I Grew This $300K Lawn Business to $800K in 1 Hour! (Coaching w/ Mike Andes)

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care. We have over 150 locations around the world. And today I'm doing a one on one coaching call with Morgan.

Spent about 24 years in the Marine Corps, got out, kind of did this.

He has a landscaping business down South Carolina. He's trying to grow the business and build it to where he can run it passively.

I'm in a rural area, Jacksonville, North Carolina. You know, am I in a place where I can still grow a business to 800 or above?

His prices are extremely low. He's not taking a paycheck. He has a partner that owns 50% of the business and together they aren't making any money. If you had to pay yourself for the work that was being done out in the field, the business is not making money. We're going to figure out how to take his business from $300,000 in annual revenue all the way up to $800,000 in annual revenue without spending any money on advertising. I think this is one of the best coaching calls for anyone in the green industry. If you could share with someone else, I'd really appreciate it, especially the last 10 to 20 minutes of this conversation. There's some controversial things I say that I haven't said anywhere else, but I think it'd be extremely helpful if you're trying to grow a business that's profitable. And if right now you're building a business that seems like you just keep beating your head up against the wall. Stay tuned. This is a great coaching call. Take notes, watch it twice, share with someone else. And let's dig in right now. Let's go ahead and jump in. I kind of looked at the site and, and what you've been up to, so you can just jump right in if you want.

A lot of questions.

Come. I spent about 24 years in the Marine Corps, got out, kind of did this and I was starting off by myself and then I partnered with another friend that was my neighbor. Basically I was helping him. I decided to partner and then we came and kind of came together and they were doing it for a while, but it wasn't organized, right. And so what I've done is come in and we had no money in the bank account, no pricing was off, no structure, no, no systems at all. And I'm used to systems in general. And so what I've been trying to do, first thing I did was raise prices, right? Which, that, that was a tremendous help. We were able to pay more and do Things like that, but what I want to do. So this year, I guess we'll say we're in profit mode, right. And so I just wanted to stack some cheese in the bank. We up to about. I think we're at 70 grand now.

From zero. And so.

Now it's like, okay, we need to go into the winter months, right. But I want to take it to 400 above $500,000. Not sure how much I should push next year.

But I'm in a rural area, Jacksonville, North Carolina.

You have, I think you have a place up in Fayetteville. And Fayetteville's somewhat similar. Just a Marine Corps base here. So it's a military town. So the, the. The income demographics is a little bit different. Like, like we don't hit recessions, don't hit us as hard as other places, right. But people cheap as hell because they're military most of the time or retirees. And so we can say fixed income, you know, which. And so the biggest thing is, am I in a, you know, am I in a place where I can still grow a business to 800 or above.

In revenue, Right?

Yeah. Like, it really comes down to kind of what you're. You're trying to optimize for. Like, what size of business are you trying to build? Are you trying to build it as big as possible? Do you want to kept past a million or is this like. I just want to make as much profit as humanly possible.

We want to get to. I want to go to a meal. I want to at least be at a million. Right? Million in revenue. That's what my partner talked about. A million in revenue. I want to be able to not work. I want passive income. Right. I don't mind working until. Until we hit that point. We do. I do a little bit yard stuff now, but most. I'm doing the estimate. I handle all money, right? Anything, money if behind, you know, or in or. And on when it comes to money. And so I think that's the key and. Right. We haven't paid ourselves in two years. Right. And so. And luckily I'm military, so I don't have to pay myself. Right. I make 90 grand a year retired, so I'm pretty okay. But when you cutting grass in July in North Carolina, you like, you wish you had some money in your pocket?

Yeah.

Yeah, it feels better.

It feels better when you're making money.

Yeah, for sure, man. For sure. And so that's what we want, right? And then, you know, been kind of looking at more. Some more your content You've been hidden, preparing your company to be sold. Right. And I can see that happening in the far future because I don't plan on doing this my whole life, you know what I mean? But really focusing on what I. Some, I think a couple videos I hit lately where I had to. It brought to mind where we were making money. We started making more money. But the problem is it wasn't reoccurring, it was more projects. Right. And because the projects are the big money, easy to sell. So we, we were from making like you know, close to 20,000 to making like last month 37. Right. And so, but the reoccurring we didn't hit. And then now I understand, like having a reoccurring is also the same thing that's going to take me into the winter. Right? Yeah. And being able to sell to them because that's the people that are asking me for brush trimmings and things of that stuff right now or power washing, you know what I mean? Like they, they want that extra stuff, but if we don't have them, the other people are not even thinking about it, you know, so.

So the biggest thing is like in this city.

Can I get that much money? And what does it look like in some. As rule we about the county we in is very diverse in, in this, this, you know, country areas, they, they big, they got. So in the middle is a lot of people. Then it's like these little sealed sales everywhere. Yeah. And, and I think we need like two, 300 plus clients. And I need to. So that's the key, like in, in a rural area, am I able to still grow something like that?

Yeah, totally. A couple quick questions for you, Morgan. The partnership, what percentage do you own at the business now?

50.

Okay, so it's 50. 50. And are they aligned in terms of like trying to make this passive or do they want to stay in the business? What's sort of their goals as well?

He wants to go to million dollars revenue. He wants a bigger. But I'm not sure. No, no, I'm not sure. I feel he's not prepared to do the work it will take to get us there. Because he's a retired Marine too. Right. And so basically for us to get, grow that large that fast, we got to go back to work for real. For real. Like we can't. Ain't no part time, ain't no halfway in, halfway out. You got to just. We gotta grind for like two, three years not make as much money, but we can grow to a size in this Area where I think we need multiple trucks just because how the, the, how spread out this area is.

But yes, to answer your question.

Okay. Okay, cool.

Because when you say you want it passive, I actually think that you might not need to get to a million. It depends on how fast you, how fast you want to become passive. Um, the reason I say that is because when you start getting above 6, 7, 8 crew members, finding a general manager that can run that without you is very, very difficult. Because now you need a leader. You need someone that has managed people before, et cetera. And so like my thought process is actually this. You're. You're around that 4:50 this year. 470, is that right?

That's next year we're going for, I think we'll hit three this year.

Okay, so you're still at 300. Okay, yeah, like, because like my, my philosophy, Morgan, is if you can get to 500,000 over the course of a few years, you can simply optimize pricing because you hit capacity, raise prices, and then over the course of those few years, get to 750, 800,000, but be very, very profitable and then be able to afford a general manager because it's kicking off a bunch of profit instead of trying to grow, grow, grow, grow, and then you hit the million dollar marker and you don't have, you don't have any profits to actually go hire a general manager. And now you've built a business of size enough to where a general manager needs to have extreme leadership skills. They need to be able to manage 12, 15 people, and that's extremely expensive. You're looking at six figure salary for someone that's going to be able to step into a position and know all of the work that you do, selling, hiring, firing, managing a crew in order for this to become passive. And so this is something that even at Augusta, we've become much more clear on is like, I'm a big fan of grow to 500,000. And then once you hit capacity, that is, you're using all your trucks and all of your employees, you simply raise prices over the course of a few years. Every single time you hit capacity till you're making 7, 800,000, but it's kicking off 150, $200,000 of profit.

That makes sense because then you can.

You have the money to go afford a general manager. And it's easy to find that general manager because you only need five to seven crew members in order to hit that revenue marker.

Five to seven.

Yeah. Because think about like this. If you can grow to 500,000 like right now. Dude, is it you and you, your partner and two employees we got.

So this is this me and my partner. That's what I guess we count as one, right? Half and half. We had three guys and they only usually working 30 hours a week because it was kind of got to a point where it's kind of hard to get people, especially during the summer months. And they stick stayed on. And then we have one office girl and she was a part of my partner's business as his girlfriend coming into it. And the only reason she's still around because she helps them build to where we are now. But most of I've listed you. I shouldn't even have her at this point, so.

Well. Or you grow into it. Right. It sounds like this past year you've been able to stack a little cash away. And I know based upon that number of employees, like things are kind of tight because you have an office staff, you have two. Two owners and you have several employees. Like there's a lot of moving parts there for a $300,000 business. And so you can. You could grow it though to 500,000. Make sense of having her as an office admin. But then I would personally recommend if the goal is making this passive is to simply over the course of the three. So I think this is probably a strategy. Morgan is like two years stay in growth mode. We're trying to grow like next year can we do. Can we do 400,000? The year after that, can we do 500,000? And that's going mostly sales, getting more customers and growth. Once we hit 500,000 though, we're going to try to actually not hire more people, not buy more trucks. And over the course of three years be able to simply dial up prices whenever we hit capacity because.

You'Re fine.

So. So you say dollar prices. I think we high now. So. And you know, to make it through the month to cover all bills, we got to make at least 15 grand. Right. And so like some of the. And that's I think why we haven't been able to fill truck. And we tried to fill trucks this year. We didn't have any marketing. Right. We got. We had like 230 clients without even marketing. Right. And because we've just been around and we do good work. Military mindset. Right. Professional looking, all the trucks are wrapped things of that nature. Right. And so there are some where if I looked at the number because this is one thing I wanted to ask you is like you say be it at $100 a, you know, labor hour. And what does that mean? That means for 30 minutes of my time, of my cruise time, that I'm charging 50 bucks per person.

So if you.

Person.

Correct, Correct. So if I'm going to charge and when I say $100 power, and I don't believe you're there now, and that's fine, I would assume you're probably more in that 60, $70 per hour per man change if I was to break down the math. Is that right?

So I don't. I don't know. I'm trying to figure out the math right now. I don't. Marines don't do math in public. So.

So we charge. Right. If I do it a man, I say I'm quoting something. The project, it's 93.75 an hour. Because I know eight hours of the day, 20 days a month, I'm gonna make 15 grand. So I need to make the bottom line. Right. And then when I'm obviously estimate number, I'm trying to get many hours as I can get out of that. Right. So our minimum charge is $65 for a yard. It takes 30 minutes or less. Right. And so when I do that math, that's $130.

Is that for a crew of two?

That's for a crew of two.

Right. So that's putting your hourly range right. In that $65 per hour range.

Yeah. So for example, Morgan, when you do an estimate for a project. Let's do project for a second. Okay. And you think, okay, this is going to take me two days and it's going to be two guys on the job. What's the math you're using now to come up with the pricing on that? Are you multiplying that by an hourly rate? Are you multiplying two days?

Two days being eight hours a day, that's 16 hours. I would take 9,375 and multiply that by 16.

Got it. And that 9,375 is including two people.

No, that's just for the job. Like nobody. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it is included to me, because our minimum Crew is always two. Our business model is always two in the truck.

So two days, two crew members is gonna. You're. You're looking at 9,375. Kind of like what you're targeting per hour with two people.

Yes, got it.

So then right now we're looking at our hourly rate technically is more around that $50 per hour range. And so I know to say. And that's Per person. I know to say $100 per hour seems like a lot. But what I, what I, I, I believe is if you get to a certain point, like for example, what, what do you, what's your close ratio right now? Do you know, Morgan, like, this year just blended average that half the job, 50, 60%.

I was at 60 when we, when I changed the prices, right. I was at 60%. And then as I got like a little bit more cocky, I kind of went down, right? And then as we go rolling in now, now I'm trying to go, I'm pulling it back again, right? Because we're going, I just want to close, keep work on. Because we laid some people off actually yesterday, this Friday. Yeah, yesterday. And so we kept one guy, but I can work, the other partner can work and another guy can do when, when we're, we're busy and kind of make some income because our months are November, December, January, February are hard for us. Right. There's no snow here. You know what I mean? And so it's just like trying to find, creating reoccurring things and just doing whatever we can to make money almost.

So, so last year, Morgan, I know this year we're shooting for 300,000. What was last year's revenue?

210 total.

So this, this is what I want, I want to stay focused on is the fact that this year you're going to grow almost 50%. Your close ratio is 50 to 60%. That tells me that you are not at the top of the market. I know you feel like you're expensive, but, like, what that means to me is you are growing because you're getting a bunch of jobs accepted. When we hit 500,000 annual revenue, we're gonna, we're gonna actually increase this price to the point where our close ratio drops to more like 25 or 30% because we physically can't take more jobs on. We're at capacity.

I got you.

And so I understand, like right now it's like, man, we're like technically like $50 to $60 maybe per hour per crew. That's all my, you know, my, my area can handle. Until you have more jobs coming in and you can't take any more people on because you're at capacity. And so that's what I believe. If you raise, you know, if you get more, more customers, next couple years we get to 500,000. And then over a course of a few years, you just keep tweaking your prices higher. I do believe you can get more than 80 to $100 per man hour range. And if you. If you had the same amount of work that you're doing right now, but you were charging that hourly rate, you'd be having a $750,000 business.

Say that bar right there, Again, if.

You took your hourly rate, which right now is like around 50 bucks per hour, let's just assume.

Assume I was splitting between two people, so I got you.

Yep, yep. So let's assume it's about $50 per person per hour. If we were able to in Fairyland, be able to charge $100 per hour, or let's just call it 85, $90 per hour, we would more than double the. The amount of revenue the business is making without any more customers, any more crew members, any more trucks. And so this is what I really think about Morgan's. You have 230 customers this year. You're going to do $300,000 in annual revenue. Now, what that tells me is you're doing around fourteen hundred dollars per year per customer. All right, so per customer number.

That's the exact number, actually. Yeah.

So here's the thing. I think you can get to 500,000 without getting any new customers. And how you do that is simply get more revenue from those four, from the 230 customers. And so you can make more revenue by either A, raising prices or B, selling them more services. And so.

Yeah, services. Yeah.

So my thought process, okay, can I get someone who I'm mowing and I'm only making, you know, 70 bucks twice a month, therefore I'm making maybe $1,000 a year on them. Can I somehow get them from a thousand to two thousand? And how you're going to do that is I've got. You really got to grease the wheels of upselling. And so how do I actually make sure that I'm selling every mowing customer winter services. I'm selling them a property clamp, I'm selling them a mulch install and creating systems around that will get the average revenue per client from a thousand or twelve hundred past two thousand. That is literally the a matter of selling an extra property cleanup, an extra mulch install, an extra pressure washing. And so greasing that wheel, you could literally have, like, I know companies that doing 800 to 900,000 in annual revenue that have less than 230 customers, but their average revenue per customer is over 2,000, $3,000. Because they are so good. Like, every single time they go mow the property, they're trying to get the customer to, hey, saw weeds in Your bed. We can get you, we can get your property cleanup. We can get molten the beds. Okay. We're going to turn winter services and you expand the revenue per year per client.

It makes 1000% sense. So that would make this. So that would. So, so either two things. Either we haven't done that well, which I know we haven't because once I start doing it, that's when we start making more money. Right. And then two in that 230 because. Because we're moving from jobber to LMN. Right. And because Jobber just, I don't, I can't track my hourly, my labor hours. It's just, it's just we can't do chemicals with it. Like, it's just so much it cannot do. So we go to lmn, right? And so I'll be able to see exactly out of those 230, how many of those are reoccurring. Because that's really a guesstimate right now. Because there's no way to look that up without going in there and you know, 1, 2, 3.

Yeah. Or we just. I think I, I think we have less reoccurring than we, we believe. And because the money just doesn't. When you look at the numbers, it doesn't make sense. So if I had a230 reoccurring, my number should be different. You know, even.

But even if, Even if it's 230 total customers, let's just say 150 of those are recurring and then 80 of them are projects across the board. I just know you're making around 1400 dollars per customer per year. If you can get that to 2,000, we all of a sudden have a $500,000 business. And again, the goal is we hit 500,000 and then we just start raising prices. Like I believe, I believe you with a crew of five to seven in four or five years after getting to 500,000 growth mode and then optimizing profitability whenever you get too many customers because like, I know you have tons of excess demand because you have, you grew by 50 year and you have close ratio of 60%. Like, I don't believe someone's really actually in profit mode until they're under 30% close ratio.

Now that will seem like a lot of people are saying no, and they will, because your prices will be significantly higher, but you won't be able to take any more on because you're focusing on recurring revenue to the point where most of your of your cruise time is just spent doing the Recurring jobs. And so you've only got to fill a little bit of time with projects, which mean if someone comes to you and wants a project, you're like, hey, look, I'm booked six weeks out. I'm charging this higher price.

And so we just gotta upsell more. Right? And what's this?

You could, you, you could not. You could not spend a single dollar in marketing in the next two years and get to 500, 000 if you just do a better job of upselling your existing customers.

Okay, that was. That's one of the questions because I started doing. When we start doing, like EDDMs, we. And I gotta send another one out. We're doing two pushes this month, and we were gonna do during spring, you know, leading up to spring rush and spring rush, we were going to push door hangers and EDDMs, like for two months. Really, really hard to try to plus up the reoccurring. And should we not do that? Like, I mean, or we still should do it.

And I happen to believe that you will get far more revenue if you texted all of your customers and said, this week only we're offering 20% off fall cleanups for existing customers only before we get into the busy season. And it would cost you zero. Like, I don't know about element. Do they do mass messaging through their platform or not?

You can. Yes, I think you. You can. It goes out, but nothing comes. There's no two ways. One, one direction.

How would you do that? You'd probably just have to say call us, which isn't ideal. Like.

Or we can call each one of them.

You could. Yeah. It's just gonna take a little longer, right? It's gonna take. It's gonna take more time. I still think that's a better move than I'm sending every door direct mail. I assume you probably spend a thousand dollars on postage, so instead of spending 5, 62.

Yeah. For like 2500 people.

Yeah. If you spent two or three days calling all your customers. There you go. Like, we really like the text, so we send it. Like, for example, Connor, he's up in Indiana and he just sent one yesterday for Christmas lights. And here, I'll read it to you. And you can use it if you want because it's a similar what I just mentioned there, but he did for Christmas lights and he got 20 jobs yesterday.

He said, here we go. Let me just open this up. Christmas lights. Give me a second here. Sorry, you'll get the recording here. But this, this language might be helpful. So here it is so you could do this in email too. But like we. The mass text really helps. This is the text he sent out. Hey there. This is, you know, put his name in there with Augusta Lawn Care Services. I just wanted to reach out and let you know that we offer custom fit to your home holiday light installation and are running a special. I want to give existing customers like yourself a better deal than we do give the public with no strings attached. I want to provide you with a 20% off the top for holiday lighting. If you accept your estimate by November 15th, simply text me back, respond with yes, I will send you a free quote for holiday lighting plus a free digital rendering of what your house will look like with the lights installed. And that was 20 jobs. That is going to come from zero marketing expense. And so the vast majority of our leads, once we get to 500,000 we just want it coming from farming our existing customers. We send them emails and we send them text messages in mass and are trying to get them to go from that thousand dollar per year to two or three thousand. That doubles the business without getting new customers.

What are you spending that money? Are you just profiting, just stacking or. What do you mean saving it? Are you just saving it? Like so you got the. So you make it. Basically I take my 2, 130 customers. I make them, you know, two thousand dollar customers per annually, right. And then that brings me up to 500,000 and I didn't have to do anything for. So now I'm just stacking the money in the bank and when I get to 500,000 I don't have to do anything still but tweak the price to actually, you know, I guess you gotta.

So when, when demand exceeds supply, that's when you raise price. So supply is like how many jobs you can get done. When you have way more customers, demand is really high. What usually we do is we raise supply, we buy more trucks and we hire more people. What I want you to do when you hit 500,000 is not buy more trucks, not hire more people. And there's still gonna be all these customers wanting in. So we raise prices and some people will leave, but we need them to leave to make space for the people that are new that are coming in that are willing to pay the higher price.

So how many trucks should I be running now then? Like what I mean I got, we have three.

So like I've seen. So for example, if you have three trucks, that's six employees that could be filled. Filling those, those up. I happen to Believe you don't need any more trucks to hit 500,000 annual revenue. In fact. I know that. I know that.

Okay.

And so the reason I know that is because if you have three trucks and you have six employees and we're charging even $60 per hour and they're working 1500, 1500 hours in a year, I can do the math and know you can hit 500,000. And once you hit 500,000, we're not buying more trucks. We're just going to tweak prices whenever we get booked out far and we have all these leads coming in.

So how do I. So, so I guess, I guess. Okay, I started the lawns first. Like how do I price that? So if it's two people and let's say just round my numbers to 93.75, 100, you know, a hundred dollars. So split that in two. That's $50aman hour that we're charging for people. Damn. I don't. Man, that's. You're right. Because I'm adventurous as hell. But like you, you.

I think the reason we ain't closing a lot of these deals is because we. It's this people, military people are so cheap.

Yeah.

They're also very loyal. And so those 230 customers that love you and you do great work for, if you would just contact them and ask to do more work, they'll take you on up on your estimates. And that cost of that lead is zero. Like there is no every door direct mail cost. And furthermore, when you send out this mail campaign, you're gonna have to do 20 or 30 estimates for new customers that have never done service for you. I want you to sell to the person that already knows, likes and trusts you and is gonna accept the estimate as soon as it hits their inbox. And so I'd be really encouraging especially because you and your partner on these properties every time do an inspection form. So for example, you can look it up on long term media and just even copy the template. There's an A property inspection and we have a door hanger and on there it shows like the five different areas there. And I'm going to sell them almost every single time I'm there. We kind of operationalize.

So you keep putting it on there. You just keep putting it on there until they buy it.

You could do it like once a month. So we made it because like door hanger can get a little bit annoying. So we made it inside copilot where it's more of a text and email. So what the guys do, they can see a list of services that they can upsell a customer and when they're at the property, oh, they need mulch, they can click on the mulch and immediately it sends the text to the customer saying hey, the prop, the crew is at the property today and they saw that you might need some molts in the property. If you need it, let us know, we'll get you an estimate by tomorrow. And that can be automated. Now I don't know if LMN can do that but with a one way text, could you definitely, you could do this. Like even if they're at the customer's property, even if they don't have the upsell feature like that, just type it in like hey, it's Morgan with you know, ospreys and we want to reach out and just go that direction.

If they, if you text a customer, you've been servicing the problem for a year, two years and you say hey, notice your bushes needed trimmed. We can get them on the schedule next week. Do you want a price? I think your close ratio is going to be 30, 40, 50% but it's going to cost you zero in terms of customer acquisition cost.

I'm not going to have to spend 2, $3,000 to you know, to get there when I could just send the email, save the 2, $3,000 and then.

Make 2, $3,000 and furthermore reduce the admin time of onboarding a new customer. It is far more, more operationally drag and very expensive operationally to have someone call you from a door hanger. Talk to your admin person, the admin person set up a meeting. You go to the customer's house, specifically outside of your regular working hours, put together an estimate, send it back to the office, the office that sends it to them. All the back and forth follow up calls versus you're on the property and you click a button and ask them if they want the service and they say yes. You say fantastic, the price will be X. Do you want that on the schedule next week?

Yeah, I just started like literally probably in the last 60 days, started emailing our current customers once a week. And we have like we did it the other day and we talked about winterizing and then we had got a couple calls from that. Somebody booked a pressure wash this morning from that email. So what you're saying is like right on, right on task of where we are. But like I didn't know like I could still. That's the, I mean that's the whole point of the call. I Didn't. I don't know what I don't know. I didn't know I could still get more out of them without going to get more customers. Because like my thing was we need 100 more customers next year, you know?

Yeah, we just take the same customers and make them twice as much revenue per year and add more value to them. Because if you add more value, like, think about like this, like Ford's best fans buy the nicest trucks. They don't buy the, the flat, you know, eight foot bed, single cab. They buy the lariat. They buy the King Ranch. They're buying the nice stuff. That's the biggest fans. Your biggest fans. As customers buy all your upsells, they spend more money with you. And so make raving fans by solving more of their problems. And then down the road when you raise prices, they won't want to leave. Because now you don't just do their mowing, you trim their bushes, you install their molts, you pull their weeds, you check their gutters, you do the pressure washing. And every time you're on their property, you're making sure that they're taken care of by seeing what other problems you can solve for them. That person raised prices.

Yeah, because people always say, yeah, you tell me. I mean, you the lawn guy, so what do I need? You know what I mean? So people do say that all the time. Okay, so, so, so to answer this question, I got that part. So this is I guess two part question, like, am I can, could I lower my prices for lawn so I can pull like, so I could. Because I still gotta worry about attrition because it's a military town and the turnover is serious here during the winter, during the summertime actually. And so we have people coming and going, we usually feel it. But I also still want to be having a healthy amount of people.

Kind of fill the trucks to capacity in a sense.

Because then I'll feel better, right? Because basically what I want to do is fill two trucks with reoccurring during the off season. During the season, me and my partner actually be doing projects. The stuff that we're upselling, we're doing that type of stuff because we don't have to, I don't have to train nobody right now. Right. I'm okay with that until we get somebody into that slot.

What should I be charging? That's 50. You said, Dang. So you basically said, I'm charging 50. I thought I was doing better than that, man. Like, and you say 50.

Hey, I started at 30 bucks. An hour. 10 years ago I was at 30 bucks an hour. Now we're at a hundred plus. So it's, it's just a matter of hitting capacity. And instead of buying more trucks and getting more and more customers, I just say, no, we're not buying more trucks where every time we're overbooked, we're going to raise prices.

How, how are you charging like on a lawn? Like, are you charging a hundred dollars per man hour, Dan?

Yeah, $100 per hour.

So if you got a 30 minute yard, you got two guys on it.

100 bucks.

A hundred bucks.

Okay, but, but again, back in the day that would have been a 30 lawn for me. So the reason we all get in these, these spirals of price is because every time you get to capacity, you've been buying trucks and hiring more people. If you were forced today to go down to one truck and just you mowing, you would have to raise prices in order to be able to cut all customers down to a manageable size.

Correct.

And so now we're going to do the same thing. So next year we're going to grow another 50% by simply upselling our customers. We're going to get close to that $500,000 marker and then we're going to stop buying trucks and hiring people. And every time we're overbooked and there's all these leads pouring in and we're just simply going to raise prices. And some people will leave, but we need them to leave to make room for the leads that are coming in. And furthermore, when it gets slower at certain periods of the year, we're going to now have a medium, a source of getting new leads and that is contacting our existing customers. So for example, we just, we did this thing the other day. It was called the trick or treat deal for Halloween. And it was basically like, hey look, we're giving this massive discount on winter services and some people think, think it's a trick, but really it's a treat because here's why. We want to keep crew busy during our off season and we don't have to lay them off for the holidays. So we're giving massive discounts on these services. So whenever you get slow, you pitch your existing customers. So for example, get slow during the summer. Great. We're gonna pitch an email that's going to highlight ripping out people's lawns and putting in rock and we're get four or five jobs and fill up the schedule for the month. Every single property we go to for mowing, we're going to text them and we're going to tell them, hey, we saw in your property X, Y, and Z. We think we could take care of that. Do you want to quote for it? And we don't actually text them. There's just a button upsell and then click whatever service we want.

And where we know if that's like the. The clients that we have are not going to be optimal for us. Like, was there. Is there a pointer that, you know, it's like, okay, I'm trying to upsell either. I'm not. I guess you're either not doing it correctly, you know, pitching the right deals, trying to find the right deals for them, or I do need people to kind of even it out. Depending on. I don't know if this matters in area. I mean, you got places all around. Does that matter what area? I mean, like, would I still work here in Fayetteville, Charlotte? Like, does it matter?

You know, customers want their problem solved, and you are solving one or two of their problems, and there are many others on their property. We just are simply not. We. Honestly, this is. This is. In my opinion, Morgan, we don't care enough to solve their problems. Like, if we actually boil it down, we're so interested in the next shiny customer and getting more customers. We're not taking care of our current customers to the extent that they could be taken care of and they are willing to pay you for it. And the reason I know that is because they paid you to solve one problem. Mowing, for example. But they have five other problems on their property. You could serve them, but it's a matter of caring enough to reach out to them and let them know you can take care of it. And I'm sure there's been times when you're mowing going and someone's like, trimming the bushes or installing mulch or doing a landscaping project for them, and we're doing their gutters or pressure washing. Like, I could be doing that.

Yeah, Pressure washing hit me hard when I seen it. This is what we wasn't doing. And I was like, how the hell. Because the pressure was so easy. We only do pressure washing, chemicals and mowing. Right. And so which is try to stay in those niches. And I saw. He pulled up one of our customers and I saw him across the street, and he had a guy pressure Washington. Like, we could be doing that.

Yeah. And then they have. They have other problems in their. Their property you could take care of. And so, like, even when it comes to, like, pressure washing, I Believe that you could do that during the hot of, you know, July and August when you're losing mowing customers. So I'm not going to pitch them pressure washing in spring rush when I have tons of mowing leads coming in and the grass is growing like crazy. I'm going to pitch them on text and email during July and August for that service because I know it'll help me fill in the gap of the mowing season.

Yeah.

So I would create a calendar for the whole year of what services do I pitch for every month based upon my climate, based upon what I know I don't have as much work. I'm going to be pitching my mowing service as like hardcore during spring rush when everyone wants mowing. And I'm going to focus most of my crew's time and attention on mowing. But then when we go into the office, when we go into the summer, I'm going to do projects, I'm going to do Pressure Washington when we go into the winter, I'm going to upsell my customers into fall cleanups and leaf cleanups and winter services.

Okay, so, okay, this talk about that when do when, like, because we're not taking a paycheck right now, right. Because we have that office person that's probably a big portion of that anyway. Because based on what I hear you say is like 400, 500,000 that we can start thinking about a part time admin person. But we have that person that we need to grow into. When can we start taking like, you know, owner payouts or, or, you know. Yeah. At this level, your owner payout right.

Now, all that money you're spending on marketing is going to go into your pocket. But this comes down to whether or not we actually create a system around upselling to the customer. Like the thousands of dollars you're going to spend on every door, direct mail, on printing and postage, and all the admin time spent on onboarding new customers. That's the money that ends up in your pocket because you grow the business to $500,000 from 300,000 to 500,000 without having to get new customers. You just focus on, you're like, well, what about Churn? There is enough leads coming in from just seeing you guys out in the field that will replace Churn.

We never did marketing before and we, we. I mean, you see where we, we've grown from one truck to no truck to three without any marketing ever in the last few years. So I know that that is a thing too. And we people, we see you Here, we see you there. And you know, bright yellow trucks. Okay, so I got a couple more questions. We got a little bit of time.

Go for it.

So we talked about that. I wanted, I think, let's see that. P for P, man. Let's. Let's talk about your baby.

Looked into it, did the demo like it?

I understand the concept wholeheartedly. Still nervous on the part of giving them more money. But we did start something like kind of in house before we had kind of see if it worked and stuff like that and. Or we were giving them, you know, no callbacks, you know, not breaking nothing on time to work in. Now we would give them an extra 150 bonus. Right. And they loved it because when I remember one, they broke something. He was like, first day I thought about it was like, damn, I'm about to lose some money. Right. P4P, that's taking. That's a larger amount. And so does that slow my process to get into the numbers that I want?

Yeah. So right now, what's your base pay, like, hourly rate typically needed to get someone in the door? 18, 20 bucks an hour. What is it?

16.

Okay. So.

Your prices are too low for P2P to actually work. And what I mean by that is you don't pass the 25% rule. There's a 25% rule, is that in order for P4P to work, you want your base pay to be no more than 25% of what you're charging the customer. So at $16 per hour, I need you to be charging in the realm of 65 bucks an hour for P4P to actually start making a difference in the business. Because right now, if you gave a third of your revenue to the employees, they wouldn't be able to give get above base pay. And I would say that makes sense.

Because when I put it in, I put it in. No numbers came back on the P4P program because the numbers, that makes total sense. Yeah.

So, like, they're not going to be able to make above 16, 17 bucks an hour. They're definitely not going to make above like 20, 22, which is really what you need them to be able to make for it to be motivating. So I think the more important thing is getting revenue on existing customers. That's going to be your. Your lowest hanging fruit. Then as you raise prices past 60 bucks an hour to the, to the customer, then P4P will start making more sense. Right now, Morgan, the biggest financial band aid that you have in the business is that you and Your partner are working in the business and not taking a paycheck. If you had to pay yourself for the work that was being done out in the field, the business is not making money, it's losing money, making any money.

Yeah.

And so this is, this is why most people will never be able to build a passively ran business is because you're in the field working, hustling like the most efficient person and not getting paid. That doesn't happen in a passive business. You will have to charge that 80 to $100 per hour rate if they want to make it passive. And everyone's like, oh, that's impossible. My market won't, won't do it. No. 60% of people are accepting your estimates. You grew by 50% last year. That means that you have way more demand than you do have supply. And so I believe over the course of three to five years, you can get your prices to that level, assuming you don't keep buying more trucks and hiring more people. This is why I'm like, hey, the million marker might not be a good idea because you're gonna keep growing, getting more trucks, more employees, and you're gonna build a million dollar business that relies on you and your partner working 80 hours a week without paychecks in order to make it work.

So how many employees you saying we need now?

Six tops.

And that's two in each on all three trucks.

Correct. And once you hit that and you're like, man, we got all this is gonna take, I think next year you'll probably kind of grow up to capacity. You're probably going to 400, 450. You're going to focus a ton on upselling. You're going to get that 450. And you're like, man, we need another truck. We need to hire more people. And it's like, oh, wait a second, we're not going to do that. We're going to raise price on all of our customers by 10 bucks a cut, 15 bucks a cut. And I can almost guarantee, Morgan, though, way less people will leave than you think. Adding an extra 10, $15 per cut is literally going to add 5 to $8,000 of monthly revenue to your books and it'll be straight profit.

That's it. You make this sound so easy.

But here's the thing. That's next year feeling like you're kind of doing the same thing, except selling more to existing customers, the next year raising prices, then the next year implementing pay for performance, and then two more years of raising prices to where you're in that 80 to $100 range. And then five years you afford a general manager that you can work on the business passively. So it seems easy, but I'm just scanning through this very quickly. But it's a five year process.

Okay, so let me just, I want to just solidify this because I'm really good, really bad with math. And so I need to get my prices to where, like the minimum for PvP 65aman hour. Right now I'm you saying I'm 50, right? Because to. That's where I'm missing the numbers at. So you're good. So 65 and I'm charging $30 an hour. I mean 65 an hour for 30 minutes, what would that be?

60. So if you're able to hit for 30 minutes $65 with two people, that is 65 per hour. However, that's your minimum. You're, you're not actually charging that amount on like projects and even like other mowing jobs, right? Like 93. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So let's just assume it's even a hundred. Like if we average out some of the mowing that are at the minimum, some of the projects, you're still at 45 to $50 per man hour.

That's where. Okay, yeah.

And once you get above 60, in my opinion, Morgan, that's when you'll be able to start taking a paycheck. Because right now you're bridging the gap of like that 45 to 50 and 60, where I think you'll actually start making some money.

That gap is being bridged by you working crazy hours and not taking a paycheck.

So if, okay, so that's the make somebody help me more. If I'm charging 65 minimum now for 30 minutes, what will I charge?

I, I wouldn't worry about your minimum. Like your minimum is probably, it's pretty good. Right now you're, you're charging 65 per hour. If it takes 30 minutes to do your minimum yard and there's gonna be probably some yards that you, the crew gets done like 15 or 20 minutes, you're still charging 65. So I'm not looking that as my hourly rate. What's going to be more accurate is If I take 15 or 20 of your jobs and look at, okay, how long is it actually taking to get this job done and what is my price? And actually knowing what my hourly rate for mowing is, my hourly rate for projects are like right now the 93 and 75 is a very, very wide Estimation based upon the entire month of work. I would be going to your projects and element will help you do this a little bit more like figuring out budget hours. When you do an estimate, it's like, will this job take 16 hours? Great. I'm charging $50 per man hour. Therefore the labor revenue on this job is 800.

Right.

That's when we have a real hourly rate. Just saying like we get projects done over the course of a month for a crew of two and make 15. 15 grand or whatever. 93, 75 that there's some jobs you're probably making 50 and some drivers make 150.

Hope the greater the two.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Because I say that because me and the projects, me and the other owner. All, all of them. Because I can, I can get it done in half the time if that takes. It takes that long. So.

And it's the thing though, when you move into a passive role as an owner, you have to actually make sense of a crew member that will work half as efficiently as you unless they're on P4P. But even on P4P, they're going to be 20 to 30% less efficient than you because they don't have equity in the business.

Yeah.

And so right now you are bridging this gap with very, very low pricing because you were crazy fast and you're not charging a lot per hour. But the business would not be able to afford that if you were not getting, you know, your. Your personal needs met with. From the military.

Right. So do I raise prices now or going into the next season or.

Nope. The question of when to raise prices is always singularly answered. When you hit capacity.

When you hit capacity. So that's it. Okay.

So the focus to get you capacity, not at capacity, that's six. That's six people. So you, your partner and four employees in all three trucks. When that is done and we're going to get there pretty quickly, I think we can do it in a year, year and a half maybe by simply upselling our existing customers and getting way more jobs from those existing 230. I think we get to capacity there and then we raise prices in 20.

27, 2026, six people, three trucks, basically all trucks working, hustling.

That's at capacity.

Okay.

That business, that business will do 500 000. And then as you raise your prices from 50, like let's just do the math. Let's raise your prices from 50 to 80 per hour after we hit 500,000 in annual revenue. If you do that in over the course of say three years, you will go from 500,000 to $800,000 in annual revenue without buying any more trucks or hiring any more people.

Okay, last question, last couple questions. I talked to Lee before about a year ago about the franchising. Is there a benefit? I mean, I mean, I'm looking for franchise and I'm looking for the knowledge man, because I'm a paralegal by trade, right? So I do a lot of research and I know that the reason I got this call is because the information you've got, you've gotten me has gotten me to this point, right? So how do I become a mastermind group or what is. What does Augusta Nation have to offer me at this level to continue to grow where, I mean, they, I mean, I don't have to pay for a session if I, if I always have you talking to me or being able to have regional managers or becoming regional whatever, you know, all that type of piece, like, what does that look like?

Like the benefit, honestly for you, Morgan, is all the things I'm talking about, everyone inside of Augusta Nation knows like the back of their hand. We're all doing the exact same thing. We grow our business to 500,000, we optimize for profit, we grow it to 7 to 800,000, we put a general manager in place and we go start another location. It's the business model. And at 800,000, I want $200,000 in profit. That's the goal. I'm only going to be able to do that if I stop growing at 500,000 and optimize over price for pricing over the course of a few years. That is the model and we, that's all we talk about. So when you talk to other owners, what I just told you is going to seem foreign to some people. Like, why would you not want to build a million or $2 million business? And I know what $2 million businesses look like, million dollar businesses, and that is two owners working 80 hours a week with thin, thin profit margins and never being able to hand it off to a general manager. And so the only benefit is the community of other owners that are doing the exact same thing as you. We're all aligned. We all are very aligned. On like, like what I just read you is from a WhatsApp group. That, that message from Connor that he sent out, we're all sharing, like, this is working for me. This is working. We're all using the same stuff. So that's the advantage. But like, what I told you is exactly what we do. It's not like it's a new thing. It's. You get a whole bunch of people going the same direction and when you fall down, because it's going to happen, inevitably there's going to come a time when you're like, I don't want to send out this one click estimate email or send out this text blast. Like, man, I just feel like I'm nagging. My. You're going to have 150 other people being like, hey, this is what you do. Like, stay in the system. Let's go. Rock and roll. Here's a great template. Let's do this. Like, that's the advantage. But what I'm actually sharing with you now is the roadmap. It's just a community of people that are all pushing you in that direction is the advantage. That's really.

I like the team part. Yeah. What is the cost for right now? I noticed last time I look it was way more doable. I think it's, I think it's raised up and there was a military thing in there too, or something, if I can remember correctly.

Yeah. Talk to Lee. Like, a lot of our owners are ex military. Like, you like systems, you like community, you are good at following systems. I know when I say all these things, you're going to listen to again and you're just going to execute.

You draw inside the lines. You're used to the hierarchy of, hey, here's the plan, let's go execute. And so that's why a lot of them are so, like, talk to Lee. We do have a discount for, for the military, but, like, I think you'll be successful either way because of that trait. But you also know the benefit of having a force of people behind you. And that's really the benefit of Augusta Nation. That really is the, the, the information is a commodity. I share it with you. I share with other people on my videos. But it's the, it's the group of people together doing that same thing that makes it feel like you're part of something.

You know, do you think that, that regularly talking to you is a benefit? Or should I wait six months or three months, or wait till I hit, you know, when should I probably reach out to you again?

I think it's more a matter of like, you know, the plan, you know, long term, Like, I just gave you like next five years. Right. And there's always little things like, well, what about this text? Or whatever? And that's when it's beneficial. Like with the owners, I talk to them every day because they'll have a hey, this text message or this ad or that's all helpful. But like, you generally know the plan for the next five years. And so there'll be times we want to get bogged down in one little thing. It's like, well, let's just look back at the plan. And so I don't think you need more instruction from me. You know the game plan, right? It's a matter of like, can you stay in the systems? Can you follow that model and actually execute? Because in a year and a half, you're going to be like, oh, man, I should buy more trucks. Like, that's. That seems very natural for me to do when I have a bunch of work and I have leads coming in. I don't want to raise price. I feel horrible about it. Like, that's, that's the, the thing that if. As long as you're. Stick to it.

Gotcha. Makes sense, man. I appreciate it, man.

I don't know if you know, I don't know if you knew who Alex Hormozi is, but he always says we need to remind him more than we need to be taught. And so, like, if, if you just played this every three months to get focused back on what you should be doing, like, you just need to be reminded a lot more than you'd be taught about new things or Facebook ads or how do I do tracking on my website. There's all these other little things that we get distracted with. And like what I just said, like that five year plan. Like, sell more to your existing customers, hit capacity, raise prices, hire a general manager. That's the plan.

Boom. Okay. I appreciate you, man. Keep doing what you're doing, man. I know you know people are listening. Oh, there's one more. What's that thing? The summit.

There we go. Is. Should I go? I.

This is the thing.

I think everyone should go. I'm biased, though. The thing that you're going to learn, Morgan, this, this year that is, I think would be beneficial is how to fill your off season so you don't go down below 15,000amonth in revenue. Like, we're going to talk about five different, like, tracks that we use at Augusta to make sure that you actually fill the winter schedule and you keep all your crew busy and you go into spring with plenty of cash because as you know, you slow down, you have burn with your admin person. Your trucks are being used one or two times a week. That is extremely inefficient. You'll never make money. It's the worst part about home services, especially landscaping. And so that's the problem we're going to fix. And so if that's a big problem for you, I would come huge.

All right, I'll see you there then, brother.

Okay. All right, man. You have a great rest of your weekend. Love you. Thank you. Got it. Bye. Bye.