How to Work ON Your Business and Get OUT of the Field

Hey everyone, this is Mike Andes and you're listening to the Landscape Business course podcast you might be watching on YouTube or Facebook. Thank you for joining today. And today we have a very special episode. We are going to be talking about how you can get your business to where you are working on the business instead of in the business and where on a day to day basis you're thinking more about hiring, sales and expansion and strategy instead of fighting the fires of daily operations. Before we get into today's show, a big thank you to to the sponsor which is Jobber. If you haven't already go to getjobber.com im andes that's my last name. A n-e s getjobber.com imd and you can get six months of their software at 20% off. So definitely want to check that out today. It's a fantastic piece of software that you can use. One of the things that I love about it so much is really the online booking. And so what it allows you to do is people can go onto your website, you can send them a link, you can text them a link, you can Facebook message them a link. Using that link they can actually book on your schedule, times and slots that you leave open for them to book an estimate or come look at their project or look at their lawn if it has a disease. Whatever you're looking to do in terms of lawn care, landscaping, Jobber's the place to do it. And that link can save you a lot of time. If you don't have an office person or if you want to save from having to pay an office person to take a call, set up an appointment, make sure that the time works for the estimator as well as the client. The client can just go right on there. You can even just text them a link that says you can book their appointment right from there. Click the link right from a text message or from a Facebook message like I said or an email, they go in there, select the time they want. It's going to make sure they get notified, make sure they're reminded and that you also get that time slotted off on your calendar to meet them. So online booking is one of the things that I love about Job. And if you want to try it out, go to getjobber.com IM Andy quote for that special discount. Now today we are going to do something a little bit differently. I usually don't sell a whole lot of things on the podcast and I don't plan on ever making this a sales pitch. But at the end of the day's episode. I do have a special offer that I want to present to you, but before we get into that, I want to talk about the whole, really, the vision of what I've always wanted to do with my business, and now it's really the vision of what I want others to be able to do with their business. And that's really manifested in creating Augusta Lawn Care, the franchise where people can now buy into the franchise. So I'm gonna talk about all of that. And the overarching theme of today's episode, though, is how do you work on the business instead of in the business? And this concept comes from Michael Gerber's book, the E. Myth. You hear a lot of times I talk about it working on the business instead of in the business. And for most lawn care landscapers, they want to work day to day at their business. They aren't necessarily interested in opening, like, a whole bunch of other different types of businesses or stores or restaurants. It's like, you're happy to work there, you like working there, but you rather work on things that are actually going to improve the business, make it more profitable, make it more efficient, or possibly grow it in size. Now, in order to do those things, all the things that correlate towards growth, profitability, more efficiency, those are the things you want to be working on. And like I said, there's a hiring, it's sales, and it's strategy. Those are the few things that you should be really focused on. And when I say hiring, team, culture, all that kind of falls underneath that. When I say sales, I'm talking about marketing, branding, things like that. And then when I talk about strategy, you're thinking about the future, whether it be from organizational standpoint, whether it be from a business growth standpoint. Those are the three things you really want to be thinking about. And, you know, sales strategy, and then hiring in the people side of the business. And so.

So many people come to me like, well, how do you have so much time to do stuff? And you have the gym, and you have two or three podcasts, you've written a couple books, you have a studio, you know, you have all this stuff going on. You have Augusta Lawn Care locally now you're franchising it, and now you're starting a food line. Like, how do you do all of this, Stu? And the biggest part of it is that when I go in to build a business, I'm not looking to run the business. I'm looking to build the framework for the business and then allow a great team to come in and start doing the finishes. So I'm more of the architect. And then I go get great contractors to build the thing that I have in my mind. And so with Augusta Lawn Care, for example, it took three years for me to be able to get to do this because I had to grow it to a certain point where I could afford the. The contractors to come in and actually build the business. And I, as the architect, actually got in my hands dirty for the first couple years working in the business, mowing lawns, trimming trees, driving the truck, stuff like that. And so, you know, recently, though, for Augusta Lawn Care Services, I'm not like that. And what's actually really interesting is that as I'm recording this episode, it's the first week that I literally have nothing to do with Augusta Lawn Care locally at our store. I don't do anything there basically, besides show up in the morning and say hi and kind of rah, rah, rah the troops and try to encourage or help and coach. That's really my role there now as a coach. And, you know, the past couple years, all I've focused on is sales At Augusta Lawn Care, I try to delegate all the operational equipment, side scheduling, operations. Everything was project managers, office managers, and then guys in the field even wouldn't take care of equipment, and they'd be responsible for certain roles within their business. So there was a system to everything. But just recently, as of this week, I literally don't do anything there. There's really nothing that I can do that they can't. And so it's been running great. I'm recording this at 2:19pm and we have a bunch of crews going out, I think probably eight crews a day, and everything's gonna go fantastic. You know, I have an estimator. He's doing his thing. We got two people in the office. It's all running by itself. I don't know about the jobs, the customers. It's working by itself. That gives me the opportunity to work on the business. And so what my goal is is to really, when I set up a business, when I start a business, I do not want to be there for 20 years sending out the mail or answering emails and phone calls. I want to be the architect. This is how you want to think about it. You want to be architect that builds the plans, builds the drawings, the contractors build the building, and then either A, you move on to another building, or B, you constantly are improving the existing building and the structure and improvements and making it look better so that you can charge more for rent, that is raise prices, cleaning the building, making sure that you have good staff for the building. So if you're wanting to run your business and just make it very, very profitable and have a very good work life balance, that is very possible. Just don't move on to another building. Focus on the building once it's been built. Work on the business, work on improving it. Work on increasing prices, increasing the value of the customer, increasing the efficiencies of your crews. These are the things you want to be thinking about if you want to work on the business. So I actually simplified working on the business down to three things. What you need to do to get your business to the point where you're at work, actually working on the business and not working in the business. And for some people, this might be very premature. If you're talking 100, $200,000 in annual revenue, there's no way in the world you're going to be able to work on your business 99% of the time or even 50% of the time. You're gonna be working, doing the work, going from job to job, and that's completely normal. I did that for the first few years of my landscaping business, and it's only been the past couple where I've been able to work on the business for the majority of my time working at the business and so at the office and things. And so I kind of narrowed it down to three, but there's probably 50,000 different things. But I'm just trying to be as general as possible on how to make sure you can work on your business. And if you're working in your business now, what you can do to get to the place where you're working on your business, thinking about hiring, thinking about strategy, and thinking about marketing and growing or making the business more efficient. So the first thing is systems and dependability. So these are the three ways you can get to the point where you are working on your business. Systems and dependability. I've talked about systems a lot, but the second thing is dependability. And usually they kind of coincide. In my opinion, in order to depend on your people and depend on your staff, you need to have a system in place that hires great people, trains great people and manages great people. You need to have a great system for that. And therefore you can depend on your team in order to have dependability on new work coming in and leads, a good flow of leads. In order to have a dependable flow of leads, you need to have systems in place to make sure that your website is efficient, that you have systems in place to capture those leads, whether it be through an estimate request form on your web website, or whether it be through mailers or email newsletters. Whatever you're doing for marketing, if you want to have dependability for the leads that are coming in, you've got to have a system in place to create that dependability. So number one thing you have to do if you want to make your business to the point where you are working on it instead of in it, the number one thing you have to do is create systems that therefore create dependability. So systems and dependability. The second thing is simplify the business. This is a hard thing for us as landscapers to do because we want to do a lot of different services. We want to get into bigger projects. Many times we want to get bigger pieces of equipment. All of those things require more skilled labor, which is going to become harder and harder to find, more and more expensive to find. And at the same token, it's not the least profitable, maybe, but it's definitely the most fluctuating profit margin is getting into services that you're not really familiar with. Super like lots of cost of goods sold, really high.

Level of skilled labor. Those are not the things you want to be getting into, in my opinion. If you want to simplify the business and make it to where the systems of the business can run, the easier and more simple you can make that business model, the better chance of you being able to actually step away and allow the business to operate without it falling apart and without you being there. If you want to work on the business instead of in the business, simplifying the business is a fantastic way to make sure that you're not going to have to always be there. Because if the architect makes a very, very, very complicated drawing, very complicated plan for a building, there's a good chance they're going to have to go explain to the contractor a lot exactly what's going on. And if they make a certain really complicated designs and infrastructure that's very hard to build, and it's very complicated measurements, these good chance they're always gonna have to be on site building the building. That being said, if the architect makes it very, very, very simple, they literally can sell like, you can get house designs that are like architect ready or contractor ready from an architect. They're literally just like, you can print them off because they're so simple. They're super generic. Simple materials, simple measurements, and everything's gonna be simple. To make find is very, very easy in that token, if you are the architect of your business, if you do not want to have to always be constantly involved every day with projects and with getting people and all the minutiae of issues happening and stuff, breaking and complaints and callbacks and fixing broken work, if you're going to want to not have to fix all those things and be there all the time, as the architect, simplify the business, take the services out that aren't profitable, take the services out, require high levels of skill in the labor force. You want to simplify the business. If you want to work on the business, the architect should not be nailing nails, hammering in things, tearing down walls. They should make the design, make the strategy, make the framework, and then go get people, go get team members that will build the building. That's not possible.

If the building's design is so complex and there's so many moving parts and so many new things being added every day, the architect will to be there every single day, literally helping the contractors do their job. And so many people complain about their employees. You know, I have to basically do it for them. And I'm the only one that can make it perfect. Yeah. The reason you're the only one that can make it perfect and do it right is because it's so complex. You're the only one that thought of the idea, knows what it needs to look like and knows what it needs to get to the place it needs to be at. If you made it simple, you could easily tell a person what they need to do. You could give them training, very simple, and then they'd be able to do the work. But you can't blame them if you're creating things that are so complex and so abstract and literally only you know how to do it correctly. And so simplifying the business and using that architect versus contractor mentality is a great way to make sure you can work on the business, not in the business. The third final way to make sure you can work on the business, and this is a little more in depth and in the weeds, but it is even out cash flow. This is one of the biggest reasons why people are not able to get middle management is because they aren't able to even out cash flow over the course of a year. Make sure that you're like, it's a huge, huge thing in our industry because seasonality, either a, you can close your business for three months during the winter, which is a valid option. A lot of landscapers do that close for three months so that you lay off and just lay Everyone off, and then you just keep the cash reserves so that you can get through the winter. Or B, you create other services or ancillary kind of ways of creating money during the winter. Whether it be getting commercial work, doing tree work, whatever it is, whatever, marketing snow removal, bush trimming, property cleanups, going after foreclosed houses, whatever you do during the winter or those times when you're slower. I know for some people, their slowest time is right now, August, July, super hot. Those are the times you've got to figure out cash flow. And that is the best. One of the things, like the third thing you need to do is level up cash flow. If you want to work on your business because it'll scare you, what'll happen is when cash flow goes low, really, really low, and you haven't evened it out, you'll get scared and you'll jump back into day to day operations in order to save yourself money. Because you'll jump back and you'll say, okay, I'll manage this job because then I don't have to pay someone $25 an hour or 20 bucks an hour as a manager to make sure this job goes well. I'll jump into the work, I'll get it done so I can save myself money and we can get by. So cash flow is a huge thing. Not so much profitability we're talking about here, we're talking about cash flow. A lot of landscapers run very profitable operations, but because their cash flow is so out of whack, they aren't able to make it through the low dips and therefore go out of business. So don't. I'm not a huge fan of people bragging about their, their profitability percentages because at the end of the day, if it's plus 31 day or plus 30 for half the year and then negative 10 for the rest of the year, I would much rather take a 15% margin business, 15% net profit margin business. I would rather have that business over a business that for six months out of the year did 30% and then the other half of the year did negative 10%. I would much rather have the business that just does 10 to 15% net margin. Not great, not amazing, not ideal, but it's consistent. And so taking out those big swings in cash flow is gonna allow you to have the nerve. It's gonna allow you to have the stomach for a little bit of risk and for you to step out of day to day operations, not have to go fight the fires, go after all the Callbacks, hire an extra office person, hire a middle manager, hire project managers, pay them a little bit more, and allow you to step out and work on the business. So those are the three things, systems and dependability. The second thing is simplify the business. The third thing is level out your cash flow. And really, this is the essence of, really this whole idea of working on your business instead of in your business is the whole model of Augusta Lawn Care. So this is now I'm transitioning. I'm going to talk a little bit about the franchise. So if you haven't seen it on Facebook and things literally the past few weeks, we just now were able to start selling franchises. So I don't know if I mentioned on the podcast before, but we are officially allowed to start selling franchises. Our trademarks passed, everything set up, FTD done. Legally, we're completely set up for it. And so that's why I've stepped 100% away now from Augusta locally, and I'm able to work on it full time, is developing the franchisees, helping the franchisees. And it's only been possible because I've worked on the business and now I'm stepping completely out of the business as really being a silent owner. And so in order for that to happen, I had to do all those things. I had to create systems and dependability, I had to simplify the business, I had to level out cash flow. But the vision now of Augusta Lawn Care is to allow other landscapers to do the exact same thing. Because I've seen so many landscapers work their butt off, work their brains out trying to build a great business, working 80, 90 hours a week, working in the business. And they wonder why they can't have time with their family. They wonder why they're not getting more profitable. They wonder why they constantly are mad at their employees, frustrated, they resent the job.

And it's simply because they're working in the business instead of on the business. And so Augusta Lawn Care really is going to be all the systems and things that you need to allow you to work on the business. And we're gonna take a lot of things off your plate. Things like the marketing aspect, the website design, all of that stuff's gonna get taken off your plate. Trying to create forms, trying to make your logo, trying to make your flyers look nice every spring, trying to make door hangers, all of that' off your plate. You don't have to think about that anymore. As a franchisee, that's what we're going to provide. But the whole vision of Augusta Lawn Care is how do we create business owners as franchisees that create an actual sellable asset in their business to either give away to their family, hand down to their children, or to sell and they're able to retire. And so what I've done for the past several months is talked to a lot of franchisees in all sorts of industries. Everything from pest control, mosquito stuff, home repair, plumbing, electrical, landscaping, just like every possible imaginable franchise, especially on home services. I've talked to and one of the biggest complaints is that the franchisor takes fees away from them every single month. And the bigger they grow, the more revenue they make, the more that franchise fee grows because they're taking a percentage off the top line revenue. And so I just kept seeing this complaint over and over and over and people just cap out. Like, there is a reason why the grounds guys and us lawns and these other companies have a certain threshold that franchisees hit in gross revenue and then they stop. Because if they go over $500,000, 600, as they get more and more revenue, the amount of money they're paying to the franchisor is growing as well because they're paying a franchise fee plus a marketing fee. And usually it's becoming like 10%, 10% of gross revenue gone. Like, of gross revenue, not net margin, not net profit, not profit. We're talking about 10% that's coming off the top line revenue. And I look at most landscaping businesses and like, there's just no way that it's sustainable. Because as the business grows, you know, if you ran a $30 million organization and you took $3 million home, net profit was $3 million, and you were a, you were making $3 million a year, you're still at 10% profit margin. Now if you were a franchisee of a company that took 10% of your revenue, all that profit's gone. Like, you broke even. And so it's almost impossible to grow your business to seven plus figures, like multi seven figures. If you're having a franchise fee that's taking a percentage off the top, even like 6, 7% is just too much. And so after talking to so many of them, like I was literally talking to people who were having 15, $20,000 a week coming out of their bank account because they were paying 9 to 10% of their revenues to a franchisor and they had a 1.8 million dollar business, 1.9 million dollar business, and that much money is coming out every single week. And they're like, we just can't stay up, we can't stay up with it. We can't stay up with all the demands for the amount of marketing we have to spend. We can't stay ahead of, you know, they're considered some of the, some of the franchisees I talked to were some of the best in the system, but yet they literally still felt like they were smothered because they couldn't afford to pay the franchise fees and then also take money home. Literally considered the best in their system in the franchisor system. And so my goal with Augusta Lawn Care is to be able to give you the systems and the procedures so you can work on the business, work on the hiring, work on the strategy, work on the marketing and perfect those things and work on the business. Now, that being said, if you're just starting out, which most of you listening are not just starting out, you already have your landscaping business. But if you're just starting out, there might be a couple years where you work in the business, just like I did. If you're just starting out and you're just gonna start with one truck and you don't have $100,000 to get like five trucks and a bunch of employees, if you're gonna start with one truck, you're gonna start working out, working in the field. Right? But the objective and the systems and the procedures behind Augusta Lawn Care is completely predicated on making your business to where you can work on it instead of in it. Alright. And so I want to talk about kind of, first of all, what makes Augusta Lawn Care different. And you might be asking, like, is this a sales pitch? Yes. If you want to click off now, that's fine. I believe in what we're trying to sell here. And this is something I'm not going to talk a lot about on the podcast, but something I'm very passionate about and I believe in 100%. And so I'm gonna explain today why we're different, why Augusta Lawn Care is different, why the franchise is different, and why the opportunity might be right for you. But I want to talk about first, what makes us different? Number one, the franchise fee structure. So like I said, you're looking at between 8 and 10% of gross revenue disappearing if you go with grounds guys, us lawns, Spring Green, all these other franchisees, franchisors, Right? And if they don't get you in the upfront fee, like they might say 6%, but then they're also gonna tack on marketing percentage, like a 2% marketing fee, and then they're gonna tack on other things. And so literally, instead of going with the percentage that we're taking off the top, we're not taking that 0%, 0% royalty percentage fee. We're taking, we are taking a set membership fee to be part of the franchise. That's it. So after your initial fee, which we'll get into in just a second, what that covers, but like after your initial fee, your monthly fee is $500 for the first year, or, sorry, $600 for the first year, $1,200 for year two and beyond. That will never change. When you sign that 10 year agreement as a franchisee, your first year is going to be one every single month. You'll get charged 600 bucks. Year two, 1200 bucks. And that will continue until like forever. You will not have to pay more than that. And so the reason I did that is because when you been in a franchise for five, six years, you basically can run it yourself. You know the systems, you know the procedures, you get all the leads, you know exactly how to do it. You really perfected it after five, six years. And yet what's happening with these other franchisees out in other systems that I've talked to is they've, number one, figured out the systems. They're really good at it, they're growing their business. But at the same time as they're growing their business, the franchisor is taking more and more money, and yet they're doing less and less for the franchisee. Because after a couple years, you should be able to figure out a lot of things yourself because you're actually doing it. You're figuring out the systems, you're figuring out procedures, you're using the marketing material, you know what works, you know what ads from the franchisor are working, you know those things. And so it doesn't take a lot of hand holding like it does the first couple years. And yet at the same token, you're actually paying more and more and more as the business grows to the franchisor. So we're eliminating that. If you're making $100,000 per month in revenue as an Augusta lawn care franchisee, you're gonna pay $1,200 to the franchisor. If you actually take a look at that, that's 1.2%. So if you want to compare apples to apples of $100,000 a month business with Augusta versus $100,000 with Grounds Guys or some other franchisees franchisor, you're gonna be paying 1.2% at Augusta versus 8 to $10,000, 8 to 10% at Grounds Guys or one of these other spring green, all these other franchise boards that are doing that. So the biggest difference, the biggest difference with Augusta Lawn Care compared to all the other franchisors that are in this space of landscaping and lawn care is our fee structure, hands down the thing. Because I want to make sure that a landscaping business that starts in Augusta Lawn Care franchise or converts to the franchise, is able to build a business that is doing two, three plus million dollars in revenue and not being penalized for it. I do not want to penalize people for pouring in blood, sweat and tears, investing back into the business and growing it, because it takes money, it takes sacrifice to build the business in growth. I do not want to be taking a tax off that. We're going to have a set fee structure. So that's the biggest difference between us and every other franchise in this industry. No one else is doing it. Because this is the argument, and this is the argument that originally I was bought into. They're like, well, what you want to do is you want to make sure that the franchisee and you are on the same page. And if the franchisee wants to grow the business, you want to grow the business as the franchisor. So what you do is you take a percentage of revenue and then you're both on the same page and you want the business to grow. And so they're like, you want to get on the same page, you want the goals of the franchisee to grow their business to be the same as you, the franchisor. Because as they grow their business, they make more money, in theory, and the franchisor then therefore makes more money. And that sounds great, but the problem is in our industry, as the business grows in size and in revenue, profit margins usually go down. And if the margin that you're taking off the top of the table, off the top line revenue is going to the franchisor, there will come a point when you cannot grow anymore simply due to the fact that there's just too much money coming off the top line. And so I've just looked at the average revenues that these franchises are hitting and stopping at because they cannot afford to keep paying a top line revenue percentage to the franchisor. And they do not have a sellable asset when they go to sell to some other individual or pass it down to their family because there's this massive amount of money they're giving away every month just to be, literally just to have a logo. And so I do not agree with the fact that it's aligning the franchisee and franchisor interest by just focusing on the growth of the business. I want to be focused on longevity, I want to be focused on profitability. And those things are not, does not mean growing a bigger business. I, as the franchisor and as the person trying to help the franchisees, I want them to make more money, period. I do not want them to get more revenue and just grow the business that way so I can make more on that percentage. I simply want them to make more money, make it more profitable, more efficient and more sellable, to either give to their family and make it enduring legacy type of thing, or be able to sell it as a sellable asset. And so the number one thing that makes us different is the fee structure. Number two is the marketing. So we do not have a marketing percentage that comes off your top line revenue either. So a lot of times, sometimes in our industry, between 5 and 8% is a franchise fee coming off every single month. And then on top of that, between 1 and 3% is a marketing fee that comes right off the top of your revenue. What we've done is not, we're not going to take any of that money because I feel like it's the same with government. The more money is channeled towards local government agencies, it's usually spent much more efficiently because you have people on the ground looking at the projects like from a government standpoint. The same way I believe for franchisees, $500 spent on national advertising is less effective in my opinion than local advertising in a very targeted demographic, on Facebook, ads on print marketing and things like that. And so we're not gonna take any money for marketing. In addition, we're not gonna take a percentage. Nothing like that is coming off. We recommend that you spend 2% of your gross revenues on advertising, but we do not enforce it. We recommend we give you all the resources, we give you all the print material, we give you all the ads that you should be using, we give you all of that information, but it's up to you to spend what you want to spend on your local market. And we're not going to take a bunch of money and then try to do a national campaign that's very inefficient, that doesn't drive results, that doesn't get actually leads in the door or is just so cost prohibitive in terms of cost per click and cost per lead when it actually comes to your website or picks up, when they actually pick up the phone. So the second thing is Just that we do not charge a marketing fee and we focus on spending those marketing dollars in your local market and giving you all the resources to make sure that the marketing that you do do and that we have measured and does produce results, you're actually going to funnel it, that money directly into your local market. The last thing I have written down that makes us different is really the focus of the whole business is residential and simplicity. So we don't focus on massive commercial jobs where you need a massive trailer, a big truck to haul a trailer, $20,000 mowers, a crew of five people. Like that's not what we're focusing on with Augusta Lawn Care. We're focusing on residential, small, upscale neighborhoods. We're focusing on the baby boomer generation that's over the next 20 years is going to need our services and is willing to pay for a more professional, high value service. And that's what we're gonna be providing at Augusta Lawn Care. That's gonna be our focus. We're gonna be focused on scalability. Things that are like, we can just like small residential is super scalable. You don't need site maps, you don't need, what's it called, quality control, people checking five different zones of irrigation and like a five acre campus of commercial. Like I'm not interested in that. I'm not interested in going up and competing at the, against Brickman and against Brightview and these massive players in the commercial space. Not where I want to be. I do not want to be in a 5% margin business. I want to be in 20% margin business or more. And I find that to be in the residential market in the next 20, 30 years, the baby boomer generation is going to need our services. And as healthcare has gotten better, they're going to live longer. And I promise you, this is the space we want to be in that we can be the most competitive simply due to the fact that we're not going to have national conglomerates coming after us after these little lawns, after these little residential properties. Yet those property owners are willing to pay a premium for services that are professional, that have a great website, that are honest, that have uniforms, that have all the systems in place to make sure that they get communicated to effectively, efficiently, that have office staff, that has systems in place to contact people via chatbot, via, on their website. This is the website right here. This is Augusta Lawn Care's website. We just redesigned this for the franchisees. This is what you're going to be getting, you're gonna be able to customize this. We have all the web design team on our side to be able to make this happen. But what makes us different is really those three things. Number one, the franchise fee structure, that month to month percentage, we don't have that. There's a set membership fee, $600 for the first year, every single month, $1,200 ongoing after that. Doesn't matter how big your business gets. That's the fee. Second thing is, we don't take a marketing fee in terms of percentage off of your gross revenues either. We just suggest what should be done. We suggest at least 2% of your gross revenue should be spent on marketing. We don't enforce it. We don't collect any money from you for marketing. Third thing is residential focus. And just simple, simple services that are scalable, that you can get labor for easily, that has high profit margin and focusing on value to the customer instead of just volume of work on massive commercial jobs. So those are some of the things that make us different. Now I'm gonna tell you the offer that I was promising you at the beginning, and then I'm going to talk about some of the questions you might have. But first, the offer for Augusta Lawn Care is this. So I'm looking for 10 franchisees. And right now I'm doing this full time and vetting. All these people have contacted us to become franchisees, but I'm looking for 10. And this is my big hunt for the next month and a half or two is finding 10 franchisees that want to start an Augusta Lawn Care franchise. And basically, if you're thinking about it, if you believe in the vision of what we've talked about, and you're passionate, as I am, about changing this industry, making it more professional, charging higher prices by having greater levels of professionalism, by being able to pay your people what they're worth and keeping them and retaining them and having a great culture. If that's stuff you believe in, if you listen to this podcast, if you read my book and you believe in those things, I'd love to talk to you.

And the offer is that you're not gonna have to pay any franchise monthly fees until next June. June of 2020. Now, there is a fee up front that's $25,000, and that's very, very common. It's cheaper than most other franchises in this market. And in landscaping, it's $25,000. What you're gonna get for that is all the training. You're gonna come here for three days. I'm going to train you Walk you through the systems, walk you through everything on how we do through Augusta. You're gonna get access to all the branding, all the copyright. We do give you a secured territory so that no one else can come inside that territory. This is one of the demises of Subway is that they're starting to decline the past several years because they don't have any protected territory. So if you put your subway and you buy one on this corner, literally they have in their franchise agreement that someone can open one up across the street and completely jeopardize your sales. They don't give you any protected territory. Like if you go to Manhattan, there's literally like 30 within. Like, I think it's like a less than a mile radius of just subways. And that drains is a real drag on your sales as a franchisee. If other people can just move across the street, move in, if you're doing really, really good, they can move in right next door and just get some of your sales. So we give protected territories, 100,000 people that's included in that $25,000 up front, 100,000 people around your market. And you get to define where that is, your county, your part of the city, depending on where you're living at. 100,000 people is included. You can get more if you want, but $100,000, hundred thousand people is included. And that's a large enough market to build a seven figure business easily. Trust me, we built in our market. There was, there's about 8,000 people that live there and we built our business to 1.2 million before leaving that market and going to a bigger market. So like, trust me, you can build a seven figure business within a very small area, but we're gonna give you 100,000 people. So no other Augusta Lawn Care franchises can get customers within your territory.

That is completely secured by getting a franchise. And that $25,000 up front, that upfront $25,000 covers really just our costs and expenses of signing you up, training you. We completely do your own website. So for example, if you were, let's say in Dallas, Texas, and you wanted to open a franchise, you'd get invest@lawncareservices.com.

It would look similar to this. You could add videos behind here, you can go to this website and check it out. But it's all customizable. The services that you offer, the pricing, all the pictures, we can customize all of this to you. The basic general format is gonna be very much like this. I'm a big believer as you all have heard about having this estimate request form up front. I have a chatbot here over on the bottom left that talks to people that are on the website. The get in the estimate talks right there. These are the things that are gonna be on your website. We will build this out completely for you. We take all the cost of building the website. That's all included in your upfront 25 grand as part of that 25 grand. You know what, let me just go through other stuff anyways. I'm gonna go through a bunch of stuff that is included with the franchise. But my offer is you get till next June to not have to pay any fees. This is only for the first 10 franchisees, by the way. After that, we will never discount ever. But the first 10 franchisees. I'm doing it because I know it's gonna be a learning curve. I know that I'm learning. I know that we don't have everything figured out perfectly yet. And there's actually a big advantage to that, and that is you as a franchisee will be able to give input into how the systems are actually built and be able to give feedback on, like, hey, this actually works better, and I don't think this is fair and this needs to change or whatever, and really paved the way for a lot, you know, hundreds of franchisees down the road to build their businesses successfully. And so you get until next June, completely free, no fees whatsoever, starting June 2020. That's when you start. You're paying your $500 a month for that first year, and then after that, $1,200 a month for every year after that, each month. And so, first of all, that's the big thing. Secondly, you're also get 50% off your initial franchise fee. This will never happen again. Only the first 10 franchisees are getting this. And it is going to be for the first 10. They're going to get 50% off that $25,000. So for 12,500 bucks, you can get set up and not have to pay another penny in franchise cost until next June. That's going to give you time to come here in November. So in November, we're doing franchise training. The first franchise training for Augusta Lawn Care will be here in November. And so over the next couple months, I'm going to be vetting, finding out who's going to be in that first group of 10 franchisees. Those are the 10 people that are going to be coming to the training in November. That's going to give you, like seven or eight months to go. And have franchise fee free, no fees, basically until next June. So what that's going to allow you to do is even if you want to start your business next spring, you can still come here for November. You can still get trained up, ready to go, get everything ready to go over the winter and then hit hard next spring. Or you can come now in November, get set up and start winter services, getting the ball rolling, passing out cards, and really get going really hard in spring. So that's the offer today. I'm going to talk about now, some of the questions that come in from potential franchisees and people wanting to get in. And I'm going to go over what's included with the franchise. But.

I really think the biggest thing I'm looking for, someone asked me this and so I said, they said, what's the biggest thing you're looking for in a franchisee? And it's very simple. They need to believe in what I believe in. You say, well, that's kind of egotistical. No, if you don't believe in a lot of the concepts that I have around business, we're not gonna be a good match. Like, you're not gonna agree with me when I say that we should sacrifice profit in certain cases to make sure the culture of business is perfect and make sure that it's improving and make sure that it's healthy. Like, I'm a huge cult. You guys have listened to me. You know exactly what I stand for. If you don't stand for some of those things, you will not be a good match. And I sure hope I sniff out any of those people during my vetting process over the next couple months. Like, we've got a lot of applications and, and I don't know, maybe there's one out of the 80 something that we have now. The contact forms people have submitted, maybe only one of them are a real good franchisee, a real good fit for us. And so I'm gonna start really marketing this hard coming in a few weeks. But I'd really like for this podcast to be able to get 10 people to sign up. That's why I'm offering the discounts. Cause I'd much rather people have listened to my stuff, read my books, are really invested in what I stand for and what I believe this landscaping industry is capable of. That's who I wanna buy in. And the biggest question, I'm gonna get some of the questions. So the biggest question that comes across is like, how do I transfer? Like, what if I already have a lawn care business? What if I already am making revenue and I already have a different brand. So if you already have a lawn care business, which is most of you listening to this podcast, if you already have a lawn care business or landscaping business, you can transfer over to Augusta Lawn Care. What is that gonna look like? Well, you're gonna have to change your logo, you have to change your entity name, you're gonna have to change the branding on your trucks. We give you all of the branding. You can just go simply undo the franchise dashboard. You can buy your logos for your trucks. You can see exactly what paint color you need to paint the truck. We give you where to go. The truck painted. Like, all of that can be done. Business cards. We have already done all your flights, all your. Everything like that has been set up and ready to go. You've got to switch over, though. We will not allow people to, like, run their lawn care business under their name and have an Augusta Lawn Care franchise. Like, you'd have to switch it all over. But again, you're Gonna basically pay $12,500 upfront and not have to pay any franchise fees until next June. And so Basically, for that $12,000, you're gonna get here, you're gonna train on all the systems and procedures, you're gonna go home, you're gonna switch all the branding that might cost, depending on how many trucks you have between you, four or five grand, up to 20 grand. If you have a lot of trucks and trailers and equipment in the office of things, literally, it's like some paint, some logos, changing, some branding, a little bit legal stuff for just changing things over. It's not a big deal. You're going to become part of the franchise system. You're going to become, you know, you're going to have access to be able to use the logo, use Max, our mascot. I'd really encourage you to look at the website, see if it's something that you want to do for all. Like, there's like, I'm going to go through some questions here, but there's like 20 or 30 videos I have on the website that address a lot of these commonly asked questions. So just go to augustalawncare.com franchise. So from that page, you're gonna get all your questions answered. There's a whole bunch of videos on there, and then there's a button to click and schedule a call with me. And that call's gonna be 30 minutes and an introductory call. I'm gonna ask questions about you. You can ask questions about me and Augusta Lawn Care. Is this to see if it's a good fit. And so I'd really encourage you to check out that website, augustalongcareservices.com franchise and just watch the videos, see if it's something you're interested in and then book a call with me. And I'd love to talk with you, but transferring is not that difficult if you're running your business. If you run it for 5, 10, 15 years, the big question is like, well, I have so much brand equity and so many of the people in my local market know my name and I search well on Google, for example. Well, this is the thing as part of being a part of the franchise. One of the beautiful things is you're part of a website that has people clicking it from around the country because you have franchisees all over the place. So the search engine optimization is massive for Augusta Lawn Care. And you'll get to Google a whole lot faster using our website than you your website created by you, only in your market. We're gonna have franchisees around the country, all their customers clicking on the site. It's all driving traffic to the main site, which is augustalongcachservices.com and so massive amount of credibility. You can easily get on the front page of Google within six months of owning a franchise. Almost guaranteed. Not guaranteed. Just want to make sure that's clear. But it's very, very simple because this site was like if you wanted to buy this site, if you wanted to go get a designer to build a site, you're gonna look at 5 to $10,000 at least just to build this out, let alone to maintain it. We do all the security behind it, we keep it all fresh, making sure that we're always updating it with Google. Well, I don't do that. I'm not that good. I have a whole design team for the website that will be working for you. And you gotta ask yourself the question, if your brand is stronger than that and if it is, stick with your own thing. But if you need the systems and you need the procedures and you wanna work on your business, I really think that a switch, a conversion, a brand conversion. If you have an existing business and you wanna switch over, this is something that would be really, really interesting for you. And so check out the website, watch the videos and then schedule a call with me. I love to do that. You can go click the button, book a call right there on calendly and it's great. Now the last thing I'm gonna address is what do you get as part of being a franchisee. So I'm just gonna list off some of the things. Number one, I already talked about website. This is huge. Just your franchise fee, which right now is gonna be 12,500 bucks, literally, is about what you'd pay to get this website done. Maybe 10,000. I think you'd probably get this website done initially for 8 to 10,000, and then you'd probably end up paying about $1,000 to $1,500 a month just to get it maintained, just to maintain the SEO, have the articles written, do the hyperlinks. Like, I'm constantly. I'm paying for all of this. I have a web design team. We have it all done. This costs a lot of money, and so I'm paying for all of that as being your franchisor. So you just. The website, literally just the website would cost you almost your upfront initial fee, plus just ongoing fees, like to pay a developer to every time Google updates their algorithm to make changes in your website and to move pictures and change the video and change hyperlinks, add text, make blogs, create the SEO, make hyperlinks. Like, all of that. That would literally cost you at least 500 bucks a month more on the realm of 1000 to 1500. And so that's the number one thing you get is your website. It's optimized. We're always testing where to put the forms, where to put the buttons. That's all gonna be great amount of data that we can use to then make sure it's the perfect place to be and is the best for converting clients. Next thing is branding. So you get the mascot, you get Augusta Lawn Care, the name. It's all trademarked. You get access to the trademark. And as part of being a franchisee, that's what you get. You're able to use that logo wherever you want, and you're able to put on your own stationery. You don't have to use our business cards. You don't have to use our gift cards. You don't have to use.

Our stationary or our banners, our flyers or door hangers. You can create your own using the logo. It's part of the advantage of being a franchisee. So next thing is brand. That's the branding, right? We got all the decals to the trucks, we got all the signage. You can buy them from the site, or you can have your local printer print stuff off. Like, it's all very simple. Constantly new promotional designs and printing. This is something I learned from Anytime Fitness is every season they come up with great new promotional campaigns, they come up with great new slogans, they come up with new, not just product offerings, but just ways of pitching those products. So for example, they might do 21 day transformations at the gym for lawn care, landscaping. There's gonna be certain seasons, you're gonna want to push certain products. Our design team will create those promotional campaigns, whether it be for print or digital media, and that'll all be done for you. We're gonna be able to give you digital ads that work. We're going to have the pictures and the creative, the video and the text that you should be using for your Facebook ads, for your Google Ads. Campaigns that'll all be there. You can make your own. But like, we'll have the ones that have worked for us very well. And then across the system we've tested, you'll have access to that. You'll also have access to what we call Augusta Academy, which is an online portal where you get to see a whole bunch of training videos. So this is what I'm working on a lot right now on is like all the systems and procedures. Instead of just having our 200 page operational manual, I'm making it all into videos. So it's very simple to like watch how to do certain things, watch how to put the labels on the trucks, how to do door hangers, like how to do Facebook ads, like video, video, video. Very easy to kind of navigate. That's all part of Augusta Academy. You'll get monthly coaching calls and for the first couple dozen franchisees that will be with me, especially these first 10, like I'll probably visit in person all these 10 people eventually. But monthly coaching calls with me, especially at the beginning. But you know, if you're listening to this two years down the road, you're probably not gonna get coaching calls with me directly. You're gonna be with someone from us that knows exactly where you need to be going, reporting wise, setting goals, accountability. And you're gonna also get monthly, daily and weekly reporting. So we're gonna give you exactly what numbers you need to be tracking on a daily basis, a weekly basis and a monthly basis. And then we're going to be, you're gonna be using that with your franchise business consultant with that coach every single month. When you do the call, you're going to be following up on those reporting items. And what's great about that is then you have accountability and you're able to really measure your results. Like for some landscapers, like, well, am I doing good? Am I doing bad compared to other People, how am I doing? This is the great thing about being part of a franchise. This is something I learned with Anytime Fitness. It's great to be able to know where you're at in certain reporting items like gross revenue or percentage or gross profit margin, or for a ratio between labor versus revenue. Lots of different numbers that we're calculating. It's nice not just to know them. Like, you should know your numbers. What's really nice, if you can then measure that against other people using that system to know where you're at. Are you doing really good, you think? But yet one of your numbers is just very, very poor. Like, your ratio of labor to revenue is just way too high. Then you can go fix it. You can go work on ways you can ask other people within the system, like, hey, how did you get your number so good? How did you improve your labor burden? Like, how did you have your office people? How did you use the website to best perform and have the best conversion? The amount of being able to learn from other people that are in the same business model is invaluable. Because if you go ask any other landscaper advice on your business, if they have a completely different business model, their advice will be completely different than what you need to be hearing. If they're focused on design, build, and you're focused on maintenance, the type of truck that they think you should buy is not what you should be buying. Because they're gonna be focused probably on a bigger truck and something that can diesel. It's gonna cost. Like, you do not need a diesel 250 to be pulling a trailerless setup for mowing or a tiny 6 by 12 mower like, or 6 by 12 trailer, like, you do not need those things. So you want to be able to get your advice from people that are in the same business model as you, tracking the same numbers as you, reporting on the same numbers in the same business model, using the same marketing and being able to see where you stack up against everyone else and being able to learn from people that are doing well in areas that you are not. So that's a really valuable thing. Also, again, like I mentioned, you get to be a part of the dashboard and the store where you can buy things. So you can absolutely download a PDF of a flyer and you can go and print that off at your local printer, but you can also just buy them directly from the store on the dashboard. And so if you want 100 flyers, 200 flyers, if you want door hangers, we can give those, we can send those all to you, but you can also just download them as a PDF and send them yourself. Arc prices are pretty competitive, but we don't force you at all to buy them from us. It's just the option. If you want to buy them from us, we give them below what we even buy them for. So just a great resource to get the materials directly to you, or download the PDFs, edit them yourselves, use Canva, Photoshop, whatever and make them yourself. Or you can get the print materials from us, business cards, all that good stuff directly from us. So there's just a lot of things. I'm not gonna go through all of them. But I really do encourage you if that's of appeal to you. If you have your business right now you're running your lawn care business, you're running your landscaping business and just seems like you're working in the business too much and you want to work on the business, you want to get out of day to day operations. I'm not saying that by buying Augusta Lawn care franchise it's going to happen overnight. It's not. But I do believe that within a couple years you can easily do it. And we're following the system that I built at Augusta locally from the place where I was out in the field. Couple years into it, I was just focused on sales. You know, the past couple years that's what I've been doing. Sales and hiring and things like that. Working on the team culture, really refining that. And now I'm not needed and I'm not sad about that. That's great, that's fantastic. It means I have great people and their systems that are running and it's gonna work great. And so I really hope to do that for you. And so you have a lot of questions, look on the website augustalongcareservices.com franchise. Click the link for introductory call. When you call me on that, I'm not gonna be trying to sell you. Like I wanna get to know you more. I want you to get to know me and see if it's a good fit. Like is this actually gonna work? Like this is the relationship we were entering into. We're doing business like you are my partner in business here and especially those first 10 franchisees. Like I will be personally vested in making sure you do fantastically well. Because if you don't, that the system's not gonna work. And so I will be coming to your place, I'll be calling you a lot more than a month later. I'll be making sure I'm a lot more available personally instead of just my team. And so I really look forward to it. I think the offer that I'm presenting right now, we're not even gonna make money on these first 10 people. By the time we set up websites and we create all the framework for the dashboard and the training and everything. 12,500 bucks, that's 50% off the regular initial fee. And then you don't have to pay your monthly fees until June of 2020. And we will never, ever discount any of this stuff again. I just need the first 10 and I want them to be super committed. I want them to be 100% in and I want to be able to vet them. Like Crate, I want to be able to select one out of a hundred that are interested. So if this is interesting to you, I'd love to talk to you, give you some more information, see if it'd work for you. If you have an existing business, see what it would take to convert it over and really become part of something that's a lot bigger in this industry. I really want to get to 500 franchisees. That's my goal. And I feel like if we get it to 500, we'll have an authority and a voice to be able to change the actual market. My goal, as you all know, is to change the level of professionalism in this industry. I feel like if I get to 500 franchisees, I have my hands in enough industries, I'm sorry, in enough markets to actually make a difference. I've seen what we've done locally in our market by wiping out some of the lower competition that is not charging enough, not treating their guys correctly, you become like a talent suck. You get a lot of their good people. You're able to charge higher prices, have higher margins, thereby afford things for your employees. Like, I've seen what it can do and that's what I stand for. And I think one of the best ways I can do this is with you. Create something that forces our industry to raise the level expectation, raise the level of professionalism, raise our prices and focus on value instead of everyone just trying to price cut everyone else. So that's what I really stand for. I'd love to talk to you about your business and you becoming a franchisee and a partner here at Augusta Lawn Care. So check it out. Go to Augusta lawncareservices.com franchise thanks so much.