https://www.listennotes.com/e/4d79bee6e32c40b19ee315b74741e069

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn care. We have 175 plus locations around the world. But today we're actually in a new location out in Austin, Texas. Ryan, the owner actually has three other locations about four hours away. He just started these two locations 90 days ago. So you're going to see kind of the behind the scenes. We're going to take a shop tour. He's going to share his current strategy that he's used to get over 100 recurring customers over the past 90 days and just share some of the things that he's Learned after doing 5 locations. I hope it's helpful for you.

So we decided in the beginning, me, Joe and I talked about it and it was either get the first manager and then start getting team members, you know, so the manager can manage, or you could just start getting all the managers. And what we thought is managers are salary. So for one we it'll be cheaper for us than P4P. Surprisingly, our guys usually out earn their managers during spring. Also, we know we're pricing competitive. Like if I need to go to 35, I will. Right now I just want to get the yards, get the density. So the managers aren't so worried about the P4P percentages once they learn it. And then we thought if we could have all the managers meshing together after one year, working together, doing projects and bids, you throw a team member in and they're in the culture. Those guys are used to it. The leadership seems established, you seem stable. And so we thought let's try that. That's why we did three at once. Get all the managers, then bring the team members. Also for me and Joe, it's nice that the only people you're relying on four hours away are all manager. Right? Not that your team members are lesser caliber. Like I rely on them all the time. But it's nice to know like, hey, you're the, you're the guy in charge. Like this falls on you. I'm sorry, I'm far away.

Yeah. So for the. So basically like about 50 budget hours says almost 100 recurring customers.

Yeah, we're over 100 in Kyle, but we're like 90% plus biweekly. So it takes a high count.

Got it. Very high count count budget hours more.

Than you do customers. Because like realistically for say your northern locations that are require weekly mowing, right now they're bagging need half of what we need. We're probably 95% bi weekly. So for us we add A customer that adds the one BH a month.

Okay. Okay. So basically you have 110 customers right now.

Yeah, for sure. I could. I can actually pull it up and tell you. Let's see. I'll pull it up on the screen. So this is pretty much how me and Joe work. We. He sits in his laptop. You can look. We have our chargers. Route it through the chairs.

Through the chairs?

Yeah, we just plug them in the wall and route them through the armrest. So we don't. That way we can. We can always. We can always reach them. But yeah, let's see. So if we come so in, Kyle, you'll kind of see our. So our naming convention tells us what services they have. If they're uppercase, they have it. If they're lowercase, they don't. So it's mowing insects, grooming beds, healthy trees and shrubs, treatments, pet waste, or yuck. And then exclamation point would be Christmas lights.

What's the Y again?

Yuck.

What's that?

Poop scoop.

Oh, okay.

I went through three hours of iterations to find a word that seemed reasonable that matched the services. Like healthy trees and shrubs isn't ideal. But, you know, I had the word bloom at one point and we settled on mighty. But we have. So we know that. And then we also have tags on all of them. So I can find just my mowing. But if we go marketing tags, resource tags, the ladies are in here a lot more than me. But let's see. Mowing. So we have 88 and Kyle. And then scooping. We have 11 treatments. We have 30.

Usually. Do you get the treatments on just like after they start mowing?

A lot of times we'll get the mowing from the treatments. They'll inquire about the weed control. We notice up here, because we're mostly Bermuda, the weeds really stand out. A dandelion's like, oh, wow, versus your St. Augustine's real bushy. The weeds kind of hiding it. So up here, people are like, I need to have my yard. It's an eyesore. And the HOAs are intense.

They're probably the things that need cut every week. Is the weeds.

Yeah, it's the weeds. Yeah. So bed maintenance, we have 13. And then oak Hill is significantly slower. I'll show you what I mean. For having all things being equal ad spin wise and effort and hours. Oak hill sitting at three, so 10 less for beds, 23 mowing, so 60ish less. And they've both had 20,000 door hangers put out. Four scooping and two treatments. So. And what's interesting is they border each other. Like, territory wise, they border. Yeah. There's not five minutes between them. You can really see it if we go to our marketing map. So blue is where we've door hangered. They have the date and the door hanger design that we put out. And then if they're purple, that means they came from a web form. These are current customers. If they're yellow, they came from a door hanger. So we use purple ones to decide where to go door hanger next. Like, for example, wait, so if someone.

Submits a web form, they're purple?

Yeah. So like here we've had two web forms in the neighborhood that we have not door hangered. I would want to go door hanger that neighborhood. We've door hangered this one and it worked.

Right.

And we know here we were there on April 25th, we did a $55 QR code scoops of daisy on the back door hanger. And we had one. But we've had two web forms there.

It's all new development.

Yeah.

That's cool. So if you do a door hanger situation, basically how you're. They could still submit a web form. Technically.

Yeah. So it would see that you did the door hanger. Yeah. So kind of what we did for our SOPs is we outline where we door hangered and any lead, even a web form that comes in that door hanger for 28 days, the door hanger gets credit. We don't care if it came through Google.

Oh, so it'll be. It would then be yellow.

Yeah. So what we do is we go through right now. I do it or the office. I'll look at the date it came in. I type in the address here. It goes to that map. It'll. I'll look at the date. If it's in the last four weeks, I give the door hanger credit because I don't think it's a coincidence usually. And I figure a law of averages, we've had a door hanger came. Came in yesterday. We put out 90 days ago. It was a February 28 door hanger came in yesterday. So I figure there's a lot of web forms that were also door hangers that are getting misallocated. So it's, you know, 28 days of the line you got to draw somewhere.

Yeah. And since everyone's going to ask this in the comments from Augusta, what are you doing on Google Maps for this? Exactly. Obviously this is.

Yeah. So you just go to like my maps. That's what I Google it. You can go Google my maps as custom and then you can create whatever map you want. So I just have one called door hangers. Here's the hill country region when we were doing it. Here's Charleston when we were trying to map that out. Our Christmas light customers from years ago. And that will take you right to it. And then in the top here, you can add a shape or a form. This is how I add my door hanger areas. I just, what I do is we send them in WhatsApp. So I was working on it earlier. I type the street name in Google then I draw a shape around it and then I just go into copilot. I do it on Sundays. That's kind of like my therapy. I like looking at my approved quotes. So every Sunday I sit in my recliner at home. I'll go to estimates I go to approve for this week. Let's see. It's easier for me to drive on my laptop than my tv. Hey, one nice thing that we could tell Josh in my video is we have this week on one of these. We don't have last week. I think it's on the dispatch board. We have this week, we have next week and no last week. Last week is my second most used because I'm always like, I'm really worried about making sure last week on the dispatch board is fully closed. Next week is next week's problem. I'm looking at this week and last week, but let's do this week. So what I like to do is open them up and I like to double check my office and command center to make sure that the EMS capital, the motags here and the how they found us is Google search. But I will still always go put it in my map just to see if it's been within 28 days. So then I come here. So that one wasn't. So then all I do is you select new customers in May. I sort by month just so I could find trends and then I just add it to map.

And you guys are technically like almost going into your busy season here because of the heat. Yeah, that's like. So I was talking with the guy this morning. He was like. Well, actually like we're like in the thick of. If not going into.

Yeah, homeowners are going to drop off also your other customers, your other companies become less reliable because their employees drop off. So their service is worse. So customers shop summertime.

So you have spring rush. Everyone's starting. But when it gets Hot.

And they're like, when it gets hot, and everyone's like, oh, it's not 70, it's 100. Then all the new employees quit, and then they miss service, and then we pick up. So our biggest goal in the summer is to never miss service. Yeah, it's the only way we can lose.

So then you add this. You would add this one in here?

Yeah. And then what I do is it already has the name. I just leave the name there. Not too worried about it. And then I just edit it. I make it purple, and I make it a star, and there's no particular reason. Purple's Brittany's favorite color. I do a star because I like the house icon for the door hanger, and I do the star because it's also in the quick menu. I don't got to hit find more or nothing, but. Yeah. So I just sit here and I go through these one by one. Every week, the same thing here. I'll look. He's got the MO tag. It's a max AI origin lead. Google search is in here. So then I'll just make sure that they didn't Google us after they got a door hanger. And then I have a separate Excel sheet where I have all of our door hanger designs we've used with A, B, C, D. And then we have Brittany in the office, counts how many of each door hanger, because we're putting them out in 10,000 batches so we know how many of each one we've gotten back.

Do you filter, like, the three designs at the same time or mostly just like, hey, we're doing the Simplify one.

We just run them in batches.

Got it. So you have. Have you seen a winner at all?

So, yeah, I mean, there's always a winner because we've done three. So the second one was better than the first one. And we changed the price a little, but also the design we got rid of weekly, Bi weekly. Went one price already on this one. We're running now like, we're not even a maybe 20% through. But I know I want one QR code next time. I don't want to. I don't want the name, address, phone number, because everyone's doing the job form. They're not typing it in. So that's a good spot for me to put, like, two basic instructions. Check what you need. Take a picture to kind of guide them more. I'm already ready for the next one. I wish these were out so I could have the next ones.

Has anyone messed up The QR codes or is it just like another thing they have to think about?

No, but the biggest issue is if they, if they accidentally scan the wrong one. Like, say they want the. They want the lawn care and they accidentally hit the. And they get the wrong website. I just don't want the chance to lose them. Like, it doesn't really matter to me which one they fill out. But I know just in testing, I have to use my hand to cover it. And it's just. Let's make it easier.

Yeah, that's good. And so when you look at this map. So like for example, the ones that you're about to put out this month.

Yeah. So here's.

Where's your strategy on like, hey, I'm gonna go this market.

Well, let me show you a prime example on this one, because this one came in, right. It says Google search. I put in the address. It's in a blue spot. So we door hangered there. Now what I'm gonna look at is we door hangered there on April 25. I can see the date. So then what I'm going to do is look at customers since April 20th or May 26th. So for me, that has been almost a month, 31 days. So they'll fall out of my 28. So we're going to go web form. I just figure you draw the line in the sand. It's 28 days, four weeks.

Interesting.

Also, if they would have mentioned the door hanger command would have attached it or Brittany would have mentioned the door hanger.

Oh, right. This person just literally fill the form.

Yeah. So they filled out the web form. We talked to them on the phone. That's why I pull it up, just to check what they put. And then I usually will check the call notes. I'll go back to the very first call because it's. I'm doing them every week, so I don't have a lot of history left a voicemail need to come. But basically I'm just looking. They never mentioned the door hanger. And it's been over 28 days. But what that will clue me in on is that we got a web form in a neighborhood that we door hangered a month ago. So it's a great candidate to go be re door hangered. We had three that came in when we did it. This one came in more than four weeks later. So probably go hit it again. That lady just shopped us this week.

Right. Got it.

As far as what we're doing for our overall strategy, as you can see all the Blue. Right now we're more canvassing because we really don't know the area. Like we didn't live here or grow up here. It's. It's really unknown to us. So we're trying to just hit as many neighborhoods as we can. I like to do the perimeter like the outside and then jump to another one. Joe does the same thing. 300 here, 200 there and see what comes in. But we're mostly just trying to canvas as much as we can this year, see which design is the most effective, which neighborhoods are. So next year we run the best design and the best neighborhoods in spring. And then I think next year our strategy will be more hitting our prime neighborhoods because when we started this year we didn't have density anywhere. So this year we're like, well, where can we get density easily? And then next year we'll drill in on those neighborhoods.

So the purple is the ones that are coming from the web forms, right?

Yeah, purple is web forms or Google local service. I also distinguish between those. On Sundays I will listen to our Google local service calls go and tag them local service. And I put in their note that it's a local service just for me. But that's the only marketing we're running right now is door hangers local service, pay per click.

And right now you like. So you got like a hundred reviews essentially. What was sort of your strategy on a new market to get those?

Ask everyone. So we started off by running an employee contest for all the existing locations we have. And we got them up to 60 immediately, just through that. And then we switched the automation from sending them to copilot first to just straight to Google. I talked to command about it. Brian Rand's recommendation was I wouldn't do that because you know you could get a bad review. And I told him I have full faith in my quality. Me and Joe are doing the work in the new territory. Ask for the review. It's going to be good. If it's bad, I'll fix it via text on those. Yeah. So it just sends out as soon as we complete the job. It doesn't say co pilot and then it just says hey, the guys were there. Do you like your job? And we found the first week we did eight time moe's. We got five reviews. Austin is very much more quick on the reviews. They have Gmail accounts, you know, down south a little harder. But up here it went quick. I would say Austin hit 100 reviews to Oak Hill 60 or something because of the amount of first time os Oak Hill just hasn't had as many opportunities to get them.

So in this area, are you ranking better from in Kyle?

Yeah, we rank really well in Kyle. One thing I was worried about in Oak Hill when we first opened it, we were stuck on a name. I don't know if you remember, but I emailed about it, kind of had the media team research it because we have lots of planned master communities in that part of town. We have Bear Creek, Shady Hollow. And so we went with Oak Hill and unknowing to us and the mediator, the web team. I think there's an Oak Hill, Texas way north by Dallas. And so I really think that skews our rankings. Also it's tough for customers because they're like, well, I'm not near Dallas. We started getting leads from Longview, which is near Oak View, Texas or Oak Hill, Texas. So I don't know, I figure it's one of those things like eventually people will get it. Google will figure out you're a neighborhood of Austin, like, you know, just hammer it. But if it didn't turn around in a few years, then I would say maybe it should be called Cedar Valley or at least a name that's not also a city in Texas. But yeah, I don't think any of us knew. I didn't know until I got my first Long View lead and figured and I googled Longview to see where it was. And then I saw Oak Hill Texas right next to it. And I was like, how unfortunate. But I don't think that's the primary problem. I think the primary problem is that's a very established 40 year old community that has existing providers.

What's interesting is like you still get quite a few. The yellow, like the door hangers seem to be doing decently up there.

Yeah. So if you notice, technically our Oak Hill location, like you see west Oak Hill right here. So our Oak Hill location is technically north of this line. Yeah, right here. So this would be all of these. This is technically South Austin that I haven't bought yet, but we do really well there. So we're just gonna fill it in. My plan is to buy it this summer as soon as we get 32 BH's between the two combined, that GM will take them both, give us time to fill in Oak Hill, figure out where we have to go, because there's a lot of neighborhoods way north that we haven't hit. But another interesting factor is so up here, north of B Cave, you see Lakeway. So this is another owner's Location, he kind of borders all these lakes. He is also very slow growing. Same thing. Low customer count, higher average lifetime value per customer. Bigger properties, million dollar estates. But his lake properties border our Oak Hill properties that are taking off slower than all the rest. So I think it's a trend up there. We also have territory maps on here we can turn on.

Are there bigger like players up there or just like longer established?

Just. I don't think there is. I think there's actually smaller companies that like, hey, we have three guys that spend three days at this five acres fully groomed and they have such a reasonable price, like my man hour rate, they're almost hiring a personal gardener. He does five houses on the street. I don't know much more personalized service. But yeah. So this is technically our Oak Hill territory. You can see how much that we have. Not we rank. We don't rank at all over here. But it's also brand new website.

I wonder if Cedar Valley would work better. Like, do people in that area think of it as Cedar Valley?

Yeah. So Craig's been here five years, he's from Ohio, but he knows the area way better than me. You can come over here. What do you consider it?

Like, do people from the area, like, I'm from Cedar Valley, they still say.

Yeah, like if you live anywhere up here, what would you call it? There's B Cave. A lot of people know B Cave as bk.

Right around this area there. This area. South Austin mostly. Right.

To be honest, that's why we think South Austin.

A lot of people know this area. That's like past the Colorado river, all this is.

Do you think if we buy this territory next and we name it South Austin and we leave this one named Oak Hill, that we would still attract the searches for South Austin and we could just funnel them to our. Right CRM? Yeah. Because this is the future South Austin that we're going to buy. It's already mapped. We have it right now named Mancheck, but that's the one we're going to buy. This is the one we already have, South Austin. And I would actually. I think he might be right. Cedar Valley, Cedar Valley. Because I mean, it's easiest to update in the beginning. But if you look. So here's Kyle Buddha. You see how close they are. They literally border right here. Our shop is so our shop. We're sitting right here, give or take. So we picked this. Like I said, I picked the shop before I bought the territories because I could go on this tollway. If you look this is the 45 tollway. Traffic flow is great. Our shops right here. So we drive out of here. We hit the toll road right here. Every morning we go straight to go South Austin South. Five minutes to Kyle North Oak Hill. And I can show you around outside, but we can dump here and everything else.

Yeah, that's super cool. So you have more space in the back?

Yeah, three acres.

Oh, it's sick. And you get all of it?

Yeah. So no one else uses it? I wouldn't say, like, technically, in our lease, we have all of it.

Right, but you have plenty of space.

Yeah, we dump and burn debris. Our landlord burns Deb.

He looks like he lives out of that. The trailer. It looks like an office.

Yeah, he lives.

Dude, you just roll that back here and be like a shop space. Yeah, that, like, semi truck with the glass windows.

Yeah, but, yeah, I think Cedar Valley might work. But I think naming the next one South Austin will help a lot. You can even see Google kind of calls it South Austin, right? Yeah, but, yeah, I don't know. I've been really dialed in on the. The grand marketing up here. Not so much like a strategy, like, well, this neighborhood, because of these metrics, it's more like this many door hangers per week, they work. It's volume, which I think up here has been so successful because we don't get stuck in the weeds even. Like, you know, my first year, I did 500 postcards, right? I bought a brick. I followed. Honestly. Shout out Jonathan, Florida turf pros if you see this. I stole his design with the hearts and his family. I talked to him via email back in 2017. We started the same year.

Oh, wow.

Yeah. So I still communicate with him sometimes, but I copied his design, slapped my family, made the whole thing in Photoshop because he didn't have a template for me. So I just took a screenshot and just copied it and I went and I put them all out and got no customers. In hindsight, I know I went to a terrible spot now where I went, but I thought, man, I did 500. They didn't work. Door hangers are dead, right? Paper media is over.

Did you do postcards or door hangers?

Postcards.

Okay, okay, got it.

But in my mind, it was paper media. It's all the same. Didn't work. I knew it.

What a waste.

Copy Jonathan for nothing. But up here, you know, like, we don't do a batch less than 10,000. And my first year, I was like, I never did door hangers for seven years after that, 500, just didn't do it. Wrote it off. I started spending tens of thousands on Google, though. Hired agencies did all of that up here. We'll go do them. Like, we probably put out over 1500 for the three of us today. If I don't get a single call, like, I'm not any more upset tomorrow doing my 500. I know I got to get this 10,000 out. We'll go to the next design. I know the iterations that I want to do. I know they work because I take the time every Sunday. Like, this is just your mental peace of mind. Because like I said, we had one come in yesterday from February 28th. If you're not tracking it, you're never in your head gonna give yourself credit for that one. I would never believe you.

So when you put them out, like, what would be the benchmark for you in terms of number of. Like, let's say you do 1500. None come in. But let's say that happens for three weeks. Like, what's the benchmark of, hey, we need to be getting, like, one customer Every. Is it 500? Is it a thousand? What's the math?

I can tell you in the Oak Hill area, there's a big master plan community called circle C. It's 6600 homes, give or take. You looked up Joe. We hit every one of them and got nothing. Yeah, we haven't been back. So around that number, 0, 6600 houses, one master community. We even verified that, like, one company. One company doesn't mow all 6600 or something. That would be wild, but, you know. Yeah, no, they're all individual. We talked to one homeowner in there. Joe talked to him. We got one yard after we talked to him, and he didn't do bed maintenance. He said he was paying 50, so we matched the price, but he had a 6600. And once we figured out that they do hire people, it's not us. The door hangers didn't work, and we just. It's not a neighborhood I think I'd go back to, but it takes that many. Yeah, I don't know. I hit them all once. Yeah. I think if you're new in an area, just hit every house once, man. Why? Guess what works? Just hit them all and then look at your map. I have plenty of neighborhoods on here. I could zoom in that. We don't have a single house. You can see, like, there's not one yellow mark in all these blues. We hit all those neighborhoods.

Yeah.

And then you come down here and you'll have 14 in one neighborhood. I mean, I was showing them earlier. We have two big neighborhoods across the street from each other. One did really well, one didn't. One thing we did is we started by our shops. If you notice, they're dense here. Yeah, these ones. So all that separates these is the one main road that runs through town. 1626. We had this many come in this neighborhood on February 25th. We had two come in on this side of the neighborhood on March 1st.

Now, that was like one day probably.

Yeah, we hit them. We hit these over the course of two days. It's probably about, I don't know, 1500 houses. You have to really zoom in to see. But they're dense.

Oh, yeah.

And then this one was the following day or days. Two days, give or take. Yeah, but yeah. And what's interesting is we've only had two wet bleeds here in these neighborhoods, and they're two of the primary neighborhoods. But look at the door hanger effectiveness in the south one. Even though only one web bleed. I think that's brand awareness.

That was all in the cut scene.

Couple days in February. Our grass was totally dormant and brown. We were door angering, wearing hoodies. It was cold and it was effective.

And you broke your foot, dude.

Yeah, yeah. Trying to jump over a retaining wall.

Oh, I never heard how it happened.

I just knew it was. I can tell you the exact street I was door hangering. The guy had like a four foot wall. Because we're hilly here, you know, and you don't want to go down the driveway to get around the wall. So I took a running jump and jumped off my right foot to jump on the wall and tore my calf. And there was. I just talked to the neighbor across the street. He was working on his son's bike in the driveway, and we chatted a little bit. I helped him put the chain on. I went door hangered. His neighbor jumped on the wall, and all he did was hear me yell. I was like, oh, my gosh, man. And he walked over and he was like, are you okay? I just heard you yelling and started seeing you bounce around. And I said, I think I just tore my calf. And he offered to give me a ride. All the. All the grief us door hangers get. And this homeowner was like, do you need a ride to your truck? And I was like, I appreciate it, but I'm gonna finish this street on the way back to my truck because I haven't hit it yet and I don't want to hold you up. And I went down the road, finished my street, called Joe. I told Joe, I said, we're a man down. I can't work through this injury. I'm not being a. A little punk. It's really bad. And then he got back in town and I took my compression off. When he got back in Monday, and my whole foot, all the blood went to my foot. And he was like, yeah, it's kind of a bad one.

Oh, man.

And I took off a week from doing door hangers, maybe five days. And then I got my cast and we were back out there the next week. Let's go put out like 1500.

You want to show me outside?

Yeah, yeah, I'll show how you get this. This is our other area real quick. That. This is where me and Brittany do all of our work. That's where she takes all the calls up here. That's where I work. And then that's the third monitor.

Dude, let's go. Dude, I remember the video you sent me. This place is a wreck. Yeah, I didn't know you. Did you have to like, just clean it? Essentially, that was the main thing.

We. Yeah, we cleaned everything. We literally mopped the walls, painted all the wall decor. Yeah. Brought in the pictures, replaced some flooring. I've killed three scorpions in here this week. This week? I had one crawl down my arm on Sunday night. I flicked it off and Brittany smacked it with a flip flop.

That's awesome. How'd you find the property originally on Craigslist or something?

Yeah. So I tasked Jen with it, our bookkeeper. And your free time in December because it's slow. Can you try to find us a rural property where I can dump around anywhere between San Antonio. Yeah. So here's our equipment storage. It locks up. It's got the simply safe on it, the alarms right there. Our backpack sprayers charge in there and everything gets put up.

Are you using the. The sprayers a lot for the spray?

We use them for like all of our bed bait and spray pre emergence. We also can do deodorizers and sanitizers for the pet waste out of them. And our weed control treatments. That one's set up with a. It's called a tjet herbicide nozzle.

You don't switch the different between one though, do you?

Nope. So that one spray paint it green because it's safe to spray in grass. That's selective herbicide only. All the ones that are yellow will turn your grass yellow. Yep. So we pull up here, the guys unload their trucks we don't have trash service here. So every week I load this in the back of my truck and take it to the Rockport shop. This is where we do maintenance. All of our hand tools and extra mowers go back here. And then I brought these pallets from the nursery. Whenever we go buy mulch, I just get extra and I throw it on here. So we have some on hand. Most our jobs are less than 10 bags, so if I can avoid a run to the store.

It's all a small little properties too, in Austin.

Yeah. We can't get deliveries to this property because of the logistics with the truck. So downside is we can't have to bring all the mulch. But there's pre emergent. That's for our May application. Extra bag rock. We only have two types of bag rock. We only have two colors of mulch. We only use two pre emergents all year. We will never need more pallets. So we loop through here to get around. These 18 wheelers were not here when I rented the property. They showed up last week.

Oh, that's what I was referring to up front.

These are the old. These are old formula one Austin VIP boxes. If you look inside, they have seats and that's why they're all glass.

They just stack them.

My landlord wants to turn them into apartments and rent them. They have no bathrooms and no plumbing and no ac.

Oh, he wants to do them here?

Yep. Yeah, so that's his forklift. We've never got to use it. Yeah, it's crazy, but yeah, we can pretty much dump all back here. You can see there's a little bit of debris. That's actually my landlord's. Yeah, I'll show you behind these.

His whole parcel is like three acres back.

Yeah, it goes way back. So you can see mulch, clean out stuff there. That's us. Yeah, this is all us. He actually likes it because he does some kind of natural gardening. Permaculture.

Oh. So he just like flips it with the.

He wants it. He wants it for his permaculture. And this is. There's three 55 gallon metal drums under all that that we burn in.

Wow.

Yeah. So this is from the last couple weeks of cleanups.

So you usually just have. Did they kind of split between doing the work and then just doing door hangers if they have the time? Essentially.

Yeah. So right now, essentially, Joe is doing interviews when he can, and then he works with Craig mowing to get the BHS done. Kind of Tuesday through Thursday, we'll all kind of tag team, a cleanup or something. Usually Wednesday or Thursday morning. Get it done while it's cool. A couple hours and then they go mow. And then I've been doing all the door hangers. Yep. Because we haven't got that second GM yet. We decided right away we were going to be very picky. We didn't mind mowing in long days. We will take our time with the managers.

Yeah, no, I think it's smart to do as long as you have the capital to burn. Like just get GMs from the get. It's so smart because I'm like, I'll do it.

Let's train.

You can almost cover. You can almost cover the cost. As long as they're busy. You can almost cover like breaking.

Yeah, well, also, you know, they'll come on for say 1200 a week and we're $100 an hour if you do 33%. I'm like, it's cheaper to have a GM on salary. And they're not worried about my BHS. I can say, hey, I'll do that yard for 35, man. They're fine with it.

And I'll do the door hangers and everything else.

Yep. Yeah. So we kind of, the employees kind of park where you guys are like, that's Craig's truck. We line up all down that fence. And then the plan is our other ramp rack trucks. This is going to be kind of the alley. This is the shotgun out. And they come in. We turn around this loop and then.

Line up taking up painting on the easel there.

That just showed up. That showed up those mattresses, this boat, these six 18 wheelers.

What does he do, just like hoard stuff or.

He owns a bunch of land and every once in a while he'll sell a chunk of 20 acres for a couple hundred thousand. And then junk shows up.

That's good.

And he never gets rid of it. But it's all investments. It's a very nice guy, but we knew the property was right for us when I saw it on Google maps and there were seven broken down cars in the front yard.

Keep everyone else away.

I mean, can you find a better one? This guy lets us burn 15 minutes from downtown Austin.

Yeah, no kidding, right?

You know, it's $500 a month per location. Our electricity is $60 a month because we split it three ways. Our Internet's $25.

Really?

Well, our total Internet 75 with spectrum. We got three locations. Splitting it like my overhead per location here is less than $1,000 a month. No dump fees. Austin hauls natural debris for free, so we only bring sticks back here. All the leaf debris and all that goes in paper bags, and it gets hauled off. We just coordinate. We have their trash app. We put the customer's address, like, we're the customer, and it'll tell us their days, and then we go do their cleanups one or two days before their natural trash day, which is every two or three weeks.

Do you have then Rockport? Yeah, we see. Dude, when I went to North Carolina, the same thing. I had not. Had never, like, played with, like, trying to schedule it and like, okay, so your thing is coming tomorrow. I'll do the property clamp the day before so I can just pile it.

We didn't know until customers started telling us, like, hey, the HOA is not gonna have these bags out here for a week. You need to come X amount of days before our natural pickup. Well, down south, we don't have natural pickup.

Yeah, no.

We knew you have to take it to the dump. You load it up, you drive there. So here it's like, man, I just gotta take paper bags to a cleanup as long as I'm there on the right day.

So it does have to be in the bags.

Yeah, Yep, in the bags. On the street and the. I think most customers are allowed 15 on their pickup.

Even in Charlotte, there's certain neighborhoods, they would actually come with a crane, like a little crane grabby thing. And they. You just pile stuff that'd be super. As long as it was under, I think, like six feet. They would come along and just pick it up, dude. I was like, that's half the cost of a cleanup. It's just me hauling this all out of here.

You want to see how far back this goes?

Oh, sure. Would you think he'll mow this eventually and, like, put more.

We had it mowed. This. This is a walk. There's a sweat lodge back here. But yeah, I saw the property and I was like, man, right on the toll road. All this junk this close to town. You've been driving around here the last day. Everything's developed. This is so rare.

Yeah. What is this? Is this considered a city this part? Or is this county, like, kind of like out in between?

I have no idea. I just know he said he's the only non deed restricted property left in this neighborhood.

I'm sure he's proud of that.

He is. And a sovereign nation. License plates.

That's crazy.

So I knew when I had a landlord who's like, I don't Follow government rules that he wouldn't mind if I dumped and burned. And we're his kind of people. Yeah. There's a sweat lodge he covers up. He has a shaman that travels from New Mexico twice a year and does sessions. What? Yep.

Wow.

They do ayahuasca or some kind of pastry or something.

That's crazy.

But they burn all the rocks out here and heat them up and then carry them in there and they cover it with their leather and whatnot. I'll show you their dystopian dining place, too.

Dystopian dining?

That's how it was described to me when I came here. But, yeah, I call. I talked to Jen in the office, told her we wanted to come somewhere between San Antonio and Houston. And I was like, hey, just start looking anywhere down the 35 corridor for good shop space that we could run more than one location out of. And we came across this place through what, like Craigslist?

Facebook? What was he marketing on?

I think she found it on a realtor's website. And then when we called them, they said, oh, you got to deal with the owner.

Oh.

Like, they didn't want to deal with the property. And we were like, all right. So then we called, and then we showed up, and it was an adventure.

Wow. Is there a dining thing?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is it. Very interesting. But, yeah, I mean, it goes back probably about another 50 yards or maybe.

Like a.

Yeah, there you have it.

Dude, that's crazy. Let's go.

Yeah. I wish you would just sell me the whole property.

What does this cost?

Well, the neighbor right next door has roughly the same size parcel. He just passed away a few weeks ago, and it's listed for 580, I think.

Similar size.

Yeah, they tried to not have me find out about it because the landlord was super scared I'd steal his deal or something. But that guy left in his will that he's not allowed to buy it because he didn't like him that much. They've called about it, and the realtor said, I'm not allowed to sell it to you.

What?

So I told my landlord, I said, well, I can't steal the deal. You can't have. That man said, over my dead body.

Wow.

He literally said something about he had a big geodome structure in his front yard, along with some other weird crap for, like, 15 years, and the whole neighborhood really does not like my landlord. So they put in his will that he cannot buy the land next door.

Why that? But, yeah, just when you thought you had bad neighbors, like yeah. In my will, I don't want my buy.

Yeah. I have an automation set up to let me know if anything in this neighborhood comes for sale. Because I think even though it may not be deed at commercial, like I could. I could get away with it. On these five acre lands out here. We're doing it now. No one minds. If anything, we just mow the property. No one else.

Hey, you'll be considered a good neighbor.

Yeah. Yeah. I have videos of when we first got here. I can give you of all the junk, but. Yeah, there's his beehives. Yeah. Pollinators are a big deal. Wildflowers. We have the Lyndon B. Johnson. What's it called, man? The president's wife. I can't think of her name. Her wildflower center's here in Austin.

Okay. For the treatments of the chemical side, is it all sprayed any granular?

It's granular only for fertilizer and pre emergent. And we spray only post emergent.

Got it. And then the mosquito thing is like. Some people ask that too then.

Yeah. So the mosquitoes I didn't know anything about, but I started talking to our siteone rep and I was asking him about the mosquito programs and then he kind of gave me some information. His name was Brad. I told him. I was like, well, how do I know that you know what you're talking about? Like, who do you represent? And he was like, well, we represent a lot of the mosquito franchises in Austin. And I was like, give me names. And he was like, mosquito hunter, Mosquito Joe. He named four of them. And I was like, all right. And I was like, and they buy this exact product. And he was like, yeah, they use proflex. They use the into care buckets. They use these sashes. They offer this misting system.

Yeah.

So I had him give me all the products they offer and I got their programs.

Yeah.

And then I just took the best parts of each and made our own.

Do they get. When do they get like bad here? Mosquitoes?

Oh, in the next week after the rain. Give it a few days.

Really?

You won't be able to stand out here.

Even during the day.

You can hear them. They're so big. You hear them?

They're like all summer long then.

Yeah, if it rains, anytime it's warm.

Okay. Okay. So it's not like a seasonal thing. It is year round.

Yeah, it's year round. I would say when it's below like 45 degrees, which is like 90 days a year, we don't have mosquitoes.

Got it.

Okay, well, like December through March 1st, you're mosquito free.

Really? Okay. Okay.

Yeah. But in any time beyond that, if we get rain, then you're going to have.

And what does that usually. What does that. Those treatments usually cost? Like, for the customer, I would say.

We do a monthly subscription. So an actual treatment probably cost us maybe $30 or less in material. The insecare buckets, we pay $10 or $11 for the bucket.

Okay.

And then I think it's $3 for a sash, which is the powder you dump in the bucket once a month.

Oh.

So you just go there when the guys go to mo, they put water in the little bucket, dump the sash in there, and put the lid on it. It's 30 bucks a month if they want the buckets. The actual mosquito treatment, the proflex, and where we miss the bushes, it's $40 a month, but it also covers fleas, ticks, cinch bugs, scorpions, spiders. Because the cross check chemical just. That's what it's labeled for. So we're like, hey, it does all this, but we do it for the mosquitoes. And then there's proflex, which is you miss the mosquitoes with. It gets on the bushes, basically. That gets on their skin. When they contact, they fly. It gets on the other mosquitoes. So it stops the breeding cycle.

So does the subscription kind of have you do all those things?

Yeah. So we spray all the bushes as part of your standard treatment. And then if you want the into care buckets. That's an upsell.

Got it. 30 bucks a month.

Yeah. And the. Well, it's per bucket.

Oh, okay.

Yeah. Because we bring the bucket, we refill that bucket. Bucket covers 4,500 square feet. So most houses are one, but if they want to be extra, they'll put two. One in the front, one in the back. Yeah, but it's 30 bucks a month per bucket. And they're the most effective, which is why they're the upsell, not the initial offer.

Got it. No, that's cool.

Yeah, the proflex works great, but the buckets are the cherry on top. Yeah, this is it. I think out of this location, we could do a million a year. This is in the running for our smallest location. Our Corpus shop is very. Well, land wise, is smaller. Housewise is close. And they'll do close to a million. They did over a million last year. But we cut projects.

Corpus did.

Corpus is the one. Like, really? They'll rob you.

Oh, that was the one with the in and you had all the. The cameras on it.

That's the one with the 10 foot metal wall.

The dog.

There's been eight break ins on the road. Our Corpus shop is on. In the. In the last six weeks, what, 13 catalytic converters stolen. The restaurant across the street broke into and no one's touched our foot. It's been so bad. The landlord called me in January and asked me if I would like to buy it after he refused to sell it to me before.

Really?

Yeah, three years ago. I didn't want to rent it. I wanted to buy it. He said no. And now he's like, are you still interested? Because no one else is. And I was like, yeah, it works for us.

You think you're going to buy it or.

Yeah, I think I could probably get it for 70,000. It's literally an 8,000 square foot lot in the middle of town.

Oh, yeah.

It's got like a falling down old barber shop, but it works.

It has plumbing.

Yeah. Has AC plumbing.

Grand.

Yeah. I mean it's literally. It's not much bigger than this little front area.

Yeah, yeah, it's really small, but it, it's.

I could, I could fit 10 ramp rack trucks. Worst case scenario, stacked in that little land they pull out every day.

Yeah, that's crazy.

They don't got room to dump or any of that. But if we.

Who's running that one?

Josh.

It was Josh. Okay, cool.

Yeah, Josh added the most customers last month out of all the locations.

Wow. Good for him.

He's killing.

That's good.