I wasted $110K+ on this...

Hey, everyone, Mike Andes here. It's a Saturday. I'm at the Bellingham Shop. This is our first location for Augusta lawn Care. I made a video here last week, and several people said, hey, we've never actually seen the Bellingham Shop. And I realized that I probably haven't made a video here for at least six to 12 months. So I'm gonna go ahead and show you around really, really quick. This is not a full tour. A full Tour is on landscapebusinesscourse.com however. Just want to kind of show you around a little bit at the end of the day. This is all going to be history in a matter of a year because we are building a new shop where we can have command center, this shop, franchisee training area, the studio, all of that same location. But this is where it's at. This is what's called Guide Meridian. It's kind of like a state highway here in Washington state. So we have our sign here. I think this is, I want to say, 16 by 8. And then we did these 6 by 6 posts, treated lumber down like 5, 6ft down on the ground with concrete, the whole 9 yards. It's huge. So it is lit up at night as well. Out front here, we have a putting green, and then we have some retaining walls, a split rail fence, paver patio, flagstone, pat, some other stuff that we kind of do. And then all the trucks are just parked up front here. We haven't had too much theft. We occasionally have every few months. But we have some pretty good alarm systems, really good cameras. And the alarms actually have a siren, so it keeps people out of here pretty good. But these are all the trucks out front, out next to the road. And then we have dump trailers. So those are load trail. We have our dealers down the street, so we get them from them. They're all 7 by 14 yellow trailers. We have two enclosed trailers. As most of you know, we used to have like five or six or five. I forget, but those no longer. We don't really use enclosed trailers. We use these ramp rack systems so we do not have to have trailers. A lot of our franchisees at Augusta Nation have this, the sport version, which is not as high, a little bit cheaper and a little bit simpler to install. But honestly, it's still not super easy to install. The first one's going to take a little bit of time, but you can see we have quite a few of those out here. And then this is where we actually originally started in terms of the office here is this shipping container. And on Top, we have solar. The reason for that is because when we first started here, and still to this day, we don't have any power. So it's all run off of these solar panels and then also propane.

We used to have to run off the satellite Internet, thinking we don't do that anymore. We had to bring in good Internet, which was like 500 bucks a month. It was ridiculous. And then this office is also ran off of generators backup because we don't always have sunlight like it is today. So the thing about this office is we don't really need it anymore. It's basically empty most of the time. And the reason it is empty is because we have command center now. So the phone never rings here. And this is kind of where Marcus hangs out and Lee hangs out. But Lee is doing consulting with our owners at a destination. And then Marcus is actually a mobile office, so he spends most of his day out in this car right here. So that's. And so Mark's the rockstar. He does excellent stuff today, but also managing the crew and the team, what they're doing throughout the day. And then command center handles scheduling, emails, phone calls, all the back end admin stuff. So really we don't need that office anymore. But when we first moved here, we spent about $110,000 between the office putting all these blocks out. We had to bring in hundreds of yards of material to actually make this drivable because it used to be just a bunch of, like, a dirt, a fill. So we spent well over $110,000 just getting this space, like, prepped. So I would never recommend that to one of our owners of Gusta Nation anymore, or anyone that's trying to, you know, build a lawn care business. You do not need a huge amount of infrastructure or a shop space like this. We originally did this because we were going to do retail here with all these bins and things. Now when we build our new shop, we'll probably have half as many bins, and it's only going to be used for our crew. And that's all we use it for now is year two. We don't do any retail. We don't load people up with material or anything like that in the back here. We're really lucky in the back here to have space to dump off of that cliff. And let me go ahead and show you one of these boxes. We have three of these shipping containers that we use for storage. These are great for storage. Unfortunately, in 2021, with the whole shipping issues and transportation, the cost of these things went through the roof. We used to get these for 2,500 bucks. These are 40ft long. These are great. We actually have power inside of them too. They're wired up. However, now these are literally like seven, $8,000. It's ridiculous. So I don't know if there's necessarily a good return on them anymore. But they're great because super hard to break into, super secure, and keeps everything out of the elements in terms of equipment and things. So we do keep our mowers inside of the indoors, inside these containers. Although on the ramp rack systems, we do leave the hand tools locked up. Let me go ahead and open this up and show you what's inside this one. All right, so if we go inside, this is what we call box three. And these all have a meaning on the side in terms of things that are labeled in terms of which truck they're supposed to be going on. Because over here we have the 30 inch mowers. Over here we have the 21 inch mowers. So you can see them all. They're all labeled though in terms of which one they're supposed to be going on based on the spray paint. And they also have on the ground here what they should be labeled as. And then obviously this is the walk zone. So they have this X here and it's supposed to be putting anything in this. So that way, if you have a specific truck and you say, okay, I'm going to be taking this mower, great. I should be able to just take this out into the walkway and then take it out for the day. So this is a pretty busy box in the morning. This is just for push mowers. That's all this box is for. Those other two boxes, the storage containers are used for fertilizer and then also another one for shop maintenance. Anything that's broken is organized and kept track of with a tagging system to make sure everything is fixed. And if something is broken throughout the day, they have to tag it, put their name on it, what's wrong with it, and then one of the guys will fix it. So in the back here, obviously every shop has a material graveyard. And I keep this stuff for mostly just until we move. But it's always a constant reminder to not do jobs that are one off and custom stuff because you end up having a material graveyard stuff where all the remains are left and die. But a lot of the stuff we do use, like these pavers, it's the only type of paper we'll ever use on a job. Those blocks will reuse those all the time. But yeah, this is where we dump. There's another storage container back there. And we did get, we did stop doing snow plowing services this past winter. But we did keep one salter and one plow just for the future headquarters to make sure that we can clear snow if it does snow. For the office to be able to get in and out. Command center and a local team over here. We do have, we still do have one track loader and one skid steer. We sold off one of our skid steers because we've just been focusing more and more on simple services. Mowing treatments, property cleanups, mulch jobs. You know those, that's our bread and butter. Not massive amounts of grading and things. But we do have a New Holland L220 and then also a Takuchi that we kind of modified and painted yellow and green, etc. So it's kind of a really quick brief look around the shop. It's nothing great. And we're really not spending any more time or money trying to make it better simply due to the fact that we are moving in a year, we'll be at another location. And at that location we'll really make it exactly what you want because we own it. And this Property is about 2 acres. We got a steal of a deal. We got. We pay a thousand dollars a month for this place, but again, we put 310, over $110,000 into building this place out, getting this shop, all this stuff set up. It's horrible because I gotta pay $500 a month. Just get Internet over here. You got trash and utilities, all that garbage. You do not want that. When you come to a shop, you want to be able to have a space where you can park your trucks and you don't need an office space. You know, get virtual assistants, get someone to take your phone calls outside of the office. It'll reduce your overhead. This location now, after our lease is over this year is going to be like four to $5,000 a month just again to lease the land. And so that's kind of going market rate. It's not like it's super expensive, it's just how it is. It's commercially rated 2 acres right against the highway with great frontage. So that's why we have to build. We got five acres. I'd much rather be spending that money towards a mortgage in a place where we can actually make it what we want and really refine all the processes and how exactly we want everything set up. This is not ideal it's not exactly what I want but we' we've known for the past year we're moving so we really haven't put much time into reorganizing these blocks figuring out a bit more efficient way of doing things. But I come here on Monday and Thursday mornings for team meetings because these two other boxes oh you know what this is you always have to have an embarrassing part of shop tour. This is where all the back of the beds go of the trucks once we take them off for the tailgates for the ramp racks but this is where everyone parks throughout here for the employees but yeah that's basically the quick quick shop. Landscapebusinesscourse.com has like a two hour one where we went more in depth into all the different things here but hope that was helpful and I doing this mostly for the fact that in a year this will be history and we will no longer have this location so take care everyone.