Introduction - The Turnaround Show - Money Solves Everything! ( Total Business Turnaround Book )

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes, the author of Total Business Turnaround, and I'll be reading the rest of the audiobook to you here on the podcast. Each chapter is going to be a different podcast episode and really the goal in doing this is just to be able to reach as many home service business owners as possible. And we want to make it as accessible as possible. Even if you don't have the five or ten dollars to get it on audio on Audible or, or buy the hardcover on Amazon, we wanna make it accessible. So please feel free to share this. I have no intention of trying to get rich off of selling books. The hope here is that the information that is inside the book and on this audio program is able to help and reach as many home service business owners as possible. So without any further delay, let's go ahead and jump into it. Every one of these episodes coming up is gonna be one chapter from the book. I would encourage if you're able to get the hardcover or soft cover book version that's actually physical copy, so you can follow along. As I am reading the book, it has plenty of space in the margins to be able to write, take notes, highlight. I promise you'll get so much more out of this book and if you can't afford it, don't worry. Literally halfway through this book, about halfway through, I'm gonna be giving you something that is completely free. It's actually going to be a course and it's gonna be visual. So if you wanna learn visually, there's gonna be an add on here. It's gonna be completely free. About halfway through the book, I'll give any further delay. Let's get this podcast episode rolling. The first introduction of the book. Here it is. And I'll check in throughout the rest of the book on each chapter.

Introduction, the turnaround show Money solves everything.

I flew into Tennessee to help Mike from Atta Boy Long Hair. Mike felt stressed. He was hiding the pain from his friends and family, but it was exhausting. Mike had been in the lawn care business for eight years. He felt that he had nothing to show for it. Earlier that year, an employee had stolen almost $80,000. They stole equipment and customer payments. When we arrived at the shop, we found the garage door unlocked. I watched Mike check the room. He wanted to ensure that no one had stolen anything. The the employee who had robbed Mike was the previous crew manager. He had handled estimates and managed the tree care division of the business. This person would tell the customer the cost, then they would collect the cash. After finishing the job. Because of this, there was no record of the estimates or payments inside of Attaboy's software system. To cover his tracks, the manager burned through employees. When he suspected someone was onto him, he would tell Mike to fire that person. That way no one could report him. He got away with this. He had full control in the department and little oversight from Mike the owner. The manager used the trucks, equipment and materials from the business. But he collected all the money himself. Mike was in a bad spot and had applied online to be part of my business Turnaround series on YouTube. It had taken several months to catch the manager that was stealing and now it seemed too late. When I showed up to do the turnaround, Mike only had $8,000 in his bank account. He had 12 employees, three of them were office based. He had a full time estimator, project manager and office manager. Mike. Mike owed tens of thousands of dollars in short term debts. He could not afford to make loan payments. The week I showed up, he was actually selling his home. Mike had $150,000 in equity on his personal house. He needed to use that money to pay off his debts and restart the business finances. When we arrived at the shop at 6am on a Friday morning, we saw a smashed pink Attaboy truck parked next to the road. I found out later it had gone over a ravine. They had pulled it out, but they had mangled every panel, every window and every visible part of the truck. It was a good reflection of how Mike felt. He thought this would be his breakout year when all the years of hard work would pay off. Now he was back to square one. Adding to the stress, he had to worry about the lawsuit against his former employee. Mike was trying to collect evidence to prosecute him. In the past year, his team had experienced six injuries. He had a big workers compensation claim looming over him. Two big accidents had occurred with the trucks. As we studied the numbers, we realized that on the day I showed up, they had passed $1 million in year to date revenue. This is usually a big milestone for a business owner that has been growing their business for eight years. No one celebrated. The business had no cash, piles of debt and a broken leader. I've seen situations like this many times before. During business turnarounds. I go out to small struggling businesses. The goal is to troubleshoot their problems. We will help them turn things around so they do not close the business. The turnaround show is great, but I realized that most small business owners don't want cameras in their faces. It makes sense. I arrive at the lowest point in their careers. They feel alone and despondent. It is humiliating to air out the issues they are facing on social media. People post about their winds and mountaintops. They don't talk about their sleepless nights and deep valleys of despair. They sure don't post about their big losses or the times they worried about missing payroll. They don't share at the moment when their revenue is dropping or new customers are scarce. They don't post about the pressure, stacking bills, overdue debts, the feeling that their business is about to collapse. They are about to wipe out everything they have worked for their identity. The show is on YouTube. You can go to YouTube.com mikeandys it shines light on the fact that entrepreneurial journeys can be lonely. Everyone faces low moments when they feel like giving up and throwing in the towel. The goal is not to normalize failure. Rather, owners must realize there is hope. They can see others who have faced bankruptcy but still turn the business around. Most entrepreneurs who watch the show don't apply due to public attention. So I created a universal roadmap to help turn around businesses. The roadmap is this book. People often ask me how I come to certain conclusions. They want to know how I diagnose problems in a business during a turnaround. This book shows my exact method. I use it to pinpoint the strategy that will turn a failing business into into a profitable one. What problem does this book solve? Entrepreneurs feel the stress of finances and the risk of failure. Unfortunately, they can't always identify the one or two actions these actions would turn their problems around. Often these solutions would start bearing results within six months. It's amazing to me that when I go to these turnarounds there are usually only a couple of issues. Things that if changed, would make the business more sustainable. These changes would put more money in the owner's pocket. They would also increase earnings for the employees and managers. Unfortunately, because we as entrepreneurs feel alone, we bottle up our feelings. Mike from Attaboy Lawn Care tried to put on a happy face, tell his team and family that everything was alright in private with us. He broke down crying from all the pain and stress. He looked at me and asked how many times do I have to stand in front of them and tell them I am a failure? This hit me hard. The pain and mental struggle was crippling him. I've met many business owners who feel the same way. We give it our all, yet it feels like we are hitting our heads against the wall. This book aims to address common business frustrations. If you are working seven days, a week and not seeing any money in your bank account. Something needs to change. This book will look at 13 things that could be keeping you from building a 1 million dollar business. It's a roadmap to overcome the problems you are facing. At the end of each chapter, I will provide a diagnostic tool. You can use it to determine if the problem discussed in that chapter applies to you. This tool also provides the solution. Once you've identified what is going wrong, you can use this book to fix the issue. Being unprofitable is an avoidable problem. It is not an issue with your market. It is not industry or regionally. Specifically, during the turnaround show, I have visited business owners all over the country. They've come from different financial backgrounds, different cultural and racial backgrounds. They have all operated within unique market conditions. But basic business principles are universal. The keys in this book are designed to work in any industry and under any conditions. Before we get into the book, let's talk about money. Money solves everything. Money will solve all your business's problems. It may also solve problems outside of your business. Let me explain by sharing my story. If someone hadn't bought my brother and me a push mower at the age of 11, I would have been a surgeon. If the uniform I bought for my business had been better quality, I may have died under a dump truck. When I was 11 and my brother Tim was 13. We spent a week and a half doing a large landscaping project, laying mulch, pulling weeds. The client a wealthy family friend, the property their vacation home. At the end of the job, they gave us a choice payment for our work or $1,000 for a string trimmer, push mower and leaf blower. These were the tools we needed to stay in business. My brother and I chose the second option. Andy's Lawn Care was born. We pushed that mower around our neighborhood in Blaine, Washington. The money we made from that business paid our way through college. I started college at 13, earlier than most. I went to Western Washington University. I was fortunate enough to mow enough grass to to never take out loans or any student debt. My parents could not afford the college tuition. My dad was a pastor and my parents had never gone to a college themselves. My brother and I looked at education as our way out. Our family had been experiencing poor finances for several generations. We believed that with a college education we could escape that cycle. We continued Andy's Lawn Care throughout college. I was in pre med and I always wanted to be a heart, brain or spinal cord surgeon. At the age of 18, I'd finished my undergraduate degree and was ready to start medical school. After graduation, I spent six weeks in Africa volunteering in Kenya. I was in Tigoni and Kalangwari, just outside of Nairobi. I performed many medical procedures at these orphanages and clinics. I would not have had the qualifications to do them in the US These include minor surgeries, injections and childbirths. I enjoyed every minute. I also spent a lot of my time in the pediatric burn unit. The orphanage opened my eyes to true joy and contentment. The children there had almost nothing in the way of material goods. Still, they could experience joy from simple things. Soccer balls or a bottle of bubbles I'd purchased them would keep them preoccupied for days. Those experiences changed the direction of my life. Back in the US I started shadowing physicians. I realized that my experience here would not be the same as I had had in Africa. We spent too much time worrying about paperwork or insurance. Not enough time doing the thing I love most, helping the patient. I also realized I'd be in school for eight more years, plus residency after that. Then I'd spend my entire career doing the same four to five procedures. Surgical technology was changing. I would need to go into hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt for medical school. With that in mind, I doubted if that was the path I wanted to go. At the age of 18, I dropped out of medical school. I began taking MBA that's master's in business Administration. Business classes at night. I also started Augusta Lawn Care. At that time, I had plenty of professors and colleagues tell me I was wasting my talent. They had called me the Dukey Howser of my school because I had gone to college at such a young age. Still, I felt pulled in a different direction. Mowing lawns was the only way I knew how to make money. At the time, I was also working part time at the local anytime fitness gym to help pay my bills. I switched from being a pre med student to mowing grass and working as a personal trainer. I did this while I completed my mba. A couple years into growing Augusta Lawn Care, I went out on a project with the crew. I planned to deliver several cubic yards of cobble rock. I intended to unload the material, walk my guys through the job and go back to the office to do estimates. The dump truck I was driving was a 1990 L7000. The dump box on the bed was over 16ft long and could hold more than 12 yards of material. It was a beast. The cable in the cab of the truck that activated the pto. The PTO is a power takeoff and powers the dumping mechanism of the dump truck. It spins underneath the dump truck. Usually you'd pull the cable from within the cab of the truck and the PTO would activate, causing the bed to dump. The cable had broke a couple weeks before. We'd been crawling beneath the truck to start the PTO by engaging the lever by hand. That day, I went beneath the truck to engage the PTO and turn it on. On my way out, my hoodie got caught on the spinning PTO. Look up PTO accidents on YouTube. You'll see it's easy to lose an arm or get killed when a tractor or truck PTO grabs your body in an instant. My neck was being squeezed as the PTO tried to pull me in. My hoodie and T shirt bunched around my neck. I thought, this is how it ends. I wasn't afraid. The feeling was one of peaceful acceptance. My shoulder hit the gearbox, my sweater and shirt ripped apart and I fell out of the pto. Later, I felt sure it was only the grace of God that I survived. There was no seam, no zipper or reason why the shirt and sweater would split down the middle and drop me out. As I recovered, I thought long and hard about the business. I soon realized it had no systems or levers in place. It relied instead on my constant involvement. I was working 80 plus hours a week to stay in business. I was making videos for my employees from my hospital bed so they would know what to do. I was in a cast and sling, but within a week would go to the shop after hours and try to manage the equipment and trucks. I had a lot of time to think. As I healed from the accident, I became determined to build the business on systems. I knew it wasn't sustainable for me to be there every day and every minute. A business owner shouldn't have to face the risk of losing everything. This could happen because of an accident or personal crisis. I was very lucky. I had incredible employees. Despite my injury, they kept the business afloat. But what if they weren't there? Would the business fail? If I wanted to grow the business, would I have to work more and more hours? I thought I had to work in the business until I hit a million dollars. Working in the business almost killed me. It was working on the business that helped me reach my goal. This book covers all the hurdles I encountered along the way. Obstacles that kept me from making a million dollars each year. It outlines what I learned as I worked on my business instead of in it. People like to say that money isn't important, that it won't make you happy. My opinion is quite different. Everything comes back to money. Money can solve most business problems. Money can solve almost any problem on this earth. Do you need more leads? You can use money to pay for ads or a salesperson. Do you need more employees? You can use money to raise wages and draw in a large number of better candidates. Need better managers. Money will help you give better bonuses. They will attract greater leadership. Support equipment problems. You can use money to buy new trucks, tools and assets. If family is what you want, money will definitely help. Money allows you to delegate responsibility and and give you the time you want with your loved ones. Stressed out relationship need more time with that person. The ability to delegate work requires money. The ability to provide experiences and provisions for your loved ones requires money. It amazes me that people treat money as a taboo topic when focused on Money can solve most of a business owner's problems. These benefits will then trickle into their personal lives. Most of us learn not to discuss money, politics or religion in public. If you want to be rich, I'd recommend getting this notion out of your head. In business, the only way to meet your goals is to make more money. If you don't want to make more money, this book won't be a great read. If you think that being rich is evil, you will not enjoy this book. This book exists to help you make more money. It will also improve your professional life in ways that will help your personal life. My relationship with money began early. Before I was 18 years old. My family moved more than 20 times. My dad was a pastor and still is to this day. Money was never something we had much of. In 2007, during the housing crisis, we lost our home. It was our dream home. The first time we had built and owned a house. The only tension I ever experienced growing up was about money. Everything else was awesome. That said, I saw firsthand the stress people can experience around money. I wanted to make sure that this would never be an issue for me or the people I love. This brings us back to the premise. Why should your goal be to build a $1 million business? This is around the point where you can stop working in the business's daily operations. You are not chained to the company. At this point. The business is no longer a very taxing, high paying job. It becomes self sustaining with the correct systems in place. Let me be clear. Not everyone should try to build a $1 million business. Some people will break under the stress of that journey. Having that many employees and customers causes some people too much anxiety. It is important to recognize and stay within your personal capacity. We will talk a lot about this later in the book. Also, a business that makes less than a million dollars annually can be a good and profitable business. And I am not saying that smaller businesses are bad. Here's a breakdown of why a million dollars is a good goal for many people. First of all, at this point the business becomes a sellable asset with a better valuation. No one wants to buy a job. Second, you can afford managers. You don't have to be working every hour of operations. In other words, you can go on vacation without things falling apart. 3. There is enough profit to withstand economic or personal problems. It doesn't matter how profitable $150,000 business is at this stage. It isn't likely to withstand a big economic shift or personal crisis or injury to the business owner. Finally, a million dollar business allows you to provide your team with upward mobility. You can give them new career opportunities. There is a ladder to more money and career development in a larger company. The goal of this book is to build a $1 million per year business with 20% profit margins. Step one is to get to 20% profit margins. Step two is to increase capacity reach $1 million in revenue by buying equipment and hiring labor. Step three is to raise prices and make more profit. The whole home service business model revolves around buying labor at $25 an hour and then reselling it to the customer at 100 plus per hour. You increase the value of that labor by adding systems, training and equipment. These are added to unskilled labor. The rest of this book outlines 13 things I have seen during episodes of my turnaround show problems small business owners experience that keep them small. Although the titles may seem accusatory or negative, none of this is to say that I have all the answers. The advice provided here is not absolutely many situations are unique. That said, I get mad when I see business owners struggling. I hate the pain and stress it causes them. It hurts their family life. It hurts their employees. It hurts communities. When small business owners fail, more than 80% of small business owners won't last more than five years in business. To me, this is soul crushing. My goal with this book is to keep that from happening. I know many small business owners in blue collar industries who work extremely hard. It isn't right that they work 80 hours a week with nothing to show for it after 10 years. Business ownership requires sacrifices. Entrepreneurs sacrifice time with their families to build their businesses. They sacrifice leisure time and work crazy hours. They take on crippling amounts of stress and pressure. Those efforts should contribute to a payoff of sustainable success and wealth. Most of all, I hate that we work so hard and experience so much pain when the solution to our problems is within reach. Often, a few tweaks can completely change a business's direction. I hope to reveal those levers to you and your business. I hope pulling one or two levers will benefit you, your business, and your family. With all that said, let's go.