I Wish I Knew THIS When I Started My Lawn Care Business

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes from Landscape Business Course Podcast. And today is a special episode because I'm going to be talking about the Augusta lawn care franchise and why you should consider converting your existing lawn care business into the franchise model. And so this is not a usual podcast per se, so if this is not something you're interested in, just listen the next one. Totally fine. But for I've been getting a lot of questions. I want to answer some of them and concerns to the franchise and who should join and what you can do to switch your lawn care business into an Augusta franchise. So I'm going to go over a couple things, but first of all, we're having our April franchisee training. So the initial three days of training is going to be in April and so that's just about six, seven weeks away. And so if you're interested, definitely check out Augusta Lawn Care Services.com franchise on there's a whole bunch of more videos, information and then you can actually just book a call with me directly via calendly. And so whenever it works for you, you can book a call with me and we can talk and see if it's a good fit for you. For those of you who have talked to me on the phone, which now I've done over 300 calls. For those of you who have been interested, I think it's almost 350 now. For those of you who have, you know, I don't pressure you, I don't try to coerce you into buying one. It needs to be right for you, ideally. And there's just some people who are not going to be a good fit and we're not going to accept in this system. But more importantly, it's like, is it the best thing for you, your circumstances, where you're at in the business? I know a lot of people, I've talked, they're going to wait one more year because I want them to get a little more experience, whether it be from business standpoint or just landscaping. So there's no pressure when you talk to me on the phone. And so definitely feel free if you're interested or if you want to watch those videos. FAQ frequently asked questions, just go to augustalongcareservices.com franchise so in April we have the franchisee training. It's three days long and what we're doing now is we've decided to make more, more training sessions available and that way we can have less people at each session. We really enjoyed having where we only have two to five franchisees here and that gives me a lot of one on one time. I can really personalize information. When we had 10 people here before for the very first training, it was hard to customize things for individual circumstances and I knew each of their circumstances. But it's hard to pack it all in three days when you have people varying everywhere from just starting out all the way up to three quarters plus a million in annual revenue. And so what we're wanting to do is we're wanting to make more frequent training sessions. And so that way when you do come, there's only a few of you and I can really, really customize the training directly to where you're at in your business and how much experience you have. So really looking forward to that April training session and that's where what we'll be filling up at this time. So I wanted to go over a few things though, because most of the companies that are joining Augusta Lawn Care already have lawn care businesses. And so you're really switching over to the franchise model. And so I want to talk about that because there'll been a lot of questions and when I've been answering, I just got off a phone call now, it's actually really late, it's almost 12 midnight here when I'm recording this because I just got off a phone call and there's a lot of questions that I'm answering the same on all these calls. And so I just want to kind of address some of those. So first of all, and that is when it comes to switching your lawn care business, we don't mandate that you have to switch. We, we have no problem with you if you're wanting to keep an existing brand open and then use Augusta Lawn Care to expand into a new market or expand into a different service mix that you don't do regularly. So for example, Kevin, he's in Mississippi and he's using Augusta Lawn Care as a way to expand his business. He already is very established, has a really good company in Tennessee, but he's using this as a way to expand into a new market. And so he's gonna keep his other brand for now at least and use Augusta as a way to really expand. Then we also have Scott in Oregon who's using it as a way you've gotten involved in the franchise because he's going to get an acquisition of a very large company come this month and he's going to transition it slowly to Augusta Lawn Care and using all the systems and things, he sees a lot of value there. So we don't dictate that you have to switch. You can use it, for example, with Scott, he might have it, actually, where there is two brands, one with Augusta doing more maintenance and then keeping the other brand and just using that for the design build and things like that. And so we don't dictate that at all. And I find that a lot of the franchisees end up will wanting. Will want to switch over to Augusta, the whole brand. But we don't dictate that you have to. And we don't put pressure on you either because we don't take a royalty. And so therefore we're not interested in trying to, like, you know, we don't worry about you keeping funds somewhere else or channeling money through a different organization or company. So it's definitely not mandate you have to switch the brands or you have to do it right away or that you have to. You can't compete with another brand in this industry. We have no problem with that. And that's why we've made it where we don't have a royalty fee, because then we're worried about, you know, that's why franchisors are not allowing you to do that, is because they don't want you to channel funds through Bob's Landscaping and then not put anything through their system. And so they don't get a royalty check. So another thing is we don't mandate services. So when you're switching from your existing lawn care business into Augusta lawn Care, we don't mandate that you only do maintenance. For example, you're allowed to do whatever services you want, and we edit your website accordingly. So, for example, we just had three franchisees here, one from Ontario, one from Oregon, and one from Kentucky. And all three of them are really focusing more on maintenance. And so we edited their website to have the videos on the front page. Being more around mowing, we made each of their verbiage and their SEO. And the keywords that we were targeting was more on maintenance and property claims and things like that. Whereas there's other, other franchisees that they're focusing on construction, landscape construction and landscape design. Build. And that's totally fine. So don't be worried about like, oh, I can only do lawn care, I can only do mowing. With the franchise, we do not distinguish, we do not dictate what services you offer. We have the systems for all of them in terms of even Snow plowing and P4P will. The training that you'll get will be able to be used in all of those different types of services. And so whether it be project management and big design build, we have the training there for you for that as well as if you're just going to stick with mowing 12 month contracts like however your existing business model is, we can adapt that to the Augusta lawn care franchise and we have the training in place for all of that and we're continually evolving and growing it. So for example, this week we're doing, we're really doing a lot of training around 12 month contracts because there's some people that in their market that's very, very popular. And so we're making sure the P4P systems and all the models and the templates are there for that for the franchisees. So don't worry about your model and thinking that the service mix that you have won't adapt to the franchise because all the systems we have in place are adaptable to whatever service mix you have. And we're constantly making sure that whether it be snow plowing or projects and design build and project management and making sure that all of those things are taken care of in the franchise model. The biggest thing that separates Augusta Lawn Care from any other franchise out there, and there is none of them in this industry that does this is definitely our royalty versus the flat fee structure. And for those of you who have listened to me for a long time, you know, this is the main reason why I was kind of tossing back and forth whether or not we even do the franchise. It's definitely the distinguishing factor of Augusta long hair. Hands down by far. This is the thing that separates us from everyone else in terms of comparisons. There's a video, I'll put it in the link description below, but if you just search out lawn care franchises comparison, there's a video I made that shows all of the cost of all the franchises in the lawn care industry and compares ourselves against them. And this is the thing that makes us different. This is the thing right here and that is that most franchises are gonna charge you a royalty fee. What that usually is gonna be a 6 to 8% for a royalty fee and then 2 to 4% in a marketing campaign fund that they collect from you and then they spend on a national level in terms of creating brand awareness, making advertisements and however they want to use that money. And so when we talk about royalty versus what we charge, which we charge is a flat fee. Alright, so this is how the flat fee model works. And that is the first year you pay $600 per month and then every month after that, Starting in year two, you pay $1,200 per month. So let's just say $1,200 per month is what we charge. We will never increase that. It's what you pay forever and it's every single month, regardless of how much money you make in terms of revenue. The reason I feel like that's the best model, the reason why this was the big thing for me is before I decide to go into the franchise model, is because I feel like having a set fee, it really aligns my interest as the franchisor with the franchisees. The problem I'm seeing with the grounds guys, us lawns and these other lawn care franchises is that they only care about driving revenue up because they get a cut of that gross revenue, they get a royalty of that. And so they encourage people to hire a salesperson when they're literally doing 150,000 annual revenue. You do not need a salesperson at that time. You need need to be delegating and creating systems so that you as the owner can go focus on sales and hiring and growing the business. Hiring someone else and paying them $50,000 is coming directly off your bottom line and you need at least 5, 6, 700,000 in revenue in order to be able to compensate for someone that is full time sales. Like completely non revenue producing. Like they don't produce revenue on jobs. Like so there's just things that I find time and time again with these franchises that is completely against profitability and long term growth and sustainability for the franchisee. And so what we found and what we've created is a flat fee model where it's the same amount every single month. And my goal is number one, to keep you in business for a long time. And number two is to grow a sustainable business that's not just super leveraged and therefore inflating growth just so that we can get more money on a royalty check. We have the same interest in you that's keeping you in business. Like from a franchisor perspective, we make money per month. And so our best interest is to keep you in business for as long as possible and make sure you're successful. It is not to drive short term temporary growth so that we make more money off your top line revenue. That is not what we do. We do not Encourage High risk, 200, $300,000 in debt, loans for equipment and a whole bunch of advertising and getting salespeople. We do not encourage that. And the reason we don't is because we're not making any money doing that. And so the biggest thing that separates us is that we have a flat fee. Now, we usually give three to four months of no fee after you come for training. And that's because I want you to have every single penny being spent on advertising and getting the name into the marketplace and really growth and expansion. So when you come here in April, you're not gonna have any fees until August in terms of paying any monthly fees. And then starting in August, you'd pay $600 per month. So we give you that Runway time in order to get invest in the business. If you are converting to, you know, spend that money on converting your brand, whether it be painting trucks or whatever. Our interest is that you stay in business for a long time and you continually grow at a sustainable rate and you have a high profit margin business. Now, when you look at a royalty structure versus a flat fee, this is the reason why we did this. And this is a lot of this has to do with the fact that I'm a franchisee of Anytime Fitness. And so I learned a lot of comparing the different models in the gym and industry and how can we adapt the best ones. Because I was a franchisee and they have 4,500 locations. I'm going to figure out what works. What are franchisees complaining about? The two things franchisees complain about, regardless what system or franchise they buy into, is, number one, the royalty fees. Number two is communication from the franchisor. So as the owner, my job is communication, training, consistently being in touch with all the franchisees, which I feel we will always be steps above what even Anytime Fitness is, because they're okay, but still not great in my mind. And so we're trying to always improve that and be very, very proficient at that. But from the royalty structure, this is where we win. This is what we're doing with Anytime Fitness, and this is what I love about them. And we've used now in Augusta Lawn Care, which at Anytime Fitness we pay a set monthly fee for, regardless of how much revenue we make at the gym, regardless if we make 500,000 a year or we make 200,000 a year, it is the same monthly fee. And so this is the breakdown. So I'm going to give you an example of a royalty structure at 10%. So this is average for the grounds guys, US lawns, spring green, franchises like this that are making a percentage of your revenue, top line revenue that goes to them, all right? And I'm using 10% because most of the time it's 6 to 8% as a royalty fee and then 2 to 4% for an advertising fee. And again, watch the other video I made about the comparison. I show all the numbers, royalty fee, everything broken down for you. But this is the breakdown. If you did a royalty, 10% royalty. If you did 300,000 in revenue and you switched to a royalty fee model like Grounds Guy or someone like that, you're going to be looking at $30,000 going to the franchisor, $30,000 going straight to the franchisor. In our model at Augusta, if you were doing 300,000 revenue, which by the way, we are pushing you where we have all the systems and my coaching is trying to push you beyond that so you can, the business runs without you and it can get beyond a million in revenue. But let's just assume right now you're doing 2, 300,000 in revenue and using that same example, 300,000 in revenue at $1,200 per month, that cost that you're going to be paying the franchisor Augusta lawn care is me $14,400, which equates out to about 3 to 4% of your gross revenue. Alright, so we're less than half, less than half of the cost at 300,000 in revenue. Now we want you to grow though. We want you to grow the business and we're going to incentivize you by saying, look, we're not going to increase any more cost to you as you grow. That $1,200 a month does not change. So let's assume now you make you become successful, you build 1 million dollar business, really have scaled the business, taking maybe 2, 3, 4 years investing back in the business. Let's assume you're doing a million dollar revenue. In a royalty fee structure of 10%, you're looking at $100,000 in revenue going out the door to royalty fees, $100,000 going to the franchisor to be part of their system. Now in our flat fee model, $1,200 per month, guess what? You're still paying $14,400, which equates to about one to one and a half percent of your total revenue going to the franchisor. So instead of 10%, you're looking at about 1% when you scale the business. And that's the goal. All right? I want you to be paying as low a percentage of your revenue as possible coming to us because that fee does not change and it incentivizes you to grow from that $300,000 level to the million dollar level instead of in a royalty structure where you dread growth. Because as you grow more and more money is coming off your bottom line and going to a franchisor. And so we really want to incentivize you, get it past a million in revenue and driving it down to a negligible amount, which is 1% of your total revenues going to us as the franchisor, which gets you the systems, gets you the website and all of that continually ongoing. And this is the thing, this is what's killer for most franchisees in any franchise is that as you grow in the business after year two, three, you know the system like you've figured a lot of it out and you don't need the franchisor always helping you. And yet if you're growing your business, you're paying them more and more, yet you're needing them less and less. And that's very, very difficult for a lot of the franchisees I've talked to in many, many systems, but mostly home improvement where you figure out the systems you figure out, for example like us, our systems are pay for performance and open book management and using the service autopilot documents and automations that we give you. Like that's our systems and things that we train you on. And a lot of franchisees need a lot of help at the beginning and so like the fees are pretty like not so bad. But when you grow, if you have a royalty fee that is growing as you grow your top line re revenue, it's very weird because you're also needing the franchisors help less and less because you figured out their systems like you understand it, you don't need help all the time, you don't need them to hold you through everything. And so what we've done is completely flip the model and that's that set monthly fee. And our goal, I'm going to show you we have two goals. This is one of the goal and that is to make it where 1% less than 1% of your revenue is coming to us as part of that monthly fee, which means you're doing about 1.2 or more in revenue. That's our goal. I'll show you a second one, just a second. So that's the biggest thing is royalty versus flat fee at Augusta. Another thing is a lot of people continue to ask what are we getting for that upfront $15,000 initial fee. So if you go to the website and if you look at our FDD franchise disclosure document or you look on entrepreneurmagazine.com or the franchise 500 rankings or whatever, it's gonna say 25,000 is our initial fee. $15,000 is our initial fee for the first 50 franchisees. So we still aren't at 50. So you can still join. As I'm recording this, if you're watching this, in a couple years we're gonna be past 50. So as I'm recording this, we're not at 50 yet. So you can, it's only $15,000 is the initial fee. Now what are you getting for that $15,000? This is the big hurdle for a lot of people to get in the franchise is just the upfront cost. So I want to spend the next part of this video talking about what are the initial costs up front? What do you get for it? Alright, so for that initial $15,000, that's the initial payment. Part of that is we want to make sure that people coming into the system are well capitalized and that you're not just scrapping by and you only have $500 in the bank. That person's gonna go out of business.

Especially if they don't have good credit and all the rest of it. Like they need to have certain amount of capitalization. A lot of franchisors require certain capital investment or liquidity as well as net worth requirements. We do not have those. Our main thing is like to have the financial wherewithal to get $15,000 either by funding from a third party or from your cash. That's kind of our hurdle or financial kind of hurdle. You need to cross our kind of standard. What do you get for that $15,000? And this is something that we've been thinking a lot about. How do we produce the most value for that $15,000? What do you get for it? All right, number one is a full setup of Service Autopilot. So Service Autopilot is the CRM that we use in the franchise. It's also the reason we use it is because it allows our command center to have access into your account, set up appointments for you, be able to see your schedule, you'll take payments over the phone from your customers, all of that sort of thing. And so we use Service Autopilot and it includes a full setup of, that includes all your automations, includes all your email formats, your documents, your email links, tags. Just a complete setup right from like everything is set up and ready to go for you. So when you come for training, we set you up with Service Autopilot and they also also saved you $1,000. Because service autopilot you charge $1,000 for the setup of automations. We get that Waived for you as being part of the franchise. All right. Another thing you get as part of the initial fee is three days of training. So you come here for three days, you come to this studio. Here we are in class as well as we go out for tours. We go to our command center in Ferndale. Then we go to Augusta Lawn care of Whatcom county and you get to see what a shop is doing between 1 and 2 million in revenue and really see like what you can make it. And so that you have a vision, you have a mental map and structure of where the business can go. So as you're growing it 2, 3, 4, 5, 600,000 revenue, you have a mental concept of what it's going to become and you're just kind of grasping at straws. And so we take you a tour for there a lot of in class time we actually take you out and we will actually do estimates in the field. Excuse me. And so we'll go out and do estimates in the field together and actually show you how to make the estimates, show you the numbers, how to use the P4P system model in your estimating process. You're going to customize websites. This usually takes us about three to four weeks. We can sometimes cram it and get the get it live within about a week, week and a half. But it usually takes about three to four weeks to completely fully develop your website. And we look at all of your competitors in your local market. We have, we see where their weaknesses in their search engine optimization, what keywords they're not targeting that we can get in faster on. So we can get you up in certain rankings and then have long, we have a, we have a short term goals and then long term goals for each of your of the franchisees websites. So the short term ones we're looking at weak spots and weak keywords in their competition in their local area. So how can we use those to drive quick action to the front page of Google. And then we have a long term strategy of the ones that are more competitive so that we can continually rank higher in those as well but that aren't going to get as quick results. And so we do the customized website for you. Like I said, we're going to edit your the keywords, your towns and cities, your demographic. We're going to have an idea, your territory name as well as two to three secondary city names that we're also going to target based upon what you know in your market. So that's the customized website. We build that out and that's how you get like augustalonkerservices.com whatcom or augustalongerservices.com El Paso, all of those territory names. That's what the website we're building for is for you. You also get access to Dashboards. So again, this is what you're getting as part of the initial franchise fee of $15,000. You also get access to Dashboard, which includes academy. So that's two things that we've built@augustafranchise.com where you get all of the updates, you get all of the training videos. That's Academy. All the training videos that we are continually, every single week, we're adding to that. And we have live environments where it's actually being done. So for example, when a snow route is being made and people are in the middle of snow, we will create a training video. How you should be routing them, how you should be doing salt applications through service, autopilot, all that good stuff. That's all in Academy as well as Dashboard, where you'll be able to download like all sorts of templates, documents, marketing templates. For example, we just did one, the complete package for hiring someone. It's five different documents. They download the whole thing. It has like the updated W4 for 2020. It has the checklist for the employer of the things that they need to do. It has a checklist for the employee of the things they need to be doing. It has the employee contract. It has the.

Handbook, has all the rules and regulations that you outline for the employee. And so things like that are super invaluable, super, very super. Like just cut so much time out of your. What you would usually have to do. So you get access to Dashboard as well as the Academy, which gives you all the marketing and all that. So we just finished last week, spring 2020's marketing campaign. All of that. Those templates are in there. Access to command Center. So again, if you haven't, don't know what command center is. There's other videos I've made about it, but basically it's a place where all of your phone calls get answered. You don't have to h an office staff. You don't go have to rent an expensive building, get office equipment, computers, software, heat a building, get garbage, have coffee. Like, you don't have to have a big office set up. We do that all at Command Center. You don't have to find people to be in your office. We train our office staff at command Center. We train them to use service autopilot. We train them on how to sell. So you just instantly can plug into that and instantly have trained professional office people that are working currently about 14 hours a day and we're working 24 hours a day coverage where we're always answering your calls right away. So access to command center. You also get access to P4P software. So version two is coming out the end of April. Right now version one's okay, but we're making it much, much better with a mobile app, a backend dashboard and really going to run all of your payroll through the system. Very, very simply. Our goal is 20 seconds or below per day per employee to run P4P.

Again. This is all part of what you get for the initial franchise fee of $15,000. You also get a 10 year license to use Augusta Lawn Care's logo, all of our branding, Max, our mascot. So you are able to use that in your branding. You know, whether it be shirts or promotional material, you're able to use all of that as a light. You get a license to do that. And we don't have a renewal charge either. So that's another fee we took out. We tried to strip out as many fees as we possibly could. And so one of the fees that most franchisors have is a renewal fee. Which means when you're done your first 10 years, you have to pay 2,000 to $10,000 just to renew and get to the next term of your franchise. We scrapped that. And we're always looking for ways to make our FTD as simple as possible because already super complicated and just long and anyways we have to do things legally and so but we are trying to take as much complications as possible. One of those things is renewal fee. And so there is no renewal fee. But as part of your initial franchise fee that $15,000, it includes a 10 year license to use all the branding, all the logos in whatever way you want as a franchisee. And then that doesn't include all the ongoing stuff. So that's all the stuff that you get as part of that initial $15,000 that does not include all the ongoing things you get. Like so for example, like I was mentioning the marketing campaigns, ongoing training, the video, monthly coaching calls with me where we one on one talk about your business, your goals, where you' you have questions, things like that. It also doesn't include the monthly service autopilot email newsletters we create. So we create the email newsletters for you. You're able to download them at a marketplace and send them to your customers. And definitely the best ROI of Any marketing you've ever done is going to be your email newsletters. You've heard me talk about this on the podcast before. And so we make those for you. You can edit them, you can customize them. You have. We train you on how to edit those, we train you on how to use your automations and edit those automations. We do not hold a key over them. We definitely encourage you to learn more about them and we help you change them if needs be and edit them and customize them. And so we want to make sure you have all the tools and necessary training to use. Utilize everything on the back end so that when we upload a document, when we upload an email newsletter, you're able to edit it if you want to, make it customized to your area, change out a picture if you want, but it's all there for you. It saves you. Instead of spending two hours every single month making an email newsletter, designing it, figure out how to do the email link, make it where it has a one click estimate. Instead of doing that, you can just quickly download it, make a few changes if necessary, and you're good to go to send that out every month. So little things like that that are ongoing that save you a lot of time. All right, so lastly, let's go over the cost again. What is it going to completely cost to get started with Augusta Lawn Care, like from start to finish, getting rolling. What's it going to cost to transfer your business from Bob's Lawn Care into August Lawn Care franchise? What is that cost going to be? Let's go over that. So your initial fee, we talked about it, $15,000. Then you're gonna have to come here for training for three days. So whether it be April, our next franchisee training, it's Thursday, Friday, Saturday, we do it over the weekend so that you don't have to miss an entire week's worth of work. If you currently have a job or you're running the business, you can still come. You can fly in on Wednesday night, you can come Thursday, Friday, Saturday, get back home Sunday and be back at work on Monday morning. So we purposely did that, but that initial fee is $15,000. Your travel cost for training is going to be $1,000 to $2,000 because you got to fly here, stay at a local motel, and then we do provide lunch and snacks and things like that. But you know, if you have dinner, obviously you'd be paying for that. So $1,000 to $2,000. You also can bring a spouse or a manager with you. So you're able to bring someone else with you to training. There's no extra fees or anything like that to do that also. So we got $15,000, then you got one to $2,000 for travel costs to come to training. And then you're looking about 1,000 to $1,500 per truck for your conversion. So depending on how many trucks you have, this is what's going to cost you for converting your brand, because you will need to paint your truck and we give you the color swatches and then also to put the decals on it. So have Max have the Augusta Lawn Care on there. Have. Exactly. We give you the layout for putting those logos on. We give you the instructions how to do that. But it's usually gonna cost you about $1,000 to $1,500, depending on your area. We've had people charging anywhere from 400 to $2,000 to paint a truck. And it's amazing the dispersion of prices across the country. It's insane. And so. But usually it's falling in between a thousand dollars to 1500 to get your truck painted and put the decals on. So that's per truck. So depending on how big your company is, that's what's going to be cost. So all in, you're looking about $20,000 to switch from your existing brand into Augusta Lawn Care. $20,000. That's what you're looking at upfront cost. And like I said, we give you three to four months of a Runway of no fees after training to really get up and running. And it's $600 per month for your first year, $1,200 per month every month after that in the future. And again, if you're just starting out, which this video is mostly for people transitioning, just switching from one brand to the other. But if you're just starting out or you're really new and you really want to scale the business, maybe you want to budget another, like 3, 5, $10,000, depending on how fast you want to grow for advertising. And we can go over, you know, training and in our monthly coaching calls, how you should be spending that money. But if you're just starting out or you're small and you really want to scale that first year, you might want to budget that much money into the initial costs in your mind in terms of your budget. But really it's $20,000 to switch over to an Augusta Lawn Care franchise. And we do have a finance partner. We do not do any financing in house down the road. We might. But for now, I really do not want to have where the franchisees owe the franchisor money. I do not want to be making backend money on that. So we have no relationship whatsoever with our funding partner from Phoenix. Funding, funding source. And so basically we just introduce you to them, they do their thing, we make no back end cut, we have no connection with them. Once you've kind of started the process with them. One of the big. So this is the big concern, this is the big concern with people that are thinking about switching to an Augusta Lawn Care franchise and that is changing your name and changing your branding. Some people are really attached to their name and I totally understand that. I really get that. But this is the thing. Like with Anytime Fitness, for example, I think it's crazy for anyone to go start an independent gym. And as I've gotten more and more into the lawn care industry, met more and more landscapers, seen the success rate, the abysmal success rate of landscaping companies, I'm beginning to think more and more a franchise that's like Augusta Lawn Care, it's almost crazy not to join and start with that versus your own independent. It really isn't. And I know I'm very biased in saying that, but this is really everything that I feel you should be getting from a franchisor in terms of support and really going to save you a lot of time and a lot of money. A lot of money. Just Command center and the website alone. Like the website is all including your $1,200 per month. And that includes updates. If you want to add pictures and more videos or add blog posts, like that's all included. We do those edits usually within 24 hours, 48 hours of you submitting a change, it's already live. And so whether it be, for example, the other day someone wanted to change on their web chat or the chat bot on their website. They wanted to change from the automatic pop up that comes up after 10 seconds. It's that we were saying, do you want a landscaping estimate? They wanted to change it to do you want a lawn care estimate? We will change that within 24 hours. Like all of that support and stuff for the websites all included in the twelve hundred dollars per month. And the second goal, the thing that I remember I mentioned about our goal is really get your fees to the franchisee being under 1% of your total revenue. Another goal that we have is for Command center to save you more money than that $1,200 combined. Like just the $1,200 per month. We want Command center to save you more than that because we know that our local shop that will this year will probably do 1.6 to 1.8 million. Augusta Lawn Care of Whatcom county, that runs as a franchise now, we know that they're going to save about three to $4,000 per month because they moved all their office assistants to Command Center. And so I want every single franchisee to be using Command center and saving more than they. More than $1,200 per month on what they otherwise would be paying towards office staff that are not as efficient as at Command center. Because at Command center, they're getting paid on performance, too. They're getting paid based upon how many estimates they send out. And they're very, very efficient. Very, very fast. They're really good at. They're trained to sell. They have incentives to also do that. So it's much more efficient. And our goal. So our first goal, like I said, is under 1% of your revenues being going towards that $1,200 per month, as well as we want to save you more at Command center than what you would be paying your office staff otherwise. And so basically, Command center is a great thing because you can use it as you need it. As you scale up, you use more of it. If you have a slow month, guess what? You don't pay anything. There's no, like, oh, I have to keep my office staff busy because it's slow. But I don't want to lose them. And if I lose them, I got to train someone else on service, autopilot, or some other CRM for a month or two before they're useful. So, like, you don't have to worry about any of that stuff. So the big concern, though, back to on a tangent there, big concern is people changing their name. And I get the pride aspect of that. I really do. But, you know, would it be cool for me to have, like, Mike's Gym? Yeah, it'd be kind of cool because my name's attached to it. I'm really passionate about fitness, and you're probably very passionate about landscaping. But by joining with the franchise, you have the brand recognition as you begin to scale and you start seeing, like, other franchises close to you that people begin to move in your area, and they're like, oh, I used Augusta over in Tennessee. Now I want to use Augusta. I moved to the coast on Oregon. So there's a lot of that, as well as the fact that you have all the systems and the support to make sure you're not Making dumb mistakes and spending a lot of time or spinning your wheels or spending money or having to create systems like just the software we're making for version 2 of P4P is costing tens of thousands of dollars. And so. So those are things you're not gonna have to worry about. You're not gonna create that. You have to create that yourself. And so, but anyways, I keep getting off the tangent. One big concern is everyone changing your name. And when you come for training, we talk a lot about the transition, like how to send the email to your existing customers and make sure that they see all the positives of the transition and that they're not alarmed. They know that you're going to continue with the same level of service. But like all the positive things that are changing, like the fact that now they are gonna get their actual phone calls answered right away, that they're going to estimates within five and 10 minutes instead of five or 10 days, that they're going to be able to use credit card processing, they're going to have automations that can alert them the day before you're coming or a host of other things. And so you can outline all the positives in a video. We show you how to do that as well as making it very quick and easy this transition on service autopilot. So that's the biggest concern. I totally understand that. So we can definitely talk about together on the phone. And like I said, maybe you don't transition. Maybe you use your existing company to stay in one side of your town or city or like one city and you want to expand in another city with Augusta Lawn Care or maybe your existing business you want to use as the landscaping design, build and use Augusta Lawn Care as the maintenance division and, and more of a residential side. If your other side is doing more commercial like you can definitely do that. And then you know, if it's you could, you'll see the pros and cons and you will probably want to or invention. You can transition your brand over to Gus if you want. But you know, our mission at Augusta Lawn Care, like I've said it a hundred times, is to change the level of professionalism in the landscaping industry. And that's why I'm so passionate about this. I know that as we scale and we get more and more franchisees, we'll have more and more sway in the industry. That's the end. That is the goal. That is the end goal. That's the finish line. That's what every decision we make is centered around is this Helping the industry as a whole. And so.

Like I know from, because you know, I know why I'm doing the franchise. I know it has, that is the end goal. I know that it's not upfront money. I know that by doing this this year I know we lost more money. Instead of just doing consulting or writing another book or doing like there's more money to do that we will not be profitable at franchise level probably for the next two to three years because we're investing so much into software, we're investing a lot into training, a lot of cost in terms of the website, things like that we have to build out. It'll be at least two or three years. Command center will eventually make money as once we get a lot of franchisees and we're really able to scale it. But right now, like we are charging at Command center by the minute on the phone as well as by the estimate. And I know that we're charging what most call centers that have hundreds of employees are charging. And so we have to get scale there to make it profitable. And so this is not about short term money. This is not something that is going to just have 10 or 15 franchisees and PIT her out is going to scale. We are going to get hundreds of franchisees. And I really hope that you're part of what we're trying to do with this whole industry. When we have hundreds of franchisees, we can dictate the market. We can make a big change in this industry. We can dictate that your competitors have to match our professionalism or they go out of business. We've seen this already happen in our local market. We've seen it starting with the franchisees where your competitors either have to match you or they leave the same way Amazon made it. Basically you had to have one day shipping and two day shipping. You had to have free returns. You had to have a big selection with low prices. They dictated that and all their competitors either matched it or they went out of business. And that's what we're trying to do with Augusta is get the presence within the industry to be able to have the volume of franchisees so that when we dictate that, hey, customers now expect the reason Amazon kicked everyone out and beats them is because now the consumer expects to have free shipping, expects to have free returns, expects to have a large volume of choices at a low, low price. These are things the customer consumer expects. We can do the same thing in the lawn care industry and thereby increase the level of professionalism where we expect transparent Pricing. We expect a professional website. We expect the employees to be compensated correctly and have an owner's mentality by using something like pay for performance. These are things that we can dictate as a franchise. That's what we care about. That's our goal, that's our mission. Every decision I make is revol revolving around and so I really look forward to talking to you. If it's something you're interested in, just go to augustaloncareservices.com franchise Like I said, I'm not pressuring anyone. I don't follow up with you 100 times at all. I'll probably send you a shirt or a hat or something like that. But it's not a high pressure sales. I want it to be people that get in this system that are dedicated to our mission of changing this industry and whether that is a slow transition of your brand, whether it be your brand coinciding with Augusta to split up different types of service mixes like maintenance versus design build, or you use it as a way to expand in a new market. I'd love to do business with you and I'd love for you to be part of what we're trying to do in this industry. So please go to Augusta longcurservices.com franchise. There's a bunch of videos on there. Some of them are old because they're gonna. It's gonna mention the $25,000 initial fee when you know it's 15 if you're watching this right in 2020. And so just keep those things in mind. This is the most up to date information that I'm sharing with you now and I want to make sure I communicate that with you since there's so many questions I've been getting on these calls. So thank you so much everyone. I really do look forward to talking on the phone and seeing if Augusta Long here is a good fit for you and for your business. Thank you so much. Have a great day.