i saved $1,000,000 at 24... how i did it

Hey everyone, I'm Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care. We have over 80 locations around North America. But today I'm going back in time. I'm talking about how I started a lawn care business and ended up having a million dollars in cash by the time I was 24. So I'm not talking about becoming a millionaire on paper or having a net worth of a million dollars. This is a million dollars in cash. Net worth is extremely subjective and I was probably a millionaire on paper far before that. But it's extremely difficult to say that you're a millionaire if you can't actually purchase, pull the cash out. Because if you have real estate and you have businesses, well, the businesses valuations are extremely subjective based upon what the economy is doing, who valuates it, et cetera. So I'm talking a million dollars in the bank. I started my business when I was 18. That's when I started Augusta Lawn Care. I started mowing lawns and being very entrepreneurial when I was really young, like 11 12, but 18 years old. I started Augusta Lawn Care at the age of 24. I had a million dollars in the bank in cash. And today I'm going to talk to you what five things I did to make that happen. And I Alex Hormozi has this quote I really love. It says basically you just need two things in order to become extremely wealthy, extremely rich. And that is one, long hours, gotta put a ton of work in. And two, is delayed gratification. And that's really what this revolves around because a couple days ago I posted a picture of my bedroom, which for the past four years has been a 6ft, 6 foot by 6 foot closet in the office with literally a mattress on the floor. And that's been my bedroom for the past four years. And that really speaks to the delayed gratification today. I'm talking about the long though that were put in from the age of 18 to 24 to make that million dollars in the bank a reality and allow me at the age of 24 to franchise Augusta Lawn Care and take that money and make it into something really cool and invest every single dollar. So the first thing that I would recommend if you're trying to make a million dollars regardless of what age you're at, is do something that no one else wants to do. Everyone's getting caught up in the things that everyone wants to do and that's be a social media influencer. Let's create a tech company, let's create some Silicon Valley startup and that's fine and good. But, but if you really want to get started and get to a million, like we're not going to, we're not going to talk about a billion dollar business right now. We're talking about a million and then making the business to the point where you get a million dollars in cash. If you want to do that, do a job that no one else wants to do. So for me, no one wants to mow their grass, trim their bushes, install their mulch. That's what I did. And so if you can start your business with something that no one else wants to do, typically it's going to be lowest barrier to entry. So I'm not talking about people who know how to code or have all these other skills. I'm talking about someone who just wants to get started and they're in the dirt, they just start in for nothing. Do something that no one else wants to do. Cleaning septic tanks, cleaning roofs, cleaning gutters, no one wants to do those things. And if you can create a business around that, you're going to have job security. The second thing I did after starting my lawn care and landscaping business was focus on revenue exclusively. Just focus on growing. Now this is a little harder. If you have a lot of liabilities, you have a lot of things that require you to be paying every single month. A mortgage, insurance, alimony, whatever it is, things that you have to pay every single month. If that's high, it's extremely hard to just focus on the top line revenue growth because you need profit to be absorbed and taken out of the business. So what I did, the second step was I built a business doing something no one else loved to do. And then I essentially focused only on the top couple inches of the income statement that I was like, I'm going to grow this to as big, over seven figures as soon as possible. And focusing exclusively on how do I market, how do I grow, how do I create ads, how do I use Facebook ads, how do I use Google Ads, how does this all work? That was my main focus for the first few years of business. Because at the end of the day, if you want to build a million dollars in cash and you don't want it to take 10, 20 years, you're going to have to build a high top line revenue in order to then create a high profit margin business and take cash away from the company. The third thing I did was I cut every single expense possible. So focus on growth. And then it switches to, well, now I've got to focus on profit what did I do? I cut every single expense I possibly could. That includes, like, not eating out very much. That includes driving a junkie car. Like, literally for the past eight years, I have not driven a car that was not Augusta Lawn Care, that was not wrapped in yellow. I recently just purchased my very first vehicle for the past eight years that was not a company vehicle. But those first eight years, like, I'm not buying a second personal vehicle outside of the work vehicle, they can still drive on the weekends. So I cut every single expense I possibly could. Looking at your subscriptions, looking at where you spend money for gifts and for eating out, these are the things you want to really dial in on. And I'm going to talk a little bit more about that after the end. And that leads me to stage number four, which is building a motivated workforce, a team that someone would want to come work for me and get me behind the vision that I had. And at the end of the day, people are money motivated for the most part. If you can give them more money, that makes them happier. They want to stay, they want to keep. They're motivated to keep working hard and coming up with creative solutions. And so coming to peace with that is important. I feel like, I think a lot of people are like, well, if you make them feel good and you say thank you a lot, that's good. But at the end of the day, people have bills and they have goals and money is gonna help them do that. And so if they wanna buy a house, if they wanna put their kids through college, they're gonna need more money. And so if I can motivate them via money, great strategy. The thing is, I've got to build a business large enough to the point where they can grow inside of it and actually make more money if they stay with me for a long time and if they're really, really a high performer. So building the business to the point where I could actually motivate the team by having positions for them, move up into and have profit sharing pay for performance, and a model that compensated and allowed a high performer to stay inside the company. The fifth and final thing that I did to make a million dollars in cash for my businesses by the age of 24 was stage number five, was I invested every single dollar back into the business. When I was 18 years old, I started with literally $8,000 to start the business. So if I'm going to go from $8,000 to a million dollars in cash, you better believe that you're going to invest in that business in order for it to grow, in order for it to hire great people, in order for it to focus on the top line revenue, all the things I've mentioned, in order for those things to happen, you have to invest every single dollar back into the business in those first few years of infancy. Now, if you want to take 10, 15 years to grow the business, you do not need to invest every single dollar back into the company. But if you're trying to do it quickly, you better believe you're going to be sacrificing now. But as I've always said, sacrifice or regret, you choose. And if you want to take 20 years and wake up and realize that if you would have just sacrificed and spent, been more thrifty, you could have done it in five instead of 20, that's a big regret. And that's really how I think about money in general. And that is compounding interest. We all know the stories of Warren Buffett talking about compound interest, how important that is. But this is the thing. If you know that you can put a dollar into your business and get out $3 because you spend it on marketing, you spend it on growing the company, then my thing, this is the question is if I know I can put a dollar into my business and get $3 in profit and let's just say two years or one year, well, that means that if I spend today $20 on a meal and I go out and eat for $20 when I didn't really need it, or I could have ate for $5 at my house, that $20 is not really costing me $20, it's really costing me $60 over the next year. When you start to think about that in terms of like what's the ratio? What is the return that I can get from every dollar in my business? So that means there's opportunity cost to not spending it on my business. So because if I can compound it by three, multiply it by three, that means that every dollar I spend today not in my business is actually costing me three times as much as its present value. And that's why I live in a closet. That's why for the past four years I've lived in a closet. To be able to pay for these businesses as they've grown. It allowed all these five stages to happen because I did not live lavishly. I did not go after the fancy truck, the fancy car for me personally. And I put everything back into the business. Now I'm making this at the end of the video because people have already commented saying something negative and they Forgot this. And this is what I want to explain because I did not make this clear in my Instagram and Facebook post that showed that little closet and that is people are, you know, commented, say, you got to spend it, you know, you can't, you can't take it with you. And you know, money doesn't come, you know, after you die, everyone's just going to spend it anyways. I get it. I understand that. I actually totally believe and agree with you. Here's the thing. If I'm going to enjoy my money, the bottom line is I need to be very real with myself in terms of what makes me happy, what brings me joy, and spend money on those things. And I'm very aware, very aware that for myself, not for everyone, but for myself, buying a Lamborghini, buying a really nice house or big house, or taking 10 vacations a year would not bring me a lot of joy. It would not. And so for people that are saying that I'm not enjoying my money, they're actually very, very wrong. Because the things that I love to do the most, the two things I love to do the most in life is build businesses. Building a business is the most cool thing in the world. I love it. I love, love it. I love the stress. I love how it keeps me up at night because I'm stressed about it. I love that journey, I love that process, secondarily is I love helping people and I love giving that money to other people. Here's the thing. When you give a gift, when you give money, this is my kind of, my philosophy on philanthropy. Can't even say the word giving money away. And that is I want to give money to the people who need it the most simply because of this. My whole philosophy on giving and joy was completely changed when I went to Nairobi and was with orphans and we would do medical stuff with them, but they were also being taught and clothed and educated in a three bedroom house. There were 70 children from ages 0 to 18. That was incredible. But this was crazy because they had nothing because no one loved them as a child. And now they're abandoned, now they're living within an orphanage. We would literally buy them bubbles and we buy them a soccer ball for a couple dollars and that would keep them happy. And just the amount of joy that would come out of their faces when they saw bubbles was insane. The reason that that would not make the same impact for a 5 or 10 year old in the United States is because they've been given a PlayStation, they've been given an Xbox they've had so much given to them that when they're given a gift, it's immediately compared to the last gift they got. Unfortunately, in our society, two things are true. One, the person who gets the gift, the gift getter, they are comparing their level of joy to the last gift they got. That's a mistake. And secondarily is that the gift giver usually gives for the joy that they get in giving. And that's not a bad thing. Again, come to peace with the fact that 90% of people, in my opinion, give a gift because the feeling they get. Grandma gives little Johnny a toy, not because of what little Johnny's going to play with the toy or play with a little bicycle. She gives the little bicycle to Johnny because the joy she gets as a grandma to see her little grandson open up the gift. There's joy that she gets, there's fulfillment she gets. And so when you give money away, it is fulfilling. When you give to other people in need, it is fulfilling. And in my mind, the person who has the least when you give them something and the level of joy they have is so much greater because they never have had anything else that gives me that. The return on my money in that case is the highest giving to someone with nothing. All of that to say the things that I spend my money on is building the businesses. And I pump a lot of money. All my money, that million dollars, by the way, went right into growing the franchise. That's what allowed me to do that. And saving up that money and doing those five steps I just talked about will give you options because you don't have to do that the rest of your Life. Maybe for five or 10 years, you sacrifice, you build a business doing something no one else wants to do, but just really being scrappy and not spending a lot of money living in a closet and not going out to eat or whatever it is sacrificing now so that one day you can do something that you do enjoy doing. You can make an impact on your family, on your community, on the people that you want to give to. And I don't think it's wrong to be very aware of what brings you joy. And for me, realizing that if I buy a massive big house and fancy cars and really nice clothes, it would actually stress me out more then me putting the money back into the businesses, giving that money to people in need because I get joy from that and then putting the money back into businesses. I love building, I love the process of growth and it's stressful. Like I Put every dollar. I'm continuing to go these five steps, by the way. These five steps, you keep doing them over and over and over. It's not like you just get a million dollars and like, boom. No, if I want to get to 10 million, I'm gonna do the same process. I'm putting every single dollar back in. It's extremely stressful financially, but down the road, people will be like, oh, you made so much money. It's like, well, no, I took every dollar I had and I invested back in. I sacrificed in the short term so that one day I could have enough money to actually make meaningful donations, meaningful impacts in other people's lives. I could have the projects and businesses I build actually make a real impact on the industries and on the employees and the people's lives that it interacts with. And that really gets me going. So I could easily take a million dollars plus distributions every single year, very simply for my businesses. And I don't. I live on very, very little. My personal expenses are less than $30,000 a year. And I do that so I can pump every single dollar back into the businesses. I'm still in the stages of growth because I love it, but it doesn't mean you have to be there, know what's right for you, know why you want to become rich and where that money could be best spent. Because if you enjoy a big house in a fancy car, go for it, do it, whatever brings you most joy. But realize for a lot of people, they'll get those things, those material possessions, and realize there's not as much fulfillment there. And they enjoyed the process more than the destination. So stop being unhappy and unfulfilled with the process of getting to a million, the process of building a business, the process of saving that money. Because that's the beautiful thing about entrepreneurship. That's the thing that you probably love. So get really, really self aware about what actually motivates you and, and why do you want to become rich? Is it to give it away? Is it to provide for your family? Are you doing it because of fear? Because you didn't have money and you saw what money problems did to your, to your relationships? Is it because of something else in your life that's gone in the past? Being really self aware of that will help you get to a million, save a million, invest that million, make it better, bigger, and be able to give more to other people.