i'm stressed, exhausted, and tired...

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes and you're listening to the Business Bootcamp podcast. Today's show is sponsored by Gusto. If you haven't already, go to gusto.combootcamp try out their software completely free for 90 days. Their mobile app is super user friendly for your employees to clock in and out of, as well as see their paychecks, see where all of their taxes and all the rest of it's going. Check it out today, go to gusto.combootcamp and try it out for free for three months. Okay, so, yes, the title of today's show is not Clickbait. I'm going to be a little bit vulnerable and share some of the things that I'm going through right now because I know a lot of you are also going through your same problems and issues and things in your business. And to think that everything goes hunky dory for anyone that is sharing on YouTube or the Internet about their business and they're trying to help other people does not mean that their business goes perfectly. I do not care if you talk about Grant Cardone or Gary Vaynerchuk or any, you know, Priscilla or any other great entrepreneur is a little more, way more popular than I am on the Internet. They all have bad days. Now, the one thing that I am committed to doing as I continue to grow my personal brand and my businesses is be really open and transparent about the bad days, the good days, the bad days, the good months, the bad months, the months where it is exhausting, the months where we lose money and all the rest of it. So I hope that in doing that in five years, that when someone sees me in five years, it's not like, oh, like everything's so great and they'll be able to see the times where there's weakness. For example, when I watch Gary Vaynerchuk, who I get a lot of my inspiration from, from a culture and building team standpoint, I get a lot of that from him. I've learned a lot from him on that angle. What I wish he would share more of is the times that he's not doing well. Like when Covid struck. Like, I really wish I would have seen the daily meetings of the firings that were happening and the layoffs and them having really hard decision about their leases changing. I wish I could have seen that. And I'm determined that as I feel I'm going to have the audacity to say I'm going to get to that level of business, that I want to share those parts Because I feel personally, that's where my audience can learn the most from. I love to see people succeeding. That's great. It's inspiring. But I can learn the most from when they're making mistakes and they're struggling because it makes them feel like, oh, like they're human. Because guess what? Everyone's human. Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone has bad days. Everyone has days where their company loses money. And so I feel like sharing that is important. I feel like if you think anyone does not have those days, you're delusional. And for people not to share that, I feel, is somewhat damaging to the audience because the audience starts to judge themselves through the lens of what is shown and reflected through public image. I put this post up. I put this post up last week. I said that people judge themselves in private based upon the public lives of others. Just think about that for a second. We judge ourselves in private. And, like, we're so bad in private, in our behind closed doors when no one else is watching. We judge ourselves based upon what everyone's just sharing on social media and YouTube and what they're showing publicly. Because guess what? They got their own skeletons in the closet. They got their own problems, their own issues. Their business also has its problems, its employee issues, its financial problems. And they, too, are also judging themselves in private based upon the public lives of others. All right? I feel it's really damaging. So in light of that, I'm gonna share some of the things I'm going through. Another stressing me out and making things not so much fun. Always being an entrepreneur running a big business is so great. No, there's times where it's like, my goodness. So I also wanted to do this because today I had six landscape business owners, five of which were Augusta franchisees that I was either in direct contact with texting or phone calls today. Zoom calls that were completely overwhelmed with work, stressed to the max, working 12, 14 hours a day, overworked, exhausted, tired physically, mentally. They're tired of trying to find a good employees. They literally are struggling to keep up with the estimates that are coming in, especially with several of our franchisees that Augustus, like, literally, there's like, I can't. I cannot get these estimates done. There's just no physical human way possible, and I can't train people fast enough to get them going. So in light of all of that, I wanted to share some of the stuff I'm going through right now. All right, so let me fire some of the things I'm going through off personally just to be vulnerable. And share that, like, hey, I got problems, too. I got stuff I'm dealing with. And then I'm going to go through some of the things that in your landscaping business, some of the things that the actionable, like right now, what you can do to hopefully alleviate some of the pressure and stress and get back on track. Things that have helped me, and the reason I'm sharing the stuff I'm working on right now, I'm going to share that first, is because it's a process. You're never going to get the business if it's growing. It's never going to get to the point where it's like just this perfectly ram machine. If it keeps growing, you're going to keep having problems. I hope, though, that some of the things I've experienced that I can share with you are solutions to some of the things you might be going through now. So hold on to that. But I'm going to be vulnerable a little bit and share some of the stuff I'm going through that have been pretty struggling, I've been struggling with. So, for example, reset mind and body. All of you know, we're starting this project, construction, hopefully starting next couple weeks. We're waiting the permits now. When I went into this project, I knew I had to do it because I was very passionate about mental health. And after the whole pandemic thing and a lot of the stuff that I was interacting with other people and family and all the rest of it, I'm like, I'm doing this. I know I have to. Now. When I went into this project, I was thinking, based upon my projections, $80,000 was a cost. The cost of this project. Well, lumber has, like, tripled in the past few months. Cost of labor has gone through the roof. Finding subcontract, gone through the roof, shipping through the roof. Well, we're getting a lot of equipment from China. Guess what? It just doubled in price. So guess what? Reset's budget now is approximately $300,000. Now you say, well, just don't wait. Just don't do it. Wait for a while. Well, guess what? I signed a lease. I had committed to it. Because I'm like, you know what? I'm going to do this. I got a great deal on the lease. I got eight months of free rent. That's great. I think we can get to profitability by then. However, $300,000 is a lot of money.

Especially when it's four times what you were expecting it to be. All right, so that's the first thing. A little bit stressful we're just still trying to get the permits. Everything's behind. I'm now paying rent or paying triple net, I should say. I got free rent, but I still have to pay triple net. I'm paying now triple net On a property that basically just waiting for the contractors to show up. Okay, that's reset. Mind and body. Two things that stress me out the most. Number one is when my team is stressed out because I feel like there's somewhat I'm responsible for that. Like, if I have a business and the people that I love the most are working there day in and day and night. My team, my managers, the frontline employees. And they're stressed because they're working crazy hours, because they care about the franchisees. They care about the employees, they care about the team, they care about the customers. They. I feel a lot of pressure when they're stressed out. Okay? So that's the first thing that stresses me out. The next thing is when franchisees are disappointed in me or disappointed in what we're like. I don't feel like we're doing what we should. We're not fulfilling the expectation of the franchisees. That to me is like gut punch. And I'm not speaking, I'm speaking to the choir here because all of you have customers. You care about your customers a lot. And therefore when you disappoint them, you feel that gut punch. Okay? So step back and realize that right Now I have 40 locations that are Augusta Lawn Care, and every single one of those locations have customers and employees. And there's going to be disappointments from customers. There's going to be human error. There's going to be new hires that are on the other side of the country and they disappoint a customer. And now that customer is calling and ringing out the command center on the phone and that's going to create pressure on them. That creates pressure on me. All of that's a trickle down to eventually. The fact is, like, you kind of made this problem, Mike. It's kind of your fault. And so that's brutal. The same way that when you break a customer's, you know, sprinkler irrigation head and like you're so disappointed, like when they, when they call, you just like feel like gut punch or like your employees forget a strip of lawn and now you lose a customer. Times that by 40. All right, all of that trickles down. At command center, we are having the same massive growth that many of you are out in the field. The problem is we also have the same Issues. Hiring people that are able to juggle 40 different locations and take a call. One call comes from New York, the next one comes comes from South Carolina, the next one comes from Texas, the next one comes from California. Like every single call is different, every single estimate, every single email. Getting people that are that qualified and that self sufficient and able to do things on their feet and sell on the phone and juggle all these things and even do a 99, you know, without human error like that is incredible. That's hard to find those people. Especially in the labor market where we're hiring entry level employees expecting to be super efficient, work their brains out and there's unemployment we're up against right now. People are getting paid to sit at home. Why do they come sit and work in a pretty stressful environment answering phones all day when they could sit at home and make five, six hundred dollars a week doing absolutely nothing but crocheting and playing Xbox? So we're hiring, we're training, we're going through the same problems and issues and we are seeing exponential growth because our franchisees are also doubling every month. I just talked to one of our franchisees, he started a few months ago, he's out in Connecticut and he went from $10,000 a month in revenue in March and in April, he's going to do over 20,000 revenue. That's doubling. Okay, so you take 40 locations that are all doubling, guess what happens? We have to double our staff. Which means I need to train these people to be super self sufficient, super qualified on the phone. Which means I got to take my most experienced people to train them. Well, guess what, they're already super busy trying to get stuff done and it's very difficult to train the new people. Well now the new people aren't getting trained as well as they should be because we're just trying to stay up with the massive influx. Then of course, like all of you are having you train this person, you invest in them and then they leave or they just stop showing up. Or better yet, you interview them, you hire them, give them a job offer, they accept and they don't show up to the first day of work. That's happening to us too. As much as I love the culture at Augusta, as much as we put so much work and effort into it and there's nothing that I would sell it for, we still have problems with that sort of thing. People not showing up when you've hired them, trying to find good employees. As much as we have accolades of like the number one best place to work in our county. And still it's hard to find good people, people that want to work hard. People are willing to grind, willing to sacrifice for the team, willing to work when even when they're not feeling well, when they're not 100% and keep grinding because they care about the franchisees. That's tough to find, especially when there's a five $600 check sitting on their doorstep every single week from the government if they do absolutely nothing. And then just a cherry on top recently is we've had massive issues with service autopilot and their automation. And we run all of command center on automations. Okay, as much as I love it, this is the problem. When that thing goes down, we are scrambling from a manual. We're doing everything manual. So this like a week and a half ago we were like, okay, we're back on track. We got some new great hires. We're like, we're, we're, we're back, we're getting good. We're gonna actually get like to the point where we're actually going on the offensive for our franchisees. And we're calling estimates and trying to sell them and use scripts and all the rest of it. Like that's where we were at. And then we have this nice little thing called service autopilot go down. And now we're manually going through every single location's dispatch board and trying to find the estimates, try to figure things out because the automations aren't triggering correctly. You know how frustrating that is? Because six hours of that is literally thousands of emails at command center. And when you get thousands of emails behind at command center, you know what happens? You start missing phone calls. And so the phone calls start becoming voicemails. Well those voicemails are the, the results of our franchisees paying for ads. And so that's just pressure, like pressure on me, pressure on our, our command center stuff. And it's something in that case we couldn't control. And we're just, we just knew we're falling behind, we're falling behind and stuff is going to fall through the cracks because now there's not automations we have to like double, triple check. We're quadruple check. We're second guessing ourself on everything because now it's all manual on 40 different locations. If it was one, it'd be okay. You, you'd spend the night, you'd stay up late, you get it done. Well, when there's 40, that's not easy.

And then there's all the Random other stuff. The little, like, chinks in the arbor. Just like the constant little tick, tick, tick. Like even the other day, like, stuff that's not necessarily business related. There's personal stuff. There is, you know, employee, the other day, one of his closest friends passed away, had to leave for a couple days. Like, that is. It's not. I don't, I don't know that person. But the team member is valuable to me and is a friend and is a part of the team. That's just a little chink. A little chink in, like, your day. It's a little chink in, like, what you're trying to do and your determination to grow this business. And it's just another tiny little brick on the load that you're trying to bear in your business as an operator, as an entrepreneur. Just another little weight, another straw on the camel's back. And that's just like every day, like 10, 15, 20 of those things piled on top.

Of. So that's some of the things I'm going through now. I'm going to go specifically, if you're a lawn care landscape professional and you are overwhelmed right now. If you're overwhelmed with work, the spring rush has hit you hard. You can't find good employees. You literally have so many estimates, you cannot deal with the work. I'm going to go through some things that helped me a lot and this is stuff that I, like, literally today said like three or four times. I'm going to hopefully help some of you if you're in the same case. Case. All right, first things first. If at all possible, do not cancel estimates and do not cancel jobs if at all possible. The reason is this, the reason you don't want to cancel estimates is because, like, you paid for these, these leads in the winter and you're like, oh, no, no, I turned all my marketing off. Like, we're not, we're not spending anything right now in marketing. Like, I can see on my P and L, I don't have any spending and marketing. It's all word of mouth. It's all through my website. No, no, no, no, no. You paid for that. You paid for it in January and February and you're running leads to try to stay busy. That was branding that money. The results of that branding is what you're seeing now, a massive influx of leads when demand actually comes up to where supply is at. So if at all possible, optimize your estimates. Try to make sure that you're. You actually optimize your estimates. Maybe on one day you do estimates on like maybe one Monday, Wednesday and Friday do estimates. So that way Instead of having five estimates every day of the week, you have 10 on three days because you'll be more efficient. Instead of trying to juggle jobs and estimates specific days, specific times, you can do estimates. Okay? So just optimize them. Make sure that you're not going, okay, I'm going to do four estimates in the morning and I'm going to go the other side of the county and do one here, then one here and one here. Try to optimize them, try to drive by estimates instead of doing where you have to go and visit the person and talk to them for an hour. We're literally testing this right now with videos to try to get this because I do not want people canceling estimates. I know you're overwhelmed, but you've paid for these leads. That's like last, last scenario, like last breaking glass of what should be happening is canceling estimates. And when it comes to jobs, here's what you should do. I know that you're overwhelmed with work. It's like, oh my goodness, I don't have enough time in the day, I gotta cancel this project. Here's what you do. If it's a multi day project, put one person on the job instead of the three that you wanted on the job to get the job done in the next three days, put one person on the job. Just have a presence on the job so you don't have to cancel, you don't have to move it off. Just have a presence on the job and be open and honest. The customer, like, hey, we're running, we're way behind because of weather, because of whatever, just list them off, just be honest. But we're going to make sure we get started on the day we promised you. And we're going to have someone on the job every single day and we're going to get it done. And it's going to take us a little bit longer, but we're going to get done. Most human beings are going to be okay with that. And again, worst case scenario, you have to tell the customer and be honest with them and say, hey, I've got to get some breathing room here. Like I'm so far behind, maybe two people have left. Your two employees have left and now you're way behind and you've got to cancel a job and you got push it off two weeks and just again, aeration, detaching, whatever it might be, say, Look Mr. Jones, I hate to do this and I understand if you need to go find another provider. But we are so far behind because of the weather or because we're just, we're just swamped with work. I need to be able to push your project off to next week and I understand that puts you in a lurch. I'm really sorry. And if you need to go find someone else, I totally understand. But we would love to be of service to you and if we can move it off, we'll be there on X date, we will come and deliver. You won't be disappointed. Most human beings are going to be okay with that. Now I don't even want to do that. I would rather try to put one person on those multi day projects to give me a little bit of breathing room. And just knowing that those are, those are obviously you're going to start, you're starting to push yourself off, right? That's going to give you some breathing room to go do. Number two, which is go get employees. All right, so number one was don't cancel estimates and jobs if at all possible. If at all possible. Number two, go get employees now. Easier said than done. What you're going to have to do probably right now is, is raise your hourly rate that you're going to be willing to pay and you're going to have to raise your prices. Okay? So you need to go out. If you are overwhelmed with work right now and turning estimates away, you need to raise your prices right now. Like you literally need to take whatever estimate thing you use. I don't care if it's a piece of paper, I don't care if it's, oh, I'm not going to pick that up. I don't care if it's a computer, I don't care what you're using. If you are overwhelmed with work right now, you need to raise your prices, no questions asked. If you are struggling, whether or not you should, should push off estimates or cancel jobs, you need to raise your prices right now. All right? And by doing so, you can now afford to pay employees more and tap into a market that's going to separate you from the like. If you're around even close to the range of making what someone would make on unemployment right now, you're going to have to pay more, they're going to have to pay more. You're going to have to tap into a different market. If you're talking 10, $11 an hour right now, you're hitting up against what people are at home sitting doing nothing, you're going to have to pay more. And if you're at 15 and not find anyone, guess what? You're going to have to go to 18. We've gotten really crazy. We've gone up to 20 base pay with P4P dollars above that. We're getting $20, the base pay now, because we need people. We want to capitalize on the spring rush. This is what we have been advertising for. This is what we've been planning for. This is what we've been gearing up for all winter long. Every episode of this podcast for the past six months before the spring rush has been about planning for the spring rush, marketing, figuring out how we're going to grow this coming year. We're not giving up on that ambition because the labor market's so hard. Guess what? It's hard for everybody, all right? We're trying to convince people to get off their butts right now after watching Netflix for the past six hours and come work out in the blazing heat or the freezing cold. If you're in Ohio today where it snowed randomly, so that's not easy, you're going to have to pay more and you're going to have to raise your rate to the customer in order to equilibrate. I can't raise my rate to customer, okay? You haven't watched the podcast long enough. You got to raise your prices, all right? You got to have enough margin to be able to pay your people more and convince them to come work for you. And now you've got to go on the offensive. Retail, other landscaping companies, I don't care. Go to construction site and see who's working hard. Offer them 20 if you know they're the average 8 wages, 13, 14, 15 an hour at a Costco or at Home Depot or at Lowe's. Go talk to the great performers when you're in the lumber yard and give them a job for 20. Gotta go find employees. And you might have to raise your prices to customer to calibrate for the fact that you're have to pay them more. Number three, if you're in the field, if you're an owner and you're in the field, go get hands. All right? I've always said you want to hire not just people's hands, but you want to hire their heads. Sometimes you wonder though, when you the level of quality of applicants you might be getting of whether or not they have a head, they might only have hands. All right? What I'm saying that what I mean is higher hand, which is I just need someone to work hard. That's All I need. I don't need someone to think much. I don't need someone to be able to drive a big truck and have a bunch of skill. I just need hands. Because if I'm an operator out in the field, I can double my productivity, double the amount of work I can get done if I can just have another set of hands in my passenger seat. That when I'm doing a cleanup or I'm doing a weeding job or I'm doing something, they can do some basic labor service and pick up the debris or pull a weed or two. And I'm there all the time for managing them. I'm not. I don't have to micromanage because I'm there all the time. If you're an owner operator in the field and you have two or three or maybe four employees, you can definitely go out and find someone right now that's lower quality and be with them all day long because they're in the truck with you and double your productivity. Maybe Instead of spending 10 hours working the day, you now spend six because you got them working with you. And then you spend that extra four getting done the estimates that you don't think you can get to right now. So go pick up somebody with hands, go to the attempt agency and hold a sign, say, hey, I'll offer you 20 bucks an hour, whatever you got to do. Because you're going to double your productivity by doing so now. Yeah, you're going to be $20 an hour. Oh, no, Mike. In my market, 12, 13 is average. I could care less. Pay someone 20, because guess what? You're going to have an extra two or three hours in your day to go do the estimates. They're going to unlock the growth that you've been wanting for the past six months. Months. How do I grow my business, Mike? How do I grow? How do I advertise? Guess what? The leads are coming in.

Time to capitalize. I know it's hard. Trust me. Like, my goodness, right now you're going to see in the numbers of the gust of franchise like we are blowing the socks off. Most of 95% of our franchisees are overwhelmed with work right now. And the biggest struggle is finding employees. 95%. Okay, that's difficult. That's hard. That's brutal. But you know what's worse? Let's just step back for a second. What's worse is you spending a bunch of ads advertising dollars right now and not getting any work. So most of us don't have that problem right now. It's time to double down on the fact that I'm going to grow by 50% in 2021. Okay, time to do it. Let's go. The work is there.

Number four, turn off your marketing and raise your prices. If you are marketing right now and your estimates are not getting done for a week or two, or you're five, six, seven weeks booked out, or you don't have enough employees to get work done tomorrow, why are you marketing? You need to stop your marketing. Go find employees and raise your prices. Raise your price. Everything's going up right now. Cost of lumber is going up, Real estate prices are going up. The stock market's going up. Everything is more expensive, including labor. You need to increase your prices. If you can increase your prices by 5, 6, 7, $10 to the customer per hour, you can absolutely afford 2, 3, $4 more per hour to your employees. You can do it. Capitalize now. I don't care if that $20 an hour employee that's just hands only works out for the next two or three months. I need them for the spring rush to give me some breathing room. And everyone's like, owner, you're gonna have like a 50 day step plan for your hiring process. Well, guess what? That doesn't help me tomorrow when I'm, I have 16 budget hours for every person in my business. And guess what? They're not going to work 16 hours. They're going to work eight or 10, maybe 12. I got a problem. So right now the things I just mentioned are the immediate, like the tourniquet, the thing that like is going to get you through for the next couple of weeks so you can focus on continuing growing your business. These are not long term solutions. I do not recommend going to Lowe's and Home Depot and offering someone $20 an hour because they're a great employee. You can see their great communication skills. And like, you'll start tomorrow at 20 an hour. I don't usually recommend that. You guys know that. But guess what? Desperate times call for desperate measures. And that's where we're at, desperate times.

I'm gonna go ahead and close it out right there because I have church tonight, I gotta leave. And I know there's a ton of comments and I appreciate you all hopping on here, but if you guys could share this with someone else, another landscaper, I would really appreciate that. There is absolutely nobody, nobody that is successful in business that does not have bad days, has time that they doubt themselves, question whether or not they should have gotten the business, wonder if they're going to go belly up. Wonder if they can ever find a good employee. Like, the worst thing is when you're so maxed out, you just like, you just. I don't know how anything's gonna. How anything. Like, how are we gonna get this stuff done? You have so much jobs on the schedule. Estimates are pouring in. The phone's ringing off the hook. And then, of course, that's the moment when people leave. I've got a vacation. I've got this. I'm sick. I gotta go leave. I can't work anymore. Like, I'm gonna move. All of that stuff happens right Then, guess what? You get hit. You gotta bounce back. And it's not easy. I went through. If you just joined. I went through at the beginning of the show. The stuff that I'm dealing with right now, the struggles, the exhaustion, no more sleep. Overworking other people are working for me. That makes me feel stupid because I should have planned better. I should have had 40 people ready to go at command center. I didn't expect that by having only 15 or 20, we'd be over. Like we needed 40 people. I didn't know that. I didn't know that. I messed up. And now I'm disappointing customers. I'm disappointing the team. I'm overworking my team. I am. We're all burning the thing like people. People are losing their voice. You know how dumb that makes me feel?

Anyways, all right, thank you, everyone. I love you. Appreciate all your support. Wow. 122 of you guys. I appreciate all of you. I will try to get made do these questions later. I got church tonight. I love you all. Have a great evening and stay strong in the spring rush. We'll see you next time.