I'm selling EVERYTHING!

It is a little bit depressing because we just officially got word from the SBA that they are not going to fund the headquarter project.

Not gonna lie, though. It is a little bit of a punch in the gut. We had a lot riding on that. And.

Yeah, I don't know.

I don't know what Plan B is, but we're about to find out.

A couple days ago, I'd mentioned the.

Possibilities of Plan B to the financing of the headquarters as taking all the equity out of my properties and paying.

For the headquarters that way instead of.

Getting an SBA loan. Here's the problem. Those are all investment properties. They're not my primary residence. And it's very difficult to get a home equity line of credit on an investment property. Now, I could refinance them in order to get all that equity out, but I don't want to because all of.

Those, I got locked in rates of like 3 and 4%, and now those.

Are 5 and 6%.

So my payment every month would literally.

Go up like, 20% on the original principle simply because I'm refinancing at a much higher rate. So it'd be stupid, honestly, to do that at this point. So I gotta figure it out. Like, there's multiple ways to skin this cat, right? You go really, really creative and try to do some sort of a fund with the audience and open it up to all of you and say, hey, look like you're gonna buy a piece of this or you're gonna get interest, you know, some sort of interest rate back on and make it kind of like an investment. I don't have a clue. That'd be like, really? I don't really want to do that. Opens up to me. Opens me up to risk outside of just financial, and I don't like to do that. As confident as I am that we're going to be able to pay off the loan and things, I'd almost rather just take it over the course next year and just pay it off with cash and take an extra year or two. But the big problem with that is the contractor is not going to want to be doing it in bits and pieces. Because if I had 12 to 18 months, I could probably pay this thing off with cash and just over time, taking what I can from the HELOCs and moving money around from the businesses, I could make it happen, but I can't wait 12. I'd really need 18 months. I need the end of 2023, and we just don't have the time for that. So I Still really do need the financing. I don't know if I want to go creative and bring in the audience. I've seen creators do that in the past and it gets messy or hairy and people have different expectations. So I got to think it through. Part of me thinking this is like therapy because it is disappointing. The SBA would be the best terms and the best way going forward. I'd immediate have plenty of cash and capital available to open up more locations myself next spring.

So got figured out. So what do we do?

We go get Mexican food, guacamole and chips. Is where you think about things and you figure things out. Let's do that.

Oh, by the way, today Amazon purchased a little company called Roomba for $1.7 billion. Roomba makes those robotic vacuums for your house. And I've said it for years, when it comes to robotic mowers, it's not about steel or Honda or Husqvarna you need to be worried about or any local competitor that's trying these things out. It's gonna be Amazon, Home Depot or Lowe's or the likes of them is gonna come in and be able to lose billions of dollars. But they'll do it for one thing that is data. The reason they're buying Roomba, because now they get the size, the layout of your house, go all sorts of data about what's going on inside your house and they'll be less sell to you. Better just wait till outside. Now they got a trackable device that could actually serve as a place to put packages from Amazon inside of and keep them secure. Wouldn't it be cool if your prime membership could include not only free shipping, but a free Roomba and a free robotic mower? That makes a lot of sense. Think about how much money they would save just on the fact that so many packages are stolen off the front door of people's house. If they can turn that mower that's trackable into a security device and convince customers that they can put on some tracking and video cameras, motion sensors and sound detectors on that device. Just you wait for robotic mowers to come along, then.

It'S pretty late at night. But back there in that whiteboard, I kind of sketched out a plan so that in the event that we do get no loans on the hq, I will be able to sell some of my real estate, specifically several units that I have quite a bit of equity in, have owned for a long time. So I'd only have short term capital gains. All that good stuff I do Have a plan where we can make it work. I don't want to do that because selling that real estate is gonna unlock a lot of taxes. But we gotta do what we gotta do. And if we have to sell some real estate, we'll sell some real estate, baby. Because Augusta Nation is gonna go forward.

It is now Wednesday morning. I've been up early just doing a whole bunch of zoom calls. It's still only 7 o', clock, but done several already. Really cool update. Fall door hangers, flyers, postcards and yard signs. All brand new versions of them now available on lawn caremedia.com if you're already a member there, there's no extra cost. Version 2 is just going to be a freebie for you for the fall cleanups. But if you don't, you can go sign up there, buy any of those things for fall cleanups. So leaf cleanups, all that good stuff, check it out and you can buy them individually as well. 49 bucks. Or just buy all like was like 80 designs. It's going to be like 100 here pretty soon for $399. So literally $4 per design for door hangers, flyers, postcards, yard signs, a whole bunch of designs. Check it out. And very shortly we're going to have the option for us to be able to actually customize and put your logo and things like that on there. So stay tuned for that.

So last night I a strategy session with myself. Very exciting. And I was thinking about, you know, when we look at a franchise, the reason that a franchise is born is because you can scale it much quicker using other people's capital and management. If I had to go start my own locations, I'd probably be at 15 or 20 right now, max. And it'd be very, very cash intensive because I'm buying trucks and equipment. Whereas with franchising you should be able to scale it much faster and get 100, 200 locations in a year. Very eas. Because other capital is being brought into the institution as well as people managing it with an owner's mindset. So you don't have to have as much management and top of the funnel bureaucracy. And so here's the question. Why can't Augusta Nation in the next.

Week get 100 more locations?

It's impossible right now because we have this constraint of command center. And that is as we get more locations, we have to scale up infrastructure. The amount of people, the amount of training, the amount of teams and organization and management and software.

It's a lot.

And it doesn't scale like I can't get a hundred people tomorrow. And there's a flaw because ultimately the goal needs to be where I can literally get 200 locations in a couple, couple weeks. And the system, everything just works just fine. With command center, that does not work because you have to. You'd have to. Literally, if you got 200 locations, you have to go hire a hundred people. You'd have to train them all up. You don't have management for all of them. That would take months. And so here's the thing. So I was thinking about, I'm running it by lead and might have some more discussions about it. And that is like, in a couple years, maybe what we'll do is when someone joins Augusta Nation, it really puts them into the queue or the waiting list for command Center. So it's like, hey, look, if you want to join, you can join now and then wait a year to be able to be part of command Center. Or you can join, get started, get your first few customers, maybe get an employee or two, and then get Command center when you really start to want to scale up. That would allow us to get more locations on board, because right now, like, we can train more people. And with the head new headquarters, that will, you know, alleviate the gap of. Right now, like, we can't have more than 20 locations because literally the building, we have one restroom. It's like, really stupid. So that that constraint would be removed. However, Command center is the big one. And so potentially having something like a waiting list would work because, like, right now, this winter, we're having five training sessions, and we're having a maximum of 50 new locations getting started, which is fine. Like, we're going to get 50 new locations from now to next spring, and we'll get them trained up and we'll be able to put them right in the command center. But that is really tough because having the waiting list would allow us to have a gauge of what demand at command Center. So if it slows down, we'd go. We'd be able to bring more people on from the waiting list. If it's really, really, really busy, like during the spring rush, we would not onboard anyone from the waiting list. So something we're working on. It's very, very difficult, Command center, because spring rush is compounded in terms of how much work they have to do. But then it drops off dramatically after that because once a customer gets set up on service, their estimates completed, they get their first bill, and they kind of get through those, you know, first couple hiccups. Well, there's not much for Command Center. We have a massive seasonality wave at Command center, and it's also challenging because at the exact same time as usual when we're onboarding 40, 50 locations in that first spring. So just thinking about it, I know these kind of videos don't do super well in the vlog, but this deeper type of strategy, what I'm thinking about, is really valuable, I think, for some people. And just to see how I'm thinking about it for your own business and removing the bottlenecks inside the company, Foreign.

Nation, first thing, I'm going to be announcing it on the Mastermind, and that is we're actually going to be delaying billing slightly. So in the past, we've always charged the franchise fee as well as everything that they've been charged for at Command Center. We've always billed them the first week of the month when we let a few days go by. So that way, if they bill monthly, they get all their cash in their account. However, now we're going to be charging the franchise fee 15 days later, like in the middle of the month, and the command center fees the first week of the month just to spread things out more for them and make cash flow better. It's not as good for us because we got to push everything off two weeks. But I think right now my focus is a lot of these owners are new, and the first year or two is very hard from a cash flow standpoint, when you're growing and ramping up a business, you know, in three or four years, it's going to look very different. When a lot of these owners have multiple locations, their net worth much higher, and their current first location is spitting off a lot of cash.

Anyway. To get a negative PPP number, even on a daily basis, is to have a massive yellow slot.

A massive yellow slot.

That would be sick. It's just a crazy idea I had. I'd be like, dude, what if we did that? That'd be insane. So I'm testing it out right now. Okay. I'm gonna see what happens. So you started, huh? So you've started? Yeah, I bought the URL.

Of course.

Of course.

Mike, find another URL. I was just talking to one of the owners at Augusta Nation, and one of the unlocks he said in his first and second year of business was getting budget hours accurate. Because if you do that, it unlocks so many different things in the business. Obviously, you're more profitable because you have accurate profitability when it comes to budgeting labor. Also, though, it comes with Scheduling is better because you're able to accurately predict how long jobs are going to take and then furthermore, you're able to and furthermore. This just emphasizes the importance of focusing on close ratio when you're first getting started. So you actually get the reps in and get more jobs on the schedule to be able to test your budget hour thesis and get more accurate on those. The only way to get more accurate in budget hours is getting reps in. So that's why I only care about the close ratio when you're first getting started.

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All right, brother. We'll see you tomorrow. It is the one up for tomorrow for me. Watch second favorite. My favorite part of the day. Really? Yeah. I'm not joking. My favorite part of the day is watching the next day video.

Is watching what lies he conjures up by putting stuff together.

It's literally my favorite part of the day.

How's it going?

Are you serious? I know when you leave. I know I can look at.

He let them in for an interview. I used to go out and tell them, we don't have anybody that's late. I'm sorry.

9:30 interview. Showing up at 9:32. They're not gonna get no interview.

I don't even do the interview. And if they. If they rode the bus, it's really hard for them.

No, if they ride the bus, we're a little bit more lenient. We are. Because they don't have a control over it. Poor Lonnie.

She had to go out and say, I would say I don't even want to talk to him when she'd go.

Out and send them away.

Kind of. Seriously. Are you serious? I don't think I said that.

Oh, man.

Have a good night.

Thank you. See you, brother. Later.