I spent 9 years and $5.6M to learn this ONE THING!

Welcome to another session of Whiteboard with Mike.

I'm Mike Andes, I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care. We have over 90 locations around North America. And today we are talking about the three step roadmap to building a million dollar business. Now you might be saying, I don't want to build a million dollar business. Why do you always put that on a pedestal? Today you don't have to go all the way to million. You can stop at stages one or two, but if you want to get to stage three, that's what's going to unlock seven figures in, in your service based business. So let's just really quickly chart out kind of what the growth of your small business might look like. Maybe you kind of jump off, you take a little bit of time, then you kind of grow. And I'm up to the top here where we're just gonna say is a $1 million business down here? Zero. So somewhere around here might be 500,000. This is gonna always be different based upon your specific kind of growth trajectory and how fast you wanna grow the business. But I see this a lot of times, a lot of times between that 200, $300,000 marker, people kind of plateau a little bit, kind of figure out, have to fig, and then it kind of unlocks a little more growth. And then here they start to see more growth in their business based upon when they scale the business. But there's more than just scaling the business. There's three different steps, in my opinion that allow this type of growth trajectory and prevent a potential plateauing or even failure of a company. So the first step in this three step roadmap is going to be, in my opinion, the most important and that is simplification. So these are three S's. So simplification, that is the first step. Simplification is extremely important if you're going to set the bed work or the foundation for the future growth of the company. So simplicity is a matter of how do I take everything inside my business and simplify it. My estimate process, how do I simplify it? My pricing strategy, how do I simplify it? My services, how do I simplify them? Now simplification does not mean you have to do things that are just very, very basic. Simplification can take a very complex thing and standardize it. So it's also a matter of simplify or standardize. So you're gonna standardize what type of products and services you offer and you're going to simplify every single aspect of the business that is stage one and for most small businesses, they never do this, they never standardize things and they never simplify. Does not mean you have to do simple basic services like mowing grass. You can do big complex construction projects, but standardize the type of buildings that you make the, and the layout of the buildings that you make. Every single type of project, when it comes to home improvement, when it comes to service based businesses, can be standardized and can be simplified. The next stage, so this is stage one or it's like the first step the roadmap is going to be, the next step is going to be to create systems or to systematize the business. So systems is what's going to unlock more growth by creating something that lives independently of you as the owner. Because until this point here, you're running all the systems. You are the one doing the sales, you're the one doing the hiring, you're the one selling every job. You're the one making sure that the marketing is done right and the advertising and you create the ads and you kind of split test things and figure out what works and you create the website and you create the door hangers and everything. You've been doing it all, but now you've got to rely on systems. And this is why franchising is so prevalent and usually has a higher success rate, is because the systems part is something that you don't have to worry about and you can go focus on growing the business because the last part, the third stage is the part that unlocks massive growth. And if these parts are nailed down, scaling the business can happen much, much faster if these have already been figured out. So first step, we're gonna standardize and simplify. Just simplify everything. Cut out the extraneous things, cut out the service areas that are far, far away from your properties. Really cutting out any sort of complicated aspects of the business so you can train people very easily. It doesn't take a long time to get them up and running. The next stage is systems. That is how do I rely on things based upon my personality. For example, I need a system for hiring. I should have a list of questions I ask every interviewee. I should have a system for making sure that when someone calls, here's how I'm going to input them into my CRM. Here's the follow up process, here's the automations. It's all a system. All right. There should be a system for how much you spend on marketing and the different types of marketing that you use, your website and how you have your estimate request form, how it is the system that then comes to your inbox, that inbox goes into your CRM, that CRM then follows up. There's gotta be a system for every single thing in the business. And that is what then leads you to the third stage, which again, most people never even actually get to this stage because they never do the first two. And a lot of people will jump to trying to scale the business prior to simplifying and systematizing their business. And this is what leads to people going bankrupt. Massive growth. But because they have a very complex, everything's very complicated, depends on them. They are the bottleneck for everything in the business. Only they understand the automations, only they understand how to do the marketing, only understand how to do hiring, how to do onboarding, only they know how to do the payroll because of that, that leads them to scaling. A business that is so complex has no systems and they are the bottleneck for everything and leads to ultimate failure. And this is what happens when a business goes bankrupt, has a big company, 10, 15, 20, 30 employees, and all of a sudden literally goes bankrupt because there was no systems. Everything was bottlenecked on the, on the owner. And everything was so complex and so complicated and so unprofitable because they were doing all sorts of different types of services and service areas. They're driving an hour and two hours away to do work and they were hiring people at a clip. That which they could not train them. All of that was caused by trying to scale without first simplifying the business, creating systems and then scaling. The goal is to create this foundation of simplification and systems and then you can scale very, very quickly and do it in a profitable way. Most people watch my videos and other people's videos where we always talk about growth and scaling and they're trying to run their business focusing on the two things that I talk about to scale their business. And that is you've got to focus on hiring and marketing. And they do that prior to focusing on this. And instead of simplifying their business, they offer every service under the sun. They service anyone within like 30 miles or 40 miles of their service area, then they don't have any systems. It's just a matter of like, oh yeah, give me a, I'll text you back and leave the invoice, just leave the payment underneath the mat. There's no system for everything. And therefore they scale. A business that ultimately is going to fail because it doesn't have the foundation of systems and simplification. So these are the three S's this is the roadmap to getting to past a million dollars in a way that's profitable and you don't pull out all of your hair and basically give up because of massive amounts of overexertion and just being completely exhausted. That happens when you, when you scale a business without the first two steps. Simplify, make things basic. It doesn't necessarily mean it's the best way to do things, but if it's simple, I would rather have a simple system because it's easier to go to systematiz. It's easier to systematize. Simplicity. If this is complex and step one you have not gotten right and you have a complex system, it's very, very hard to systematize that. You've gotta do this in sequence. Simplify. Keep your service offering, your service area, what you do in your business, simplified and standardized. Then it's easier to systematize and create a system around something that is simple. And then when you have systems in place, instead of it all running based upon you as the owner, that is when you can scale a business. I'm Mike Andes. If that video is helpful, check this video out here where I talk about one of the most important systems in your business. And that's gonna make your employees and your business much more efficient. It's called P for P Pay for performance. Check that video out right here.