It Took Me 16 Years to Learn What I’ll Tell You in 16 Minutes

If you're not rich yet, it's probably because you're too nice. Being nice is killing your business. You don't need to be mean. You just need a spine. Money doesn't flow to the kindest person. It flows to the clearest person. My name is Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care. We did over $50 million in revenue last year mowing grass. And if you're a people pleaser like me, this video is for you. Because until I learned this skill, I was kept poor. Being nice keeps you broke you back down when you know you need to raise prices. You let clients walk all over you in the name of customer service. You keep bad employees because you don't want to hurt their feelings. You think generosity is discounting and it's not. You can't help anyone else if you can't help yourself first. Your best customer wants a premium service. They want employees that are well uniformed, well trained and well mannered. They want the top of the line equipment and trucks. And in order to provide that to them, you will have to charge what you're worth. And that will make some customers mad, but not your premium customer that wants you to stay in business. You can't help anyone if you can't first help yourself. And you can't help your customer, your ideal customer that's willing to pay a premium price if you're not willing to charge what you're worth and have the uncomfortable conversations of of customers that will tell you that you're too high in prices. You can't hire the right employees, you can't retain them, you can't buy the right trucks and equipment that your ideal customer is willing to pay for unless you're willing to have the discussions necessary to charge what you're worth. Recently on a turnaround show, we were at a pool service that was doing almost a million dollars in annual revenue. But they weren't making any money. And between the two founders, they had raised prices last year on the lowest paying 20% of their customers. And I was encouraging them, I was trying to tell them like, look, raise the prices on the other 80% as well. Because when they raised prices on the bottom 20%, only two customers left. And those are the customers they didn't really want. They were far away and they were way underpriced and always were giving a lot of hassle to the crew when they'd come and do service. And so I said, look, the customers who are actually your top paying 80% that stay with you for five six, seven years. I understand it doesn't seem nice to raise prices on them. I understand it doesn't seem nice to tell them we've gotta raise your prices by 30%. But I said those customers that have been with you that long want to keep you for another five, another 10 years in the future. And in order for you to serve them, you've got to think about yourself and you've got to think about the business. Furthermore, those customers that have been to you for so long, they're the customers who value your service the most. And so they are the ones that are most likely to not leave the business when you raise prices and charge what you need to for your service. By simply raising prices to the top 80% of their customers and raising it by 20 to 30%, they are able to go from a 10% profit margin to a 30% profit margin. That's a tripling of their profit simply by having the hard conversations with past customers to be able to raise their prices and charge what they needed to money rewards. Clarity, not compassion. Rich people aren't ruthless. They're clear. They have a clear vision and they have clear metrics, they have clear standards, they have clear systems and they have clear expectations of their team. The market doesn't pay you for good intentions. It pays you for decisive leadership. If all of your customers like you and no one says you're too expensive, you're probably underpriced. This is why in politics in the US government we now have over $30 trillion of debt, is because the only way to get elected is to be nice and give everyone everything and cut their taxes while also giving them a whole bunch of free handouts and free government programs. And that's why we have an unbalanced budget and we have massive amounts of debt. Unfortunately for your small business, you can't go into infinite debt and you can't have an unbalanced budget and lose cash flow every single year. So in order to not do that, you'll have to have hard conversations and avoid being nice to everyone around you, whether it be family, friends, employees or customers. This is why most people don't raise their prices. They're afraid of what past customers are going to say. They're afraid of the few customer emails that they'll get that say, I've been with you for five years and now you're raising prices on me and you might get a couple of those. But one clarifying question has always been very helpful to me and that is what is right for the business. It seems Simple. But in the heat of the moment, when you're asking yourself, am I being greedy or am I being. Being too harsh with an employee or the customer, or am I just trying to be nice? The question has to go back to what is right for the business. Not what is right for me, not what is right for this customer, but what is right for the business. Because the business must be preserved. Without the business, we can't serve the employee. Without the business, it can't serve me as the owner. And so the business must be preserved. And I think of it like cancer. And if you have a cancer or a tumor or something eating up an appendage of the body, like an arm or a leg, there might be a time you actually remove the arm, remove the leg. And that's a horrible thing, and it's painful going to operating room, having surgery. But the whole objective of going into surgery and removing the arm or removing the leg is to save the life of the organism. The organism must be preserved. And it's not easy and it's not fun, and it is difficult to remove an employee and fire them or to cut out a customer that's sucking the life from your entire team every time you show up or calling your office all the time. Those are difficult conversations. And under the guise of being nice, we put up with it way too long. But by doing that, we risk the cancer metastasizing, growing into the rest of the organization and killing the entire organization. It is extremely difficult to cut out a family member, a team member, a friend that is constantly sucking your energy, constantly pulling the resources out from the organism towards them. And there has to be a time where you sever that part of the organism in order for the entire business to. To continue surviving. There is a very high price to pay for people pleasing. You're not broke because you're unlucky. You're broke because you avoid conflict. The money you want is on the other side of uncomfortable conversations. Every time a customer says, well, let me think about it, I'll get back to you when I decide on this estimate, you're leaving thousands of dollars on the table. Every time a customer tells you, well, I'll think about it, I'll get back to you about that quote, and you don't have an objection, overcome. You don't have something else to say. That challenge, that uncomfortable conversation, that objection you're hitting on the other side of that is all the success you want to have. But under the guise of being nice and not being pushy, we fail to push Forward into the sale and do what's right for the customer, which is to solve their problem and make sure they choose your service. And if you actually believe in your heart of hearts that them choosing you is the best decision, if you care for them, you would push through that uncomfortable conversation and you would make sure the sale gets consummated. Trying to be liked isn't going to get you a new sale. Trying to be liked and be nice isn't going to get you paid and it's definitely not going to pay payroll. Recently I was on a turnaround where the business owner was working for a third party contractor that serviced Walmarts and they did all their street sweeping and all of their lawn care and landscaping and they were like six months behind in their invoices. Now Walmart was paying this third party, but the third party wasn't paying the contractor and they were over $200,000 overdue invoices sitting inside their system and the business was struggling. They had just taken $85,000 as a working capital loan at over a 40% interest rate just to make payroll. That shark loan that they were paying on was a direct result of not having the hard conversations with Walmart and the third party to be able to make sure they got paid on time because they were supposed to be paid within 90 days. Under the guise of being nice and not wanting to mess up the relationship with Walmart, the business owner was failing to have a hard, uncomfortable conversation and tell them simply, we will not show up to service if we don't get paid today. You can be kind and still firm. I like to think of it as kindness with standards. Boundaries are love for your team, for your family, for your customers and for yourself. Discipline and consistency is what kindness looks like long term. Many times when I think about people trying to be too nice in their business, it actually comes back to the fact that they think money is bad. If you think money is evil, you almost always will underprice. I was raised in a very religious home and, and I know that for some people they are taught that the love of money is the root of all evil. I believe that. But realize it's the love of the money, not having the money that is evil. Riches simply magnify who you are. They do not corrupt you. So if there's a lot of good that you can do for the world, having money will magnify that. And if you have an evil heart, if you already are corrupt, having more riches will only magnify that. And those few people that have Low riches and also corrupt. They're the ones in the news. They're the ones that everyone likes to beg on. By truly believing for home service businesses, if they had more money, if they had riches, it would simply magnify inside of their heart their desire to give back to their community, create jobs and serve their customers. Being broke doesn't make you humble, it just limits your impact. There was always a phrase I heard back when I was a young kid that completely changed my mind on making money because I didn't have anyone around me that made money. None of my family was entrepreneurs or business owners. No one was millionaires. That was like completely out of my mind. And I was taught that, like, if you're rich, there's a very high likelihood you're not going to heaven. But this one thing really unlocked my mindset and that is that if someone is broke, they spend their entire day trying to think about themselves, what they're going to eat next, how to make their rent, how to be able to pay for their car payment, how to care for their family. They never have the ability to think in abundance and actually think about giving to other people. They never get to think about creating for the good of others because all day long, because they're broke, they're thinking about where the next meal is coming from, how they're going to make the next bill, and then not to diminish those individuals. It is simply to say, if given the option between rich and poor, the person that chooses poor out of being humble is simply reducing the impact they can have on the world. I believe this is actually a big reason why tithing is so important or being generous and giving to other people. It has nothing to do with whether or not they need it or they deserve it, or even that the church is going to use it for the right purposes. It's a function of being able to have excess to give. By giving to somebody else, I unlock this mindset of abundance that I have enough to give and therefore I've got to go find more in order to be able to provide for my own needs and still give to others. The benefit of giving 10% of everything you make means that regardless of how little I have, I. I always have enough. I always have this abundance mindset enough to give to other people.

I dropped out of medical school and started a lawn care business. It almost killed me why I didn't have systems. Inside of every home service business, there's sales, operations and admin. That is getting the work, doing the work and getting paid for the work. I had none of these systems in my business. And for that reason, I almost lost my company. And even though it was doing almost a million dollars in annual revenue since that day when I went to the hospital, we've created systems in all of those departments and now have over 200 locations. At Augusta Lawn Care. I want to share with you 100% for free, all the systems that we've learned in sales, operations and admin to be able to scale the business completely free. Go to mikeandys.com blackfriday or DM me below and I'll send you the registration link.

You don't get rich by stepping on people. You get rich by stepping up, taking risk, doing the deep work on yourself that no one else is willing to do. Nice owners create toxic companies. When you don't enforce standards, you punish your best people. Your best people are tired of working with slackers. When you don't raise your prices, you underpay your team. You shortchange your church, your family, your community, and everyone that depends on you. When you say yes to every customer demand, you put your team at risk of burnout. When you say yes to every social obligation, you might burn yourself out. Weak leadership hides behind kindness. And I'm guilty of this, too. Recently, I was at a location for Augusta Lawn Care and I started noticing a couple little things, like some dirty trucks. They weren't washed like we normally would have. There was a broken taillight and even a broken mirror. And those are things that typically, they're small. They're little. But I wanted to be nice. I didn't want to bring it up. But sure enough, a few months later, because I didn't bring those things up, it ended up in a much more difficult transition for that general manager simply due to the fact that I wasn't willing to have the uncomfortable conversations and talk about the small, little, potentially insignificant things that I saw. He was not meeting standards. And if you're gonna do that and you're gonna try to get around those small, uncomfortable conversations, they will only become bigger in size. The same way that a cancer left inside a body without cutting it out will simply grow and continue to SAP the organism of life. Fortunately, a few months later, I was able to have the conversation with the manager. And sure enough, by pulling back some of those tiny straws, things like the trucks not being cleaned, the equipment not being exactly what should be employees getting off earlier than they should be, by pulling up those threads, it unveiled a whole bunch of other stuff in the business that needed to be Fixed. By doing that, we were able to dramatically increase the profits of that location. But it all came down to having an uncomfortable conversation and pointing out areas of weakness in the current operations. Stop confusing kindness with providing comfort. Raise your prices. Enforce your standards. Tell the truth faster. Being firm today, having those uncomfortable conversations today saves everyone pain tomorrow. If you're not rich yet, it's time to stop trying to be liked and start being respected. Respected for the things that you stand up for, the people that you protect, and the standards you will not compromise on. There'll be times you can't be a pushover. I remember one time at one of my locations years ago that a bunch of the employees came together in a mutiny against the general manager. And, and they called me in for a meeting and I just showed up there. I didn't know half of them. And all of a sudden they're saying all the negative things about the management and what they want to change. It was a full out mutiny. And I didn't react, I didn't spew, I didn't say a bunch of negative things about what they were saying. I was simply quiet. But I knew inside of me that all of them would have to go. The entire team would have to be cleared. The deck, the culture, and every employee. And sure enough, that's what happened. And once a new team was brought in, within a matter of a few weeks, the culture changed. The manager was able to thrive, grow, and make the location much more profitable. The market rewards leaders, not peacekeepers. And in the moment, I didn't jump in between the general manager and all of their employees and start trying to be the peacekeeper and try to make everyone be happy and keep everything nice. In that moment, I just realized that we were going to have to let go of the entire team. Because I realized that your job as the leader, as the business owner, is not to make everyone happy. It is to make sure that everyone realizes their full potential. And that might be outside the organization or inside of it. But regardless, my objective as the leader is to ensure that happens, not just make them happy. So I want to give you the action of the week. This week, I want you to have the uncomfortable conversation that you know you need to have. It might be with your customers and you got to raise prices. It might be with a family member or a friend that is holding you back and metastasizing and pulling your energy away from what you want in your life and the goals that you have. It might be an employee that you know is toxic inside the company and needs to be fired and meet. I encourage you to take action. Have the uncomfortable conversations and stop being nice. Stop being liked. Start being rich so that you can give to others.