I started five years ago and we now have over 170 locations. So when I talked to Alex, I said like, look, I want to get to a thousand locations. I think we need to do that in order to be able to change the level of professionalism in the industry. What do I need to do? And ultimately say, hey, you got to look at the unit economics. In other words, how much is each location making in terms of profitability and revenue? And so he said, basically, get to $200,000 in annual profits and you're not going to have any problems selling locations. People will come to you in droves. In other words, in true hormozy fashion, ensure the owners make more money. So I asked myself, what problem must we solve so that $200,000 in annual profits occurs every single time, not sporadically, not one off best performing locations, but every single single time. And this led to a six week deep dive into spreadsheets and a whole bunch of reports. And I looked at the unit economics of Augusta Lawn Care, which is all the locations we have the green industry. So lawn care, landscaping, tree service, et cetera, as well as all home services. And I analyzed financial statements of over 250 home service businesses. Now what I noticed is that the revenue leads and profits drop for three to four months of the year. So I looked at the calendar year of 12 months. For any three or four month period there, almost every single home service business dropped in revenue, leads and profitability. Now what's crazy, if I remove just one calendar quarter from these 250, over 250 HomeService businesses that I was analyzing, if I move one calendar quarter or three month period from the business, the average profits increased by 72%. Now what I noticed when I analyzed all these financial statements is that the revenue leads and profit of all of these businesses dropped for three to four months every single year. So if I looked at 12 months for three or four months for almost every home service business, that this massive drop in revenue, leads and profit, if I remove just three months or one calendar quarter from all these businesses that I was analyzing, the average profit went up by 72% just by removing one calendar quarter. So let's look at one of the businesses. This is an actual business, I stripped out the name. And this is a lawn care and landscaping company and this is their lead count. So in Q1, 79 leads, Q2, 490 leads, Q3 and Q4. And you can see massive amounts of seasonality, a big shift in the amount of leads during the spring rush, which is very typical for the green industry and mowing lawns. Now, this is their revenue for each quarter of the year, $80,000 and 330,000, then 420,000. And again, you can kind of see that shift between there where the leads come in and then all the revenue. And because takes time for someone to get as a lead and then actually produce the work and then collecting the revenue. So that's why that shift in revenue kind of happens in the green industry. Now, if you look at the profit in Q1, they had a negative $60,000 profit, $50,000 in profit in Q2, 60,000 in Q3, and then it tapered off towards the end of the year with a $20,000 profit in Q4. Now let's look at a different business. This is a company that did Christmas lights, snow services and winter services. Q1, 10 leads, Q2, 5 leads, so hardly anything. They basically shut down Q340 leads and Q4 because most of their revenue is from Christmas lights. 170 leads in Q4. Same thing happened with revenue. 70,000, 30,000, 90,000. Shoots up way up to $390,000 in revenue for Q4. Now, if you look at the profit for each quarter, $10,000 in profit, negative $50,000 in profit. When they hardly had any leads, revenues are very low. $30,000 in profit and then $90,000 for each quarter. Now let's look at the lawn care business. This one did $1.1 million in revenue. And their off season would be January, February and March for those three months in Q1, then negative $60,000 in profit. Now, what I want to do is take the worst profit quarter, which in this case is the first quarter, and replace it with the median or the middle of the three other quarters. To determine the median, we're looking at the three other quarters. We have 20,000, 50,000 and 60,000. If I were to stack rank from smallest to greatest, I'm going to take the middle one. So not the best quarter, not the worst one, but the middle, the median. Think about median as like the median in a road of a highway. It's in the middle of the road. So I'm going to take 50,000, that's the median and replace the what was used to be our worst quarter, which in this case is Q1, with that number. What happens? Well, if we take $50,000 in profit as our median quarter. And we also do that same number in Q1. Instead of negative 600, negative $60,000, our profit went from $70,000 for the year to 180,000. So again, our whole objective is here. How do we remove the worst quarter now in April to June? That's to consider their off season for the light and snow business, because again, they're mostly busy during the fourth quarter and then it slows down dramatically during the spring rush. So they do $580,000 in revenue, but their profit over the course of the year, as we saw dramatically dives and has negative cash flow for the second quarter. Now, if I replace that with the median of the three other quarters, this is what we come up with. We have ten thousand, thirty thousand and fifty thousand dollars in profit for the three three other quarters of the year. I'm going to the median or the middle one, which in this case is 30,000, and replace the negative $50,000 that we have in Q2. Again, you can see here, we doubled the profit from $80,000 a year to $160,000 in profit by simply taking the median of the three other quarters and replacing the worst quarter of the year in terms of profitability. Now, I call this Q4 collapse. This is when revenue and leads drop for one calendar quarter. And now it doesn't have to be just the Q4 because some different seasons of different industries change. And as we saw with the Christmas lights is actually their Q2 that was the worst quarter of the year. So any quarter of the calendar year is what I call Q4 collapse. And this absolutely kills the profit margin. Now remember, whenever you see that little sign on the slides for your workbook, go to that page and start filling in the workbook. So I want you to go ahead and fill in the last quarterly numbers for revenue, lead count, and profit. So look at last year, and for Q1, 2, 3 and 4, go ahead and pause the workshop and fill in how much revenue you made. So top line revenue, how many leads came in? So how many estimates did you send out as well as what was the profit on your bottom line of your P and L? What was the bottom line profit for each quarter? Then go ahead and total those up for the entire year. Now what I want you to do is take out the worst profit quarter and replace it with the median of the three other quarters, just like we did in the example for the Christmas lights company, as well as the snow company, as well as the mowing company. So now the Question is, well, what would your projected annual profit be if you were just to take out Q4 collapse, the worst quarter that you have in terms of profitability, and replace it with the median of the other three? And this is where again, the discussion tab I want you to share with other people. Hey, if we were to solve this one problem, if we were to solve Q4 collapse, what would it do for our profitability on an annual basis? Now, I believe there's a virus that is killing home service businesses and I call it seasonitis. Seasonitis is the symptoms that come with seasonitis. This disease that's killing small businesses is that revenue drops for 50% or more for any month of the year. So I look at my very best month, let's just call it $100,000 in revenue, and then I look at my any other month of the year that's going to go below 50% or $50,000 in monthly revenue. I have seasonitis. The business contracts this disease. The other way to be able to contract seasonitis is if there's negative cash flow. So negative profit for any one month of the year, if this happens at all, where any one month of the year we go into negative profit or, or we go less than 50% of revenue compared to the best month of the year. We've now contracted seasonitis. Now, in the home service industry, we have come to accept that our revenue and our lead flow will be seasonal. We just kind of accept it and we just assume it's part of being in the home service industry. But many home service businesses take until summer just to break Even because of Q4 collapse and the leads dropping off and revenue dropping off. It takes all the way through Q1, they're now negative cash flow. Then they come to the spring rush and, and many times till June, July, August, until they actually break even and start making a profit. Now what I want you to do on page three is enter the revenue and the profit that you had for each month of last year. So go through your P and L, look at the monthly revenue and profit for every single month. And I want you to do is circle the month that you get past break even. Because for a lot of home service businesses after they go through Q4 collapse, it can take 4, 5, 6, 7 months of the year before they even see their first dollar of profit. So on the, on page 3, you see January, February, each and every month draw a line that's horizontal down the middle. Do your revenue and then your profit below it. Do that for every single month and then we're going to circle the month where, you know, you actually get above zero. So if you have January, February, March, April, May, you're profitable here, but it comes actually back to zero. Many businesses in home services take till June or July. Circle the month, you get profitable, and let's move forward. Now, based upon this, I realized that this is what makes home services a lousy industry. I actually agree with this assessment. Even though we have over 170 locations at Augusta. I deal with lots of home service businesses and I'm very bullish on the industry as a whole. The reason that the vast majority of home service businesses are unprofitable is because of Q4 collapse. Now, recently I went to a home service conference. They were talking about all sorts of really cool ways to improve your business. And I really believe that marketing skills are important, and that's what they talked about. Sales and hiring skills, very important. We'll learn how to get applicants and then interview them. Leadership skills, very important to be able to lead a team and make sure that they're growing and have managers in place, et cetera. But is it possible that we are focusing on the wrong thing? Those things are very important in your business. But is there something that's bigger that we are avoiding and and not dealing with that's actually the root of many problems inside of our business? We neglect the most obvious gaping hole in our business model, which is Q4 collapse. Now, why do we do this? Q4 collapse is the important problem to solve, but yet we replace it every single day with urgent tasks. A customer calls in, they're super mad, someone's leaving, a bad online review, a customer's threatened not to pay, a flat tire on the trucks, a a piece of equipment goes down, one of your employees doesn't show up to work constantly, that is filling up 90, 95, 98, 99% of our day is with these urgent tasks that pop up, these fires that are happening. But because of that, those take our time instead of focus on the important problem that if we were to solve, that would fix many other issues inside the business. Now, I want you to go to page four and figure out how much more money do you make if you just solve Q4 collapse. Now, to come up with a number, we're going to take the projected annual profit and subtract out last year's profit. And you're coming up with, I call the jackpot. This is essentially the number that if we were to solve Q4 collapse and we were able to take the median of the other 3/4 and replace that instead of Q4 collapse those numbers in terms of the profitability, this is the jackpot that we're talking about today. And if we were to solve Q4 collapse, this is the amount of money that would get unlocked. So on page four, take your projected profit from two pages before minus out your last year's profit. And that's going to come up with how much will solving Q4 collapse actually make you in dollars and cents? Now what percent? We want to figure out what percentage this move your profit margin. On average, I saw this 72% increase when I analyzed 250 plus home service businesses. But in your business, if you take projected profit and you subtract out your last year's profit and, and then divide that by last year's profit, you're going to come with what percentage increase are you going to get? I see many times when people solve Q4 collapse, their profit margin go at 50, 60, 80, 100/% simply by solving this problem. Now I want to make it tangible. We can talk about dollars and cents, but ultimately money is paper and it burns. Let's figure out what's it actually going to do tangibly for your business, for you and for your family. Let's just take an example of a car. If you leased a car, it's $100,000 in value, it's usually going to cost you about $1,400 per month with all your expenses included, including insurance, the lease payment, etc. And around $17,000 per year. So if your jackpot is greater than $17,000 per year, you could afford this if you just solve Q4 collapse. Now if vacationing, spending time with your family is important to you for a family of four, and if you went on a cruise, if you went to Disney World, if you went to like out of state travel, so not international, but inside the country, for about $8,000, you could do an annual trip with your family. Now if you're important to you that you send your kids to college, that if you pay for the tuition, they do more of a white collar job instead of blue collar, you know, the average tuition for A student is $10,500 per year for an in state university. So if you have a couple kids, this could be 20, $30,000 that, that you need to be able to make every year to be able to afford this tuition. Now if buying a house, if that's really important to you, we can take our jackpot. And if we made more than $60,000 per year by solving Q4 collapse, we'd actually be able to afford the average $800,000 house once we include the mortgage, taxes and insurance. Because on average, you're paying around $5,000 per month for that in the United States. Now, if you're like, well, I don't really care what material possession, I don't need a car, I don't need to travel. I. I don't want to go to school. Don't want to get a house. Great. You want to spend time with your family, you want to spend time with your spouse, maybe you're trying to work on your relationship. Well, let's take this for example. If we have a weekly house cleaning, grocery delivery, a personal chef, that'll help you with meal prep and laundry for a family of four, it's going to cost you around $2,000 per month. All right, that's $25,000 per year. And that sounds like a lot. But again, if you're not optimizing for a house, not optimizing for material possessions like a car, but you just trying to save time, if you did this, this would then unlock between 42 and 84 hours per month. That's two hours every working evening, as well as an extra date night with an additional two hours every single week. So if you're really just trying to spend more time with family by solving Q4 collapse and unlocking $25,000 extra per year, you're able to spend this type of quality time with your family because you can now afford to delegate and hire out other simple household chores. So on page four, I want you to write down, this is the golden ticket. What would solving Q4 collapse do for you, your business, and for your family? I don't want it to be vague. I want to be very specific. Don't just like, I want to travel. Where do you want to travel? Who's going with you on the trip? Are you flying first class? What are you doing on the trip? Make this as tangible as possible. If you're buying a certain vehicle, what type of car are you going to buy? When are you going to buy it? This is the golden ticket. If we solved Q4 collapse, what could we afford for our family, our business, and for ourselves in our lifestyle? Now, the objective of today's workshop is to recognize seasonitis will make you poor and then fix it once and for all. How we're going to do that is we're going to create five custom options for fixing Q4 collapse in your business. Then we're going to make a projection and Create a game plan for every single option. So for all five cures to Q4 collapse, we're going to create a plan for your business and see which one is the best. You will leave the workshop with one to two cures for seasonitis to take action and solve it once and for all in your business. So back to going to Las Vegas and visiting Alex Hormozi. What did I do after that? After realizing the real problem with seasonitis and Q4 collapse, I spent eight months creating a plan to cure seasonitis for Augusta Lawn care with over 170 locations. We call it Augusta Nation. And it's going to honestly take me nearly 24 months to complete this rollout. And I'm going to share some examples of other owners that have solved Q4 collapse, but it's taken two, three years. It takes several seasons to actually get your off season to be able to replace Q4 with the median of the three other quarters and actually solve this problem. Now, today I'm going to share that plan with you and we're going to create a custom plan for your business. So let's first off, define exactly when your business is sick with seasonitis. Because remember, seasonitis and being sick is when revenue drops by more than 50% for any month of the year or you have negative cash flow for any month of the year. So what you do is go to page three where we put our revenue and we put our profits in. And I want to X out any month where you have seasonitis, any month where you are sick, where again, revenue is less than 50% of your best month or your profit goes negative. If that happens at any point in these months, I'm going to X off that month and that is when the business is sick. Now there are five ways to cure seasonitis. Today as we go through the workshop, the goal is that no month revenue can be less than 50% of your best month. Now you're going to, you might have to mix and match a couple of these cures because one cure might not fix all the months and make sure that you're not sick with seasonitis for every single month of the year. So we're going to choose maybe one or mix and match to pair them together. But the goal is that no month is less than 50% of your best month's revenue and that we never have negative cash flow or negative profit for any month of the year. Now cure one is lockdown mode. Lockdown mode is really going to be good for someone who wants to take a long Vacation time off, distraction fee. You're basically shutting down the business for that Q4 collapse period. Now who this might serve, you run the business and another seasonal job like a teacher or firefighter where you might have a few months where you can take a few months off. You have paid off all your trucks and equipment and the business is debt free. This is again who might use the lockdown shutdown mode. You have year round level billing contract with all your customers. If these are. If you check off all these boxes, lockdown will probably serve you well. Otherwise this might not be the perfect solution for you. So to determine first off for tier one, we need to figure out the fixed expenses. Because fixed expenses are the enemy of cure number one. Because if you have a bunch of fixed expenses, you will not be able to do use cure one to solve seasonitis. So here's a list of all different fixed expenses in your business. Rent, lease, software, auto and liability insurance. These are things that are not going to go down or up based upon your revenue if next month you drop revenue by 50%, your lease payments staying the same, your rent, your shop space, it's staying the same. You aren't going to get any less in terms of the cost of your insurance if your revenue just dropped next month. So think of fixed expenses as they are not tied to how much revenue you do. They're going to come and they're going to be the same every single month regardless of how much revenue you bring in. So what I want you to do in page five is figure out what is your total monthly fixed expense. What is the total amount that you would spend next month if you didn't have any work but you had to pay your loan payments. You're going to have to pay for licensing. You're going to have to pay for anyone that you have on payroll that is salaried and gets paid regardless of how much work is getting done out in the field. This is where you can list these all off, list them all off inside your workbook and then come up with a total amount monthly fixed expense for your business. The reason it's important to know this is that lockdown mode gets harder the higher your fixed expenses are. Lockdown mode is actually impossible if your fixed expenses for Q4 collapse are greater than the profits in the rest of the year. So Q1 through Q3. Remember, Q4 might not be the actual fourth quarter of the year. It is simply the three or four months of the year that your revenues drop, your profits drop and your leads drop. So let's say, for example, from April to December, you're making $100,000 in profit. Now, we're going to consider cure number one for lockdown mode. Now, monthly fixed expenses are $40,000. So you have quite a bit of debt leasing expensive rent for your facilities. And your off season is January, February and March or Q1. Now, this will not work. The reason for that, you can see on page six, is that the fixed monthly expenses, if we multiply that by the three months where we're going to shut down, we're going to lock down the business, that's $120,000, but the profits we make for the other three quarters is just 100,000. And so this literally would not make sense. We would not make enough money. We'd be negative cash for the entire year. And so lockdown mode will not work. Now, I want to use this as an exercise. Now, I will never do this motion that you see on the screen, but it will make me stronger. And so throughout the workbook, I'm going to ask you to do certain activities or, or role playing simply to be able to do the exercise, even though I don't expect you to ever actually do it in real life. Flexing that muscle, doing the exercise is going to make you much stronger. Now, what I want you to do is hand your list of fixed expenses to someone you don't know, ideally, or a business owner that you're doing the workshop with, or your general manager, or even your spouse, and let that partner scrutinize your fixed expenses. Now, don't take pride, just get really curious. And I want the question that you ask your partner. If you were forced to cut fixed expenses in half, where would you cut first? Again, I know you're not going to cut your fixed expenses in half. This is an exercise I want you to be able to think about. If I had to, if there was a gun to my head, where would I be cutting these fixed expenses first? Because by reducing my fixed expenses, I'm able to make lockdown mode a possibility even if I don't use this. This is again an exercise. All right, so which now in your workbook, I want you to write down, which one fixed expense will be your focus to reduce next year? By how much and by when? So we make this very tangible. Which of your fixed expenses do you think you can reduce? By how much? Is it 50%, is it 20%, is it 30%? And by when? Many times I see this being paying off debt, because many times fixed expenses, if you've been growing Fast. And getting a bunch of truck payments and equipment payments and loans from the bank and credit cards, paying that off as many times. The fastest way to be able to reduce your fixed expenses because you pay off the debt and you don't have those payments anymore. All right, so we talked about fixed expenses, but now let's address variable expenses when entering lockdown mode. Variable expenses again are the cost and expenses in the business that change based upon when revenue goes up and down. Now, be very careful for the next, like five to 10 minutes. There's a lot of numbers coming your way. This is the most intense part of the workshop when it comes to knowing your numbers and a lot of math. So if you don't know your numbers, at least guess, put something down in the workbook and move forward. Having a number to work with will be helpful just to get the skill that even down the road, as you know your numbers, you can come back and fill them in later. But pause the workshop if needs be because you're going to need a few minutes on some of these to figure out your numbers. Look at your profit and loss statements and actually get an accurate number. But please guesstimate. If needed, just throw a number in that you think might be approximately correct. Now, major variable costs. When it comes to home services, your cost of goods sold or your cogs is the major variable expense, the major variable cost to the business. Now, when it comes to cogs and home services, we're typically looking at three different things. Materials, direct labor, and subcontractors. These are going to change dramatically based upon how much revenue you do. If next month I double the revenue for my lawn care business, there's a very good chance I would have to get more materials, I would have to get more direct labor or subcontract more workout. I'm not going to be able to call that a fixed cost. It's going to increase as I increase my revenue. Now, if I look at a chocolate bar, now, the ingredients or the materials that go into this chocolate bar, cocoa, sugar, milk, a wrapper, cardboard boxes. This is the materials or the ingredients that go into building this chocolate bar. But also I need direct labor that is actually going to package it, mix and create all these ingredients and put them together, that would be the direct labor. And in this case, building this chocolate bar, the cogs, the cost of goods sold include all of these ingredients and materials as well as the direct labor of the manufacturing process, the packaging and transportation. Now, cost of goods sold in home services looks like this. We got lumber, we got Bricks, we got plants. And then we have employees and we have subcontractors. So, so we have materials, direct labor, W2 employees and then subcontractors. Now what I want you to do on page six is add up your cogs, your cost of goods sold. That's your material cost, your direct labor. These are people out in the field doing the work. This does not include your office, does not include your salespeople. This does not include you as the owner. If you are not working out in the field producing revenue for the business as well as any expenses. In terms of subcontractors, if you put those dollar amounts from your last year's P and L, you're going to get your total last year's cogs cost of goods sold as a dollar amount. So again, revenue minus your cogs is going to give you your gross profit. So if you take your total revenue for last year and you subtract out how much material you spent on, how much you spent on direct labor, people out in the field doing the work, and subcontractors, you're going to come with your gross profit. Now if you take your gross profit and divide it again by your revenue, it's going to come with your gross profit margin. For most home services, this is somewhere between 40 and 65 or 70% in your gross profit margin. The big reason for that is because a lot of times we're spending between 20 and 40% of revenue on the cog or the direct cost of direct labor, people actually on the field doing the work. Now, we've already calculated our monthly fixed expenses. I want you to divide that by your gross profit margin. And this is going to come up with our monthly break even revenue. How much revenue do we need to produce every single month just to break even and be able to pay off our fixed expenses? So when the leases and the payments are due on your credit cards and the trucks, all these things that are not going to change, I need to know how much revenue I need to produce just to pay those off. And that's what this number is going to do. If you look on page number six, you're going to see this calculation and that that total last year's monthly fixed expenses, that's calculated on the last page. So take that number, divide it by last year's gross profit margin, and that's going to give your monthly break even amount of revenue you need to produce. So break even revenue, very important. Why is this important? Because this prevents seasonitis from happening where you have negative cash flow. You have Negative profits. If you, as long as you could hit this monthly break even approximately, you're going to not have seasonitis on that one aspect. You might have revenue gyrations, but you're not going to lose money if you can make more than this per month in revenue. Now, if there are months that you make less revenue than what we just calculated, you will lose money and the business contracts seasonitis. All right, let's move forward again. This is a little bit of math. Hang with me. I want you to take that dollars that you have to generate in monthly break even revenue. I want you to subtract out approximately. You're going to have to guess here what your material markup was. So you might have had $100,000 of material cost, but you then charged $150,000 to the customer. That would be an additional $50,000 you made as material markup. Now you also have other fees, estimate fees, dump fees, any sort of fees, any sort of revenue that you can generate outside of the actual labor. I'm trying to take that out right now because what I'm trying to get to is my break even labor revenue. And how much labor revenue do I need to produce every single month to break even again? Page seven will walk you through this exact calculation. But we're trying to come up with is how much labor revenue do I need to generate every month if I take out all of my material markup, other fees that I'm charging the customer. So if I take the break even labor revenue, and we now divide that by your average man hour rate, the amount that you're charging per hour per employee, this is going to come up with how many monthly labor hours you need to be able to sell to break even. Now let's look at the math here. I usually use 120 hours. Why that's 30 times 4. Or that's 30 budget hours worth of work that I can charge the customer for out of a 40 hour work week. It's about a 75% efficiency score. If I take 30 divided by 40, that's 30 budgeted hours. It's completed work that I can bill for, divided by 40 clocked hours. I average that out. That's very. Just a good rule of thumb, but if you know that, significantly higher and you're able to get 140, 150 budget hours of work completed every single month by each employee. Fantastic. But for the sake of the example, for the sake of Math, let's use 120. This is now going to give you your full time Employees that you need just to break even. How many full time employees do I need working just to be able to break even? Why is this important? I know how many employees should I be at least having to keep busy during the off season to be able to not have a negative cash flow month again? Page seven will walk you through all these things. On that gray text you're going to write right over the top of it, fill in your exact numbers. Because we're trying to get how many employees do we need to break even? And this might be 2.4, might be 3.6. So it's not going to be a whole number, but. But ultimately we have approximately know how many employees we need to have to be able to break even because of our fixed expenses during the off season. Now, I believe that seasonal work and for the vast majority of home services, we have seasonal work demands. Seasonal labor. This is the number one concern when it comes to lockdown mode is what's going to happen to my team? I'm not going to have enough work. Do I lay them all off? Do I have to cut people? What happens? Because if I'm actually going to shut down for a few months, what happens to my team? Here's a few things that you can do. First off, you can advertise short term positions. So some people actually really only want to work two, three, four month stints. And to us as business owners, we think, oh, everyone wants full time. That's not true. Someone might have a life event in five, six months they're going to move out of town and they just need a job short term. They need work during just the spring rush, just during your eight, nine months when you're really busy. Now, the H2B program in the United States allows people to be able to be hired from out of the country and go through an immigration process. That's a short term visa. However, taking that concept, can we not hire outside the country, but can we hire from outside of your city or your county? You might live in a place that has a higher income, higher cost of living. Is it possible that you're able to hire in your market only for $25 an hour, but if you went an hour and a half, two hours away, people will be very happy to work for $18 an hour. Is it possible to actually run ads there and then move them for short term, 3, 4, 5, 6 months during your busy season? So that way you can match seasonal demand with the supply of the labor? So the goal here is to be able to lay off to Meet full time employee demand. We know how many full time employees we need to just break even. We're going to need to lay off to that level if we're entering lockdown mode because we want to at least break even and hit that number of full time employees that we need just to do that. However, we will need to lay off our team to get there. Now you're well, what if no one wants to come back to work after the layoff? Because it's super important to have experienced team members that are. It's extremely important to have them when you bring on new team members so you can train them up. And when spring rush starts, I need experienced team members on the crew. So the labor strategy I use for the lockdown mode for cure one is to have a comeback bonus. The ability to be able to pay our employees $2,000 if they just return back to work after being laid off for the spring rush. And you're like, well, I can't afford to return to work once. $2,000. That's insane. Well, let's calculate the cost of actually replacing an employee. First off, let's talk about the cost to find a new employee. If you take a scheduled interview, it might take you 30 minutes. Half the people even show up to the interview. Maybe one third of the people you interview, you actually give them a job offer. Maybe half of the people that you give a drop off offer to actually accept. If that's the case, you've spent six hours finding that new hire. And if your time is worth $120 per hour, which again, if you're charging 80 or 70 per hour for the fuel workers, your time as the owner is significantly more. That's $720. But that's just to find the new employee. What about actually getting them to find and hire and train them up before we get into the training part and actually figure out the real cost of a new employee, let's look at just the cost to find them and get them on board, get them hired. So fill up this form of exactly what I just did. Your scheduled interview time. All right. Does it take you an hour? 0.5 hours. Then as you move through this, use decimals. So how many show up to the interview? 0.5. That's like half, you know, 0.75. That'd be 75% of people show up once you've offered them interview, go through this. How many of them get a job offer? Well, about, you know, half of the people that I interview, I'll give them off okay, 0.5. Run this math, divide that by those numbers, and all of a sudden you'll come out. How many number of hours does it take? Multiply by how much your time is worth, and you'll come up with the actual cost to find and just hire an employee. Now let's look at the cost of training a new employee, because again, we're comparing this to just paying someone to come back, a return to work bonus. What's the actual cost of training a new employee if they don't come back? First off, let's assume that takes 60 hours of training. Most home service businesses I see take a lot longer. So we're being conservative here. 60 hours is like literally a week and a half as it's in like two weeks. So first off, what I want to do is assume that like half the efficiency for the newbie, which means they're not even. They're about half as efficient as they will be once they're fully trained. Also keep in mind they're going to need a trainer, and that in trainer, the alternative to them training is to actually do more work and produce more revenue. So let's just reduce their efficiency by again, half, for example, and then honestly, like, what percentage of people actually make it for a full month for your frontline team members, half maybe. Well now all of a sudden, if this is all true, the amount of hours it's spent between the trainer, the trainee, and the fact that a lot of people don't even last the first full month, it's been 120 hours per trained team member. That makes it through the first full month. Now, if you're charging the customer $80 per hour, now all of a sudden the opportunity cost, the amount of time and energy pours in this new employee to get them trained up, $9,600. And if I add that to how much it costs to find them, interview them, get them to the job offer stage, et cetera, I'm looking at $10,320, $2,000 for a comeback bonus to get them to come back after leaning light off for three, four or five months. Not a bad deal. I want you to actually figure this number out. What's it cost you to train a new employee? Go through the exact same math. Okay, how many hours of training, how efficient are they? Do these as decimals. 0.75, 0.5 compared to what they typically should be doing if they are fully trained up. And same thing when it comes to your trainer. Well, it slows them down by about half. Okay. Great. Put 0.5. You'll now come up with how many hours and then how many dollars and cents it's actually costing you based upon your hourly rate that you're charging the customer. So what does it cost you to replace an employee again in your workbook on page nine and then compare that to what is your return to work bonus going to be? I would rather give my employees $2,000 to come back and then I'm able to not have to replace them with a $10,000 training, retraining, people, dropping out, interview process. It costs the money, it costs time. And this is what doesn't show up on a profit and loss statement. If the cost of churn of employees turning out and not coming back to you after the off season, it doesn't show up on a P and L like line item. Off season churn doesn't show up. But what it is doing is making your crew less efficient. It is taking your time during spring rush to hire and train new employees. And the constant turn at that level is keeping your business small. All right, let's take a right turn. We've talked about all these aspects of fixed expenses, your variable expenses, the amount that is costing you to retrain employees after an off season. Let's take a right hand turn. Continue to talk about lockdown mode. First off, the revenue you should grow to for the most profitable business is a math problem. There is no guessing. Now this is what we call capacity based growth. There are three capacities. Labor capacity, asset capacity and personal capacity. Now the labor capacity of your business, how much should I grow the revenue of the business to to be most profitable is determined by how much revenue can I produce with my employees without them going into overtime, without them working more than 40 hours a week. How much revenue can I produce with my current employees? I also have an asset capacity. How much revenue can I produce with the trucks and equipment that I currently have? And then you have personal capacity. How much revenue can I produce without losing my marbles, without my physically breaking down, my family breaking down, spiritually breaking down, just being able to keep my head in the game. What's my personal capacity? How big can I build a business before I lose my marbles? Now let's look for. Let's look first at the labor capacity on page nine. You can calculate this. Take the monthly budget hours per employee. And again we assume 120 is a pretty good kind of range. And that assumes 30 budget hours per 40 hour of clocked work week that someone would put in. Now if I Take that and I multiply by hourly rate that I'm charging the customer, and then I multiply that by the number of employees. I'm going to have approximately how much labor, how much revenue I'm able to produce in a month without going over capacity. Now, if you have a whole bunch of material costs that baked in, you have big projects and 30, 40% of your revenue is just materials, you'll need to adjust this number up by 30 or 40% because this labor capacity revenue amount will seem low. Now, your asset capacity is the amount of monthly labor revenue per employee. And we're going to take that and multiply it by the number of employees in each truck. So monthly labor revenue per employee we calculated above by taking the number of budget hours they complete every single month, multiply them at the rate I charge the customer, that's the monthly labor revenue per employee that I can generate. I'm going to multiply it by the number of employees in each truck and then multiply that by the number of trucks. We now have our asset capacity in terms of revenue per month. What will my business be able to generate without my trucks being overworked, without having to use them seven days a week? And I'm not getting oil changes? Personal capacity. How much revenue can I produce without losing my marbles? This one's tough because it's a personal decision. Only you can really answer this. I recommend getting help from people around you, employees that are key, even your spouse, a therapist, anyone give you feedback on, like, how big can we actually build this business? And keep in mind you can increase your personal capacity by gaining knowledge and gaining skills, like you're doing in this workshop. So max profit, where you make the most amount of profit for your business in the most sustainable way, occurs when you're at max profit capacity. You're using all of your trucks and equipment, using all of your employees, and you're maxing your personal capacity. Now, what you do when you hit capacity determines if you are in growth mode or if you're in profit mode. In my opinion, there is no I'm trying to grow my business and be more profitable. If you're in growth mode, you're buying trucks, you're hiring employees. If you're in profit mode, you are not buying trucks, you're not hiring employees, and you are raising prices. Because if I hit capacity and I have the max number of employees or max number of customers I can contain, I have two options. Either I'm in growth mode and I go get another truck, I hire more People, I get more equipment and I grow the top line revenue. Or instead of doing that, I raise my prices to all my customers so less people accept their jobs, I become more profitable and I don't buy more trucks and I don't hire more people. Now, exceeding capacity limits leads to short term profits, but long term burnout. In the short term, you can use your trucks seven days a week, grind them in the dirt, never do maintenance, never check the brakes, never check the tires, never do oil changes. And in the long term, you're going to, it's going to be damaged, it's going to be bad. Now labor, same thing. I can force people to work weekends, holidays, 50, 60, 70 hours a week out in the blazing heat. In the long term, they're going to burn out, they're going to leave. And same thing personally. In the short term, if you exceed these capacities, you will make more profit. If you work your employees harder this week, you will make more profit in the business. But if you do that in the long term, they will leave. And personally your relationship will fall apart. Physically will fall apart, mentally, you will fall apart. And that's the cause of many failures in home service businesses is simply burnout. Now, to be conservative, what we want to do is use the lowest of these three capacities. You've now calculated what your labor capacity, your asset capacity and your personal capacities are. I'm only going to grow the business to the, to the lowest of these three capacities because if I exceed any of them, it could lead to system failure. In the long term. This is a great monthly revenue goal. And again, I can increase my asset capacity by buying more trucks. I can increase my labor capacity by simply hiring more employees. And you can increase your personal capacity by gaining more skills and gaining more knowledge. But this is a great revenue target is the lowest of the these three capacities. To take that lowest capacity number and I want you to subtract your lowest monthly revenue during the off season. So whatever that lowest capacity is, I'm going to subtract out my lowest monthly revenue during the off season. And if you do that, you're going to come up with what your excess capacity is during the off season. Now, excess capacity is the difference between what you make currently in monthly revenue and your max revenue. If all trucks employees were fully used every single day, that's excess capacity. And excess capacity will keep you poor. The reason for that is because you don't need any more fixed expenses or assets to grow to capacity. You already have the trucks, you already have the employees to grow this revenue marker. And so if you're only here, you want to be able to grow to your capacity because that's where all the profits are at. And the reason all the profits are there is because your net profit nearly equals your gross profit. Because I don't have to buy more trucks, I don't have to get them nicer shops. I don't have to get more insurance. All my fixed expenses, I'm paying for the fixed expenses of 100,000 per month business, but I'm only doing $40,000 a month. That extra $60,000 difference is where all of your profits are. Get to capacity, reduce excess capacity. But in the off season, excess capacity soars because I'm still paying for the $100,000 per month business with the trucks and equipment and the employees to do so. But now I'm only doing 15, $20,000 a month in revenue. That excess capacity goes through the roof, and that is what's keeping us poor. So what's the fix? Well, for cure one of seasonitis, when it comes to lockdown mode, the cure would say, hey, we need to reduce capacity. We should, like, let go of employees, reduce our labor capacity. We should sell off trucks, reduce our asset capacity, and lay off team members. All right, take another right hand turn. When we look at the 4L framework, and this is something I created a couple years ago to identify where in the business is there a constraint? What is causing me to not grow my business? We have liquidity, cash money, cash on hand. We have leads, we have labor, and we have leadership. And every business, regardless if you have five employees or even the Fortune 500, is going through the 4L framework. Liquidity is simply money. Usually what happens is you take that money and you go get more leads. You spend money on Facebook ads, you spend money on Google Ads, you create a website, you take that liquidity and you turn it into leads. Great. But once you've got a bunch of leads, guess what? You can't do all the work yourself. You got to go what the next constraint of the business is like. I got to find laborers. I got to find someone to do the actual work. And if you get enough employees, 10, 15 employees, guess what you need next? Leadership. You need a general manager, you need an office person, you need a salesperson. Leadership is now required. And then once you do that, all of a sudden, your margins get collapsed because now you're bringing all these overhead people for management. And what happens? Liquidity gets hurt. And so this is the constant cycle of growth in a business. You're always being constrained by one of these four. And if you were to fix the next constraint, it would unlock growth for the business. Now, the goal is increase the number of times we cycle through the 4L framework. This is when we say the business goes to the next level business. It's like, oh, I got my managers, I got more trucks. I got more. You're fixing the next constraint. If you get a bunch of leads, like, great. Business is growing. Oh, man, Now I gotta get employees. Okay, great. Now I got employees. I gotta get general manager a second location. I gotta get an office person. I gotta get a bigger shop. This is the growth engine of a business. And you, by solving the next constraint, allow the business to continue growing. But this is also the game of whack a mole that is very exhausting. Because right when you fix it, fix leads, and you get a bunch of leads finally coming to your business, all of a sudden you can't find employees. And you're like, oh, my goodness, I can't train them and hire them and I gotta find them. I'm running indeed ads I can't figure out. And oh, my goodness, now I got all these employees and they're all calling out, I need someone in operations. I need someone to be able to manage these people. This is the game of whack a mole that is so exhausting for business owners. The constraint to growth constantly is moving as you grow. It's simply moving around the 4L framework and it doesn't stop. Let's assume for a moment, though, that we have Q4 collapse. We identify what Q4 collapse is. Revenue, leads and profit dropping off a cliff for three months out of the year. What happens to the 4L framework? Well, during the winter, no leads. And so what happens? You have excess labor. All your laborers are sitting around. You have excess capacity because you have no leads coming in. Well, what happens in the spring is now you laid everyone off. You had to lay them all off or they quit because they weren't getting enough hours. And so you have no laborers. And so what happens? You get excess leads. All these leads are pouring in again. Excess capacity will keep you poor. So having all these leads, excess coming in, you literally turn off leads. You don't even get back to customers. It takes you a week or two to get back to estimates why you have no labors and you don't have the laborers. Because back in the winter, you didn't have the leads to keep them busy and you had to lay them off or you had to fire them. And Then because of this, you now have no leadership during the summer or fall because there's no tenured employees and everyone just started with you. So three, four, five months later, they're not ready to be a leader, they're not ready to be a manager. They can't take things off of your plate. You can't delegate to anyone. And because of that, it causes no liquidity. So the foil framework gets affected dramatically. If you have an off season, you have no money, you can't afford for the business to grow. If you don't have liquidity, I'm not going to be able to go get more leads next spring. To be able to take the business to the next level. Off seasons will keep you poor. The goal is to fix the off season. Why? We're going to get steady leads all winter long. By doing that, we're going to be able to have laborers keep them all winter long. And during the spring, they're ready to go. They're trained up, they've been tenured. We don't have a bunch of newbies running around. These people are ready to go. And because they've been with in now for an entire year, come summer and fall, when the business continue to grow, I have people that I can actually delegate things to. I can hand things off. Operations, sales, admin. I can now find leaders within the organization. You can't get to the next level in the 400 framework. You can't get the next level in your business if you run out of cash liquidity during the off season. If during the off season you get no leads, if you lose your best employees and leaders during the off season, you will never be able to continue this growth engine of the 4L framework. Now you didn't come to this conference, you didn't come to this workshop for me to tell you to shut down your business for three or four months. Not great cure one lockdown for seasonitis is really a patch job. It's kind of like wearing a mask during COVID you know, you can still get sick and die. And so if you're like me playing defense and shutting down the business for three months, sounds horrible. Now if you can keep your costs, your fixed expenses way down during the off season and shut down, great. If you can lay off all your team and get them to come back during the spring rush, you using the return to work bonus, awesome. That's fantastic. But for me, all gas, no breaks, default aggressive. Do not have an off season and never lose money. Because really what cure one does is concede Victory to the off season. We basically bow down to it and say, hey, we can't overcome it, so we're going to lay everyone off. It'll be very hard to build anything more than a lifestyle business using lockdown mode using.

Because if you're using Cure one and you're letting all your employees go and revenue now goes to basically zero for three months, the enterprise value, the valuation of your business goes dramatically lower as well. As no one wants to buy a business where for three months of the year revenue drops to zero because if they have to buy the business and get debt on the business, their fixed expenses go up and they're not going to be able to afford to be able to close the business down for three or four months out of the year. The off season, in my opinion, is the time to go all in. The goal of the next four cures after we've addressed this first one of lockdown is to step on the gas when your competition is slowing down. It is to figure out a way to hire employees when your competition can't afford it. They're not running indeed ads. They're not running Facebook ads. They're not trying to hire and interview new people. We got to figure out a way to buy equipment when your competition can't afford it. Better yet, they're selling their equipment because they have negative cash flow. They have seasonitis and you're able to pick it up for pennies on the dollar. We've got to figure out a way to advertise when our competition can't afford it. They're not running ads anywhere because they have nothing to sell.

Cure 2 for seasonitis is more and better now. In the words of Alex Horosi, more and better before new so before we start focus on something, making something new, let's first just focus on doing more and better of what we're currently doing now. Ideally we use cure number two to fix seasonitis and avoid the rest of the cures. So cure 3, 4 and 5 are all new things in the business and so I would rather just focus on Cure two doing what we're currently doing more and doing it better. Now who this might serve if your leads dip, but your core services are still possible year round. This one's going to be really beneficial for you. Also, if you don't want to start another business or a different service or complicate the business, this one's also going to be super helpful. Now at Augusta Lawn Care, our core or gateway service is mowing for Q number two. If we're able to sell mowing throughout the entire off season. That's really the solution. Now before we get crazy, let's review a couple layups that you can have and win this game. Still, when it comes to cure number two, first off, if you are able to switch to level billing or like a subscription model where where every single month you're getting the same amount of revenue, this will basically solve the problem. And many times it is possible to do a subscription model or level billing if you have where services are at least being performed year round and there's not a period of time where there's like snow on the ground and you're supposed to be mowing the grass. So for Augusta, if you're the mowing once or twice a month and you can probably get away with doing level billing or subscription model. Now for many markets, subscription model or level billing year round doesn't work. Why? No competitors do. It adds a lot of friction to the sale. When you're trying to have a big contract and they have to sign something and then it's like, well, if you're going to do a level billing agreement and they don't sign something, what happens if they take you to court like they don't want to pay during the months when you actually make all your profit. Also, it doesn't actually make you any more money if you do level billing. It's the same amount of money just split up over the course of 12 months. And this can actually lead to a lot of cash flow problems getting accentuated during the spring rush. If you're growing fast because you're actually performing a ton of work but making revenue less than what you should be. Yes, it makes the revenue for the whole year get a little evened out and you make more profit during the off season. But during the busy season you actually are performing more jobs, more work, more budget hours on a customer's property for the same amount of work. Also, this doesn't work for one time jobs. So if you have recurring work, recurring payments make sense. But if you're doing one time projects in your home service, very difficult to convince someone that they're gonna be on some sort of subscription when it's a one time job one and done. So layup number two is that you can sell time insensitive jobs into the off season. So these are jobs that can be moved a few months off into the future. Time sensitive and recurring jobs are going to get priority during the spring rush. So time sensitive. In other words, if I wait three or four Weeks, the job's gone like it can't work. So if we're mowing, if the grass is growing and I don't address it very quickly with the customer, it's time sensitive because in three or four weeks they've got to find someone else. The grass is now 2ft tall. It's also a recurring job mowing. Very good. So time sensitive and it's recurring. They're going to get priority in the spring rush time insensitive jobs and one time jobs get scheduled for the off season. And so if I'm doing a paver patio, I'm going to get that lead at the same time I get a spring rush lead for mowing. But I'm going to prioritize the time sensitive and recurring mowing job and then try to push off the time insensitive or one time job of the paver patio a few months off into the future. So that way I'm able to level out how much work is coming in and hopefully fill up my off season. Now let's look at the impact on revenue if you do this. If you do a first come, first serve scheduling basis, which I do not recommend, we want again take time sensitive jobs and recurring jobs and focus on those during our spring rush. But if we take first come, first serve, which is, wait, the paver patio came in yesterday. The mowing job came in yesterday. Okay, let's get them both on the schedule. If it's first come first serve scheduling, that's what your revenue is going to look like throughout the year. Now, the impact of revenue seasonality will decrease a little bit. If I prioritize recurring and time sensitive jobs during the busy season and then I try to put those projects and wait a few months, I push them off into the future as long as possible, I try to put them into the off season. Now if I do that, what's going to happen is I'm going to have a slight increase in revenue during the off season and the amount of revenue that I actually make during my peak is actually a little bit lower because I've pushed those big one time jobs off into the future and by doing that actually reduce how many trucks, employees and equipment I need to be able to get through the spring rush and meet demand. That's where the real savings are at. Total revenue doesn't change. But better scheduling means better asset and employee utilization. I don't have to hire 12 people, I might only need 10 during the during the busy season. And instead of only needing two employees during the off season, I'm able to hire five or six of them because I'm able to push those one time projects into the slowest season. Now the likelihood of quitting in general when it comes to businesses is lower when the roller coaster of revenue is less steep. So instead of going from 5,000amonth in revenue to 100,000amonth in revenue, that's a lot. That's a roller coaster. Instead, by moving some of these projects into our off season that are time insensitive, that can wait a little while, I'm able to have maybe $30,000 of revenue during the off season and then maybe 50 or $60,000 of revenue during the go time. Less revenue when things are good, but more revenue during the off season. So let's assume for a moment though that everything we've talked about still can't do it. Let's assume you can't do level billing. You, you don't get enough time insensitive projects to actually fill up your off season. Well then what can I do? Well, that's where cure number two comes into play. Cause we talked about the two layups. Having level billing throughout the whole year and having the ability to move projects off into the off season. If you can do those things, you're gonna probably be able to solve Q4 collapse pretty easily. But let's take care number two of more and better accepted jobs now. First off, more accepted jobs, that's going to be coming down to advertising. We'll talk about better, how we do better in just a moment. But let's first talk about more accepted jobs. How are you going to achieve that? We're going to run more ads now. In my off season, when I was experiencing Q4 cops in my first location at Augusta Lawn Care, I was spending between 70 and $100,000 of cash every single off season. And we were doing the dumbest things to keep the crew busy. I would literally make homemade cookies and have them delivered to property managers for commercial jobs. I would go and pressure wash my customers, my mowing customers. I'd pressure wash their driveway just to keep my crew busy. We'd reorganize and organize again the shop space, the equipment, sharpening blades, just burning money. 70 to $100,000 was essentially my profits from the other rest of the other nine months of the year. And during those three months, I just burn it all on doing these meaningless tasks to keep my crew busy. I would have been better off if I spent $500 a day. $500 a day, that's $45,000 over 90 days. If I spent $500 per day, multiply that by 90 days, that's $45,000. I would have been better off spending $45,000 on ads if I would have been able to keep my crew busy and just break even because I was spending 70 to $100,000 on doing meaningless tasks to keep them busy. If I could just get revenue high enough to get above break even, that would have been a better option. Spending $45,000 on ads instead of 70 to $100,000 in inefficient labor. Now we can solve Q4 collapse by advertising more and getting more customers. The real question is like, how much do I need to spend? Okay, well here's what we need to be able to know what our advertising budget is required to solve Q4 collapse. First off, we need to find the revenue gap. How much more revenue do we need to make to actually solve Q4 collapse? Now, if you actually go back in your workbook, you're gonna be able to find this. So we gotta find the revenue gap to solve Q4 collapse. The answer is on the page of top two of the top of page two. Take the difference between your lowest revenue month, sorry, your lowest revenue quarter Q4 collapse and the median of the three remaining quarters in 2024. So again, we already looked at this. We looked at our worst quarter and we took the other three quarters. Take the middle or the median of those three and we're going to compare. What's the difference in revenue? This is the revenue gap that we need to solve. And this is on page 10. Now we have the revenue gap. We've got to figure out how many additional accepted jobs do we need to get in order to fill this revenue gap? Well, what are we going to do? We're going to take that revenue gap, we're going to divide it by the average job value in Q4. Now, this works for one time jobs. So say you do paver patios, $10,000. Boom. That's your average job value in Q4. Now if you do recurring work, you can also do this, but it's going to slightly change. Let's say you do $50 per mowing service and you do that twice a month, it's $100. And you do that for three months during your Q4, that's $300. The average job value during Q4 is going to be $300. So that's what I want you to figure out now, because I got to figure out how many accepted jobs do I need to get to fill this revenue gap. And yes, one time jobs will fill this much faster. So keep this in mind and we're going to try to figure that. So if you say, hey, during the off season, I can sell a property cleanup or I can sell a mulch install. Okay, what's the average job value for those jobs? That's what I want you to enter right here. Now that we figure out how many jobs we need to be able to get the revenue needed to be able to fill this gap, we now got to figure our marketing budget. How much do we have to spend on ads to be able to actually fill this void? Well, first off, we got to figure out what's an achievable customer acquisition cost for your off season on page 10. Now, customer acquisition cost is the price of getting one new customer. And if you don't know what that is for your off season, I would like 2 to 5x what you usually get in customer acquisition during the spring rush. So if you're like, well, I don't really spend money on ads during the off season. Okay, well, during the spring rush, I'm getting for $40 per lead. $40 customer acquisition cost, great, 5x that be conservative. Do $200 is gonna be what it's gonna cost you for customer acquisition cost during the winter, it will go up dramatically because there's less leads, less people need your services. There's a reason there's an off season. Less demand is going around. So now we can figure out what our marketing budget is. We have the number of new clients, number of jobs we have to get, as well as what our customer acquisition cost is. If we multiply that, we to figure out how much our Q4 marketing budget needs to be to be able to solve Q4 collapse. All right, so now we're going to fill out this equation with fill in blanks to figure out does cure 2 actually fix the problem of season items. So you're going to spend X amount. That's your marketing budget, your advertising budget in order to be able to make X amount of revenue. And we figured that out on your revenue gap on page 10. And this will yield X amount more profit. That's what's on page four of your jackpot. So use all those numbers to fill in the prescription. And then the question is, is it worth it? And you might fill out what we just talked about and fill in the gaps like there's no way this makes sense. It does not make sense to solve, you know, spend money, more money on ads to solve like the numbers, trust me, will be very weird and obvious. What might have been the case is that your customer acquisition cost is just too high during the off season, and that's very possible. Also, demand for your services may be so low during the off season, causing you have to spend so much money on advertising just to get any revenue. So I want you to do now is share your equation for solving Q4 collapse using advertising. We're going to do more advertising to get more customers. But is it a viable option to solve Q4 collapse either? Partially it's okay, but I'm not going to be. I'm not going to spend that much money and get all my Q4 club. Let's figure out, fill in those blanks and come up with whether or not this is actually a viable solution. Now if you like. No. After doing that equation, I know it is not possible. It does not make any sense. When we spend $400 on a customer on the customer acquisition cost, and the average ticket is only $600, I would agree with you. However, you can afford a higher customer acquisition cost if you have a higher level lifetime value. Now, lifetime value is the amount of revenue over a customer's lifespan. So not just their first ticket, but over the course of 3, 4, 5, 6, how long do they actually stay with you? Because if I can keep selling the same thing to them or more other stuff to them, I'm able to increase the lifetime value and make sense of spending more money on the customer acquisition cost. In other words, the business with the highest lifetime value can spend the most of the time the few leads that do come in during the off season. The real question is how can we make sense of a higher customer acquisition cost? Well, we can increase the lifetime value. Now what does this look like if we, if we can make sense of spending more on ads to get a customer? We can. We can do that. We can spend more to get the customer if we increase how much money we can make on each customer over the course of their lifespan. So I would agree with you on a customer acquisition cost of $400 if their lifetime value is $600. Meh. I'm not spending 66% of the lifetime value of a customer just on advertising. Not happening. However, if I'm able to increase the lifetime value of the customer from $600 to $5100, all of a sudden I am happy to spend $400 to get the customer. The company that has the largest lifetime value can spend the most on customer acquisition cost and still remain profitable. And these are the big businesses that take market share because they can afford to spend money on ads. They can afford to buy customers when no one else can. So that $400 customer acquisition cost not looking so bad. If I can make 5100, everyone is looking for a lower customer acquisition cost. How can I save $5 or $10 in ads, et cetera, when we are looking for the higher lifetime value so we can afford and a higher customer acquisition cost, because not just $400 customer acquisition cost, I can spend $500 customer acquisition cost. I can outspend my competition on advertising if my lifetime value is way higher than theirs. So instead of $600, I'm making $9,000. That customer's worth so much more to me, I'm willing to spend more. And when leads are less during the off season, I can still afford to buy them. Now, what we really want to do is figure out how to triple our lifetime value and worry less about how I save $5 on this cost cost per click and then my conversion. Those things are important, don't get me wrong. But again, if I just fix the problem of being able to sell more to my customer and making them five, ten times more valuable to me than my competition, I'll be able to outspend my competition and buy customers when they can't afford to. The question becomes, how do we increase the lifetime value? Is there a way to increase how much money we make from each and every customer? Well, that leads us to the second part of more and better, and that is better, better accepted jobs. We talk about more, and that is spending money on advertising. But if we want better accepted jobs, we're going to upsell customers to make them more valuable to us. So the question is, do we have an advertising customer acquisition problem or do we have an upselling problem? Do we not know how to turn the $600 customer into. Into a $5,100 customer? All right, let's talk about upselling. When it comes to upselling, think about, like, whenever someone says you're going to upgrade to something, so you're trying to sell customers a better version of their initial product that they've already purchased or they're thinking of purchasing. For example, when it comes to the Ford F150, the same truck, different models everywhere, from like $38,000 up to over $70,000 based upon the model that you have. So you have the xl, very cheap, the Lariat, the xlt, you have the, the Raptor, you have the King Ranch. These are the types of models that people can get upsold even though they're selling the same F150 different models allow you to upgrade. Now, upselling means selling a more expensive version of a product that the customer already has or is buying. Even once I upgrade my truck, I'm also going to be able to have the option of getting extended service warranty so I can have a powertrain like 29 components or 100 components are covered 1000 premium care. This is an extended service plan for my truck. I'm upgrading the level and the quality of my initial purchase by getting this extended service plan. The same thing is true when it comes to your estimates in your home service business. This is a screenshot from Copilot CRM where we're recommending optional items on investment. Why we're trying to get them into upgrade into more services, more revenue that we generate from the customer. Now, if I'm buying a 27 inch television and the salesperson is trying to offer me a 40 inch television or an extended warranty, that's an upsell. So hey, you want to buy a tv, great, here's this option. But you can also have this larger option, this better option, the extended warrant, that is an upsell. Now if you're going to buy a ticket on an airlines, this is many times what you'll see this Delta where you're going to see basic, you're going to see economy, you're going to see first class, same ticket, you're going the same place, you're getting the same exact plane. But we're going to try to upgrade someone, we're going to upsell them into a better type of seat. Now on that same exact flight, it's full of other upsells, luggage, boarding privileges, seat selection, wi fi access, snow snacks, club access. These are all upsells to take what could have been a $200 customer to a 6, 7, 800 $1000 customer by upselling them more stuff. Now there are 11 options or upgrades to be able to increase the lifetime value of customer. If you go to page 11, you want to fill those out because we're going to need those here in just a moment. The first way to be able to increase the lifetime value of the customer and give them options and upgrades and upsell the customer is to sell frequency discounts. For example, if you do weekly instead of monthly recurring cleaning services. So if you have a janitorial service and doing monthly, fantastic, you're on recurring, I'm happy. But what if I give them a discount to go from monthly to weekly in terms of the frequency of the service. So Instead of charging $150 per month, I'm going to charge just $80 per week so I can increase the annual Customer customer value ACV from $1,800 to $4,160. You say, well, you gave him a discount. You literally cut the price by almost half. But I increased the frequency of the service. Now if you take ACV annual customer value and divide it by your annual churn or the number of customers that leave every single year, you come up with a lifetime value. Let's run the math on this. If the annual churn for this cleaning service is 33%, that makes the lifetime value of a customer increase from $5,400 to $12,480 just by going from monthly back to weekly. Even though I gave them a discount. How do I know that? Well, I know the annual customer value is $1,800 for the $150 times 12, $1800 for the year. Here's my churn. 33% of my customers are going to leave every year average. On average they're going to stay for three years will be $5,400. Look what happens when I increase the annual customer value. I didn't change the churn, I didn't change the turn, I didn't change my service. I just simply gave them a discount for increasing the frequency and I more than doubled the lifetime value. Who do you think, if you had these two businesses, who do you think is going to be able to afford to spend the most on marketing the person that makes the customer worth more than double in terms of lifetime value? Alright, now the second way to be able to increase the lifetime value and give options upgrades to customers is sell supplements. Like, oh, I don't sell supplements, I sell home services. Well, supplements are things that you need to use every single day. You got to use them frequently, you got to use them repeatedly and they dissolve, they go away. So for example, lawn care treatments, granular or spray for if you're doing carpet cleaning, sell odor enhancers. These are little add ons that you can give to upgrade that level of service, upgrade that experience and increase the lifetime value of the car customer. We can also sell increased quality of products. So the type of mulch that you use, the type of paint that you use, if you're painting walls, these are all things that you can do to take what Otherwise be a $50 gallon of paint to $500 a gallon of paint Simply by increasing the quality of the products you're using. The fourth thing you can do to increase the lifetime value and upsell customers is sell tiered service packages. For example, good, better, best. Don't just give them one option that you think they need. Give them an option that's cheaper, Give them an option they ask for, and then give them the one that's way more expensive. But they might actually buy it. For example, when it comes to irrigation, if you're installing the irrigation, that's great. That'd be like they asked me for an irrigation system. I'm going to give installation. Cool. Why not giving them an installation and a maintenance plan? Why not giving them an installation with maintenance, but also a warranty on fixing everything that goes wrong with that, that all the equipment and all the pipes and all the equipment for perpetuity, for lifetime. These are ways to have a good, better and best model that you can upsell someone and all of a sudden a $10,000 irrigation job becomes $20,000 because I give them, hey, I'm also going to include maintenance on this for five years. I'm also going to warranty it. Any problem whatsoever, I'm going to fix it for the next 10 years. These are the type of things that you can do to create tiered service packages. Fifth thing you can do is bundle services. For example, mowing, weeding, and bush trimming. I'm going to give a discount. I'm going to bundle them together. Why would I give a discount? I don't like that. Well, if I'm able to triple the amount of services by offering other ones in my business and bundling them together, I can increase the lifetime value of the customer. The sixth thing that you can do to increase the lifetime value upsell customers is sell optional services on every existing quote. For example, if someone's trying to get a fall cleanup, or why would I not offer an optional spring cleanup? Because it's not like they're going to randomly wake up over the winter and decide they're going to start cleaning up their property. Sell the day service, but also give them an option for that future service? Also, on the exact same quote, it takes you a few seconds to click a couple of buttons and add it to your estimate. Inside of copilot now, number seven bonus or incentive program for your technicians. So they are actually looking for ways to increase the lifetime out of the customer. Now, there's an upsell feature inside of copilot. Literally, with a tap of a button, you're able to send a text or an email to the customer based on a specific service that you see inside their property that is needed. So the employee can be out there mowing grass and oh, there's a bunch of weeds in the flower bed, I'm going to go and upsell them. Weeding service. And it sends them a text, it sends them an email and notifies them, hey, if you want service, click this button, we'll get you set up. This is the type of thing that if you have this program in place, you'll be able to increase the lifetime value of that mowing customer. Because now you get them on weekly weeding or monthly weeding services. The eighth thing you can do to increase lifetime value is sell follow up services. Now many times we actually look at this as callbacks or customer complaints or customer service. When in reality, if you're painting someone's house, why not just sell that you're going to come back in 30 days and do all touch ups. We usually do it anyways, but we'd consider a callback. But now they're not mad because they know you're coming back. And you can increase the lifetime value of the customer by selling on the original estimate. Same thing with AC tune ups or heaters or any sort of mechanical. It's like, hey, you have this other option that we come back in 30 days, 60, 90 days, we do an inspection, we dial everything back in, we get it back to what you want. Great way to be able to increase the lifetime value of the customer. Ninth thing you can do is sell limited time or lifetime warranties. We're going to talk a lot about this later in the workshop. A leak free warranty on a house, a replacement warranty for the sod or plant. Install the parts or equipment if you're doing plumbing, H vac retreatment warranty. If you're doing pest control. We will keep doing this until it's fixed. You can offer these warranties and these guarantees to be able to ensure that, hey, we offer this service but if you want us to guarantee it, it's going to cost you more. And a lot of people, they want the problem solved so badly they'd rather just pay the higher price and you guarantee that the job gets done and they're satisfied. Number 10, sell personalized recommendations. This is when you actually do a property inspection. Do a 21 point inspection. You review the property on an annual basis or quarterly basis. Sell these personalized recommendations. You are the expert. They don't know about their plumbing, they don't know about their landscaping. They don't know about the trees, they don't know about their lawn. You are the expert. So sell this as a value add, as a recommendation, as an option on every single estimate. Again, 11th, final thing that you can do to upgrade increase the lifetime value of customer is sell the access to support. Like a lot of us just do this already, but why not have hey, if you want us to fix within 24 hours and it's an emergency, we'll give you a subscription, I'll put you on a membership. I want a text Concierge24 7. I have someone available to text message them or hey, I want a specific technician because I really like that one employee. Here's one time we charged $230 to mow someone's lawn that usually would have a $45 mow, but the reason was because they only wanted one specific employee to come at one specific time. So what did we do? We sold access, we sold support. It's like, hey, we will only have that one employee during this two hour window in the week, but it's going to cost you five times as much. And they loved it and they accepted that job. What did we do? We increased the lifetime value of the customer by five times by simply selling, selling access or support. So now the question is when can you promote these upsells to the customer? Here's just a few options. You can do it in person. When you're meeting the customer for a quote, you're walking around their property. All of those 11 that we just mentioned, you can be looking for ways to upsell the customer during the checkout or estimate acceptance process. So in your portal, on the email, baked into your estimate the notes, these are ways we'll upsell customers using these 11 methods. Now at the end of the job, during the walkthrough, great option, you just solve their problem, they're super happy with you. Great opportunity to upsell them these more services. Now when they're happy with service. So after they leave you a five star review, if they give you a great survey, that's a great opportunity like hey, we're glad you're happy with our service. You know they're happy, you know that they love you. This is a great time to ask for more services, ask for more revenue to be coming from that customer. Also you can make up milestone excuses like hey, it's your birthday, you get a discount. You've been X amount of years as a customer. You now unlock the ability to be able to have this service on your Property. You've done 10, completed 10 services with us. You left us a positive review. Thank you so much. You now unlock this at your property. You could always look for ways to be able to promote these upsells to your customers. Now on page 11 out of the 11 that we talked about, I want you to circle three upsell strategies and that you can use in your business to increase the average ticket from $300 to $500, $500 to $1,000. How can I increase the lifetime value of the customer? All right, now I want you to talk about these and I want you to actually figure out when are you going to promote these? Not just which ones are you going to use, but when are you going to promote these upsells specifically in the sales process, at the estimate, when you're in person, Is it during the job? Is it on the walkthrough? Is it on the invoice? These. These are all times you upsell the customer. Now what else can be used to sell more and better? Instant pricing. This is something we've been using a ton at Augusta lawn Care. Now, instant pricing and upselling is super key. During the checkout process. We talked about this as one of the options. When they're buying something, a great time to ask them if they want to buy more. They already have their money out, they're willing to buy. Ask them to buy more stuff from you. It's generated millions of dollars in extra revenue in the first year. They that we added this when people were doing instant pricing for mowing and then it gave them the option to upsell and do leaf cleanup, bush trimming, other services. Now instant pricing, a lot of times people say, well, what about people that want a meeting before they buy from you? Now I thought the same thing. I also own an anytime fitness gym. And when we add instant pricing where people could just check out online and buy a membership, our membership, our signups went over by 28%. This gave me the confidence to actually figure this out for or even home services. And so people still just want to meet me before buying. Well, they have an option on your estimate form that if they want to meet someone in person, they can do that. But I guarantee you the vast majority of people just want the problem solved and we do it as fast as possible. Now you might be saying, well, won't customers compare my prices to others, my competition? And the question is, the answer is yes. Price sensitive customers will do that. However, you don't want them anyways. You want the person that values their time and is Willing to spend whatever it takes just to get the problem solved. Great. Customers value their time more. They accept usually the first estimate they receive. I saw a stat a year or two ago, but it's probably still very similar. And 70% of homeowners will accept the very first estimate that they receive. Why? Because they're in a rush. They want to save time. They don't want to be waiting around. They want the problem solved. And many times the person who gets the quote to them first shows they're professional and they have systems in place to do things quickly. And that's what the customer wants. If you are going after these customers, make it easy for them to become a customer. Make it easy for these people to give you money on an instant pricing form. Customers will stop looking as soon as they check out and give you money. This is why sometimes you'll send an estimate, five people, they say, yeah, or we'll go ahead with it. And then you show up at the customer's property and like someone else already did the work and you were two weeks later after they said they were going to go forward with the job. But they never transacted with you, they never gave you money and therefore I never locked them in. I want them to accept an estimate. I want them to give me credit card information. I want them to be some sort of transaction so they stop looking for other services. You might have been told like in the past, like, ah, you know, don't give anyone a price until you build a relationship. You don't want to do instant pricing on your website because people got belly to belly, shake your hand, see eye to eye. Well, every single day, Amazon selling billions of dollars worth of goods up to a $7 billion in one day from people you've never met before. You've likely gotten an Amazon package in the past week, let alone like couple days. And the reason for that is you don't need to know the seller. You simply go to a place where you're like, hey, they do things fast. I'm able to buy stuff very quickly. And here's what's cool on Amazon. Guess what? They have Buy now with one click. Now, I'm sure that someone, some executive at Amazon was like, hey, but this is going to increase the amount of misplaced shipments and returns. Because technically speaking, someone could click the instant checkout, the buy with one click and it goes to the wrong address. Okay? They could also accidentally click that. And then all of a sudden they have to return it back to us and we have to go through this whole return process and it costs a lot of money. And guess what, they're right. But here's the thing. The reason that Amazon instituted the one click button was because they had a 70% shopping cart abandonment. In other words, they were only closing 30% of the people that are interested in the product and actually put it in their cart. 70% of people would put in their cart and then not buy it. So what do they do? Well, let's remove steps in that process. So they have to click add to cart and then go to the cart and they click checkout and put in cart information, put in their billing information, put in their shipping address. Let's remove all that and click one button. This is why they did it. And so if you're tired of customers not accepting your estimates, not becoming customers, and just, you know, the estimates just pending, give them instant pricing. Give them the ability to accept the quote immediately. Now most home service businesses will not do instant pricing because it's going to be inaccurate. Let's go ahead and address that myth. When you look at price accuracy over the course of a distribution, some jobs you give estimates to super high. You're like, oh wow, that was crazy. That was a great job. We didn't have the amount of time I thought it was going to take us. And then other jobs you lose your shirt on because it takes way longer. This is the distribution, but on average, accurate price is in the middle. When we look at in person quotes, you're going to be pretty accurate because you've seen the job, you've seen all variables, you've seen the property, everything is very, very aligned with the price accuracy. Now if you do over the phone estimates or OTP notice, the distribution goes a little further out. We go from in person being very accurate to over the phone estimates being slightly less accurate. Now if we take instant pricing notice, it even goes further in person over the phone. Instant pricing from my website on a form, it's going to be less accurate. But here's the thing, if I take the average of all these dots, it's still in the middle of the distribution. Because there's going to be customers that accept a large property when they're really a small. There's even customers accept a $79 mo when you're like, man, I would have charged 59 if I would have seen this property before. And you're going to be able to keep that customer and they're happy and they're happy to pay more because you solved their problem instantly. They didn't have to go get five people to come to their house and visit with them for an hour. They just wanted the problem solved and they're willing to pay a higher price. Now. What's cool if you do instant pricing is just do their service for three or six months, do a really good job, and then raise their prices down the road. If you have recurring services. This is what we do all the time with Augusta. We get 99% of the people that submit an instant pricing form for mowing. We just accept their price. Let's go for it. The very worst case scenario is that 1%. I'm going to have to like, hey, Mr. Jones, we're going to have to change the price. It's way underbid. We can't afford it. But honestly, I'd rather just do the job. Do it for three or six months, win the customer's confidence, know that you do a great job and then raise the price in the future. And we see such a small amount of people that drop off because we do a great job. And if you're confident in your services and confident in your quality, you know that when you raise prices, the customer will stick with you and you'll be able to get back in alignment with the accurate pricing that you want to be able to achieve. And I'm not going to lower the pricing on the people that accepted the higher price, so I'll actually make more money now. If you're going to instant pricing, I recommend you don't track the number of leads. Notice the more and better cure. Number two, it's not more and better leads, it's more and better accepted jobs. The reason I want you to track accepted jobs is because the number of leads you get might actually go down. But the reason for that is because the close ratio on instant pricing is much, much higher. All the tire kickers are removed. All the people that think you should be able to mow their lawn for 10 bucks, they're not even filling out the form because they see the prices. So if they see the prices, they click accept and they're locked and loaded. The likelihood of them being able to move forward very high. Close ratio, very high. If you get their credit card information, basically 100% of people are going to move forward with the job now. Side note, there is zero admin time associated for instant pricing. It didn't take your admin. They don't have to answer the phone. You don't do anything. You put up a form on your website and everything is taken care of. The customer 247 can go there and get pricing. There's no in person estimator required either. Not driving around doing estimates in person, they're expensive. Those overhead people are expensive. Answering the phone expensive. I want to be able to do this all instantly for no cost from my website. Now in 2025 Augusta is actually going to be adding more into pricing for two more services because it works so well for mowing. And my hope is that, that by 2026 that 75% of the estimates at my locations are being done with instant pricing. I don't want my estimator, I don't want my general manager going on and do in person estimates. It costs a lot of time and overhead money. Now instant pricing more and better. We're talking about more and better here as the cure for seasonitis. So more we're going to increase the customer count using these ads that we then drive to our instant pricing. 24, 7, 365 on the weekend, on the holidays, people can go and buy from me using these instant forms. That's more and then better. And I'm going to consistently raise prices to upsell customers and increase the lifetime value. I'm going to raise their prices and upsell them more stuff. So more, more ads driving to Getting more customers 24,7 Using instant pricing and better because once those customers become customers, I will raise their prices and I will increase their lifetime value by, by upselling them. My prediction is that we look at 2000 and tens in home services, accepting credit cards and having a website separated the pros and the amateurs. There's over 600,000 landscapers in the United States. The vast majority of the profits go to the top five, 6% that have a website except credit cards. Now in the 2020s I believe that over the phone pricing and instant pricing will be the thing that separates the pros and the amateurs. The people that are willing to save customers time, give pricing immediately and check out are the ones who are going to win. And I don't think it's until the 2000-30s that AI robotics, that's when it's going to really concentrate a fragmented market. But if you're wanting to win now, you want to make more money now focus on giving pricing to customers faster. Now there are three levels to instant pricing. The first way is just give a range of price inside your current form. Literally just go to your form like service, name, price, range, give them an estimate, generally speaking range of how much is going to cost. So that way they don't waste your time. Submitting an estimate request form and thinking the prices are completely different, that's easy way. You can do that in a matter of a few minutes. Now, a little bit harder is to make it where they actually get a specific price. They accept the price and by clicking accept, the job gets put on the schedule without any other communication. A little bit harder because you got to get more narrow with your pricing. You could use pictures, you can use measuring tools, etc. To get exact pricing. Now, the best way is it's the hardest. But if you can get your payment information actually locked in, the credit card information from the customer on that form, that's most ideal. I can put that card information on file, keep it for the future use, but I'm locking that customer in by getting their payment information ready to go. Now, you can always add fine print to your instant pricing form. If you do, I just recommend keep it really short, keep it really simple, and max three sentences. At the very worst, at the very worst, you're going to put something like the price is subject to change after the first visit. So if you're worried about that for recurring services, just put that as your fine print. And again, less than 1% of ours do we ever actually have to change the price on? Because I'm just going to do the services and raise their prices on down the road. Now, on page 12, I want you to list two services in your existing business that you could raise that you could actually do instant pricing for. And then we're going to write down what the fine print should be. Is it based upon, you know, a per minute rate the first visit? Is it based upon there being other extraneous circumstances that you couldn't see from satellite during over the phone estimates? What can you do either over the phone or instantly using a form on your website? Go ahead and write those down. All right, let's assume now that it's actually impossible for you to do instant pricing for your services for your business and on your website. Well, the cure number two is to sell more and better. So one of the best ways to do this is to follow up on pending estimates. So you've sent the estimate out, you haven't heard back to them, Just follow up with them. By doing that, I increase close ratio, and by increasing close ratio, I sell more and better jobs. Close ratio is simply the number of accepted estimates, estimates divided by the number of sent estimates. So what percentage of the estimates that you send to customers are actually getting accepted? If your leads drop by half during the off season, okay, but Your close ratio goes from 30% to 60%. You will close the same number of jobs. For example, during a summer month you got 200 leads and you close 30% of them. You now have 60 new customers. But during a winter month you only get 100 leads coming. Half. But you close 60% of those customers. Well, you have 60 new customers, the exact same number of customers with half as many leads simply because you focused on your close ratio. Now at last year's conference at Blue Collar Summit, we talked about the importance of follow up phone calls, calling customers and that have a pending estimate and trying to convince them to buy. Now we did a study and at Augusta Lawn Care, if people had three follow up calls, just the follow up calls, it increased their close ratio from 35% to 65%. Almost double the amount of customers they got just by following up three times. But that's not the end of it. Some people made the three calls after Blue Collar Summit and like I did not get the same results and I listened to some of their calls. Okay, great, let me listen to it. Well, what we were saying was, well, hey, I'm calling to see if you had any questions. I'm calling to follow up. I'm just checking in. Weak, very weak. If this is the type of verbs and verbiage that you're using when you call customers to follow up, it's not going to get the same results. We need to have reasons to follow up. So when we call them, we're calling them because there's a last spot available, because we have a specific day that came available. Because hey, the service that's on your estimate is the crew's favorite service and we'd love to get them that. The crew, the specific crew, you know, they love doing this. Like we'd love to get this job on the schedule. Alright, hey, you know what we need before and after pictures for our website. So we want to get you on. That's why I'm calling you. Hey, the route or the schedule is filling up. If you're on some sort of a route or recurring based job, like hey, that area of town, filling up on the schedule. Also call me. Hey, I forgot to add another option. I know you'd mentioned xyz, Y and Z. I just wanted to make sure that I give you this other option that we might not have talked about again. The ability to be able to upsell this person, get them on the schedule, follow up using these words. All right. Hey, which day works better for you? This day or this day? I Just want to try. I'm trying to find a spot in the schedule for you. Which one works better? Limited time promotions or a freebie? These are the reasons to follow up and actually call the customer. Hey, we got an authorized discount for day only. Hey, by the way, if you're a solo operator, use this one. I'll do it myself. If you came to their property and you're the estimator, then you call up. Following up with an estimate. Hey Mr. Jones, I really wanted to be able to get that job done for you. I know your daughter's prom was coming up next Thursday. I'm willing to do it this weekend. If you want to get on the schedule today, I can get it done for you. I'm going to do it myself. You're a solo operator, you're doing all the jobs yourself. But use this as a way to to have a reason to call the customer and follow up. Changing the way you follow up on estimates will allow you to sell more jobs when leads dry up. So the question is, can we actually do better than just doing follow ups via phone calls? And this is what we created Augusta this past year. And like based upon how far I'm booked out, I am going to follow up on my estimates in a different way. Now some people will do it based on close ratio. You can see this one, I circled one weeks booked out and based on how far I'm booked out, I'm going to follow up with the customer more. For example, if I'm four weeks booked out, I'm going to just send the estimate via email and sms. But if I'm only one book out, one week booked out, I'm sending a loom breakdown where I'm the video of me and the quote is on my screen and I'm video it for the customer and I'm going to email it and I'm going to text it to them. That takes way more time, way more follow up. And there's levels between that like follow up phone calls and then emailing and texting a personalized video to the customer. These are things that take more time. But as I get less and less weeks booked out, I want to put more effort and increase the conversion on those estimates. So now I want you to create a four stage follow up strategy yourself inside your workbook on page 13. Create like Hey, I have four different levels. Do I start with sending the email? Then maybe I send it via text, then I make a video, then I call them. Create the four steps. You could just use this one for example, like based upon how far I'm booked out, I'm gonna follow up with these estimates in a different way to be able to increase the close ratio. So that way in the middle of spring rush, if I'm booked out six months, I'm not gonna spend tons of time on every estimate. Cause half of them are gonna decline due to the fact that I'm booked out so far. But during the winter, during the off season when I'm only booked out a day or two, I'm gonna be following up religiously to get these jobs on the schedule as fast as possible. When you're fishing in a barrel, you don't need a bait or a rod, you just need a net. And that's what the spring rush is like. You just dip in. You get more customers dip in. You're not even trying, you're not even having to follow up. But during the slow season, we should treat every lead as gold and follow up with diligence. Every single time we're going after every single one, we're doing loom videos. We're following up with a phone call, we're texting the customer. Here's a tip. Send a selfie video. You can do this to new customers as well as new leads. Take your phone out and just simply make a video, compress it in the gmail app, send it to the customer. That's a huge way to be able to reactivate them. If you sent the estimate and sitting there pending and they don't remember who you are, reactivate them, make a personalized video. You will get a response like I'm too busy. All right, let's just shoot it straight. These are the people, your customers, that that are putting food on your table. Treat them accordingly. You can do this on your way home from work. It takes 10, 15 minutes to set a quick video to all your new customers and any leads and people you've sent estimates to. And they haven't converted yet. So how in the world would I manage that? Well, you can create automations inside of copilot. Send yourself a text or an email and for every estimate that is sent or accepted, so accepted would be new customers. Sent would be new new leads and literally going to take you five or 10 minutes and day and you'll make all these videos I use for every single one of my businesses, franchises, Augusta Lawn Care, Lawn CareMedia.com for designs and for marketing material. Landscape Business Course, MBA for entrepreneurs, Landscape for a blue collar summit Lawn care web design home service, Web Design Home Service CPA Copilot, CRM, P4P software, all of these. I have triggers inside of Copilot and I have zapier integrations that send me an email. And every single Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning I'm going to make a bunch of videos. It'll take me 10 to 15 minutes a day to knock out these videos to new customers that are coming in. So in essence, how does more and better work? Cure number two? Well, we're going to sell more. How we're going to advertise, but because we're advertising during the off season, is we low or even no profit margin because our customer acquisition costs went through the roof. But I'm then going to sell better, that is I'm going to up, sell, sell and increase the lifetime value of that customer. And by having a higher lifetime value I can make sense of generating that customer even though their customer acquisition cost was very high. And this is the cycle that continues. Because I take that higher lifetime value customer, I can actually make them profitable and I spend more on advertising to be able to keep getting leads. And the rest of my competition is in their off season.

Tier number three for seasonitis is an adjacent service. We talked about lockdown, shutting everything down for the entire off season. We talk about doing things more and selling more jobs, using advertising and then increasing the lifetime of the value of the customer by selling more and better accepted jobs and using upsells. Now we're talking about how do we sell an adjacent service. Now who is cure number three for? If your market has severe weather shifts in the off season, this one might work for you. If you can't sell your primary service during the off season, mostly due to the weather, this is also going to be helpful for you. Also, if you don't want to change the business's name or the brand, this one's going to be beneficial as well. Cure number three. Now to recap, we talked about upselling and Cure two is what I'm trying to sell a customer a better version of their initial product. But cross selling is what tier 3 is. Cross selling is when you say, hey, you might also like this other thing trying to sell customers additional products that complement their initial purchase. So we talked about upselling the Ford F150, trying to get them from an XL version to a lariat, etc. That's upselling. But cross selling is, hey, I'm going to also sell you a headache rack. I'm going to also sell you an RV or a trailer. I'm going to also sell you a bumper. I'm going to also sell you a kayak rack. These are all forms of cross selling. Now if I'm going back to the example of selling a TV instead of selling a bigger version of the tv that'd be upselling. I'm going to cross sell that customer into buying remotes into controllers and a streaming service. In this case Roku. These are other things I can bundle together and package together. But they're not, they're not a tv. This is not a tv. I'm not upgrading a tv. That's an upsell. I'm taking the TV and I'm adding these other things that complement that purchase. Then the Expedia for getting any sort of travel. The first thing you do, you get airline tickets. What are they offering it? They're offering a car rental and they're offering a hotel. These are not has nothing to do with flying in the air, but they're complimentary and they're added on to and they're cross sold with that airline ticket. Generally the idea of crosslin is that you say hey, you know that thing you bought? Well, you might like to buy this one too. This happens all the time on Amazon and we'll show more of those in just a minute. Now in your workbook we want to talk about the upsell service funnel. We talked about upsells. This is where I'm going to take low revenue services and I'm going to sell them a higher, better version of that product and service. For example, on page 14, you're going to do this for your industry as well. We're going to look at the cross sell tree. But first let's look at the upsell funnel, the upsell service funnel as an example. I'm going to use lawn care well at the top of the funnel mowing relatively cheap. Most people need it top of the funnel. But I can get people in a property cleanup. But then I might get them on recurring bed and shrub maintenance. Then I might be able to sell them chemical and applications. And then ideally the highest value customer that I upsell lawn care to is going to be a full service maintenance. I can do all sorts of things for their lawn and for their lawn care needs. Great. That's the upsell service funnel. But now let's look at the cross sell tree. So now what I'm going to try to do is I'm going to try to get three different adjacent services that could sell at every single one of these stages of the upsell funnel. So adjacent services to be Clear don't need large investments in new equipment, trucks, or branding. These are things that you already have. You don't have to go invest a bunch in new stuff. New equipment, new liability insurance, none of that. Let's look at the example of this lawn care. The example of the lawn care upsell, upsell funnel. Off the upsell funnel, we have the cross sell tree for mowing. I can also, I can cross sell pet waste removal. I can cross sell snow removal. I can cross sell top dressing and overseeding. They're adjacent to mowing like it's on the lawn, it's on the customer's property. I, I don't necessarily have to get more trucks to do them. Awesome. All right. I can also cross sell people that need a property cleanup into pressure washing their driveway, pressure washing their house, storm insurance for cleaning up all the debris around their property, gutter cleanouts. I can also cross sell people that do bed and shrub maintenance to do drip irrigation because they care about their plants, installing bark or pine straw, weed barrier or rock in the flower beds. These are all things that people that care about the shrubs and their beds I can cross sell them into. I could also cross sell people to do chemicals and applications into mosquito control, soil tests, organic options for fertilizer. These are things I can cross sell them into outside of the adjacent or outside of the original upsell of lawn care. Now, when it comes to full service, I could sell this person roof cleanups, pest control. So like mice, etc. Around the property, I can do irrigation fixing or starting or blowing out the irrigation every single off season. So what I want you to do Inside of page 14 is look @ your upsell funnel and then on every single one, create three cross sells for each of those services as they get deeper with you and start selling and buying more services from you. Now let's look at the impact on your business if you just cross sell one service. So let's assume some of these things below $50 per cut for mowing, $30 per service for weeding, $300 for a bush trimming, etc. If we take the annual customer value, the annual value of these services, you can look at. You know, if I mow someone's lawn 30 times in a year at 50 bucks a pop, that's $1,500. If I do bush trimming one, you know, three times in a year, $300 a pop, that's $900 annual customer value or the annual value for these services. So what's the impact on your business? If you cross sell this one of them. If I'm able to cross sell my mowing customers into snow removal, I could boost revenue by 42% because the value I get per year would go from 1500 plus 640 is what my kind of averages are. $2100 annual customer value because I simply cross sold this no service to my mowing customers. Now if I cross sell bush trimming to my mowing customers, I can boost my revenue by 60% because on average they're paying $900 for that service year round. I'm going to get them on those three mowing or three bush trimmings, $300 a pop and take that $1,500 customer and turn them into $2,400 per year. Now check this out. If I cross sell snowmoval to my mowing customers and one mulch install, I could boost revenue by 133%. Using these numbers, I would essentially be able to double the revenue with zero marketing budget. So the question is, do we have a leads problem? Do we actually struggle with getting more customers or do we have a cross sell problem? We don't have another enough offers to sell our customers to be able to increase their lifetime value. Now I think of this as aura O R A these are three ways to grow revenue in your business. The first is to onboard more customers, advertise market, get more customers in the door that are brand new. The next way to be able to grow your revenue is to be able to retain customers like well, retention doesn't necessarily grow revenue. If you retain customers over the course of time, you raise prices on them. As you hit capacity, you can increase the revenue of your business. The third way to be able to grow revenue in your business is to ascend. In other words, make the value of that customer from from $1,500 to $2,000 per year. That's ascending the customer. I'm cross selling them and other services and making them worth more to the business. Now in home services we do a pretty good job of thinking about onboarding or always thinking we need more customers. We're always thinking about advertising, getting more leads. We do decent at retention. We try to do good customer service but very rarely do we survey and actually figure out how to retain and to have a great customer experience. But we still we stink at ascending customers and trying to cross sell them into higher ticket items into other services that are higher margin. This is where the real money's at. What is the impact on the business if you cross sell just One service, you know, I don't want to come. I don't want to come across salesy. Okay, so let's do a little bit of a mind shift here. All right, this helped me a lot. Ford's biggest fans don't buy the cheapest XL model. If you're like, oh, that person loves Ford, they're probably not driving a regular cab and a long bed with no power steering. Like this thing is going to be have a little more bells and whistles. They're likely going to upsell into higher models, including the Lariat and the King Ranch. They're also, by the way, customers that stay with Ford for life. In other words, Churn is nothing. They're never leaving. They are not. The customers that are buying those cheap XL model trucks. They're going to buy those more expensive versions. They're also going to cross sell into light bars, suspension, tires, accessories. They're going to get everything modded out the way they want. These are the lifetime customers, the ones that never, never leave and spend more with Ford. So customers who stay forever and are your biggest fans, they give you more money. So once you realize that, oh, if I cross sell and and I get more money from them, they're not going to leave. And furthermore, they're gonna be my biggest fans. They're gonna be people that leave great reviews for me. Cause I solve more problems for them. So getting customers to buy other stuff from you is not only going to increase the value, the annual customer value that we've talked about, but just by increasing the annual customer value, by solving more of their problems, it's gonna make it harder for them to leave and you're gonna reduce Churn. So it has a doubling effect. You increase revenue and at the exact same time, less people leave because you solve more of the problems and it's harder to leave your service. All right, let's get a case study where this actually had a massive impact. Now, this business had 200 recurring customers, made an annual turn of 50%. So every single year, they were losing 50% of their customers. Their annual customer value was $1,000. Now, if you take $200 or 200 recurring customers, multiply it by the annual customer value of $1,000. You know that they're making $200,000 in annual revenue and they have a churn of 50%. So annual customer value went from $1,000 per year to $2,400 by simply cross selling snow and organic lawn care to all of their mowing customers. So they had 200 customers that stayed the same, the company went from $200,000 to $480,000 the next year. They didn't do a bunch of advertising marketing campaigns. They had the same number of customers customers, but the company went from 200,000 to 480,000 more than double simply by increasing the annual customer value from 1,000 to 2,400. Now, here's what's crazy. The average lifespan of customers went from two years to three years. So the annual churn, in essence went from 50% down to 33%. And no change of service happened. Like they didn't change the way they did stuff their training models. It was simply the same exact service service. However, because they sold more services to the customer and they cross sold them into snow by doing that and organic longer by doing that. It also had the impact of reducing churn because people didn't want to leave. It's harder to leave once you've purchased more services and paid more to a company. The same way it's hard to leave Ford once you've bought the best truck and you've modded the thing out. Okay, so the lifetime value went from $2,000 to $7,200 more than a triple. Because not only do we increase the annual customer value from 1000 to 2000, we also increase the churn rate to be able to go from 50% down to 33%. So before we had $1,000 annual customer value, we divide that by our churn, 50%, $2,000 lifetime value. Afterwards, we had $2,400 that we made because we upsold them into snow and and into organic lawn care. And because of doing that, the churn went down to 33%. What happened? Lifetime value more than a triple. So what if you don't have a retention problem? What if you have an ascension problem? It's easy to sometimes think that, oh, like my customers are leaving. Churn must be customer service. Maybe you're just not selling them enough stuff. Maybe you don't solve enough of their problems and you make it so easy to them to leave to someone else that will solve more of their problems with why? Because they cross sold them into other services. By the way, you can now afford. When you can triple your lifetime value, you can now afford to spend much more on customer acquisition costs to get more customers, since they are much more valuable to you. And how do we do that? We cross sold the customer. Now, after going to Vegas and being with Dr. Kashi and Alex Mosey, I created this cross sell tree and found that there was one adjacent service service that increased demand during the off season and that was snow services. So for that reason, at Augusta Lawn Care, our cure three, our adjacent service is snow service. Now we sell it using instant pricing. It's like, hey, do you have a small, medium or large size driveway? Boom. Here's your pricing check out. Let's go. Now, there's four different types of cross selling. You're going to write these down on page 15 of your workbook. First type is bundling. Now offering a discounted package that includes multiple related products, for example, but on a game console with games and accessories, great bundle. By buying all of them, I will give you a discount. Now, in home services, what you can do is instead of even doing price discounts, you can offer certain priority or support or incentive if they bundle multiple services together. For example, customers that buy mowing and snow service will get first priority when the snow falls. So it's like, well, who gets first priority in the snow route? Everyone that's on our mowing route. So what is it? It's an incentive to bundle these services together.

Recommended products or add ons. If I'm recommending products that are relevant based on what the customer's already purchased or is considering purchasing a great way to cross sell. For example, here's one thing I think about is like, if you're slow, you know, work right now and work's not coming in, just go one year ago, just go one year ago and look at that last month, that month a year ago, and find all of the declined declined estimates and recommend the exact same services that they requested before. You'll be amazed that some people will actually accept the estimate and it'll take you hardly any time. The reason is because they were considering it at one point. They thought about having the service and it's around the same time of year. Pitch the same thing. All right? When it comes to recommended products or add ons, the question is what adjacent service could you recommend before the job is completed? So before the job is completed is like when you're collecting lead information on the phone or on your website, when you're doing in person meetings and you're actually at the customer property when you're following up on the estimate, can I add or recommend other services when I'm getting the deposit for the big project during the job itself while you're on site, how can I recommend other products or add ons? Now in your workbook, think about after the job is completed, in other words, the highest point of activation. Many Times is right after the problem is solved, you just did the job, they're super happy. You solve their problem, you do a walkthrough. Their rave reviews, they're happy. It's a great time to cross sell them into another service. So during that job walkthrough, great. Highest point of activation on the final invoice, often to the next level. Another service that you also perform, if you do snow, great. At the end of July and August invoice, I'm going to sell them snow. When they're purchasing the mowing on the invoice for July and August, I'm going to sell them Christmas lights. When it comes to October, November, these are the type of things that I can recommend or do add ons even on invoices that are paid. Scheduled post job inspections. If you're doing a project, just schedule a post job inspection and what are you going to do? You're going to get there, they're going to be still happy with the product. You might tweak a thing or two, help them out and then you're going to sell them, you're going to upsell them and you're going to cross sell them into recommended or add on products. Another way that you can cross sell customers is to partner. This is recommending a product that is sold by a partner company, like an affiliate or commission mission based kind of model where the partner with snow only, for example, they do only snow plowing. You basically become a sales organization during the off season. You're just trying to sell into your partner that also does this other service. So if you're like I don't want to do in this get in the snow. I don't want to get into this other service that is busy during the off season. Great, you're going to become a partner and just sell every one of your customers and for them and get affiliate or commission. Last type of cross selling is seasonal. This one works great in seasonal businesses recommending products that are related to the main product but are only needed at certain times of year. For example, in copilot you can send mass email or mass text to all your customers right before the windy season when you know the leaves are coming down or literally right when the snow is starting to fly. Hey, if you want to get on the snow route, click this button. That's a seasonal cross sell. Even though you only sold them mowing in the past. We should have season specific offers for season specific services. In other words, you're like, I'm not a seasonal, we are a Seasonal business for every season of the year. We've simply got to create better offers. We have spring offers for spring services, we have summer offers for summer services, we have fall offers for fall services, we have winter offers for winter services. So I have four different types of seasons as a whole. My revenue should be staying the same. I don't just have one season, I build up for and I have a busy season and an off season. No, I have four different seasons. And for every one of those seasons, I'm going to create unique offers. Now on page 14, I want you to actually match a service from your cross sell tree with each month of the year. Now, some months you might actually have two to four months where you target one specific service. For example, for us for mowing during the spring, like March, April, May, I'm going to be targeting my mowing. That's like my season specific service. My season specific offer is going to revolve around that. But for the other nine months of the year, I need to figure out which of these cross sells can I actually put and actually offer my customers. It's probably going to be seasonal. I'm going to do leaf cleanups during October, November, I'm going to do snow during November, December, I'm going to do Christmas lights. These are all types of things, things that I can offer bark mulch when I'm going to do fertilization treatment, when am I going to pitch bush trimming? Have season specific offers for every single month and every single season. So Augusta Lawn care, we asked ourselves, what if our name was actually Augusta Snow Services? Well, if that was the case, we'd look at our calendar, something like this. We'd be mowing for seven or eight months out of the year. But then as we go into the snow season, this would be go time. This will not be the time to chill, relax, lay off employees, let off the gas go time. This is time to buckle down, run ads, hire more employees, get more trucks and get ready for snow season. So again, the question is, do we have a leads problem or do we have an offer problem? And because we don't have enough offers, we do not have enough services to keep us busy during the off season. So for each season, create more offer offers. Now, when you're doing these cross sells, you've got to give your team the resources to actually be able to execute. What are we gonna do? We're your sales training at command center. We do game day calls, we actually listen to calls and we're trying to equip our team with strategy to pitch adjacent services that our locations offer. We gotta train them. A customer service call many times is an opportunity that's hidden with a complaint. But really it's a cross sell opportunity. Like they're mad about in the flower beds. The crew, the grass clippings are getting in the flower beds. Okay, great. Maybe it's a cross sell opportunity to get them into weeding services. Instead of trying to figure out how we're gonna get the guys to not get the blades of grass three inches into the flower bed. This is an opportunity to cross sell them into weeding services. You're also gonna give them product knowledge and sales collateral. We give all our frontline team members business cards. It costs like 8 bucks for 100. But I'm gonna give lawn care technician. This is actually from ups. I went to the store, an employee behind the counter said, hey, I know Augusta lawn care, my friend works there and pulls out the guy's business card. That's the ability to be able to have knowledge and collateral for your crew members to actually be able to hand these out. This is why you, when you go out in the crew and you're actually doing the work, you all of a sudden get like five new customers. Because you're constantly upselling and cross selling customers and you have the collateral and then the sales knowledge to actually be able to get new customers. Now you also got to train your crew identifying the customer needs. So instead of like, you know, one size fits all, you need 20 different services. Then you'll be able to see, oh, there's weeds in the beds. I should offer them weeding. Oh, the gutters are overflowing. I should offer gutter cleanups. You're going to have to train your crew on identifying specific needs of the customer and listening to them them when they're talking to identify what those problems are. You're also going to need to give them customer data and pricing. Like I'm not going to show them the customer information. I'm not going to give them the pricing that I have because they might steal it from me. They might. But they'll also never upsell or cross sell for you because they won't be able to because they don't have the information required to actually know about the service, know about the customer, and know about your pricing to just close the deal. These are some of the instant pricing door hangers that we use for our crew out in the field. So if they see the need for that opportunity to cross sell, they can write down the prices and give it to the customer. So if you hiding things from them are somehow going to make your business more protecting. I can also guarantee you you're keeping yourself from upsell opportunities, you're keeping yourself from cross sell opportunities. You're keeping yourself and your crew improving the lifetime value of the customer on your behalf. Also use software, use tools to be able to incentivize your team to to be able to give relevant products to your customers and give these suggestions based upon what they've done in the past. See what their purchase history is. If they've purchased fall cleanups every single year, probably a good idea to try to get them cross sold into a spring cleanup or into a regular weeding and bed shrub maintenance type of program. One of the upsell cross sell features inside Copilot for example, we did a test just by having the software set up where the feature was turned on. The average revenue of a location went up by 29% just if it was toggled on. And this is simply the ability when a customer, when an employee is at a customer's property, they can click on a very quick cross sell and immediately text or email the customer and ask them if they want an estimate. Make it super seamless for your crew to do this and immediately unlock massive growth for your business. Now let's look at some examples of cross sell communications communication with your current database. So people already that have done service with you, they're already inside your database. And I'm going to look specifically at online retail stores. The reason I'm going to look at them is they do a great job of cross selling. The first cross sell is a price drop alert. You get like an email like this where it's like hey, for this period of time there's a price drop for just the next 24 hours. For home services you could use this for the mass text or mass email to existing customers and just have a time bound discount. Okay, we're accepting new new snow customers and for the next 24 hours you get your first one 50% off. For example post purchase. Right when the customer after they purchase, we're trying to get them to do another service, another product in home services. The same way that this person is getting cross sold into more clothes. Home services have it automated. Right when they accept the estimate, right when they even submit your form, even your instant pricing on the thank you page. I am trying to get them to buy other stuff after they made a purchase that's like they're still activated. They have their car information out ready to Go. They are accepting the estimate. Get them into the next service, get them into the next product. Common combos. If I buy shoes, I probably need socks. Probably need laces. Great combination. For home services, add optional line items in every single quote if they need. If they're asking for weeding services, just take the extra 10 seconds and put bark mulch installation on the estimate as well. Because they are. We know they have the problem. Their flower beds not looking good. We know they're not satisfied with that. We can solve, yes, the problem they asked for. But what about the common combo? Because usually you pull weeds and then you install mulch or you spray the beds or you put down weed fabric. These are the type of things that you can cross sell people into using the common combo. Abandoned shop carts. People put stuff in their shopping cart and they just leave the website. Same thing true happens with home services. Decline line items. Why can't we follow up with them? Your pending quotes. We just never heard back from them. Why? What if you actually misinterpreted what they wanted? What if they actually wanted to spend more with you? What if you undersold the customer? This happened to me before where there's a job. I was like looking at like a 2, $3,000 budget to change some of the edging and extend out a flower bed for a customer. And I was like, man, it's expensive. It wasn't gonna take maybe a day. All of a sudden, a couple weeks later, I'm driving by the customer's house and I see one of my competitors putting in this massive retaining wall. And like, what in the world? They got excavator out there and everything. What's going on? So I talked to him and we were friendly. I said, hey, like, what was your bid on this? Like, I was looking at two or three grand. And I thought I was gonna to be able over like, oh, no, this is like a $10,000 job plus a paver patio. I'm like, what? The reason is because she didn't just. She didn't just want the bed extended. She wanted the bed extended so she could build a paver patio. But I never cross sold her from the edging that I was trying to sell her for two grand into the 10, $20,000 project of installing a retaining wall and then building a paver patio. So by you not listening, you might just say, oh, they didn't want. The estimate is too expensive. They didn't account accept the estimate. It's abandoned cart. When in reality they might have actually wanted to spend More with you. All right. People think that they can automate upselling and cross selling and here's the thing, you can and you should, using text, emails, et cetera. However, I believe it's worth the extra effort to customize these recommendations and these cross sells for your customers. What's crazy is we're willing to knock on the stranger's door and ask for a brand new job. We're willing to set up billboards and spend thousands of dollars to display those billboards in front of a bunch of strangers. We're willing to pay thousands of dollars to paint our trucks, wrap our trucks. Why? We're attracting new customers, complete strangers. We're trying to get them on board into our service. But yet we are not willing to follow up phone calls to customers who already have a pending estimate. We aren't willing to contact our existing customers with a text or an email or a phone call or or knock on their door about a certain promotion or a limited time offer or a combo that they could save more money on and get more of our services. We aren't willing to text customers that decline an estimate. Like if they decline an estimate, I want to know why. You might think it's price all the time when it might just be scheduling. It might be that they want an extra little addition to the estimate that you didn't include. If the economy is going to struggle and at some point it will, there will be less leads to go around. Customers will be more price sensitive. Customers will likely get multiple estimates. The business owners that are not willing to contact the customer will lose business and the leads will go to the business owners who contact the customer and follow up. Here's a tip. Don't just send them a text, send them an imessage. The reason, because with an imessage the customer knows that you are not doing this automated. You are doing this one on one. And why do I do this? Because I'm trying to scale the unscalable. Gary Vaynerchuk talks about this, talked about 10 years ago, scaling the unscalable. If I can do that and take what otherwise seems completely unscalable, which is sending imessages to everyone, my customers. But they know because they see that blue bubble that I am seeing this one on one that is scaling the unscalable. Because if you look at whether you dining out or looking, looking at really nice shoes or looking at really nice clothes, a great salesperson giving you personalized recommendations is so much better than just a mass message. Hey, these are on sale great versus Mr. Jones that shoe would work perfectly for you. I think it compliment very well. That shirt or that wine would really really will complement with that certain type of meat that you're buying. These are the cross sells that a great personalized message can bring. And by doing that using iMessage one on one contact the customer doing what's unscalable, you'll be able to increase the lifetime value of the customer. For example, if you're going to spend five minutes to send a personal imessage to a customer, which by the way it takes like two or three but let's assume it takes five, that means you get 12 personalized messages every hour. Here's the question. If you close one extra customer and that customer ends up becoming worth $5,000 to you over the course of their lifetime Lifetime gross profit profit. Is it worth it for one hour of work? Is it worth to spend five to get $5,000 of lifetime gross profit for one customer? Is it worth spending one hour to make 12 messages via iMessage? I think so. Here's a crazy idea for this next year. What if you spent $0 on marketing? Zero. Nothing, nada. Instead, what if you only focus on cross selling to existing new and old customers and leads and yes, even the ones that are mad at you. Amazon does a fantastic job of this. Most of the product page, most of the pixels on that page are just filled with upsells and cross sells. For example Jockko Go my favorite energy. Let's go instant checkout. We talked about this in Cure too. What I'm trying to do, I'm trying to sell more, sell more and sell better. Trying to make it as fast as possible. They're trying to upsell me into business versus version of Prime. They're trying to cross sell faster delivery with Prime. They're trying to upsell into recurring subscriptions, which is a bit of a hint towards cure number four, which we'll talk about later. Now if you scroll down on the product page, I'm going to see frequently bought together I. E. Bundling. I'm going to see similar items to consider again what's related to the other stuff you've already purchased. Again, I'm going to see them trying to upsell me into business Prime. These are all going to be more cross sells. Compare these with similar items. In other words, you've done this. You might like this one too. Related products with free delivery Again, this is just one page on a product page inside Amazon and the vast majority of the pixels are just cross Sells and upsells. Okay, if I look at like if I'm buying some sort of some digital device or some sort of electronic, they're trying to upsell me into accident protection on the checkout, during checkout. And then there are also other products. They're trying to cross sell assembly from the product purchase. I'm buying drawers. They're cross selling me to the service of installing said drawers. That's a cross sell. They're also on the exact same page, trying to upsell me into more drawers, better drawers, upsells, cross selling the actual service of expert assembly. Now be very careful. This is a warning. The easiest way to boost revenue is to add services and expand your service area. They are also, in my opinion, the least profitable way to grow the business. I only want to add an adjacent service if it has an opposite demand curve than my primary service. So for example, we use snow services as an adjacent service at Augusta because when there is snow on the ground, demand for lawn care plummets to nothing. So when I look at the demand curve of lawn care that gets very, very busy during the spring, kind of gets me slimmers down a German bit the summer, and comes back during the fall and goes back off during the winter. Great. Snow is the exact opposite demand curve. Very, very high when there is very, very low demand for lawn care. All right, so now I want you to look at the cross sells that you made on the cross sell tree of page 14. I want you to put an X next to the ones that that the same demand curve as your primary service. So for example, if I had mowing, I have the opposite demand curve. Is snow very good, but if it didn't, I would put an X next to it. Which ones are actually viable options for the adjacent service? That's going to fill the gap for your off season. And I need it to have an opposite demand curve. So on page 16, list two adjacent services to sell your existing customer service customers. They should not require new trucks. All right, now once you've listed what those two adjacent services are again, for a list of all the adjacent services, you're going to look back on that cross sell tree. We're going to choose two of them that have an opposite demand curve. And I want you to draw that demand curve and see does it match your current revenue. Because if the demand for this adjacent service goes up when you already are making a lot of revenue and it's really, really busy, it's likely not a good adjacent service to use as a cure for seasonitis. The Main objective of adding this adjacent service is not to add more revenue, it is to solve Q4 collapse. And to do that, I need an opposite demand curve of what I'm already getting from my primary service. Now, where in the customer life cycle will you cross sell these adjacent services? Very important. I figured out which of the which one they are where, which adjacent services. Making sure that I have the fact that there is an opposite demand curve of my core service. And now when am I going to sell it? Am I going to sell after I've done my core service? Am I going to sell it while they're in the process of buying my core service? Am I going to do it via text, email? Think about when you can sell this to your existing customer base as a cross sell. All right? And I want you to now actually go through this. I want you to promote this agenda adjacent service to your existing database. Pretend like the person you're talking to is someone that has already done service with you in the past. They've done your core offering. But now how are you going to promote this adjacent service without spending money on ads? Now we're not spending money on ads. So think like blasting them in text and email through copilot thinking. Like, do you do social media posts on your Facebook and your Instagram? Are you doing in person? Are you calling all of them? It might be worth calling all of them if you're able to close 10% of them on this new adjacent service that you're offering. So go ahead, run through that script and talk to them as if they're an existing customer.

All right, let's go over cure four for seasonitis, which is recurring maintenance. We talked about cure number one, locking down, shutting everything down. Talk about more and better using advertising. We'll get customers and then upsell them as much as you possibly can. Tier number two, we talked about cure three, where we sold an adjacent service or we cross sold customers into similar services that were not our core offering. And now let's talk about recurring maintenance. Now, when it comes to the valuation of your business, the book value of your business is your assets minus your liabilities. So if you look at your balance sheet and you take out all of your your cash, your assets like your trucks and equipment, etc. The value of those minus your liabilities like loans, debts, etc. You come up with your book value. Now, your enterprise value is what the market would pay to buy the business. Now the difference between the two is called a market premium. The goal is to increase the difference between the book value and the enterprise value. In other words, the price that you are worth. If you just sold everything off today, your assets minus your liabilities, book value, the difference between that and your enterprise value, what you could sell the business for. So how do we increase enterprise value? Well, if you just increase the total revenue of the business, it's going to increase the valuation of the company. The multiple on the profit of the business in terms of valuation is usually increased just by increasing the revenue. Now expected growth opportunities or profits also increase the enterprise value of the business. If you have a brand or intellectual property, if you streamline operations, cut out costs. If you optimize your prices. One person I know raised prices. The company raised prices right after the founder sold and they sold it to private equity. And the first thing private equity did was raise prices by 30%. He would have made tens of millions of dollars if he would just raise prices before selling to private equity. Make revenue and profit dependable. In other words, we know when revenue is happening and profit it's all are dependable. They're constantly happening. It's not up and down, it's not erratic, it's very consistent. If you drive down costs and overhead, you drive down your fixed expenses, you increase the gross profit margin of the business. Very good also if you focus on higher margin services. Now today as we talk about chair number four, recurring maintenance, these are the, the all the green items is what we're going to address or streamlining operations. We're optimizing prices using recurring services, making revenue and profit more dependable, driving down costs. These are the things that are actually addressed by having recurring services. Now total revenue is a big factor in terms of what the valuation or the enterprise value of a company is. But there are really three different types of service revenue. And not all revenue affects the enterprise value the same. Let me explain. There's one time revenue. Examples of this are paver patios, a project like a fence installation or bathroom remodel, smart home install. You're doing it one time. Now I want you to go ahead and write down all of your one time jobs, the main ones on page 17 of your workbook, write those down one time projects. They're not happening every week, they're not happening every month, they're not happening every quarter, they're not happening every year. One time projects, go ahead and write those down. Now the second type of revenue is reoccurring revenue. These are services that happen again occasionally but without a set predictable schedule. So it's not happening weekly, it's not happening bi weekly, it's not happening monthly, it's not happening quarterly, not having annually. Now examples of this usually revolver, any sort of emergency or repair, snow removal, septic tank repair, irrigation repair, snow cleanup. These are the type of things that reoccur. They happen infrequently, but they do happen more than once. It's not a one time job, so go ahead and write these down again. Think repairs, think emergency services. These are recurring reoccurring revenue. Now the third type of revenue is recurring revenue. This is offered on an ongoing basis and paid for in regular, weekly, monthly, quarterly or annual payments. This could be like mowing bush trimming, janitorial window cleaning, pet care. Like the pet keeps growing hair. Therefore on every week basis or every month basis, I have to trim the pet. And so this is a recurring revenue model. Now in your workbook, I want you to have this one time reoccurring and then recurring jobs. What are these revenue sources in your business? And write down those main services for each. Now here's what's interesting. When it comes to cash that you collect up front for a one time job, very high. I'm collecting $10,000 on a patio install. It's a one time job, but I'm collecting 10 grand up front. Now reoccurring revenue, repairs, etc. Not as much. I'm not replacing anything. It's not a one time big project. And then recurring revenue typically is the least amount of revenue that I collect up front. All right, and you're going to fill this in on page 18. But here's what's crazy. The enterprise value of this type of revenue is very different because the highest enterprise value is given to recurring revenue. Whereas one time jobs, the the enterprise value, the valuation of the business is much lower. And the reason I care so much about enterprise value is because building a business as an asset is one of the best ways to grow wealth because it's not taxed. And so if you were to gain income from a W2 job, it's going to be taxed at a relatively high rate. Usually 30 plus percent of it is going out the door to taxes. Whereas you build the asset or the enterprise value of your business, it's not taxed. And that's well how you know really great wealth is accumulated is through corporations and through enterprise value. Let's take an example of a company we all know, Apple iPhone sales really realistically since like 2016 have been stalled out the past like 10 years, not a lot of new iPhones been Sold. But if you look at the stock price of Apple, it's more than 10x over the course of the past 9 to 10 years. Why is that? Well, let's look at the revenue break, break down over that course of time. The real growth of their revenue has actually come from the services, recurring services, subscriptions. That's where the growth is happening. That dark red color is the part that's been growing over the past 10 years from basically nothing to now making up a very large chunk of their revenue. Now if you look at their quarterly revenue over the course of the past several years you can see okay, the blue iPhones relatively stable, it's up and down but it's not going up. But the part that's really inclined over the past several years is services. That's the orange line. That's the only real segment of their market of their revenue that's growing very, very quickly. Now if you look at the breakdown of revenue at Apple, services make more revenue than the Mac. So all MacBooks, iMacs, etc. All wearables, Apple Watch, AirPods, Air Max and all iPads. All those combined don't equate what they make on just their service revenue. Now this is all recurring revenue. Licensing from Car, Apple CarPlay, iCloud, the App Store, the $2 you pay every month for that iCloud, storage, Apple TV, Apple Pay, Apple Care. These are all recurring revenue models that Apple has built in as a service side to their business. Now if you look over the course of the past just couple years, look at the recurring versus one time revenue for product revenue. This is iPhones, computers, iPads, etc. You can see Q4 Christmas is when they make a ton of their sales. It's very, very cyclical. You could actually say that technically Apple has a case of seasonitis when it comes to their products. It's very up and down, it's very seasonal. But look at the services side. Slowly but surely increasing, very stable, very consistent revenue that Apple's starting to get stable revenue equals increased enterprise value. And that's why over the course of the past nine or ten years Apple has more than 10x. Their stock price, their valuation, their enterprise value has more than 10x in that period of time. Meanwhile their main core driver of revenue, iPhones has stalled out is because that recurring revenue is so much more valuable when it comes to enterprise value. All right, for example Microsoft in 2023, sorry in 2013 you could only buy Microsoft Office as a one time download in February of 2014. Satya, Nadella became the CEO and he's like, yeah, that's not happening. We're focusing on the cloud and we're focused on subscription revenue. Now today you can still buy Microsoft office for a one time price of $149. Very difficult to find it. You literally have to Google it just to find the one time purchase. Why? Because they're constantly promoting the recurring revenue of $6.99 per month. And so it seems kind of counterintuitive because like, wait a second, the upfront cash collected is so much lower at 699 or $7 a month for recurring subscription. And why would you do that when you get $149 today? So again, when it comes to one time jobs, the reason you grow your business so fast is get all that revenue upfront versus being on that recurring, recurring subscription model. Recurring services that take much longer to grow the business. But look at the enterprise value of Microsoft. It's 20x in the past 10 years since they made this change. And a big part of it is due to the fact that they switched to a recurring revenue model where now that $7 per month keeps adding up, keeps stacking on top of each other. And they took a hit for several years. Their stock price didn't go up. Why? Because they actually made less money because they stopped selling and focusing on this one time purchase. And that's why a lot of people will grow bigger businesses when they sell one time jobs. Because you can grow it much faster with fewer jobs versus smaller amounts of revenue, smaller amounts of cash collected, but over the course of hundreds of customers, many more customers, and it takes a lot longer to grow. But enterprise value is at, is where it's at when it is when it comes to recurring services. So again, one thing to think about when it comes to upfront cash collected, you can use this to your advantage by downselling large one time jobs into reoccurring or recurring jobs. For example, someone wants their roof replaced and like I can't afford the $30,000. Okay, great. We can downsell them into reoccurring repair jobs, which in other words, when the leaf, when the roof leaks, we'll come out and fix it, we'll repair it as a reoccurring job. It'll happen infrequently. When it rains, they're probably going to call us out, we're going to fix it. Now we can also downsell them into a recurring roof check to prevent leaks before they even occur. So hey, we're going to come every month. We're going to every quarter we're going to do a checkup. We're going to make sure that the shingles are right so that the leaks don't happen. We're trying to prevent, we're going to maintain the existing roof. All right, so now on page 17, I want you to take a list of that one time, those one time jobs and ask what are your downsells? How are you getting one time jobs if they can't afford that big chunk up front? How am I trying to down sell them into reoccurring jobs that will look cheaper or even maintenance or recurring jobs that are even less revenue collected cheaper for them. But allow me to still sell that customer. Now the goal is to get the customer at the lowest customer acquisition cost and then maximize their lifetime value. That's what we've talked about throughout this entire workshop. So the question is how will we maximize lifetime value? Well, we've talked about some of these already sell more and better upsells. That was cure two. All right. Then we talked about cure three, which is sell them adjacent stuff cross sells. And now we're going to talk about sell them more often or more recurring. And that is cure number four. So why focus on recurring revenue? Well, first off, recurring revenue is less volatile ups and downs based on big jobs, exp accepting deposits, finally getting paid. Sometimes I've seen businesses go out of business simply because one or two big projects didn't pay on time. So another reason why I like to focus on recurring revenue is because it's more resilient during recessions. For example, when it comes to the car market, new vehicle sales in the United States. This is the chart. Look at up and down gyrations of thousands, well, millions, millions of vehicles. And notice in 2007-2009 during the financial crisis, new vehicle sales plummeted by 42% in the United States. Meanwhile, the aftermarket sector, which includes repairs and maintenance, experienced only a 1% decline. Now again, I like to think of repairs as reoccurring. They happen infrequently, but they do happen more than once. Recurring is maintenance. So again, I would rather get new tires and new brakes in my car instead of buying a new vehicle. And I would rather do a better job doing oil maintenance, getting my window washer fluid topped off. I'd rather do that than go get a new vehicle. And that's what happens during a recession. Again making my revenue and making my profits much more stable, consistent and predictable. So again, why focus on recurring revenue? It doesn't depend on having an amazing salesperson or owner present all the time. If you're selling one time jobs and that one time and that estimator has to be on job jobs because they're most experienced, they have all the skills, they have years of doing that work, it's going to be very difficult for you to be gone for a couple weeks or if something happens to you physically or in the family, it's very difficult to ever pass that business along because it depends on a great salesperson to sell these one time jobs. And the reason that I care about this so much is because like I want to build my business as if I'm going to leave it. I want to be able to build my business in a way that I still get paid. Jobs still get completed because on a recurring basis, even if I'm gone for a week or two weeks or something happens to me, the business doesn't collapse because it's dependent on me selling one time projects. So I'm going to use lawn care as an example for Tier 4 here for recurring maintenance. I'm going to use lawn care as an example. But just know that selling recurring services throughout the off season is useful in all home service industries. It just requires creativity. I'm going to give you some examples. For roofing, for example, you can do quarterly tune ups, repairs, cleaning off the roof, memberships for priority after a windstorm, or if you're in hurricane season, et cetera, solar panel cleaning, and maintaining the relationship between the panels and the roof. These are things that you can do on a recurring basis. Exterior cleaning. I have an exterior cleaning business. Well, during the off season I can sell recurring maintenance around gutter cleanouts, roof and chimney inspections. You know, continue to do window cleaning itself, caulking and weatherproofing, the seals of the windows. These are things that an exterior cleaning company that usually only does pressure washing, usually only does soft washing, is busy, very busy during the spring rush, can do other surfaces during the off season as a recurring basis. Why install pools? Great. Well, you can do heater, filter and pump inspections. You can drain the water, you can refill it. You can do chemical shocks. All of these are recurring circles that you could do during the off season. Plumbing, drain, unclog, insulate pipes, water heater flush and do inspections and clean everything up, water filtration checks and replacing the filtration system, backflow testing, sump, pump or septic tune ups. These are all things that can be done on a recurring basis even during the off season. So if you're struggling to think of off season recurring services that you could offer. This mindset kind of helped me. We are not selling a service or even time. Rather we're selling insurance, asset protection and peace of mind. So the reason I say this, because homeowners, if they have a million dollar house, are paying about $5,000 a year just for the insurance and most of them never get anything for it. Like most of the time in someone's lifetime, their house doesn't burn down, they don't have a tornado, knock it out or hurricane. Like you usually pay for it your whole life and don't get anything from it. And people are willing to do that for insurance sake. And so the cost of prevention when it comes to selling home services when and a recurring maintenance program throughout the off season, maintaining their asset, their highest, usually the largest asset in their portfolio as a baby boomer, it's far cheaper than repairing it, waiting for the storm, waiting for something to break and just maintaining it. So the same thing, I like to use an analogy, is is it cheaper to get a personal trainer or just wait for your open heart surgery, like just be healthy? Yes, pay them $100 every single week and go get a personal trainer. That $5,000 is going to be a whole lot cheaper than having to do open heart surgery and weeks of repair and physical therapy and everything that goes into it. So the same thing is true for their home, the same thing is true for that asset is I want to maintain it instead of having to wait for it to break down or have to fix it. Now from this mindset is where winter services was born and we explain winter services and again, I'm focusing on lawn care, but this can apply for any recurring home service during the off season. We explain it in six easy steps. We keep your property looking good all winter long and through the holidays. We come to your property on a bi weekly schedule until the mowing season starts again. It is the same price as your mowing price, so no cost difference. We spend the same amount of time on your property as when we mow your property and we complete as many of the items on our checklist as possible possible in that time frame. Oh, and by the way, here's the checklist of services and we just start our way at the top. We work our way down this and these are all things that we can do even if the grass isn't growing, but it's gonna be the same price. I'm gonna spend the same amount of time there and I've done as many as I possibly can and I'll pick up where I left off in a couple weeks. So what if you're trying to do winter services like I just mentioned and you have occasional snowfall, like, I don't know, I get snow sometimes like randomly. How do I do winter services? Okay, for us in lawn care, I'm just going to add this to the service checklist and that is shovel snow and spread salt if the snow is present. And if there's more than 2 inches of accumulation, I'm going to pull forward the next winter service visit and actually get rid of the snow sooner. That's what I can do in that snow market. Also, if you're in a snow market and you're doing winter services, if per push pricing for snow plowing is common, just run ads when there's a bunch of snow and people are getting these massive bills because they got like three or four services in a matter of a week, they're going to pay like 400, $500. Like, hey, you know what? We can, you know, you tired of these massive snow bills? No worries, we got you. There's a level subscription year round. We take care of it and get all these other services. Now monthly pricing is common and there's not much snowfall. That's when I'm going to run ads saying, hey, are you tired of paying, paying for absolutely nothing. You're paying for this recurring flat monthly fee for snowplowing. There's no snow. Well, you can get winter services from us and you're going to get services, all these other things, regardless of whether or not it snows. Again, these are just ways to be able to pitch your winter services based upon your climate and based upon whether or not it snows. In this example. Now, what about areas where it's still. You still kind of got to mow occasionally, like once a month maybe in your core service. Well, in that event, I'm going to put the top of the checklist. Just simply say mow lawn if needed and furthermore, mow law. At Augusta Lawn Care, what they do in a lot of the markets that have year round mowing me once a month is they just assume that they're going to. The customer is going to need mowing at least once a month and they can opt out of that if they would like. So it's like, okay, great, we have biweekly winter services, we come every two weeks. But if you want, you can opt out of that, no worries and we'll just mow your lawn once a month. Boom. So now I'm getting revenue from Every single customer. And if they opt out, I'm still at least mowing their property once a month. But I'm trying to give them that bi weekly recurring service. Now this is not a money grab. The customer actually saves a lot of money. Now this is actually a downsell from a fall or spring cleanup. It's a reoccurring service. I'm actually trying to get them into a recurring service and collecting less money up front. Is it a cost them less? So if I look at snow, for example, there's a downsell from on call snow services. If someone called me in an emergency, I'm trying like a hundred, 200 bucks each easy. Whereas hey, I'm going to do a bi weekly recurring subscription and I will again pull forward the snow service if there's more than 2 inches of accumulation. So I'm simply downselling a reoccurring job into a recurring service. Now there are four ways to convert existing customers into winter services. Now again, this is a recurring maintenance package that you're going to sell during the off season. There are four ways to do it. Number one, just send them an opt out email or text basically saying do you want, if you want the service, cool. If you don't, we need to know about it. Now this is the exact email we used to send to customers. Tell them, hey, we got this budget friendly way of being able to keep your property looking good. Here's all the services we offer. Same price, we spend the same amount of time. If you want to opt out, click here. Now we only got about 25 to 30% of people that would actually use this and stay in the service year round. So we start adding more ways to be able to convert. Better way to do this is send them a standardized price comparison video and send them send personalized videos to the people who opt out. So you're going to make an actual price comparison of like hey, winter services versus doing fall cleanups and and winter spring cleanups. You're going to save money. You're going to send that to all your customers and say hey, if you want to opt out, totally fine, again opt out here. But then if they opt out, I'm going to send a personalized video. Going to show you in just a moment. I'm going to share a personalized video to actually share on their property what their price savings are. So let's go ahead and watch an example of one of the owners inside of Augusta Nation, Connor. Actually this is the video he sent to a customer who opted out after getting a Broad message explaining the price comparison of winter services versus just having the cleanups. He opted out, but watch what happens. He comes right back with this personalized video showing the customer's property and diving right back into the.

Sale. Hey, Jason, this is Connor here, Augusta Lawn Care Services. Hey, I have your home pulled up here. I saw that you opted out of winter services, so I just wanted to make this video for you and use your home as the example so that way I can say specifically how we can help you. And I think we're one of the only companies here in town that offers winter services instead of, you know, like a one time big cleanup. So I just really wanted to see, I just really wanted to give you the time to go through it with you, explain it to you, see if this is something that you're interested in, and kind of go from there. So why you would choose winter services. So winter services essentially exist because we're trying to get rid of the standard cleanup. So we have a one time fall cleanup or spring cleanup, you know, a couple snow services, you know, all that jazz it can get, it can add up really quickly like you have over here. So what winter services does is it's a gradual front to back bi weekly property cleanup.

Where we pick up the branches, large debris, blow off the walkways, driveways, hard surfaces in the lawn, blow out the flower beds and leaves and debris, pick up and mulch leaves, depending on your preference, pull the weeds in the beds, cracks, sidewalks, and the driveway. So and we would also inspect and blow out the gutters and downspouts to ensure that they flow and that they work. Blow them out of any leaves or gunk that's in them. We trim the shrubs, winter prune, trim the trees. I know you don't have any shrubbery really up front, but you have some in the back, by the back patio trim, remove low hanging branches, edge garden beds, walkways. And this is the only way that a residential customer such as yourself can get on our snow route. But we also include at the same price of your bi weekly mowing rate, snow removal. So we would do your front steps right here, your walkway and then your driveway, and then we'd go up to your mailbox, which would be just right here. So that way you can still use your home and your driveway and everything else like normal. And it's all clean and ready to go. So I know the past couple of years you've signed up for a big one time cleanup in the spring, where it's always been like four to six hundred Dollars. Well, with this, we could essentially do that whole entire cleanup for a very nominal rate or very comparative. And you would get all, everything else cleaned up as well. We could also cut down some of the bamboo, clean up the garden, pick up any of the leaves and the weeds and the cracks in the back patio, anything else like that. So we could also clean up this area that we have right here, this kind of like little gully for the rain to go through. So all of that would really be included in your winter services. We would just use your bi weekly mowing rate, which is a price that you're already familiar with. And then we'd be able to clean up all the leaves as well and get your property looking good all year round. So I just wanted to make sure that I took the time to explain that to you if that's something that you're interested in. I know you have this big old oak tree right here in the front and you have a ton of mature matrices in the whole entire neighborhood. And so just because you may clean up your leaves doesn't mean that your neighbors will. So I'd hate for their. Their.

Non neighborly to be your liability of having to spend the time and take care of everything. So I just really wanted to take this video for you, shoot it out to you, give you an idea of what it, what it entails and how we can help you. I also wanted to mention, for recurring clients like yourself who are already on our mowing route, we are also offering 20% off Christmas light installation. So if that's something you're interested in getting the fronts, the garages, any custom work, the trees, anything like that, kind of looking like Clark Griswold, then we could definitely take care of that for you. We're giving 20% off to people like you at the moment up till November 15th. So if that's something you're interested in, let me know. Outside of that, this is for winter services. If this is something that you're really interested in, please let us know. As of right now, you're opted out. So if you're still not interested, there's nothing that you need to do. Outside of that. I appreciate your business. Anything else, give me a call.

Now. The third way that we're going to be able to convert existing customers to winter services is to send that personalized video to every single customer. So what Connor did for just the people who canceled, we're going to do for every customer. We're not going to send them a broad one. We're going to Send every single customer a personalized video showing their property and making sure we get as many people to convert as possible. Again, this is going to convert even better. The fourth way is to show an in person price comparison. Again, I'm going to knock on every single person's door. You're right, that's crazy. It's like again scaling the unscathed. And furthermore, I guarantee you your conversion rate will increase as you go down this list. There'll be less people accept and go convert into winter services if you just send them an opt out email. I promise you if you go in person explaining how much they're going to save this year, there will be more people convert into winter services. Now on page 19 you can fill out the price comparison sheet that you would use for in person sales or even your videos. And if you already are doing winter services, just do this exercise or for a different service that you haven't added yet. Because every service in our business we can turn a one time job into some form of recurring service during the winter season. So list off that first, that first time one time job and then what can I do to make sure it's recurring? This is an example from Augusta Lawn Care of what we did. We got our standard cleanups on the left hand side, there's my price. And I'm really focusing on the price savings by them choosing winter services. Now in your workbook you're going to name this a certain promotion. It might not be called winter services, but we're going to compare that one time or reoccurring type of work and compare it to our recurring services like we have it with a winter services. All right, Now I want you to pitch this, I want you to pitch this to someone as if they're an existing customer. They already use your core services, but you got to convince them to convert to the this other service with similar pricing, similar in terms of scope and time. But we're going to be doing other stuff on their property to stay busy throughout the off season. You've got to sell it. And remember, this is a down sell. It's going to cost them less. Focus on the price savings. So the question is, which method is going to have the best conversion? Obviously the ones at the highest effort are going to have the highest ratio of people that are going to convert. Alright? So in person selling is gonna be super high knock on average customer's door. Are you kidding me? But extremely high ratio cause you're gonna be able to actually show them the price savings in person and We've just consistently seen I can take someone from 20, 30% conversion using the lowest opt out email to 80, 90 plus percent of their customers converting into winter services because they did in person. Or at least an individualized video explaining the savings to the customer. Now you might be saying like, look, I don't even get leads for maintenance. I can't do recurring work. But the question is how do we convert one time projects into recurring jobs? Because it can happen across the board. Almost every home service most one time project can be turned into recurring revenue. You can sell a warranty or a guarantee. You can sell annual inspections, you can sell recurring maintenance. For example, if you install a sprinkler system, you can include the repairs if we perform monthly inspections, adjustments and startup and blowout. So you sell all these additional recurring services and by doing that they get access to a free repair. Like we will warranty this whole thing. If you install a paver patio, have a monthly maintenance package for landscaping including annual sealing and sanding. And if they do that, you'll warranty for lifetime the paver patio. If you, if you install a pool, give a lifetime warranty on systems in all the heater and everything that's in the back end of the pool. If the bi weekly cleaning, chemical replenish and inspection is completed, I want that recurring revenue. So I'm going to warrant that with a warranty. I'm going to guarantee that and I know that if I'm at the property every two weeks, every week doing these services, it's likely that there's not going any damages or breakages in the systems. Install a roof with a leak free lifetime warranty as long as they do annual roof cleanings and a biannual inspection and sell the value of that to the customer. You can install plants with a lifetime warranty as long as, hey, we'll do it as long as we install the irrigation, we spray the bushes and we conduct bi weekly maintenance of all the flower beds. I give them all these recurring services by simply turning a one time what would have otherwise been a plant installation or a hedge or a tree. I'm turning that now into recurring revenue on an ongoing basis. Someone buy the deck. All right, I'm just going through a whole bunch. You could do this very literally every one time job, someone installs a deck. I'm going to warranty that bad boy for life. As long as they purchase annual cleaning, staining and inspection. As long as they do that, I will warranty that bad boy for life. If I'm installing A retaining wall. I'm going to sell monthly visits for erosion control, bed maintenance and drainage behind that because it's the number one reason why retaining walls fail. I'm going to inspect it. And by them doing buying all these recurring services, I'm going to give them a lifetime warranty that that wall will never fall. And if it does, I'll rebuild it. If you do home wash service, you can become reoccurring by selling the next scheduled service. If you want to go recurring, take it up a notch. You can sell either a bigger discount, a quarterly or annual visit. All right, inside your workbook. What recurring service could you sell to customers during the walkthrough of a one time job? So when you're doing the walkthroughs, customers super thrilled. They love this patio, they love the pool, they love the fence, they love the deck. What could you take that one time job? It's finished, they're happy. Let's go. During the highest point of activation, when you're doing the walkthrough and you solve their problem, they're happy. What are you going to be able to sell them into in terms of a recurring business model? All right, now when I look at some of these clothing brands like Eddie Bauer, the North Face, Columbia, Patagonia, they warranty their products for life. They'll say, hey, we'll fix it. If it ever rips, anything breaks, if the zipper breaks, a button pops up, we will fix it. It's a lifetime warranty. Now by doing that, the value of the brand is substantially higher. Look at this. Amazon's knockoff jacket versus North Face. It's literally eight times more expensive by North Face. But people are willing to do it. And then, and they're happy about, they're putting five star reviews just as often. Why? Because the value of the product is backed up by a lifetime warranty. A guarantee that this product, we stand behind it. So now I want you to think about this on page 20. What warranty or guarantee could you sell that would increase the value of your service by double? Like the same way that one jacket is eight times more expensive than the other. What can we do to warranty our services and, and be able to charge significant amounts more? And just remember, just remember if you're selling that recurring service, if you sell a lifetime warranty most of the time between seven and 11 years, that's when homeowners are selling their house, they move every seven to 11 years. So like, oh man, what about the 30 year roof? They're probably going to be dead. They're probably going to be dead in 30 years. And the likelihood if they're not, they're younger, they're going to move within four or five years as their family's growing. So what if the company was not named after the recurring service that you've created? So, for example, what if Augusta Lawn Care was actually Augusta Winter Services? The quote off season would be your go time. So the same way we talked about snow, you have mowing season for eight months of the year, but you're going into winter services. You added recurring maintenance to your repertoire for the off season. Guess what? In October, it's like go time. I'm actually hiring. I'm running ads. I'm going full out trying to get more customers. I would actually go after customers, customers that are outside my database. I would run ads on Facebook. I would run ads on Google. This would be the time to get after it. You would be hiring more employees. You'd hire, you'd buy more trucks when your competition can't afford any of those things. They can't run ads because they have nothing to sell. They don't have winter services.

They're laying off their employees and they're getting rid of their trucks because they're realizing they have too much fixed expenses during the off season. That's the time to accelerate. And this is the recipe to dominate in your local market. You can write this on page 21. Advertise when your competitors have nothing to sell. This is how you dominate in a local market. When they can't even sell anything, they don't even have an offer to give customers. You're out there advertising, buying trucks and hiring people. All right, quick tactical tip on recurring maintenance. How to justify a large price discount. They're like, well, this is kind of crazy. It's like $500. Why would you do that? Why don't you just do the full clean cleanups and the spring cleanup? How you can justify this them so they didn't seem weird to them is, hey, we're trying to keep our crew busy year round to avoid layoffs during the off season, during the holidays, they're happy about that. Let's go. Another thing, when you're selling this, speak to the price discounts. So really focus on the fact that they're saving money, the continuity of the standard, which means throughout, even during the off season, your property is going to look good. And the insurance of keeping things like rodents out of their house. Or if they're snowbird and they're out, they're not at home. I'm going to do an inspection of their home. Like these are the type of things you can offer that offers a lot of value to them, not just the actual service. Selling. Trimming the bush away from the house, okay, worth a couple dollars. Keeping rodents from invading their house while they're out of their house for three months as a snowbird, very valuable. So sell to that insurance and to that peace of mind aspect. All right, so here's a tactical tip again. I want to drive ads to instant pricing, same thing for winter services. So the same way that you would run ads to mowing, you'd run ads to a different one time service or reoccurring. I also for winter services during the quote off season, I can drive ads to instant pricing forms to sell this recurring maintenance. Here's actually an example of the type of ad you might want to create to really focus on the cost savings and ensuring it makes sense to the customer that they are simply saving money due to the fact that they're doing a recurring subscription instead of a one time job. You're wasting hundreds of dollars every single winter on your lawn and your landscaping. Usually you pay $799 for a fall cleanup. Take care of all your bushes, all the leaves in the ground, and get them hauled off the dump in the spring. You pay about $700 for a spring cleanup. Trim all the bushes, get everything looking good, and that's usually going to cost you about $1,500. But let's look at this new service called winter services that Augusta Lawn Care is offering where you save hundreds of dollars. We come every two weeks to your property, and first thing we're going to do is do a property inspection. So if you're out of town, we can make sure that no one's burgling our house, broken glass, anything like that. Next, we're going to check your gutters and downspouts to make sure there's no drainage problems. Now if there is snow, we're going to go ahead and put salt down and shovel the walkways and driveways. We're also going to pick up any debris or leaves that fall on the ground because you know what? Sometimes, sometimes they straggle. They fall throughout the winter, and we'll make sure they're looking good for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Now we're also gonna blow off the driveway and the walkways to make sure everything's just looking fine and dandy. Not just twice a year, but every two weeks we're gonna trim the bushes, make sure there's nothing touching the house. We don't want rodents and insects invading our Christmas. Also, we're gonna pull the weeds in the beds and if the grass is growing randomly because it gets warm outside, we'll mow the grass too. And so now you're wondering, well, what's the cause? It costs exactly the same as if we would come and mow your grass the same price every two weeks. But now you're getting all those services and your property is looking good the entire holiday season. If you want a quote for your exact property, just click the button below or give us a call today. All right, now I want you to pitch the person that you're with watching the workshop. I want you to pitch them and I want you to use the price comparison template that you created inside of your workbook. Now keep in mind, they are not an existing customer. They don't even know about your existing core service or your recurring service. They're not in your database. You actually got to sell them on. Again, price, insurance, peace of mind, focus on these things and when it's coming to new customers. If I can sell customers that I've never done work for before in the past, this is my time to go accelerate during the off season. So pitch this. Do this a few times. You need to pause the workshop and get reps here because you're going to need to be able to get very fluid at how to explain the the service and explain how they're saving money and it's going to help their property. Alright, here's a case study. This is Connor and Aaliyah Stead from out in Evansville, Indiana. This is actually just an excerpt from the Augusta Lawn Care Facebook group. He said, hey, we had 186 emails sent and only 28 have opted out. So just north of 80% conversion, everyone who said no, I am sending them a video re explaining winter services and how I think it is the the absolute best deal for them. Connor's the one that made that video previously and here's the follow up to that video by the way. Just wanted to share a cool win. Had this client add me on Facebook this morning after I sent him a personalized loom because he had said no to Windows services. This is that video we just watched and he said we have been able to convert about six out of the 29 people who said no to Windows services with these personalized videos. Like Mike said, even if they say no, no one else is doing what we do. And and the client will always remember the video that we made for them. I think loom is very underrated and has been a great addition of ammo to use when we need to make the conversion. All right, here's another case study. Dustin Biernink from Bloomington, Illinois. He says our Q4 monthly revenue was $24,654 in 2023. In 2024, it was $42,539. We attribute this to an opt in winter service track which give us the ability to upsell the customers that did not stay for winter services into a simple fall cleanup. This helped dramatically fill some of our our capacity, which increased our profit from $1,168 to $12,153, more than a 10x profit in one month. Here's what's crazy. Advertising this recurring service to your existing customers will cost you exactly $0, which means you are texting or email away from a 50 to 80% increase in recurring revenue during your off season. And that is cure four for seasonitis.

All right, the fifth and final cure for seasonitis is to start a new brand. We've talked about locking down the business, shutting everything down and laying people off. That was cure one. Cure two is more and better. Doing more advertising and selling more accepted jobs using upselling. The third cure was to be able to sell an adjacent service or cross sell customers into more services that you offer that are adjacent to your existing core offering. The fourth cure to seasonitis was recurring maintenance throughout the off season. And now we're going to talk about create a brand new company, brand new brand for your brand business. Now, who this cure is going to serve? The first four cures, if it doesn't fully, you know, cover everything for the off season, then you'd get to number five. It's a, it is a last resort. All right, but ideally we would have already gone through the cures of 1, 2, 3, 4 and actually fixed the problem of seasonitis. But if you still can't get more than 50% of revenue, if you still are having negative profit margin months during the off season or need to move on to cure five. So let's switch from the home service industry for a second and talk about the manufacturing business. So what does a factory do if demand for their finished goods and products drops dramatically? Well, first off, they could just shut down, turn off production, turn the conveyor belt off, turn off the lights, lay off everyone that's shutting down. And that would be what we call, you know, the shutdown for cure one. In top right hand corner, you can See, see that? Now the second option they could do is like, hey, let's just improve sales. We're gonna go advertise, we've got more customers in a sales team or increase market share of the limited demand for our products that are coming in. They just improve sales. That's again, kind of a cure too, which is more and better advertising and upselling. Now, they could also sell adjacent products. All right, so hey, we're gonna use the existing conveyor belt. We're gonna make a similar product with slight adjustments, but it's going to be the same exact buyers just sell an adjacent product. They could also stabilize revenue by having recurring payments on a contract basis or just say, hey, look, we require delivery throughout the entire year, even though you might not need our products year round. So this is going to be a way to stabilize the revenue and create that recurring revenue for the off season. Now, the fifth thing they could do if the products start not selling is, hey, we're going to create a new conveyor belt. We're a new product. We're going to tap on a completely different demand curve and that would be the equivalent that we're talking about now, which is creating a new brand. So keep in mind cure number five is very high risk and it's very high reward. Now the reason that the reward is high is because you're tapping into a completely different demand curve, totally separate than your core service. So that's, that's awesome. But cure five, like I said before, is a last resort. I want to focus on more and better before I focus on a new brand. The only use for cure number five is if any combination of the previous four cures do not, does not completely fill the offseason. Now, I assess each Augusta locations, climate, demographics and looked at their entire Q4 performance and I was, I estimated about 31%. Almost a third of them might not be able to fully cure seasonitis with just cure years one through four. And that's when Augusta Christmas Lights was born. So why did we start Christmas Lights? Well, it serves the same customer. Typically, people that mow their grass are not also going to put up their own lights. They're going to need us to do it. So it's a great cross sell opportunity. Also, there was no major equipment or assets that are required. We use the same trucks, same crew. We can get out there and get the work done. Also pretty easy to add it to our liability insurance. Separate business entity was not required. Also, there is zero demand for Christmas lights during the spring rush when we're mowing grass and demand spikes right after our lawn season typically ends in October. Now, it's also a recurring service because we can do it every single year. And the margins after the first year get really good because I buy the same lights and then I just put them on the same house the next year. Now, it's also really good cash flow. The reason I liked Christmas lights is because I can get the sale, collect all the money up front and then go buy the lights and then order the lights, get them within a matter of couple days and install them. And so I didn't, I wasn't upfronting any of the cash. I'd get the cash before even buying the lights. And then once I had those lights, if I can get them on the second, third and fourth year down the road, those are very, very profitable years. So what are the advantages of starting a new brand? We've talked about some of the risks. What are the advantages of a new brand? Well, the first off is you can reduce your per hour overhead recovery cost. So for example, your rent, your utilities, your insurance, all these fixed expenses we've talked about before, office wages, they get distributed over more working hours. For example, if you're going to have $16,000 a month of fixed expenses in overhead, it's $192,000 annually. Well, if I take business number one and I have six, six workers that are working 1500 hours or three quarters of the year because they shut down for the off season, well, it'd be 190,000 divided by 9000 hours. Nine thousand hours is six workers times 1500 hours. That's $21.33 per hour of fixed cost expense. But business number two, they're able to create a new brand, keep their crew busy during the off season, and now work 2,000 full hours. That means that there's now 12, 12,000 hours that are worked throughout the year. And if I divide that $192,000 of fixed expense out, it's now only $16 per hour of fixed expense. That's the same cost that I have for the 192,000, but just spread out over more hours so the overhead recovery is much easier. And I'm making $5.33 per hour more in profit. Another advantage of having the new brand is that you're able to pitch that new service, that new brand to existing customers. So have a special offer, be able to give them a special offer to get into the new brand that you're offering to your customers. Now, there are a lot of warnings and risks of starting a new brand. So all those advantages I talked about, very cool. Some of the downsides, first off, usually just a distraction. It's always fun to start a new brand, but many times you think it's always sunshine and rainbows and this new service and then you start doing it, you start realizing all the problems with it. So don't allow the shiny object syndrome, the woman in the red dress, to keep you distracted from your core service. That's actually very good. And this is why many people will go from one service to the next to the next in industry to industry, always thinking the next one is going to somehow be better than their first. Now, some of the risks associated with starting a new brand, it could cause customer confusion because they're like, wait a second, the person that mows my grass also is doing painting. That's weird. It can be confusing for customers. You'd also just simply dilute your marketing efforts instead of focusing on your core services. So if you only have enough money to spend $10,000 on advertising, well, if you take 5,000 and you spend less on your core service, you might just make less in your core service and then make extra on the new brand that you're adding, therefore kind of diluting your marketing message. And people don't actually get the 6, 7, 8, 9 touches required to get them to become a customer and make a buying decision. Now another risk is that it adds the cost and train train of time to train new employees because you're adding new stuff to the business. New brands, new uniforms, new services. Now the reason I put McDonald's icon in there is because at McDonald's, within a matter of a couple days, they get a 16 year old that has no skills whatsoever making $120 per hour. And yes, that is the hourly rate per employee and revenue that they're making per person that goes in the drive thru in the back kitchen, $120 an hour. And they can do that because within a matter of a day or two, they can turn someone from unskilled and very green to being profitable. Why? Systematization, simple services. They're not trying to train them on 50 different things inside the restaurant. Another risk is that offering a service that uses a different labor pool. I've seen this before where it's like, oh, this is a great complimentary to my existing service, my core service. But you're using different employees. The whole point of fixing Q4 collapse is to keep my employees throughout the off season. If I have to go hire different People to do the new service. I've kind of just made two different seasonal businesses instead of taking my existing business and bridging the gap and I'll keep my current employees. That's the whole point of starting a new brand and fixing Q4 collapse is I don't have to go shut down, I don't have to lay people off. I keep the same crew members busy throughout that season. Another risk, choosing a service that has the same or similar demand curve as your current seasonal service. We talked about this before, but this is bad. If the demand curve of the black line, your core service, is almost the same as when it gets really, really busy for the new brand that you're adding, that's a warning sign. Ideally, I want the demand curve to be opposite. So when I'm really, really busy, my core service, there's not a lot of demand for the new brand that I have and vice versa. And that's the truth when it comes to Christmas lights. When we're mowing, no one needs Christmas lights. When we're finishing up mowing, that's when we're able to sell Christmas lights like gangbusters. Now, the combined results if you add these two demand curves together is that the one left is bad because I just massively inflated the spring rush. Whereas if I have a demand curve that's opposite, I'm able to get a much more level revenue throughout the year. And again, remember, the valuation of that business is much higher when I have that stable revenue. If you own a long career business and you start a software company as a soft wash company, this is what you're creating because they're both super busy during the spring rush versus if you own an air conditioning company and you start a heating company, very good. Because guess what? When it's hot, you need ac. When it's really, really cold, you need heating. So why do H Vac companies, for example, have high multiples and a whole bunch of private equity is pouring money into it? Well, AC and heating are two seasonal services that perfectly offset each other. When it's hot, I have ac. When it's cold, I have heating. And this is when you look even with when it comes to private equity, they're buying out H Vac companies. Left, right. This is over the past few years amount of people have been buying up these H Vac companies because they have their seasonal offers that are completely complementary to each other where it goes from hot to cold and is not just the same exact off season and spring rush. So remember, with cure number five, the goal is not to increase revenue, it is to solve Q4 collapse and cure seasonitis. You can always make sense of adding more services. You know why you can always make sense of it is because you will always make more money. Because the first dollar in any business is the easiest one. It's the easiest one to get too fast. It's the taking your core service and doubling it that's going to be a little harder. So you'll always make more money. That's why everyone will always be able to validate their decision to start a new brand. Also, it is fun to start a new brand. We love creating new llc, starting a new website, create a new logo. All that is very fun. So because it's fun, we then validate it and say yes, we justify it simply due to the fact that we made more revenue, it made hundreds of thousands of dollars and therefore it is good. When in reality it might just be taking away from your core service and you in your core business that could, if focus was put on that lead to a better, bigger and better outcome. Also, most people will jump to number tier number five simply because it's fun. When reality cures, number one through four have a much higher probability of success. The probability of you just doing more and better of what you're currently doing is has a higher success rate than trying to start something completely new that can divert your focus, add complexity to training, create more work in terms of trucks and equipment and all the other aspects of adding a new brand. So now let's assume after I said all the negative Nancy stuff about starting a new brand, let's assume you still need to do this to solve your Q4 collapse. All right. Do I start a new website? The answer is yes, because if a service page is all that's required to add one more service page to your website, then this would qualify as Q number three or an adjacent service inside your existing business. Okay, do I start a new entity? Well, there's yes and no. No, just use a DBA doing business as our trade name if you want to operate under a different name without additional legal or financial complexity. All right, and that's usually what we do for Augusta Lights. But yes, you will need to start a new entity. If you need different types of liability protection, you want to have certain tax benefits that potentially could come, or if you're planning to grow the second new brand much bigger than the core service, you might just want to create a new entity. Talk to your accountant, talk to a lawyer. They'll figure this out with you now should you start a new Google listing? Yes, but keep it updated. You can't let it go for 89 months inactive until you're off season. Or if you're going to change, what you could also do is just change the name of your business name on Google and just reflect like Augusta Lawn Care and Christmas Lights. Boom. Keep in mind when you change the name on Google, sometimes you'll risk re verification where they'll make you redo a video or verification of your address. So sometimes that's a pain in the butt. But ideally I like to keep it at one and just maintain that simply due to the fact that I don't have to manage two different accounts now. My recommendation also is to make the business name similar in just the naming convention to promote easy cross sell opportunities. So we didn't name it something like Billy Bob Christmas Lights. We named Augusta Christmas Lights, used the same mascot and made slight variations so that the customer very easily identifies the brand and is able to do that cross sell very simply. Here's a case study for you. Joel Heck from Lafayette, Colorado AKA this last year he's the owner of the year at Augusta won $10,000. Let's go. He says Christmas Lights was a great addition this year. 36 installs and $37,000 in revenue. November was our best month for revenue, $65,000 and profited $24,000. And that was his best month in the past two years. It was like adding a 13 month of revenue for 2024. Let's go. All right. Jason Murphy from Middletown, Kentucky Christmas lights transformed my business in three years of doing lights. We went from burning through 100k during the winter months to adding 100k thousand dollars in profits. That was a $200,000 swing in three years. Now five years into lights, Q4 is by far our most profitable quarter. Ryan Payne from Rockport, Texas we don't do winter services so can't help with that year round. Mowing and Christmas lights have been our two tracks. Winter Christmas lights have added up to $100,000 in revenue in Q4 during the best year and added 18,000 our first year in tough market. Can be the difference between laying off a few people or not. Can be the difference of a good Christmas for your family or no Christmas at all. Alright, so now in your workbook on page 22, I want you to come up with three possible new brands or services that you could start inside of your company. Now go ahead and pitch that to someone and I want you to do it as if they're an existing customer. Like literally pitch it, okay, you're my mowing customer. I'm going to pitch you on Christmas lights and pitch it to as if they already use the mowing services. Go ahead and do that. They're using your core services already. So let's go ahead and recap for just a minute. There are five different ways to solve Q4 collapse, lockdown, more and better, adjacent service, recurring maintenance, and starting a new brand. And what we've identified is that off seasons will keep you poor, Q4 collapse will keep you poor. Seasonitis will keep you poor, and I want you to be rich. We do not have an off season. I recommend removing this from your vocabulary as a business owner. We don't have an off season. We have a window cleaning season and a gutter cleaning season. We have a roof install season and a roof maintenance season. We have a mowing season and we have a Christmas lights season. We have a pool install season and a pool maintenance season. We have a lawn season, spraying season and a pest control season. We have an outdoor painting season and we have an indoor painting season. We have a landscaping season and we have a winter services season. We have season specific offers for season specific services. Remove the vocabulary that you have in off season. It's keeping you poor and it is keeping you from growing your business. So the question is, which track should you use to cure seasonitis once and for all? Which of the five? These are the five cures of seasonitis. At Augusta Lawn Care, we use mowing to sell more of our current service. Cure number two, more and better. For adjacent service, we use snow services and snow plowing. For recurring maintenance, we sell winter services. And the new brand that we've started is Augusta Lights. So it's time to make a decision. Which cure will you use to eliminate your offset season? Go into your workbook, page four. Think back to the beginning of the workshop. How much money was your jackpot and what was your golden ticket? What did you write down as the dollar amount that you would make if you solved Q4 collapse? What was the golden ticket? How would it actually materially impact your family, your life and your business if you solve this problem? Okay, this is what we're up against in terms of the decision. It's time to commit to one of these and you might have a combination, but there's gotta be a decision made in terms of committing to, okay, I'm doing season, I'm doing Q2, I'm gonna sell more and better my current service. I'm gonna Pair that potentially with, like, a recurring service. I'm gonna create a recurring plan. I have the plan in place. I know how to sell it to my customers. It's time to commit. Let's look at some of the case studies of businesses that actually use these five cures. This is Connor and Kayla Hutchinson from Charlotte, North Carolina. Last year doing winter services and added Christmas lights. This year, we are up 67% for the fourth quarter year over year by retaining more customers with winter services, leaf cleanups, and Christmas lights. So in Q4 of 2023, they did $238,000. 2024, 67% up. They had $399,000 in revenue. Ricardo Vargas from Alexandria, Virginia says, First year doing Christmas lights, we finished at $30,500. I'd say it was a success and pretty fun, to be honest. We had a 50% conversion rate for winter services, enough to break even during the winter up until spring. If it were not for these two winter tracks, we'd be pretty tight and I'd be worried. Instead, I'm happy and have a clear mind to put forth a plan for next year to double the business. Corey Williams from Whatcom, Washington. He says Q4 2023 was 287,000, revenue $20,000 in profit. Q4 2024, $303,000 in revenue, $115,000 in profit. In 2023, 22% of our mowing customers converted to winter services. In 2024, that went to 60%. Using the new sales process, profit in Q4 is up almost 300% year over year. Brian Connor and Jeremy owens from Augusta, Georgia. We have kept six more team members at the Augusta, Georgia location than last year. We have 12 team members that we plan on keeping through the winter. We sent out a loom video comparing cleanups versus winter services and showing the value to our customers. This is our first year for Christmas lights and we completed 45 installs and close to $50,000 in revenue from lights. So again, they went from six people they kept busy during the off season to 12 employees keeping them all busy all year round. Jason and Tracy storts from Knoxville, Tennessee. Our first year with a great Augusta 2022, we offered winter services to our customers and most opted out. We started out in December with about 50 and kept 25 through the winter. There was much confusion with our teams and our customers. I was not a fan at all. By the end of the season, Our revenue for Q4 was $93,000 with a total loss of $75,000 in fall of 2023 I almost decided not to do winter services due to the frustration it caused in the previous previous year. However, we decided to try it again. We did 162,000 in revenue and had almost a $44,000 loss for the quarter. We started out with 148 customers on winter services and kept about 110. This year we introduced Christmas lights and did just over $60,000 in revenue. We have right at 180 customers on the books for winter services and have done roughly $106,000 in revenue. And just for December Q4 revenue was $373,000. Pretty good turnaround. I'm very thankful that we did not give up on winter services and incorporating Christmas lights has definitely added more cash flow. We still have our GM and seven guys on and able to be able to keep them throughout the whole winter again. They stay committed over the course of three years to finally solving Q4 collapse. They slowly added to that recurring maintenance. It takes longer to build that up but eventually solved seasonitis. This is their actual quarters last three years since they joined Augusta's $93,000 in Q4 2022, $162,000 in Q4 of 2023 and this past year in Q4 of 2024 $373,000 and they entered the seven figure club that we have at Augusta Nation with all the owners that do over seven figures. Now my biggest concern after this workshop is and whether you've worked through this over the past few days or you watch the entire thing from start to finish over the past four or five hours. My biggest concern is that someone can be in WI fi range and see the signal. You can look and see on your phone on the WI FI network. You can see it, but it does them no good unless they're connected and someone Today my biggest concern is that someone has clarity and sees the need to cure seasonitis and Q4 collapse in your business. But it does you no good unless you are connected. Now in the past in this workshop and if you see my other courses there for free, Landscape Business course, MBA for Entrepreneurs and the turnaround course, they would just end. Now I'd probably give some inspiring ending and hope that you take action on solving Q4 collapse. But this one's different. Not today. I want to solve Q4 collapse with you. Now stepping back 18 years ago is when I started mowing grass at 11 years old. I did that so I could pay my way through college and I actually started college when I was 13 years old. I was relatively young. I went to Whatcom Community College, got my AA degree, transferred over to Western, got my bachelor's degree, and then continued with my MBA. But 18 years ago, that's when I started mowing grass. And 11 years ago, I finished my Bachelor's degree. I was 18 years old, finished my bachelor's. I went to Africa for extended period of time and I hoped an orphan. Orphanages in and around Kenya, Nairobi, so Tigoni, Kalangwari. And a couple pictures here of the orphans, as well as one of the hospitals called wima, a hospital that I was volunteering at. It was super cool because, like every day I'd see like 40, 60 patients. It was very fulfilling. I was able to do all sorts of crazy stuff as a medical student over there. Surgeries, birthing. I worked a lot in the pediatric burn unit, and it was phenomenal experience. Coming back to the US Though, I realized that I didn't want to be in this medical environment. Like, first off, if I was going to go to neurosurgery, I was probably the same three or four procedures for the rest of my career. And it wasn't as fulfilling seeing 40, 60 patients a day. You see a few, and it's much more paperwork and insurance and a lot more politics, honestly. And so didn't want to get involved. So 11 years ago, I dropped out and did the only thing I knew how to do, and that was mow grass. So I started Augusta Lawn Care. Previously, I'd been paying my way through college using Andy's lawn care as my brother bought him out, started Augusta Lawn Care. Now Augusta Lawn Care. Almost ended a few years later when I was underneath that dump truck. Ford L7000 1990 or 91. And the reason I almost died because of that was because I went underneath the dump truck. The PTO was spinning. I had to engage it manually because the. The cord up inside of the. The cab actually broken. So I went underneath the dump truck. My hoodie got caught in the PTO and immediately tried to, like, suffocate me, like, get really tight around my neck. So fortunately, I dropped out of the PTO and it shredded my shirt. It kind of like got a lot of bruises all on my chest, underneath my armpit. My bicep hit the gearbox to kind of keep me from just spinning over and over. And if you don't know what a pt, PTO or power takeoff accident looks like, look it up on YouTube. And a lot of people, like, lose their arms or they'll pass away. Because they get wrapped up in the spinning of the pto. So fortunately I was able to survive. However, that picture there's a day or two later in the hospital when I was recovering from the injury and I still remember being on that, that specific hospital bed with my phone, FaceTiming my crew, just walking them to the next project because I didn't have systems, I didn't have procedures, I had nothing in my business that could run without me. And I realized that over the course next few weeks, as I was in bed laying there and I'd gone through my master's in business administration, I knew technically what a system should look like, technically how a business should operate. But I was not doing it in my business. And I realized that my business was personality dependent, not system centric. It was built on me working 80, 100 hours in the field with my crew every single day. And without that the business would fall apart. So as I came out of the hospital and started to fix the business and create systems, I started to share my story of what I was doing. As I was posting videos on YouTube, I made a podcast, created landscapebusinesscourse.com and just started to share my story. I actually remember like before this time typing in landscape business course, trying to find something on Google for something around how to like run a lawn care, but business run a landscape business like the tactical parts of the business side and there was nothing there. There's some diplomas and certificate certifications around like horticulture from different universities, but I never found like anything like this. So I actually created landscapebusinesscourse.com and again it's free. You can go there if you want to check it out. Still all that content is there and if you watch those videos in the early ones, you'll actually see the lacerations on my neck pretty clearly because it was just about three to four weeks after I got to the hospital that I started making these videos. Now six years ago, after a couple years of creating content, sharing about what I was doing, very, very few people that are watching my videos executed on the systems paper performance estimate videos there were no longer would I be on a hospital bed videoing. Like literally this came from me on a hospital videoing my crew so they could walk through the job and now it's like oh no, we're going to create a video for every single job when you're when estimators on site with the customer and then that's going to go to the crew so the estimator never has to come back to the job site. These are the type of systems that were created, but very few people, as I shared these systems, actually started to execute on them. And the reason was because they just looked at me as a content creator, kind of a consultant, someone on the outside. And for example, paper performance completely changed my business and I promoted it for a long time. We created software. I have a book, it's a free course, P4P University. And thousands of people have watched the book and read the book and watch the course. And yet less than 130 companies outside of Augusta Nation have actually implemented the software and fully utilize where they pay their employees based upon performance instead of hourly wages. And it just consistently where it's like people don't listen. They see me as an outsider and this is my biggest concern. Today we all get excited. You watch the workshop, you're fired up about Q1 or Q4 collapse or fired up about cures one through five. And we all excited about solving the off season problem. But nothing changes. And so five years ago, I wanted to have skin in the game. And to do this I needed to create a brand and I create a community. And the best way to do this was to start a franchise. Now, the fastest way, if I was trying to make money, would have been to make a $999 per month mastermind, have a Facebook group do a daily master mastermind, have some meetups, do some workshop stuff with them occasionally, and create a bit of a mastermind. That would have been the fastest way to make money. I genuinely believe I could be at 500 to 1,000 of these and printing very profitable cash flow. But it would not have changed the level of professionalism in the landscape industry, which is our goal at Augusta Lawn Care. There'd be no brand and there'd be no community. Now, I had already seen the power of franchising because I actually owned an anytime Fitness prior to starting the franchise for Augusta Lawn Care. And I became a franchisee there. And in fall of 2019, I said, in five years it'll be obvious that joining Augusta is the right move for all lawn care companies. Five years later, for the very first time ever, today, I will show why this is true. So are you going to pitch Augusta at the end of this workshop? Yes. And the reason why is because I'm 100% confident and for sure that Q4 collapse will be cured if you join Augusta Lawn Care. Now, the average location at Augusta Lawn Care, the revenue increased by 36% in Q4 compared to the last year. And we Were only focused on it for a few months prior to Q4 collapse. Joining Augusta Nation is the smart financial move for any lawn care vacation business. Our mission as stated is to change the level of professionalism in the landscape industry. Now how are we going to do that? Well, Amazon came along and changed the expectations of the customer. Now we expect two day shipping, we expect free delivery, we expect free returns. But that was not how it was 15, 20 years ago. They came along and changed the way we thought about online e commerce. And that's how we'll change the expectation of the customer and thereby force our competition to change. They'll have to adopt standards of pay for performance, answering the phone 24 7, having uniforms and painted trucks, having insurance, having trained employees. These will be the things that will become required in the industry because our employees, they are the standard and our customers expect it and thereby we'll be able to have the change we want to see happen in the landscape industry. So I wanted to build a franchise that I would join. I knew it was like to be a franchisee and see all the systems at work inside of Anytime Fitness. And I had interviewed dozens over 50 other Home Service franchisees and seen what they liked and what they didn't like. So here's what I wanted and what Augusta Nation does today. First off, the big one is no royalty. There's no penalty to grow. A royalty is where you take a percentage of the revenue off the top and you have to pay that to the franchisor. We we have no penalty to grow. There's no perverse incentive because if I'm getting a royalty as the franchisor, I just want you to grow top line revenue. So I'll encourage you to market and advertise way more than you should. I'll encourage you to get salespeople way sooner than you should and just spend money to grow top line revenue. Because I'm getting a piece of that top pie. Now there's no royalty or marketing fund by the way, at U.S. lawns usually you're looking at 6 to 8% royalty. Spring Green, 10 to 12% royalty. Grounds Guys, 7 to 8% royalty. These are lawn care industry franchise specific. Now home services Mosquito Joe has a 12% royalty. Glass Doctor is a 6 to 9% royalty. Merrymade is an 8.3 royalty. Now instead in Augusta Nation you pay a flat $1600 per month fee. Flat fee. I don't care if you're doing 100,000 in revenue a month or if you're doing 5 million a month in Revenue, you're paying the same amount per month. Now what would this cost if you had a million dollar business? If we take Augusta long, can we compare it to these other franchises? So on a million dollar business, if you're paying $1,600 per month as a flat franchise fee, I mean $19,000 per year. Now if you take the same size business and you have an 8% average royalty of these other brands, on average, that'd be an $80,000 per cost per year of cost, 76% less to be in Augusta compared to these other ones. And I can guarantee you when you compare what we offer in support, coaching, software, et cetera, it is leagues ahead of these other franchises. Now I wanted to build a franchise that I would join. So here's what I wanted and here's what Augusta Nation does. You can leave at any time. If you join Augusta and you have a customer base and then you leave, you can take your customers, there is no penalty. If you start from scratch and you grow it and you're like, I don't think it's worth it for, for me anymore, you can leave at any time, there's no penalty and you take your customers. Now, not a single other franchise will do this. The reason they won't is because they're owned by private equity like Roark Capital that just bought Subway, KKR that owns Neighborly and all the associated brands, Blackstone, big firms, private equity. Now the reason they don't do this is because by having it where people can leave at any time without any fee, it requires me as the franchisor to, to constantly update the value and make sure it's always worth every month it is worth the price of admission of the $1,600. And that's why they won't do this, because they will get someone a 10 year agreement, a franchise agreement and basically unless you die, they're going to get their fees. So by having it where you can leave anytime, I incentivize to do things. Number one, keep you in business. Not inflate top line revenue for a royalty, but only keep you in business. Two is to constantly prove the value of that $1600 monthly fee. Now if you look at the initial franchise fee in terms of costs to join a franchise, US Lawns charges 49,000, Spring Green charges 50,000 and Grounds Guys charges $35,000. Now what does this initial franchise fee cover? The legal setup. So it's about a lot of attorneys, a lot more legal stuff around franchising as well as the franchise License itself. Now that license can sit on your balance sheet. And as it goes up in value in time, we have franchises that join Augusta for 5, $10,000. And now that license is worth $24,000 on their balance sheet. Training week. So you come, you have training at all these franchises. This is what the initial fee covers. A website software set up. You give you a bunch of systems access to a brand. So you should be able to get customers, customers for cheaper using the domain authority online as well as the brand network. And you also get exclusive territory rights for almost all these franchises. They'll give exclusive territory rights for a certain area. So any lead that comes in, regardless of who it comes through, is going to go to you in a certain area. So, Mosquito Joe. So these are now outside of lawn care, 42,000 for the initial fee. Glass Doctor is $59,000 for the initial fee. Merry Maids is $37,000 for the initial franchise fee to join their franchise. So what about Augusta Lawn Care? What's our initial franchise fee? Well, it was $24,000, but not anymore because now we will actually fully refund that once you've been inside the system. And in 2024, we launched the Give Back program. And I want to walk you through what that exactly entails. You get your initial franchise fee refunded back to you. Now you can either a, get it refunded back to you in five years and, and put it towards a new location or just literally get the check back to you in 10 years in cash. I will give you a check probably at conference in person. Now, the only thing you have to do to qualify for the Give Back program is follow these three systems. Number one, implement Pay for Performance, where we pay employees based on how hard they work and not how long they work. Second thing is open book management. We share numbers with our team. We give them the financials, they understand the business. So we can improve the level of professionalism in the industry, starting with the frontline team members. The third thing is you just have to have your trucks wrapped exactly as you see on, on the screen there. As long as they look like that, at the end of five years, you'll get it refunded toward another location. Or at the end of 10 years, I will hand you a check for that initial fee amount. So, quick recap. Since you get the initial franchise fee refunded, the real cost is that $1,600 per month. So let's determine if it's actually worth it and what, what you get for it. All right, first off, you're going to get a great website. Now if you went to lawn careweb design.com you'd be 499 per month for a custom website. Now, Augusta Lawn Care, because we have all these locations and we get thousands and tens of thousands of clicks every month, the domain authority is very high. Usually within one to three weeks we are on the top or at least the very first page of Google at a new location inside of Augusta, simply because the domain authority that we have have across the nation. You also get access to pay for performance software. Now, this is typically $199 per month. You get it for free. You also get another website for free, which is Augusta Lights, augustalights.com again customized to your area with all of the instant pricing, exclusive webinars, training for Christmas lights. You get 20% off discounts for all of your Christmas lights as well as a private web portal that we have completely separated just for Augusta Nation to order your lights and get dedicated support. Now, if you come to Blue Collar Summit, all of our owners for $500 can get two tickets, whereas everyone else in the public is going to pay 799 or $1,000 per ticket. So you're literally saving like 92 bucks a month. Plus you get extra. We have additional additional summit just for Gust Nation as well as an after party that's all just for the owners inside of a Gust Nation. But in terms of hard cost savings, you're still saving $92 per month. So if you add up all these actual hard cost savings, you're actually save. If you simply were to get the websites, you simply come to conference, it almost costs you 1600 bucks a month to not be inside of Augusta Nation. But that's not the end of it. There's a lot more. You also get exclusive access to a lot of different things that we don't give the public access to. First off is the technology around instant quotes where you have no admin type and you sell jobs 24, 7. We talked about that today here in the workshop. We do it for mowing. We also do it for winter services. We also do it for snow services. And there's many more to come. We also use it for upsells and use these upsells forms to be able to get customers that are buying one service and get them into others. Now on those instant quotes coming in 2025, we're going to actually allow it where customers can put their car information and it takes that card information and puts it on file on the Back end of customers copilot CRM. So you can actually charge that customer in the future and there is no more communication required after they fill out the instant quote form. You also get access to Max AI. Max AI has been created from here at a command center instead of Augusta Lawn Care for us to be able to answer the phone 24. 7 using AI. Now, we're already staffed like 7 days a week, almost 20 hours a day with staff members. But if we ever miss a call or closed for whatever reason, that call is going to get answered immediately get answered 24. 7. And the reason this is important is because only 38% of missed calls actually have a voicemail. So all every call you miss, 62% of those, you're missing out on those leads. Now in 2025, Max is actually going to have the capability to actually sell jobs over the phone. He's going to be able to collect card information over the phone and he can do it in less than half the time as a human operator and with much less air. And the reason for that is because as AI gets better, we're tapping into these tools to be able to make sure we can sell customers quickly, fast on the phone, online and immediately get them pricing without an in person quote. Now you also get access to training in person training for both owners and general managers. So it's a four day training for owners, two days for general managers and you can do all day, all six of them together to operationally and the owner side of training, that's all in person. At our headquarters you also get daily masterminds with myself. So we call them Mike minutes masterminds or the 3M. Every single day you can ask questions. I will answer every single question. Usually Monday through Friday, literally almost every week. I'll do it five days a week. I also have more coaching quarterly we do a roundtable on Zoom with all the owners. Monthly you get a one on one coaching call with either someone from the corporate office or or inside of Augusta Nation we have an owners run coaching program where you have a specific dashboard with all your metrics completely separate that you can see all your numbers in a really good spot. And get monthly coaching from other owners and owner success managers. Inside of Augusta Nation we give you ad templates for Facebook, for Google and make sure that your website is tracking your cost per lead. When someone is submitting an asset request form, the brand deals alone can pay for your fees just in and of themselves. Hustler 27% off. Echo 20% off. Gravely 22% off Ferris 25% off. Go down the list of all these different brands just in the past few months. These are the brands that we've added to the list of preferred vendors. Now we don't make a single cut a single dollar of any savings that you get. We pass this all directly down to the owners. And Connor recently he texted me this on WhatsApp. I screenshot it said just in savings between deals with Gravely Green, Touch, echo, ramp rack, etc. And now discount Tire. I feel like we will have greater than our royalty to Augusta. We'll have saved greater than our royalty to Augusta this year. It's wild how much in discount you are able to get for us. And we're only continuing to add more brand deals as we continue to grow. Pro Shop Printing is a alliance we have with Vistaprint. We pay them to create an awesome place to be able to get templates and downloads for all your print marketing needs. Door hangers, instant pricing on the door hangers. Lots of technology that we've tied into here to make it super fast to order all of your marketing materials now. Command center, you have access to command center. We really recommend this heavily. From when you're going from zero to $500,000 in annual revenue, grow as fast as possible. Not focusing on admin work but rather focus on sales and hiring. Now the cost per minute is 94 cents to a dollar and 46 cents per minute. If you compare that to other services like Co Call Boss or Jill's Office, it's very, very cost effective. Also, if you have a larger business and you already have your office staff, it's like an insurance policy because if something happens, your office manager, you don't want them to leave. With all the inherent knowledge of the business and what's going on, you want to be able to follow systems so that they did bow out or if it was your spouse and they need to move on, et cetera, you have passed things off to command center. You pick up where you left off and run the business without it fall falling apart. Being part of Augusta Lawn Care, I can see the locations that sell and the ones that don't. And many times for most home service businesses, if you have a business that's doing under a million dollars in revenue and you need to move on, you have something like in life happens, it's almost impossible to sell the business. Being part of a franchise allows us to actually validate your financials and give the buyer confidence that they can have systems in place to fall back on as well as have training of place to make sure that they are easily able to transition to becoming the owner, allow you to sell the business and allow you to scale it up using the systems in place that copy and paste multiple locations is really our model. We want to grow to $500,000 as fast as possible, throw it into profit mode, and then over the course of a few years, get the 7 to $800,000 in annual revenue being ran by a general manager, being very profitable and allowing you to copy and paste that model over and over again. We have something called the 3F program, the franchise fee forgiveness, where you're able to attract really good talent. Because they know that they work for an Augusta location for two years, they'll get the initial franchise fee completely waived. And many people have joined Augusta and gone through this program and they work for two years at a location. They're very high caliber and they're willing to take less money simply because they know this program is in place. This allows you to take the best people and the most rewarding thing is to see them move on, become a business owner themselves, and then have them come back and inspire your current team to be able to get more out of life and continue their journey to success. Now, the brand awareness alone inside of Augusta is very powerful. I believe that as we get to a thousand locations, the customer acquisition cost to get a customer at Augusta will be 60 to 70% less than the average independent seller. Simply because people actually know what Augusta means. They'll already know the brand. And because they already know the brand, they'll be able to get. You'll be able to get more customers for the same dollars that you spend on advertising. So this alone, I think, will be a huge boom simply because the brand awareness, the same way that when I say, hey, sandwich shop, you think Subway, you think Quiznos. These are big brands. And because of that, it's easier to capture a customer when you're presented with an option of an independent versus a chain that you actually understand, understand the brand. Now, we just launched phase one of Augusta Leads. Augusta Leads. Phase two program is going to include a program that allows you to actually buy leads from us. We will do all the marketing for you and at a set lead price. It is not a variable lead cost. You don't pay management fees, you're not contract, there's no monthly fee. It's simply a cost per lead and you pay for what you get. This will allow you to be able to start multiple locations knowing, okay, if I spend X amount of marketing, I'll get X amount of leads, I'll convert X amount and it becomes much more systematic in terms of growth and scaling past that $500,000 in annual revenue marker. But honestly, if I had to tear it all apart, if I had to break it down, the reason to join Augusta Lawn Care is the community. And it's all summed up in two words. Augusta Nation. In this community, you can share equipment, tips and employees with nearby owners. We see that many times the the locations that grow the fastest are the ones that are nearby other owners because they get the support. They can share trucks, they can share equipment, they see what's best practice. They can do co ops when it comes to marketing. Be able to share your wins and losses without feeling competitive. This is many times you can't even talk to your competitors because if you're doing bad, they'll step on your face. If you're doing really good, then they won't want to talk to you. They don't want to be competitive with you. These are some of the WhatsApp groups that many of us have. We have different hubs inside of WhatsApp for Christmas lights, snow services, snow plowing, every track of winter services. And for solving Q4 collapse, we have a different track for it. We have local groups like the Washington State franchisees, et cetera. And these are meetups across Colorado and Georgia and people meeting up for topgolf and for, you know, going someone's wedding. These are the type of things that Gusta Nation participates in and this is the type of community to be a part of running marathons together. This is a training event out in Kentucky where about 70 people got together to learn how to do Christmas lights. So on all of these benefits, on top of the savings of the actual hard cost and savings, you get all of this stuff. So I have a special offer today since you finished the end of the workshop. Now, I didn't tease this at the beginning. If you made it here, you've watched hours of the content. You know what Q4 collapse is, you know what C4 seasonitis is and I want to solve it with you. So if you join Augustination today, there's a couple of things that you're going to save on. First off, you get three months of $0 monthly franchise fees. So once you come for training, you'll get three months of no franchise fees that will allow you to be able to paint your trucks, put decals on any changes if you're switching over from an existing brand. Plus you get one full year of 50% off monthly franchise fees. So instead of the 1600 it's only going to be $800 per month. This is gonna be a savings of $14,000. So if you join from this workshop you'll be able to get that. So down below there is a link. You can book a call with Lee and you're going to be able to get all the information you need to see if your territory qualifies as well as if you would be a great candidate to join Augusta Lawn Care. So to claim the discount you can go book an intro call with Leigh at Augusta lawncare services.com/franch or click the link down below. But you need to mention the workshop. So inside the description of the form, mention the workshop. He'll then know that you qualify for the discount. Second thing, you'll have to still pass the same screening efforts and territory analysis. There's a small percentage of owners that apply to be in Augusta Nation actually get through. Do not think that if you just apply that you're going to get in. Right now, one out of seven to one out of eight owners that apply to joint Augusta actually become owners. So we will go through a thorough analysis of your market. We'll do over a 30 page market analysis for your territory to see if it's actually going to be a great fit. And then the third thing would be to pay for the franchise license and attend training. And then you did inside of Augusta Nation. Ultimately I truly believe that we are better together. I am certain that both myself, Augusta Nation, the support of coaches and other owners together will be able to cure seasonitis. Thank you so much.