I said “Change THIS, or the Business FAILS!”

If you're going to go past the mill, you got to separate operations and sales.

I'm Mike Andes, founder of Augusta Lawn care with over 150 locations around the world. One year ago, we visited Simply Lawn Care.

We got a problem.

Yeah.

A $800,000 per year business ran by co founders Brandon and Scott. Scott found himself working 90 hour weeks. Meanwhile, Brandon lacked direction for his role in the business.

He's going to start feeling like you're not doing enough. Is that a frustration for you? Eventually you guys are going to start colliding.

Screw him. I'm mad at him.

When people don't treat you like a.

Human and it's like one of those things you just gotta like kind of toughen up, you know, like just deal with.

They've had explosive growth in the past year by attacking these three problems. One, way too much overhead cost. Number two, delegating the roles inside of the partnership. And three, marketing to get more leads.

The difference between this year and this year is whether or not that can get nailed down.

We are going to check in with Brandon to see how they did it.

Good morning.

Good morning. How you doing?

How's it going?

What's your name?

Scott.

Scott.

Okay, great.

I don't think we've met before, right?

Yeah.

You've been at conference.

I've been to the side.

I remember Brandon more, I think because he would be the one stand up and ask questions.

Yeah, he's a talkative office boy, team general manager.

Cool.

During COVID we both lost our jobs. Let's just get a company going. Not even company, a side gig. We did the little cutout door hangers, put them all around. Said like mowing for $30. I think a mo. So obviously underpaid. But we just banked on the fact that we were a couple college kids that lost our jobs and we're just trying to work.

So we started this company because we saw YouTube videos, said, hey, this guy knows what he's doing. Let's just do everything he says. And the reason we've been able to grow to 800,000 in three years is because we just did everything he said.

When I first pulled up, I could sense a little bit of tension between Brandon and Scott.

He's a talkative office boy, team general manager.

They are equal owners, but I wanted to know if the responsibilities are also balanced. After the team meeting, I pulled aside.

Brandon Scott's role has been more consistent. My role's kind of changed. So Scott has always been the gm. You can call him now. He's just like fighting fires, obviously doing all the scheduling for the guys.

If I'm doing estimates all day, I'm doing 20 or so estimates, whatever it may be by the next day there's a machine that has to get fixed so we don't have extra. So that night sometimes I have to come in. I had to fix the machine so that way in the morning we can stay to schedule.

Yeah, Scott's anything. He's always working till 12:30 at night fixing all the stuff we break during the day. Always make sure we're set up for the day.

This is what we're working for. To make a million dollar business. I feel like they always look a little all over the place, but that's what we work on. And it's just a never ending wrong battle. It's truly the only way I can manage it. I just think forward, don't let myself get caught up in the 90 hour work weeks or even more than that sometimes. And it's like one of those things you just gotta like kind of toughen up. You like just deal with, you know, this is one of those weeks where everything just tends to go wrong. And we're working, we're making do.

What I was doing about a month ago was I was doing all the estimates and taking all the calls. But then in the past month, because we wanted to upgrade to copilot, we hired the office assistant because we just needed to get some new people in here. So we did 80 applicants.

Lily, what she do versus you now.

What she's doing is she's still taking all the calls, she's handling all the emails.

Brandon and Scott hired an office worker to help with some of the admin tasks and take them off of Brandon's plate.

I feel like I'm dealing with a lot of analysis by paralysis where I'm like do I just. Instead of writing out all the training manuals for her and then teaching it, is it better to just sit down with her and just show her it and like basically bank on it's going to work out with her and not write anything down.

The problem is, the problem is right now you don't know what the training manual should say. Cause you haven't done it enough times. So like my thought is like where's your strength and what can you do really, really well? And am I hearing you correctly when it's like strategy systems, like more of.

That side of things?

Yeah, basically.

And then right now the challenge is like that's not a full time job. And so you're basically doing admin stuff to fill in the meantime. Yep.

What I like is I do like the office. I don't like having to talk to customers. Like the 20 hours of just like talking to customers and doing the same repetitive thing all day was just like, it was just demoralizing. Why I was feel demoralized talking to customers in the past. It wasn't anything to do with the actual customers. It was more of a failure of our systems and operations.

After you start a business and you're really excited, there's a lot of mundane things associated with running the business and growing.

Louie, what do you think? A little bit of thatch.

Just a little bit of thatch.

It's not always exciting. And new things. Just doing the boring work and getting the reps in is sometimes all that's required to actually grow the company.

We didn't need the role. I thought I needed it. I gave her a two week notice, which is funny, most employees demanded two week notice. So I gave her a two week notice. I was like, look, I'm sorry I failed you. Not your fault. It was losing the company money. And like I think she knew it too.

I know just based on talking to you guys, you're the analytical to put everything together, put everything in a checklist, which is great. And that'll keep things organized. But if you jump to it too soon, it'll slow everything down. Right. And so is that a frustration for you?

Sorta. I do have like, I text him to like make sure things are done sometimes. Cause it's hard for me to just like not look at other stuff on like the office side.

Right.

Cause then it's like back, back in my head. I know something has to be changed, but I didn't do it because I like, you know, hey, make sure you do this. Or I send an email to the office lady and in the back of my head I'm always like, did she do it or did Brandon get a chance to do that?

Uh oh, we got a problem.

What happens on a great day? Flat tire.

Oh, no.

And so what I'm seeing is a business that is like if Scott's not here, it all will fall apart. That's essentially like my concern. It sounds to me like you are really good at sales, but you're also the ops person. And that's the part that I think is going to be the bottleneck. Because as you keep growing the team ops becomes like its own thing. Just managing the guys, making sure they're at. There's always a flat tire that said.

Yeah, that constant, like once I have like one bounce off track, it's not like it just takes that 20 minutes somehow. It tends to take like the 40 minutes. It's always added time somehow where it's like, got to come back here, grab this, grab that, go to them, fix that for them. Or even like bring another machine so they can keep going to stay on schedule.

The number one thing like that makes me feel comfortable on the job sites is anytime I have a question, call Scott, Facetime him, tell me exactly, do it. Like that's what I did earlier the hill. Like it's my first day on the stander. I felt a little nervous with the hill called. Scott, just push mow it.

You're gonna be good, man.

So don't worry. When you got their phone call away, it'll help you out with everything.

We had this off site meeting we did our first time we ever did peer reviews. And every single person was telling me, you're doing too much, you're gonna burn yourself out, all this other stuff. And I was like, my hands were in everything in the business. So I literally with Liz, we took three hours. I wrote every single thing I did down for day 22 things. And I was like, okay, who could do this? Things like who can open up the shop in the morning, who can do the equipment maintenance? Like every little thing until finally one day is like, there's nothing here. And that's when you can go do more locations, you can do a lot more stuff. Cause you don't need to be an ops anymore. So it's really going this direction. In my opinion. It's like, okay, this has to be done. That then frees Brandon up to be able to take this off your plate. You focus both now on a much more individualized rules of selling will probably increase your close ratio. Like a lot of really positive things. But then in order for this to happen, you've got to like, this is probably 20 things by the way.

You don't realize how many tasks you do a day until you write it down. I probably have 22 or more. And that's just, that's just things I don't even notice until the day to day happens.

How do we fix that? Well, probably Brandon taking these off, probably getting one of your best guys like, hey, I want you to be responsible. A lot of them don't even want extra pay. They just want the responsibility. Which means if I write something down here that's broken, I expect to be fixed every single week or let me know why not? And then it's a matter of, okay, now you have more time to go focus on those things. But it requires him to do this. Well then what's going to break down this, these sort of things. Right now we're not leaning on the admin person because they need training, whatever it is required, systems required to get them trained up so that this can actually happen. Right now I think this is breaking because this is not happening. And this is not happening because we don't have any confidence over here.

When you're first growing the business from 0 to $500,000 in annual revenue, this is why 90% of people will not be able to cross that revenue marker. Cause you have to do admin sales and operations. The challenging part with Simply Lawn Care is the fact that Brandon and Scott, there's two owners, so they're doing 7, 800,000 annual revenue. There's really not enough margin and profit to pay for someone else to take a rollover.

Scott is just doing all the in person estimates and helping train the team and then I'm doing all the office work. Now we're actually, we decided no office person this year. I'll just do it all. So I handle all administration, he handles all app ops and then sales is technically split. He does any in person estimates, but I handle everything virtual. We actually have a quarterly meeting and a monthly meeting. We just sit there for half a day and we just brainstorm what's going wrong with the company right now, what needs to be improved and what can, like, what do we want to implement. We pull out that list again of what we assign to each other, you know, improvement wise. And we just say, okay, did you get this done? You get this done. And we just go down the list and make sure everything got completed. And if it didn't get completed, like, why was it not completed?

Simply Lawn care was spending $30,000 a year on Facebook and Google trying to get new leads.

I thought the old marketing was like dead. I was like, yard signs don't work. Door hangers don't work. I'm not super warmed up to door hangers. Still, we haven't gotten great results, but yard signs have been phenomenal.

If you've been trying Facebook and trying Google and then you find something, just go all in on it.

Yeah, right.

And the thing is it's unsexy that there's no course about like how to put up. Yeah, but, but it's like, look, if that's your best customer acquisition cost, just go all in on it. Right? Because like I did yard signs, for example, when I started up in North Carolina, they all got taken the next within 24 hours. And so it was door hangers. And it was like once we found that over the course of few weeks, it was like just go all in, 100% on it. And so if that's your thing, is yard signs, like, okay, great, instead of spending $1,000 a month on Facebook and Google, I'm going to spend $1,000 on having someone go part time and just.

Put a gazillion of these things across our market.

And then people know us as the guys who have yard signs all over the place.

The question is, would it be better to spend that $30,000 in marketing spend and instead of giving it to Google and Facebook, just give it to your admin person. And their whole job is simply to follow up on existing estimates and call all of your existing customers in your database and, and try to upsell them more work.

And so I think a lot of times we're always going for the new shiny like customer when it's like 1700 people that have done service with you. And if you just convert more of those, Instead of spending 30, $40,000 a year on marketing, that money goes in your pocket. And someone like calling 100 of those an hour, no problem. Well, what if we run out of 700 people? Call property managers, call real estate agents, have things on the market that just came up, you can have an alert. Every single new house that comes on the market need to give them a property cleanup.

Steven, quick, how much do you love spring cleanups?

I like to say we're going a little old fashioned. It basically costs us about almost $30 exactly a lead from yard signs. Google Ads in the spring rush gets us like 30 an hour. But most of the time Google Ads is like 40, 50 a lead. So actually yard signs were our highest performing lead source from actual ad spend point of view. So we actually went Super. We bought 500 yard signs, spent a couple grand on them. I mean, our biggest lead source is free Facebook posting and Google reviews. Number one.

My biggest issue was like my last company is like, you see your boss kind of like sitting in the AC on Facebook when you get back from work and all he does is like hand out your check and like they're grinding. Both of them are up all night. Like that's where Noah's like, I know my boss is out working me, so it's like I'm gonna try to work.

As hard as him.

We both know it's gonna. It's gonna hit that plateau. And the only thing getting us past that plateau is just like, the delegating rules, you know, fixing our systems a little bit. And that's really what we plan on having Mike here for.

It's such a weight and a responsibility where it's like, if you can't control your own emotions, it's not gonna work.

We won't ever, like, clash. We might butt heads, but it's not ever negative. It's like, what decision do we make?

It's strictly numbers. It's strictly generating revenue.

Repetition. I want to have that, like, that big company team feeling.

The happiness of these people is what makes me emotional now.

Because they've always been there for me.

That's where the girl comes from.

It's not.

It's not like, oh, Brandon, you know, he's slacking today. Screw him. I'm mad at him. It shouldn't be like that ever.

If you have a wife, this is your second wife, and you need to tell your wife that. I told my girlfriend, like, I have to treat Scott like my wife now.

Trying to, like, grow a company with a partner, you're never going to be on the same path. It's like a marriage. And, like, you got to understand that. Not every day it's like a 50, 50.

This year we actually have ran the numbers, and we should have more disposable income at the end of the year, which we're not paying out to ourselves. We're still not making much money. Although one highlight is Scott and I have raised our salary to finally above minimum wage. We ended the year at 700,000. Last year we should do right around $1 million. This year. On the low end, we projected at 900,000. That's if, you know, we just follow the current trend. High end, maybe 1.1 million.

I'm happy to say that Brandon and Scott from Simply Lawn Care have turned around their business. They're going to increase revenue by almost 50% this year, and they're going to be able to make enough profit to at least pay themselves a little bit of a salary. I think this is a big win, and I look forward to seeing what Simply Lawn Care will do in the future with multiple locations and constant expansion.