Jonathan's Advice for Mike: Stop Worrying About Money

If City Turf was valued like SpaceX, we'd be worth $2.7 billion.

Anyone wants to just take your revenue, multiply 150, and that's your valuation of your lawn care business.

Once you get to a high level of wealth and tax complication and trust complication, like, one answer pays for a lot.

I just pulled the data because I was interested. I pulled a couple locations close to you and we're getting leads for like $10. And they're good.

I, I believe as you become a more senior leader inside an organization, your predominant job is getting the right people on the team and coaching people and getting the wrong people off the team. Like, your job is to grow people. So whatever you— I would invest in them. Franchisees are exact same thing. Whatever you gotta do to invest in them, you do that. That's how you grow this business.

Welcome back everyone. Another week, another podcast.

Hey everyone.

We're gonna jump right in and I got, the craziest cold open the day.

Oh, great.

Yeah, we're going to do a little bit of everything. I had like, I was like, you know, I could have these 3 different cold opens over the next 3 episodes or just do it all in one. So we're going to do it all in one, but we're going to need to keep your answers tight because I have like 8 of these.

Okay, so first, answers tight. Do you know who you're talking to here?

The first section is just hot takes.

Okay. All righty.

Hot takes. Yeah, these are, these are a little bit longer ones. They're not too hot. Don't worry. Okay, so the first one. Should there be a minimum wage? And if so, what should it be?

I say no, because prices will just rise immediately to minimum wage. It makes no difference.

I don't know.

That's my—

yeah, there's your hot take.

Okay, now I mean, I think there should be a minimum wage, but I just— the idea that we take it to $25 an hour doesn't, in my opinion, fix the problem, right? Okay.

All right, if you were the Fed chair— so recently Kevin Walsh just got in, Today was his first press conference. But if you were the Fed chair for one year, what would you change with interest rates and how would you do it?

Oh my gosh, this requires thought. My first inclination, my first thought is I wouldn't lower interest rates right now. Would you increase them? I think I would need— you don't want me being the Fed chair, but my answer is I would not change anything right now. I'd have to get in and understand the data better, but I wouldn't, I wouldn't in this moment say I'd raise them either.

You know, it's interesting. I listened to a little bit of his, uh, his initial press conference.

Okay.

You can tell they're basically gonna redo all the numbers, how inflation's calculated, how unemployment, which probably is necessary, but they're just gonna bake the numbers they wanna see. It's gonna be great. It's gonna be great.

I hope not. But I do understand the argument for updating the numbers. I've heard some stuff about that over time. And when I, at least when I hear one perspective, it's like, oh yeah, that makes sense.

Okay. So the next part of the cold open, cuz that was the first two questions. Those are hot takes.

Okay.

This one, I just need one bit of information or one piece of advice for two different business owners. Okay? So I'm going to express who this is and it needs to be relationship advice.

Okay?

So relationship advice for two different types of entrepreneurs. The first entrepreneur is a single guy. His business is doing $400,000 in annual revenue. He's 22 years old and he's looking for a wife. So he's currently single. What piece of advice off the top of your dome would you give this young man to find a wife? Yeah, he's looking for a wife. To find them, or just general advice at this, this size of business and stage of life?

I don't know what I want to say here. I feel like you played it pretty well. Heads down, build through your 20s, then go find a wife.

Okay, so after like 29, 30, that's, that's when you look for a wife?

It's a dang good strategy.

How old were you when you got married?

Oh, I was 21.

Okay.

It worked for me, but like, I know other people got married at my age and they got divorced. Like, how do you know what you want? Yeah. And I would not talk somebody out of getting married. Now see, this is where we turn in longer. And so I don't know that I'm really answering your question, but I would just think like, there's nothing wrong with just building, building. If you're, if you don't already have a girlfriend that could be your wife, I don't think it's imperative to go find one. If you're really passionate about business, just build the thing. And worry about that later. I don't think you have to solve that problem immediately, but everybody's wired differently. I started dating Tiffany when I was 17. It just happened to work out that way. It wasn't— I wasn't a problem I was trying to solve for.

Got it.

I don't think I answered— did I answer that the way you—

down the road we can do a much longer monologue about the pros, the cons, etc.

Yeah, I'm pro marriage, but there is no greater opportunity to go all in on building.

Yeah, I get you. All right. That leads me to entrepreneur number 2. Okay. This individual's been married for— is married. They're 45 years old. They have 2 kids in their early 20s. They have a business that is $1.2 million in revenue, is really profitable, but there's now stress in the relationship because they've grown apart. What piece of advice would you give to this entrepreneur?

Questions have to be asked, but I would tell you that at this point, You probably have grown apart because you're living two different lives. Like maybe she's living the kid life. I don't know. This is where you'd expect you're living the business life and the, your communications maybe are too much about the business or just too much about the kids, but they're not really anything else at this point. And so it has to be a very concerted effort to start, stop talking about the business, stop talking about the kids and start talking, talking about other things in life. Date nights, going on weekend trips together, finding things you can do together, eating dinner together, like all this stuff. And maybe therapy, maybe getting somebody to help you work through it. I've not— we've not done therapy or anything like that, but I have several business friends that have done it and they swear by it. And, and so I think there's a connotation around it like something's wrong, but it could just be you're just wanting a facilitator to have the conversations that are hard to start. On your own because there's been a distance and a gap for so long. Like if you go too long with a business partner or a marriage or, or a spouse or anything, and you don't talk about a thing, it's really awkward to ever start the conversation. It's really awkward to ever, you know, like cut that divide. And so sometimes just having somebody help you do that is enough to just get the conversation started where both parties feel heard. So I'd be very intentional. And those are some of the things I'd think about. I love it.

Side note on that topic, Renee, I think it's Renee, Dan Martell's wife has a YouTube channel and she did a couple podcasts with the two of them together. It's, they're really good.

Yeah. Dan.

Yeah.

Yeah. So Dan told me, oh, I did a thing with him. He's a, he's from Ireland. I don't know him or anything. I met him in '14 through Yannick Silver, a guy. And I was really impressed with him. And then probably like 4 years ago, Dan told me that he and Renee do a thing with him, I think every year. And he's like, it's phenomenal. You've got to go do it with Tiffany.

It was in Ireland, I think.

Yeah, in Ireland, I think. Well, I think he bought a castle to do it out of. Yeah, he's an interesting guy. I think he had built a big coffee business. Good. We did— I did this thing with him in Aruba, I think, and Anyway, he's great. I really thought he was really good. But anyway, I was surprised when Dan's like, oh yeah, Renee and I, we work with this guy. He's fantastic. And we go to Ireland. I came back and asked Tiffany if she was interested. She's like, yeah, I'd do that. Well, then we just went on about years of traveling and it never made our calendar. And I actually forgot about it until you brought it up now.

Wow. Very cool. Okay. All right.

We got to close it out. See, that wasn't brief.

Wasn't brief. All right. This part of the cold open is rapid fire. Okay. Okay, so these are going to be non-business stuff. This is more or less just audience getting to know you a little bit more. It's simple. A or B? All right. Which would you prefer? Either A or B? And you don't have to say A or B. Just tell me which one. If you want to think through it, you can, but it's just—

just don't say more than— I hear you. I hear you.

Okay. So from a health perspective, do you prefer a cold plunge or a sauna?

Sauna.

Oh, very interesting. Okay. Second, perfect date night or a preferred date night. Painting class. Or sports event?

Sports.

Really?

Okay.

I didn't know that. Okay. Third, better viewing: UFC, NBA Finals. There's a third one. Or World Cup?

UFC. But Tiffany would strongly disagree.

Would she be World Cup?

Yes.

Because she probably got into soccer because the boys, right?

Oh. Oh my gosh. Riley. Okay. Riley played academy soccer. It's like it never ended.

Yeah. Okay. All right. Last one. Preferred workout. Do you do full body lift when you're doing, uh, weights, or do you do upper and lower body splits? Splits. You do? Okay. All right, cool. There's your cold open. All right.

So, hey, all right. Survived it.

What are you working on this week? I know last week a lot of data stuff. Is it still working on?

I'm working on a lot of stuff, but I got my, it's hard to describe how giant of a project this was. I got my marketing calendar nailed down and I think I probably did a marketing calendar at a level most people don't think about. So, and then I also created, I said this before, this, it was a big project, this task list that defines everything that has to continue happening in the business on an ongoing basis and who owns it. I got all that done. And in doing so, a project that I had started a while back that I was gonna, I, I was doing it for, we're moving to EveryChat to run our business from a communications marketing standpoint. And I'm waiting for something to get built in there, which is the tiering of our clients. And so I had started this project where I tiered all of our clients. I'll explain that. And I was just waiting for this to get done in the product. Well, after going through it, so I kind of just put the project on hold, but after going through my marketing calendar and everything, I resurrected this project and it's my top project to finish this week. And what it is, is it's basically a ranking of every client in our system into 4 tiers. So Tier 1 client, Tier 2, Tier 3, Tier 4. I also have all the data for every home that I could potentially serve in my market, the neighborhood they're in, the home value, all this other data. It's tiering that entire prospective base, and the tiering becomes critical because it determines how I market to different classes of people, how I talk to them, how we serve them customer service-wise. And then when you get into the prospects, who gets direct mail, Who gets what kind of packages, who doesn't get any physical touches, things like that. So it drives all decision making. So I have to finish this tiering project and I'm doing it now.

I have a question about that. I have a question. I know you still gotta keep going on, on this.

No, I'm good. I'm good.

The hardest part about that is weighting. Because when you have multiple variables, it's like, well, is the home value the higher weight? Or is the lifetime value of the customer? Or is the type of service like that would, that's always been the hardest for me when I come to tiering is where it becomes still a subjective game of what do I put the most weight on?

100%. And the other one is there's factors I can't score yet that I'm hoping to convince Riley to build into every chat, which is, which is referral weighting. I need referral. I need to understand who referred who. It was something we were always going to build into Service Autopilot. It actually is in Service Autopilot. It's hidden. A little side note about Service Autopilot. That's in Service Autopilot, but hidden. And so is a whole entire affiliate marketing functionality piece to turn all your clients into referral people. And we never released it. It's another one of my brainchilds that never got done. Anyway, my point is I really believe in this. Like when you think about the value of a client, you could say, hey, the value of the client is based on what services are they buying? Are they higher margin? The pain in the butt factor of this person., their propensity to buy additional services. Like, you could come up with all these scoring criteria. Well, one of the major scoring criteria has to be, do they refer and how many people have they referred? Like, a client that refers 4 clients versus a client refers nobody is way more valuable than a client that— like, if, if I have a client that buys 1 service but refers 2 people a year, and I have a client that buys 3 services but refers nobody, the client that refers is way more valuable to me, hands down.

Are you tiering it based upon, like, what's the factor between, like, tier 1, tier 2? Is it a point system?

Yeah, so I'm sorry, I got distracted. I was saying that there are tiering, uh, there's tiering functionality that I can't include right now that will include heavier weighting later, but I need software to do it. So, so that's where that went down the road of the referrals. It's also where the paid and the bat factor comes in. So right now when I'm tiering. I'm tiering based on where they live, what services they're buying that are stacked rank by, uh, gross margin. I'm tiering based on this very lousy, uh, thing we've tried to build that tries to figure out if they're a pain in the butt client or a good client. It's been— it's— and then, um, total revenue. Which is a little less— That they're— That they're—

That they're billed, that accrued?

Yeah, no, total revenue that they are spending with us at this exact moment. So, when it comes to accrued, I don't value that as much because I just do projections.

Got it.

I don't know, maybe that's flawed, not flawed, but if somebody's been with me for 6 years, yeah, they're really, really valuable. But if somebody's only been with me for 1 year and I am only looking, and I'm looking at accrued revenue, that massively devalues what could be an incredibly valuable client. And so that weighting, I don't, it's, I don't, I didn't give that a lot of value. I mean, from—

Yeah, it's so interesting. I wanted to do this so bad.

It's really hard.

It's, well, the thing is I started, I convinced myself not to do it once I started being like, okay, if I do, this has 10% weight versus 20%. Oh, I just changed all the tiers. Or if, for example, to your point, referral, someone who does a referral has so much more value. Well, is it like 5x the value?

Yeah.

As their lifetime gross profit. So like it got to the point too where I couldn't do it across Augusta because everyone has different values. Like for some people, revenue with a lower gross profit is more valuable than because it fills in their off season.

Yeah.

For example, it's just so weird.

I think it's different by company.

It's got so—

it, it has to be different by company.

Yeah.

This isn't a new idea. This is an idea back in the service. I mean, The, the volume of things that never got built into my vision of Service Autopilot. This is an example, but even back then I remember thinking you could never just define this for people. I had a name. Yeah.

I mean, I, anyway, uh, we were trying to, 'cause like we do the same thing. We do this internally for the, the franchise owners. 'Cause like we have much more parameters. So like internally we know like the health score of every location. And so we know who, who needs help, who's crushing it, et cetera.

Is that based on NPS or is that based on this data?

We, we don't even put in, in in, in MPS. It's simply based upon like the amount of recurring revenue, their profit margins, the percentage of like efficiency of labor, a bunch of stuff in the back and we plug into it and then that gives us health score. And we were really trying to think about this for Homeworks. Like how can we just give people a health score of a client? Like you just see it like, oh, it's red, it's green, it's, it, but man, it's just, it's a bag of a bunch of variables and if you tweak one too much or put too much weight on one, it can throw it off.

So I think what you're at risk of, I've thought about with the software, is your risk of building this thing that sounds so wonderful, but then nobody ends up using it for those for exact reasons. And so, uh, to solve the problem for me, because I've got a lot of holes in the data, I'm just only taking it so far for now, and then we'll re-rate all of our client base in the future as we have more ability. But I gotta have something.

Yeah, that's super cool. So yeah, so you, you finish now the marketing calendar.

That's basically calendar task, that stuff. It, it sounds so, I finished my task list. It sounds like nothing. Um, this, that's like, it was miserable projects to finish. It was, they were really miserable. Yeah, I actually just wrapped up one of them last night. I went to bed at 4 o'clock this morning. So I just, it's like pulling teeth to get me to finish these because there's so much thought and decision-making has to go into it. So you just, I just kept finding I want to go do something else. So anyway, yeah, those are done. Tiering's next. And then I, I got so many projects going, but I'm, I got key projects that are, that I try to spend most of my time on until they're done. And then I move to the next one. And the tiering is a bottleneck to some of my next projects. So I got to get it done.

Cool.

What about you?

All right, this week, so we kind of went to phase 2 of the MCP Access. So now there's a whole bunch more people inside. So I was able to go and see some of the things that people are doing.

So it's code ready that people, it's not, is it beta for?

Yes, it's beta.

So phase 2 beta.

Yeah, exactly. We'll do a third phase too. So we're gonna just do it slow. But yeah, just seeing some of the use cases, people get creative. It was really cool. For example, I actually specifically went and looked at what you had talked about last week, like data attribution. And then tying it to like channel churn. So it's like, okay, if they came from Facebook, what's the churn? If they come from a door hanger, what's the churn? If they come from Google, what's the churn? And man, it, it does great. So there's some really cool stuff that members are building and it's just so cool to see what they're building. 'Cause I didn't, stuff I didn't even think of.

So that's been really fun. And when you say building, are they just, they're just building it as a prompt, right?

Correct. Yeah. It's just really the prompt and like most of it's like useful for reporting. 'Cause we will never be able to build every report that everyone wants to see.

This is one of the greatest things about this. I think about like a ServiceOps Pie 2.0, it's like, I would have had to do all this reporting stuff that nobody will ever be happy with. This is like the solution to that problem. I love it.

So you just keep legacy reports, just keep legacy reports.

Um, what, what is— so you've seen cool things that have been built. What's the biggest like technical challenge? Like, ah crud, this is, uh, has anything like that presented itself just yet that you're like, oh, this is a big decision we have to make internally?

Well, right now the biggest one has been like, I'm gonna eat the cost. I want to see people eventually— tokens.

Yeah, tokens, or like, or of data cost, or like, uh, hosting costs, because you're hitting certain— because eventually it'll mean you have to scale more instances of services or servers.

A little bit of both. A little bit of both. Right now it's okay, what are the parameters we got to put in place? But like, I want the box to be open because I feel like if I'm like from day one, hey, we're charging, so so few people get in and then nothing interesting gets built into the community.

I agree. That's a good idea.

And so I'm like, hey, let's, let's eat the cost, let people in, and then down the road we'll put some parameters. 'Cause there's people that get in there and they will hit that thing. Like, my goodness, they can go, they can go crazy really fast. And so, uh, but yeah, been very interesting. The second thing I've been working on this week was I had mentioned a couple weeks ago the upsell calls that we're doing for on the phone for Augusta. I went out and did some, so I got on the phone and just started doing it just to get the reps, see where some of the holes are, what's working, what's not. It was super eye-opening and just really, really solid to be able to like get hands-on with the customers, what it feels like from an agent's perspective, where the gaps are in information for the agent to actually do a good upsell. But it was fun. I actually did one of some of it I got on video and I'll post it.

Oh, that's cool. On the backend for your, uh, for your AI model, what model do you use?

For, for what I'm building? For what I'm building?

Or are you, are you guys only passing data to the frontend model? Like if they're using, uh, ChatGPT, you're just, you're just gathering the data and passing it. Have you AI enabled with a model your system in any way yet?

In Claude, like in terms of an MCP connector.

Okay, so you just built it for Claude.

Correct. Yeah.

Okay. That's what— okay. All right.

Yeah. Like, yeah, there's so many ways to do it once you do like open up the API. But right now we're just doing a connector with Claude.

Okay.

That's like our focus on.

Okay.

And then I think down the road we'd open up some other elements.

Cool.

That's what I've been working on. Okay.

Fantastic.

We are going to go into our first question. The first couple questions today are a little different. So it's what questions we want to ask each other. Now we have not talked to each other about these or given any heads up. I've prepared 2 questions that I'm gonna ask JP, and then, uh, if you have any questions, you, you're, you're welcome to ask me anything.

Um, I have 2 questions. I thought this was, I love this.

I like this.

I thought this was a cool idea.

Yeah. I thought last week, last week's episode, I thought was really good. It just came, came out this morning.

Yeah.

But like, I enjoyed last week's episode because I took actionable things away from our conversation and implemented it within an hour. And I think you had some, some similar things.

So yeah, I liked that. I listened to it at 1:30 this morning while I was walking.

1:30, you were doing a walk?

I went to bed at 4 o'clock this morning. So I'm in a really bad place from this whole sleeping thing right now.

Oh man. Okay. All right. Well, I'll ask you, uh, my questions first. Okay. And then, uh, we'll see what we'll go from there. So first question I have is about dealing with public backlash.

Mm.

So. What are actionable things you had to learn or do to regulate your emotions and lead better? And specifically, if you have examples or stories, I know you had already a bit of a, a personal brand and online presence that really launched a lot of Service Autopilot, but what did you have to learn? I think one of the things I've mentioned before in the show is just my respect for your emotional regularity and like lower highs. And, uh, higher lows and, uh, being able to stay composed in those moments. But what were some of the things you actually had to learn or specific things that you would do to make sure you could regulate your emotions and lead, especially internally, the team, but also the external-facing backlash that's coming your way?

You know, I never really had to get comfortable with getting a lot of negativity on social media, uh, cuz I never built that big of a channel, even though it was really successful. Uh, in terms of driving revenue at Service Autopilot Leads. Um, but Service Autopilot, that was a different thing because you just deal with so many challenges building software and meeting expectations, and then problems happen. There's no getting around the problems. It's impossible. Uh, so the one thing that I, I think the first thing that came to mind that I feel like I've really learned in dealing with really hard stuff where you're kind of stuck, and I don't know if we've talked about this already on this in our whatever number of episodes we've done, but it's this idea. This is probably one of the biggest takeaways for me. It's this idea that my brain will just cycle and I will go over the solution and over the solution and just constantly, cuz I like facts and details. So I'm always trying to solve like, what's the solution here? And it just becomes this negativity in my mind. I'm not really a person that just gets stuck dwelling on problems forever. I more live a little in the future than I live in the past, but I will cycle on solving something forever and just bring it back up. And so that whenever we, you get, whenever I would get into a bad place where things weren't going good, I was frustrated with the company. It's going too slow. I was frustrated with a situation in the company, or we had really screwed up, like servers are keep dropping or whatever this, we're not getting, we promised everybody 9 months ago you were going to get this functionality, whatever the scenarios. And that's where you feel like you're taking a mental beating. My thing I use to this day is to constantly ask myself, have I identified the problem? Have I figured out what it is? Have I figured out what the next few steps are with absolute clarity? And am I doing the next step? And that's a really simplistic thing, but for me it helped because I would constantly just reanalyze the problem and what we need to be doing and constantly rethink it. And so then you end up just dwelling on this thing and you're not It drains all the energy and life out of you and you're not moving forward. And so what I got comfort in was I am doing— I believe we have made the right decision. We're doing everything possible. We're doing the best thing for the client, doing the best thing for the team. Here's the next action. I am working it. And as soon as that's done, I will work the next action and the next action. And that brought me a lot of mental relief. It didn't solve the problem, but it brought this structure to the situation. That's the first one that came to mind. Uh, the other one— go ahead.

I wanna hear about the next one. I think the, the, the thing for me that's hardest is when it's the 9-month problem. It's not something that is like, hey, I can— oh, I, I hear you. I will fix this tomorrow. It's not like, that's not— that's, those are the easiest. I love those problems.

That, that was never my problem. It's the longer stuff. It's the stuff where you don't know the servers keep— we have, why do I have to keep rebooting these 3 front-end servers, you know, in our— this was a real Service Autopilot thing— every 2 weeks because people are calling in and saying it got slower. We could see the data. It's like all of a sudden thing got slow. Why is it getting slow? So we have to reboot the server and everything's great for 2 weeks and it's slow again. And we're just chasing a problem and we're like, can't find it. It's like that kind of stuff where it's like, this is a terrible experience for, you know, we have a lot of servers. Yeah, well, you know, we had a lot of servers. So in that scenario, maybe 15% of people are being impacted by it. Well, today 15%, and in 3 days it'll be a different 15%, and 5 days will be a different 50%, it's like, that's, this is terrible. We gotta, you know, that kind of stuff would eat at me because it felt like we were letting people down and we didn't know the answer. And so, uh, that's those, just as to what you said, it wasn't the, we've got a problem and I can deal with this tomorrow. We can fix this for them and that's done. It's the stuff that lingered that was gonna take forever, was behind, or we didn't know what, we didn't have the answer just yet. So, all right.

Second, second example.

Man, the other one, I know I've talked about this. One of the great things about being a dad is you just really think about how everything happens in life. You can say whatever you want to your kids. It's all about what you do. And so it's like, I would use an example of somebody who's a smoker and they tell their kids not to smoke, but they smoke. Like, that's not going to work, you know? So you have to live it. You have to live it. And so I just, I'm constantly reminded, I was always reminded and I always reminded myself, I am the example. Like, so people have to see me calm. And so it's like, and I, so like, how can I, how can I calm myself? Breathing, I think is a big thing. Like just to be conscious. Two things I always remind myself of. This sounds so silly. I could picture this cuz we had an office. I drive to work and I would think in the morning when I drive to work, I need to smile. Cause I get, I do. I like literally would try to smile while I'm driving to work because I will get really serious. Like when I'm thinking about a problem, I'll look, I might do it on here. Like I might look like I'm upset or frustrated. I'm not, I'm just processing. I'm working. So I go to remind myself that, and then the one is like breathing and because you're the example. So how do you be as calm as you can possibly be? Because people are looking for confidence. The other thing that I constantly remind myself of, talked about this one too, is, and you're absolutely at this place in your career and many people are, it's like, if you think back about all the stuff that you thought was going to take you down, or all the stuff that you were so stressed about it, and here you are today, it's worked out. You figured out a solution. You didn't— you know, most people, like, some people run from their stuff and don't solve them. But yeah, I'm talking to the person that, like, you continually, as I say, engineer a solution to the problem, or you and the team together figured out that. If you dwell on that and pay real close attention, that, that should give you extreme confidence. So whatever you're stuck in right now, it's like, hey, I've been doing this for a decade. We've always solved it. It has not been fun and it hasn't been fast, but we have always solved it. This, why would this be different? Those are so that I think there's an element where you just have to like inject some positivity into a really bad situation. Uh, the fourth would be like, work out hard, work out really hard to de-stress. Don't, don't go home and drink vodka. Go run, go, go lift weights, go do— because like that is not 1:30 in the morning.

Not at 1:30 in the morning.

Yeah, exactly. So those are, those are 4 things that come to mind.

Cool. All right. Second question I have for you, um, probably similar vein, but I'm 30 years old. I don't need to ask. I don't know how old you are. Are you in your 50s?

I'm 50.

You're 50 on the nail. Let's go. Oh, come on. You're gonna live to 120. Remember last Last week's podcast.

We'll see. No, it's like, I've always been, I wasn't happy when I was 30. I mean, I'm happy. I've always been happy. It's like when I was 20, I was like, golly, I'm already, I'm 25. I got so much to do. I'm 30. I got so much to do. So for me, that's how 50 feels like. I like, I want to be able to do all the, I want to be able to do all the athletic stuff and not one day not be able to do it. So that's where it comes from. I need to quit whining about it, but yeah.

Okay. Well then that might actually, you might have answered the question. All right. So. What would the current 50-year-old version of JP tell the 30-year-old version of JP to stop worrying about? Could be in life, business, money, anything.

I've just convinced in life I've been wired to optimize for safety. I mean, to this day, I can't unwind the wiring. I still think about, is it enough? It's like so beyond— if anybody knew my number, they'd be like, this is the dumbest thing I've ever— like, what? How? Like, how could you even ever think about this again? It'll never matter. There's no chance it could matter. Um, but there, there's still the program running in the back of my mind where I'm like, well, is enough? It's, but I've come to learn a lot of entrepreneurs do this like a little bit more. Um, and so, but it's, but it, I've always had that wiring. I've, um, yeah, I, that, that would be the simple answer is it'll all be fine and you will have plenty. And I had plenty already.

Would you tell that 30-year-old version of yourself to take more risk with the money? Yes. Or would you tell them to enjoy the money more? Ah.

You know, I don't— this is the thing. If you have the advantage of hindsight, then you say take way more risk, but we don't know what's gonna happen. So would I look back and say, did it work out? Yeah, it worked out really well. Was I— did I put myself in a position where I was constantly stressed because I was taking risk? No, not at all. I, I took a, I played a conservative game, which worked for me financially, and I did not stress about— I only, I didn't stress about money like, oh my gosh, the business is going to be, is the business going to be okay? I didn't have any of those stresses. Like I believe that I would be fine financially. I just always thought, will it be enough? I need, it's just like this little thing of more and more and more runs in my head. That's where it's like an unnecessary, but no. So I would, I would take more risks knowing how I know the economy worked out and the world worked out and politics worked out, but we don't know what the next 20 years look looks like. So if I look at it from a purely analytical standpoint, I was protected along the way. If really bad stuff happened, my businesses were not going away. And so I think I made the right decision for me, how I'm made. But in the hindsight of history, I should have financed everything and leveraged everything, but I didn't. And you know, I'd have a lot more if I did, but like, who cares? It, you know, so does that, Is that clear on how I answered that?

Yeah, totally. So it was the worry about money and that you were too conservative in your, in your bets, essentially.

Yeah. But the conservative gave me a level of peace because of my underlying program that's running for safety.

Interesting. Okay. All right. Heard. Okay. I was digesting it for my own self. I'm in the, I'm in, I'm in that, that same boat of like, I still have so many opportunities to put the money back in. And I don't worry about money. I don't at all. And so I'm a little, I'm a little different in, in your, in regard. I think I'm business. I make very conservative decisions, but I don't worry about money. I don't know. It's just different.

It's an interesting topic. So let's just go slightly further. I wonder if some of why, some of why I worried about money was from a religious standpoint because of what I believed was coming in the future.

Like, mm-hmm.

Just to be very clear how I saw the world back when I was, and, and so, and it was unnecessary wiring. Um, I also think some of it was I got married at 21 and I was, it wasn't just me. Like I had a wife and then I had kids. And so that brought this whole, like, they need to be okay. If something happens to me, it wasn't like, I feel like if it had always just been me, then I could have just, I would have been more free with money because the only person that gets hurt is me. But as soon as I had family, it's. I still think this way. I've noticed like, oh wow. I mean, I think if it was just me today, I would probably work even more than I work and I would spend, I would probably invest a little more aggressive. And I'm like, I could do that now. It doesn't even matter. You're like, why? But I noticed that in my brain. So I think I was pretty impacted because I got married so young. There are advantages to this, but because I had such responsibility at such a young age. It wasn't just me that I was taking care of financially, and I didn't want to let Tiffany down. Like, the idea that I might have blown it all up and, like, she's on the ride with me, that was very much on my mind. So I think those are two of the factors that wired me for this security thing. Um, in your case, man, I mean, to be where you're at at 30, you're marching in. I mean, you're— you've got such momentum at this point. I, I, I don't, it's gonna be very hard to stop it. I mean, even whether you, whether you invest finance massively or not.

What's funny is that when I got married, it almost was the opposite. I went, I think seeing someone else spend the money a little bit helped me realize like, oh, I can go get more of that and I don't need to worry about it. Mm-hmm. And I almost started like, I don't, I don't have that mentality of like, okay, if something happened to me, she's not gonna be okay. Or I need to go out and I'm being more conservative because I have her. It's actually been very different for me.

That's great.

It's, it's just, yeah, it's very interesting.

I, I'll say the one last thing, man, something I really believe in, and I think this would resonate with you, is you gotta figure out what you're trying to optimize for. And so one thing you're optimizing for in life is money, but I know with you it's not the only thing you're optimizing for. And so when it comes to the money thing, I do think you should figure out what the number is. And I think you figure out what the number is based on, imagining what the ideal life looks like and whatever that dollar amount is, that's the, the, and it's just the dollar amount to live. And it, uh, but like live a really epic life, whatever the epic life you want is that you think you would probably still want 30 years from now. What's that number? You build to that number to be able to generate that. And then everything after that is just gravy. Like you could just give every other dollar you ever make after that number away. You can, uh, you can let off the gas a little bit. Like, I, I think that is the angle. The problem is I know almost nobody that actually lives that. Everybody just goes and goes and goes forever. And like, there's an element of why. I think about this a lot with myself. Like, why? Why? Why? Because then you're going to wake up when you're— I had less hobbies when I was your age because all I cared about was work. I had one goal. I wanted to be successful. I liked what I was doing. I wanted to make it work and I wanted to make money. And then, but I loved other stuff, but I didn't do any of the other stuff because I had kids. It was either like, I'm either working or I'm with my family. There's no time for much of anything else. But as I got a little older and the money thing was less of an issue and I had a team around me, I started introducing more stuff into my life, like racing cars or traveling and the idea that if I hadn't done that and I'm at where I'm at today and I hadn't done any of those things, I'd have a much lesser life. So I do think there's this element where you figure out your number so you can bring all that other cool stuff into your life. And, and, and part of that is like, I know, I think I kind of know how you're wired. You want to help other people and you're doing it with what you do. Your platform does that, but also there's other ways I suspect you want to help people in the future. And once you have that number, you also give yourself permission to be way more free in that area versus just build, build, build. I don't know if that means anything.

No, it's very good. I'll listen, I'll listen back to this part of the podcast myself since I've got my therapy session for the day. Let's go. Cool.

All right.

Your, your turn.

All right. Um, so what, what's the thing you're most proud of that Augusta is doing that you would suspect City Turf does not do and we should implement? Yeah. And, and you only know so much about City Turf. I only know so much about Augusta. I, I think you're pretty fond of your online pricing and selling. I think you would say that's a really important thing that you've done. So no, you can't use that one. You've already got me thinking about that. I've thought about for years, but you've resurrected it for me. Um, what does anything else come to mind that you think you guys are doing that City Turf's not that I need to be thinking about?

Well, I don't think you need to do anything. I think you're doing just fine.

I don't, but I really, really like working on City Turf again and getting back into the marketing world and just, I, I really like it. Yeah.

I think, I think, okay, again, I don't think you should do anything. I think the things that I have seen really good outside returns from us that I haven't seen you lean into as much is probably Facebook ads.

Um, we do not, we do zero.

And the, the reason I think that it'd be a huge opportunity is cuz you know copy so well.

Okay.

And you, you, you're so good at identifying the pain of the customer. And I think that's actually where it shines. And I think you have been super successful on the print side in the past because you know how to speak to the pain of the customer. And that Facebook is a, just a, it's a postcard. And I think if you were, if you took that same energy towards, that you put towards postcards and the copy there and put it towards like short-form video and Facebook, I think you'd crush. And I think it would serve you even more so because it, it has so much better data. Uh, and that's the part where I think you shine. And then you could take that and scale it just the way you like it versus so many elements of, of print just have limitations on. So, hmm.

Okay. So I am heading that direction, but I gotta say it's pretty far down my list of things to do. That's interesting.

I'm not saying you should be the top. I'm just saying, yeah, yeah.

I'm just saying I think you'd crush. You think that we could make the economics on it work quite well is what you're saying.

Oh yeah, I just pulled the data because I was interested. I pulled a couple of locations close to you and we're getting leads for like $10.

And they're on Facebook.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So, you know, I'm not saying you should do anything. I'm just thinking you're very good at identifying pain and then turning those— that pain into words.

Okay. I get excited about it. I will tell you, it's a project that I'm excited about and I've hired a video photography guy. And so I've got like a guy that can help me with this. But I've identified it possibly incorrectly after talking to you as lower on the list. First, I need to get all these other key things really running smoothly. So that's great. Thank you for that.

And the caveat to that would be like, go hot, go get someone lethal at Facebook ads. There's a difference. There's so many tiers in this and just get someone incredible because if you get just someone to just run ads for you, it's useless. You will 5x your lead cost. And so I saw the difference this year getting Matt, who's the head of Augusta Leads, like, who knows what he's doing and spends a lot of time— like, that's all they do.

So you hired him full-time for Augusta Leads? Yeah. Would you have a concern about me hiring a contractor to do that?

No, no. I would just go on, like, pay $500 an hour, get the best of the best, have them set it up. So 20 hours or less, and then maybe 3 to 4 hours a week of optimization. Little things, for example, like it's more of a Google thing, but not showing our ads on the Display Network. We have like 9,000 websites that we've aggregated that we just know doesn't perform as well.

You've taken them out, yeah.

So most people are like, oh, the Ads Display Network stinks. It's like, well, actually, if you narrow it down, you can crush.

Yeah, the exclusions.

So it's all about like just getting an absolute savage. I think the creative part is that you're so good at it And if you get an average person to be a media buyer for you, it won't perform well. But if you get a great media buyer, I think you'll, you'll crush.

Hmm. Okay. Thank you for that. Uh, that's the stuff I get excited about. Yeah. Like where I get, will be engaged. So interesting. Okay.

And the part that is so fun with Facebook ads compared to print is the delay between execution versus data collection.

Yeah.

Because you can change one thing in the ad and see the bump versus print. It's like, okay, well, like, they might call me a week later. I can't like print the offer out quickly. It's, it's so much slower versus like we could iterate really fast and even just 3 weeks on a Facebook ad and get it towards crushing. It's like right now I can say this now because it's almost July 4th, like right now if you throw a July 4th something inside the ad and reference July 4th, you'll just crush. Like All of our Facebook ads right now are showing like, get your property ready for July 4th. It's coming up. It's the best holiday of the season for your outdoor living area. Like little stuff like that on the creative side, I think you'll just dominate.

Hmm. All right. Very good. Thank you. All right. Next one. So based on what you know about me and maybe what, you know, it's like, I think you know a decent amount about me.

This is like the son having to tell the dad how to like run the personal finances of the family. Like what in the world?

Hey man, I bet you've got—

Riley, what do you think about your dad? You think you could do a better job?

I would ask Riley's really well put together. I ask, I have conversations with Riley. Like I value his opinion. You've done it. You're 30. You've done a ton of stuff. So are you 30 or 31?

30. Okay.

All right. So based on, but we are in the same world. So I'm just curious what you're going to say to this. So based on what you know about me and kind of how I think and my expertise and what you see me do, what would you tell me that you think I should be doing from a work standpoint right now?

My, my first thought went towards media because like it has been 10 years I've been making content. I feel like I'm on this grind. You have the stories and you have the, you have a, uh, an incredible resume and I would not say, to necessarily give your number or like be more open about that. But like, I do think the type of media and the format that you deliver in, um, if done correctly, could just crush. And, um, you also have a Rolodex that is like really, really solid. You know so many people with incredible businesses. And I think your, your, your comfortable format is interviewing and podcasting and long format. And I'd be really interested to see you getting really good at packaging and then shortening, not like how long, not necessarily shortening the conversation, but like how do you make a 10-minute video with a friend of yours instead of a 3-hour video?

Yeah.

Um, okay. And that 10-minute video is only like, no one else has access to them. They're an incredible entrepreneur. You have that pool of people and I would love to see them highlighted for my own selfish sake. And then being done in a format though, from a media perspective that's more digestible versus like, I will watch your 3-hour podcast, but other people won't. And so I would love to see everything that you've done. Uh, I like to put a microphone and megaphone to it. It's like partly why I have, we, we started this show, like partly one of my reasons for doing it, uh, was to be able to pass those things onto the next generation of entrepreneurs and specifically in home services. So I would love to see like the media side just blow up for you. And, um, I don't know exactly what that recipe looks like cuz I'm still trying to figure that out. But, uh, I think you are already knocking on this door, so you'll get there.

I, I don't have these answers either, but I am, yeah, I'm curious. Okay.

All right. Thank you. It's so hard. It's so funny when people are like, oh, like they just make content and they do. It's like, you know how hard it is to do this?

It is. It is hard. Oh man. And you don't, and it's hard to get the feedback. Like, like, cause it's, it's such a broad audience. Like what, what do you care about? What do you like? What do you value? Because you could have a video that people actually care about, but the packaging wasn't that good. And so nobody saw it. It's, it's really complicated.

And like, then it's like, you gotta balance what you wanna make. Cause I'm interested in certain things, but then like, so recently I was like, okay, I put a poll up. I'm like, guys, do you wanna hear, I had like 3 different types of content. It was like, more turnarounds, studio videos, kind of listicles, et cetera? Or do you want to hear like more about my businesses, like how I run my business? And it was like 50% plus of the 3 options was, we want to hear more about like how you operate.

Oh really? I mean, okay. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean like, I made like 5 or 6 of those videos. We're talking about like 5 to 10% of the views compared to a regular video on my channel.

Oh, okay.

And so it's tough though because now you have people like, we have a whole team I gotta make sure the team gets fed, that they have salaries. I can't just be like, I'm doing this 'cause I'm interested in it. It needs to be packaged well. It needs to have a good thumbnail. It needs to have a good hook. And so what's also interesting, the thing that has helped me though is tracking link clicks and realizing that a video that might get 300,000 views might drive, let's just call it 200 leads. Another view, a video though that is really, really focused on my ICP, like who I'm going after, people that are really interested in my core audience, it might do 4,000 views and drive 100 clicks or 100 leads. So we've been recently tracking the clicks on every single video for every single platform for every single business. And that has helped me realize that the vanity metrics of views aren't all that they're made out to be in terms of driving business results.

And when you say clicks, are you talking like end card or are you talking in the description?

Mostly the description. You can track, and end cards are easy. QR codes, we have QR codes, we track those. But now in the description, we have individual links for every video. It takes us a little bit longer, but then you have really good granular detail, like what videos drive business results versus which ones just get a bunch of views. I see. And it is interesting. Nonetheless, for anyone that says making content is easy, it is hard.

It is.

Even when you have a $40,000 dog that you bring on for a great hook, a great hook, and still you can't get views.

This is Oliver. We call him Ollie. He's a 10-year-old French Bulldog, and I've got at least $40,000 invested in this guy. $3,000 to buy him, and the rest keeping him here. That video did not do good. I know.

I was like, come on, folks, what are we gonna do?

Oh man.

All right. This is gonna lead, lead, lead you into the next question here. I have heard you mention this before. I have purposely not done research on this because I wanted to come with much more of a student's perspective. Tiger 21. You've been doing it for 6 years. Maybe first explain what it is and what you've learned being inside that group for the past 6 years.

So Tiger 21 is a group I had heard about and I joined after I sold Service Autopilot. But I'd heard about it previously. And then when I was going through the transaction to sell Service Autopilot, I talked to a couple references of investment banks and that, so they're individuals that had sold their companies and it came up, Tiger 21 came up several times. They're like, man, I got Tiger 21 after I sold my company. It was fantastic. Love it. So I'd heard of this thing as a financial group and then I got it reinforced by these referrals. And so Tiger 21 is basically this referral group. A, not referral, financial group that it's focused on finance. And there are chapters all over the world. I think there are like, I don't know, 1,700, 1,900 people in it. I don't, I don't know the exact number around the world. I think when I got in, there was under 1,000. Uh, I don't know what some would call this.

The Illuminati.

Yes, it's the Illuminati. Yes, it is a very, very successful group.

It is.

It is legitimately very successful. It's very, like, you're not allowed to talk about the meetings at all because very private information is discussed. And so I have to, I feel like I have to be very careful what I say. Let's see, maybe a couple ways to describe it would be there would be a monthly meeting. And so there's local chapters. So I'm in one of what, when I got in, there were 2 chapters. Now I think there are 6 chapters in Dallas. And so each chapter has about 16 people. In the, in the group, in the chapter. And so like, for example, in the Dallas chapter, I know a bunch of people across different chapters because you, you go ever— like tomorrow I'll be at my Tiger 21 meeting all day long. And so, uh, you know, there'll be, call it 16 people in the room, and periodically we get together with the other chapters and do stuff. And so the general format of it is at the beginning of the meeting we do a world update. So what's going on in the world financially, that kind of stuff. What, what are numbers, metrics, things like that. Then we do an issues and opportunity. So everybody has an, goes around and they're like, what's something personal to share? Um, what's an investment you've recently made? What is something you need help from, from your board of directors in this room? And then usually there's a fourth question. This is how our chapter runs. Different chapters run differently around the country. Or world. And, uh, and then the fourth question might be some question like, what do you think's gonna happen with interest rates? That might be a, you know, that's been a question. It'll be, what do you think's gonna happen with, you know, some investment? I'll bet we talk about SpaceX as an example tomorrow. I'll bet we do. And so it'll be, that's so then at, then we usually have lunch and we talk about all that. Everybody takes a turn, talks about all that stuff and whatever. You want to discuss kind of goes into, uh, goes on a list and then we, we literally go around and we just, everybody gives you feedback on that thing. And then somebody does what's called a PD, which is called a portfolio defense. You literally get up in front of the room and you lay out every single financial asset you have, where it's invested, how much money you've got. You lay out your entire tax structure, structure, how much money you spend a year, uh, how. You manage taxes, how you manage trust, everything you lay. So the idea is that you expose everything, it's completely confidential, and then people challenge you. Like, wait, what about this? Should you be doing that? It's that kind of a thing. And then, uh, sometimes our group will go to dinner or there'll be a cocktail hour after or something like that. It's usually like the meeting's about 6, 7 hours. So that's the structure of it. Um, been in it a bunch of years. I really like the people. Um, in the Dallas market, a lot of very, very, very wealthy people. Um, I think they're pretty— most of them are pretty down to earth, um, compared to what people would imagine.

Is it application-based, or is it like you have to have a certain net worth? Like, how do you get into that?

Liquid net worth above $20 million. So can't count your business, can't count your real estate unless you're in the real estate business. I think, I think that's how it works. I don't know. I, I, I, what I just know, it's— I just know that one stat.

So Um, is it like a paid thing, kind of like Hampton?

Yeah, yeah, it's paid. It's $33,000 a year. And, um, I mean, I think Hampton was largely inspired by Tiger, um, and then changed. And there's several others. There's another— there's other— it's an application and a lot of people don't get in. Like, they really are hardcore about who gets in. And, um, and there's other groups like this. There's a few others. And there's one that I think you have to have above $100 million net worth to get into. It. So there's a couple things like this. Uh, perfectly, I, if I were to leave the group, I wouldn't join a different one. I'm happy here. If I were to leave the group, I'd be joining a normal business group.

And what have kind of your biggest takeaways been now that you've been there for 6 years? A lot, obviously a lot of really cool people, wealthy people. What are some of your biggest takeaways?

Everybody's an expert at, at it. They've got a thing like, so, uh, I think maybe one of the biggest, I, ideas that I might've had is I was going to, it's the same thing that happened to me when I sold Service Autopilot. So I sell the Service Autopilot business. We have a leadership team. We do all kinds of planning and like, we'll just call it meetings, like where you're trying to figure stuff out. So you go sit in a board meeting after I sell the business at the Explore level. And, you know, I just thought I was going to go into a world where it's like, wow, when you're dealing in hundreds and hundreds of millions of annual revenue. That I was going to have all these wow moments. And it's like, you know, learned a few things, but it's largely the exact same thing, just executed with bigger numbers. That was my, like, so I was a little disappointed. And I really smart people, like legitimately smart people, but we weren't stupid people either. Like we were operating at a decent level. It's like, I definitely learned things, but it's like, I just thought there was going to be this, oh my gosh, I never thought of that kind of moment. And it's more like, just do the basics, do the blocking and tackling and execute on it really well. Well, kind of coming into Tiger, I had this idea that, you know, you're coming into a world of people that probably have a tremendous amount of knowledge at a financial level. And the people that do are the people that do financial, like do investing as a career. But then you've got people that are real estate people, and if you look at their portfolio, it's heavily weighted towards real estate and they've got other investments, but that's their lane. Then you've got business guys like me that are operators. That's their lane and they've got knowledge in other things. And so I think one of the big things I learned was like, we're all just human at the end of the day. We have expertise in an area and then we, we have general expertise in lots of other areas. And some of us are stronger in certain investing than others, but just because you're really good at one modality does not mean you're a good investor. And I'm not saying that. People are, there's something wrong with the people in the group. I don't mean that. It's just like, you just really quickly realize we can all only really be incredibly good at a few things. And so you might be a wonderful operator, and then when you come into the investing environment, you might be good, but you're not exceptional as compared to other people in the group. That's one thing. And the other thing is everybody's a human. Like everybody worries about all the same stuff. They're like, the biggest thing everybody worries about is their kids. Like, you, they know people aren't sitting around like, yeah, of course you want to grow your wealth, but the conversations are about all the human stuff, your family, your kids. It's all about the kids. Like, how are they going to turn out in life with the money? You know, how do you pass money to them? What are they doing in their careers? How are their marriages? Like, it's all that kind of stuff. It's like, everybody's human and everybody worries about the stock market because the stock market moves every day and you can see it move. But. If you're in a private equity portfolio or in your venture or you're in real estate, you can't see the valuation moving. So when you hear people's language, they're way more worried about stocks than they were private equity or real estate. And that's just a very human thing. And so to me, it's, there's a lot of incredibly smart people that are making really smart decisions. And, you know, we have great, it surfaces great conversations, but at the end of the day, you know, it's every, everybody's still trying to figure it out. And, uh, everybody worries about the same stuff in life. That, that would probably be one of my big takeaways. Now I can kind of talk about how people invest, but I think that emotional element is really important to understand.

Yeah. Like I think sometimes too, people, when they join a community, they think it is going to be this like unlock or this massive aha moment. And then they get in there like almost disappointed, uh, cause they realize that other people are going through the same problems. They don't have this infinite level of knowledge that they thought they had. From the outside looking in. And so what's the value that of still staying in a community like that where it's not like this, aha, you're not, you know, everyone's not leagues ahead of you. You actually feel like you're probably contributing to other people in the group as well. Why still stay in a group like that for 6 years?

I don't know if I'll stay in it forever, but I, because we travel a lot or we've dialed it back a little bit. Well, a lot. Uh, I would be gone and miss meetings. I was really trying to plan my travel as best I could to miss as few Tiger meetings as possible. So I'd have this feeling, because I'll be gone for a while and I'm driving to the meeting. This has happened to me multiple times. Like, why, I don't know if I, why am I still doing this? You know, I, because I haven't really invested in many deals. There's a ton of opportunity to invest in deals inside Tiger. And, and that's another thing. Somebody presents to us every, every month. And so you get access to deals. I, that's a really actually important thing I didn't say. And a lot of people do invest in those deals. I just don't. I figured out what my investment philosophy is and I'm just executing my playbook and I'm good. So I don't get that benefit from the group. And so sometimes going to the group, I'm like, I don't know, this is taking up time on my calendar. Should I do this? And then every time I, after I leave the meeting, it's like, there's no way I'm leaving. And so I think it's this element of, it's not that you need to get something out of it every single week. Or month, better said. It's like when you need something or you have a question or you're just trying to think through something, or you listen to other people thinking through their challenges. Once you get to a high level of wealth and tax complication and trust complication, like one answer pays for a lot. It doesn't take much to, uh, to, to get all your money back. And I really like the people a lot. And so it's the way I think about is literally that simple. It keeps me way more informed. It keeps me in front of a lot of people that have very different perspectives on business and life and investing. It gives me, when I need something, I could call, like we had a fellow in our group that he was traveling somewhere and something happened and somebody in Tiger, not even in the Dallas chapter, set a private jet to pick him up and get him back to Dallas. You hear those stories all the time. It's a very tight-knit group of people that will do anything. Like I could call, I feel like I could call anybody in Tiger and they'll take the call. And there's just a lot of little things like that that are incredibly valuable. So if someday, as an example, I had a medical emergency, there's an infinite number of people I could get on the phone that would get me in somewhere that I wouldn't be able to get in otherwise. And that's just relationships. It's back to that network concept. And so those are the little reasons why it's like, okay, I can't point to, I just saved $33,000 this month., but I can over time say that I'm convinced I get it's worth every dollar.

Yeah. It's interesting too that you say that the things that they worry about or talk about the most are actually now nothing to do with the money or less to do with the money and more about the human aspects of life.

Yeah. We, I mean, the whole group's a financial group, but like people are good. Like I just, like people like the game they're playing. They're, they're playing the game because they like what they do. And of course they think about their money and of course they want to grow it. They want to see their number go up, but I have my experience, and again, it's— there's groups all over the world. My experience in the Dallas group is like most people feel generally like, I'm fine, I'm good, and they're worried about other stuff at this point, and they're just playing the game because, um, they like doing it. And then another thing I observe is that people get caught— like all of us, you get caught in a trap where you just keep going. This is what I've been doing for 25 years, is what I'm going to keep doing. And so like, I travel so much and people are like, man, I, I should, I would like to do all that traveling. And I'm like, you could do, you'd never need to work again. You could do all this traveling. But so Pete, we all have this risk of getting stuck and not doing all these other things we'd like to do. And that happens even at this level in a major way, because you have so many responsibilities. Um, I gotta, I think, I don't think I'm saying anything I shouldn't be saying publicly. I, I, you know, uh, Another observation is smaller, uh, smaller owners or people that own smaller businesses get trapped in their business and they don't know how to find the key people to run their companies. That happens at a very, very high level. Like companies are doing massive amounts of money, the same exact problem. Like, how do I find the person that can really free me up? Like you're doing massive money, but you're the CEO and you're still literally stuck in the business. That still happens at huge numbers, huge numbers, and people are still worried about what will happen to their business if they hand it over. That doesn't change. There's lots of that stuff. Something else I'd tell you is most people are investing in assets. Like they're buy, they own things. They own deals, businesses. They're invested in private credit. They're invested in public equity. They're invest, invested in venture. Like their money is heavily locked up., you know, people have liquidity, but a lot of money's not liquid. And that's a really common thing you'll see. So they're going to, people are going to be in, and if you were to just look up ultra-high-net-worth individuals, you'll find that this is a pretty common story. It's not just a Tiger story. And Tiger does make this data public of how people invest their money. So I'm not saying anything too private here. But if you look, you'll find that they're invested in private equity, real estate, public equity. Fixed income, private credit, hedge funds, Bitcoin, like commodities, all that. It's like they, they're, they have allocations in lots of different places, all inside their portfolios. And then if you're a real estate guy, you're going to, you're going to be totally cool with tons of debt. If you're not a real estate guy, you'll probably be less comfortable with lots of debt. Most of the people that I know have their homes paid for. It's like things like, like it's just, you know, it's all over the board. But that's, that's some of the things I've learned.

Very cool. I have, I have played with the idea of doing some sort of like higher tier of home service business owner and it being like non-business almost. Like whether it be like investing or trusts or just like, but more like relationship, lifestyle, health, travel, things like that. Just, I've played with the idea even just seeing like how, what you did with Academy and like the, the relationships that were formed inside the community. I still run into people all the time. And they're like, oh yeah, like I met that person in academy. And I'm like, yep, there's gotta be something like at that level where it's not just how to do sales and how to do your door hanger, but it's like, it's a, a little higher level.

I, I've thought about doing the same thing as I've thought about what I'm gonna, you know, what did I thought about what I was gonna do next. And I will tell you, it's one of the best things I ever did was academy. I really, really liked it. So it's something I recommend, but I will tell you, I do not think it's the best use of your time or money., compared to what you've got right now. So if you're optimizing for what might make you— give you the most enjoyment personally and satisfaction, yes. If you're optimizing for building wealth and a big giant thing, uh, you don't do it. It's very distracting.

Remember what JP50 said to JP30, you know, he said not to worry about the money as much.

Agree. Yeah, that's why— that's the question you have to ask yourself.

Yeah.

100%. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay.

But it, but it's good.

We're gonna move to the last question on the docket. And this is, uh, I think someone a— had asked this and then we kind of tailored it a little bit for the show. But what mindset do you see as the biggest obstacle for entrepreneurs going from $0 to $1 million and then from $1 million to $10 million? So I'll give my 2 cents and then I'll, I'll volley it back to you.

Okay.

I kind of tried to break it down. So from $0 to $1 million, I, I see the constraint mostly just selling and then Beginning stages of management. So figuring out how to sell, sell, whether it be online, digital, print, just getting a sale, identifying the, the pain of the customer, having an offer that's appealing, and then being able to actually consummate that sale and get enough of them. And then management, cuz you have to typically get to a million, you need employees. And so how do I actually manage employees? But from a million to 10 million, I think it really switches. And I think a lot of times people just think at a million, what I have seen be a, a limiting belief is like, oh, I'll just keep doing what I've done to get to a million and I'll get 2 million, I'll double it and I'll triple it and I'll go to 3 million. Versus from a million plus, like especially getting closer to 10 million, I see leadership and decision making as really the skills that are required and leadership being very different than management. Um, and requiring now to hire managers underneath you as the founder, the leader of the organization. That being a very different skill than managing the, the technicians or the frontline team members. And so th— that's kinda how I bucketed it. It was like 0 to a million is sales and management, very entry-level management, I would say.

Mm-hmm.

Because you usually need 5, 6, 7 maybe employees. And then as you get to 10 million, it's more about leadership decision making. You know, I'll say for you, just breathing and smiling, things like that.

Yeah, totally agree with that. I have two different ones, but I totally agree. And with the 5 for 50 thing, I, I've got this, uh, thing that I haven't finished called these roadmaps. And so I think about the business as two engines, like the revenue engine and the recruiting engine for people. And so, um, it's sort of aligned with what you said. The revenue engine is the really important one under a million, and then the recruiting is the, the one after. So let me give my two answers. So I'll do the, the 1 to 10 million first. It really becomes, it's about, I agree with what you said about leadership, but my answer was it's very much about people, which is a leadership thing. It's like getting the right people on the team and getting good at finding people. Like that's really, really important. And, um, and so if you don't, if you're not finding the right people, you're just, you're either unable to grow. And so then you shut down the revenue machine or you are growing, but you're just letting the wrong people on the team and you end up with a company you despise because you have the wrong people. You just, you hate it. It feels painful and hard. And so the people side after a million is just so critical. On the zero to 1 million, I agree with what you said, which is aligned with what I talk about in the Roadmap, but I went with this idea that nobody can do it as good as me. If you look at a lot of companies that get stuck at around $350,000 in revenue or half a million revenue, it's a story of, it's a story of maybe they don't have the money to hire the person or they don't know who to hire, but it's Also a story of they can't install this thing like I install it. They can't design it like I design it. They can't sell it like I sell it. They can't do the work. Um, they're not going to be as good at the front door with Ms. Smith as I am. It's a lot of stories of nobody can do it like me. And so you, uh, don't hand off the tasks. You don't trust somebody else. You don't invest enough in another person to train them up so they can be as good as you. So those are my two.

And I think if you can't recruit, to your point, it's almost like supply and demand. Like most time to get to a million, you just need more demand. You need more customers, you need more leads. But then after that engine has, you have that momentum. I think, I think you said that, I think you said this, I apologize if not, uh, any business like doing $10 million plus, it's like it already has so much momentum.

Yes, I said that. I believe that.

It's already moving so much. Right. And it's hard to stop it because like It just has so much momentum behind it.

Yeah.

And then it inevitably is no longer a demand issue. It is a supply issue. Can I get good people? Can I build out a leadership and management team? Can I create the systems where this all doesn't fall apart because of the weight that's being put on it? And so I think it's almost like, to your point, even if we boil it down lower, it's like you gotta get demand. And once you have enough of that, it's all about just making sure you have the supply to be able to make sure you don't fall apart.

Yeah, I agree. I had one other little idea here that isn't really what you were asking, but your word mindset just triggered this random little idea. It was a mistake I made, and so I, I thought I'd mention it for anybody that might feel this way. So when I got started in the business, I, I didn't really know the business. The thing you have to remember is I was a high school kid that mowed lawns and trimmed bushes. That's all I did. Then I'm out of the business for years, and then I get back in the business for City Turf. Okay. So I thought we needed to look really professional and bigger and like to compete. Like when I started City Turf, TruGreen Landcare was big in residential in my market. Mm-hmm. So people think of TruGreen as fertilization. We could, the landcare division was doing lots of maintenance. There was a bunch of bigger companies. It was heavily contracts and it was a very different business than it is today. Like when we went selling over the phone. Quoting over the phone, that was really unusual. Charging a credit card, way, like crazy unusual. And so my, it's very, the business has really changed. Where I'm going with that is I just felt looking at the market, I needed to be bigger. And I don't know if this is a thing people feel like they, they, they want to represent themselves as bigger, but the simple concept here, thought is play to your strength. Like we, we are going to have different phases of business. And when you're small, I'd play that angle up in terms of what that means to how you'll serve the client and be present with the client. So as your business progresses, you can do different things to serve the client and treat them differently. And I've played that strength. So just don't— I don't think it's necessary to try to represent yourself as some big company when you're not a big company. I don't know if that'll resonate with anybody, but that's something I also noticed in the Service Autopilot world. That I was like, hey, you know, if it were me and I was running this business, I'd totally play the angle. There's only 4 crews here and we are gonna take care of you like nobody else. Yeah.

Yeah. And then it's funny because I always say it's like you have this identity crisis because you, you have that angle and I'm always a big believer in like, play to your strengths. Don't try to be something you're not when it comes to the size of your business. 'Cause they'll inevitably be disappointed if they think you have 100 crew members and you show up every single week and then they don't like you and they're like, can I have someone else? You're like, no, you're kind of stuck with me. Yeah. And, but then as the business grows, you eventually have to get to the point where, okay, now I have, I don't have 4 crews, I have 15 crews, and now I've gotta convince them that like, I almost wanna change my identity to, okay, now we are more professional. And I think it's when you start trying to become something you're not, and it almost shifts to where when you're bigger, you're like, okay, now I'm gonna try to appear smaller because I, I'm, I'm trying to market to what I'm not. Um, it's like Apple trying to appear small and then like you got the guy in this garage trying to appear massive, right?

Very interesting. Yeah, agreed.

Okay, I'm gonna go back. We're gonna go to non-financial advice in just a second, but I want to go back because you're— the questions at the beginning, you had better questions for me than I had for you.

Really? Okay.

Yeah, because I was thinking— I was— I took it from a different angle, and so now I have my real questions. I haven't thought about this, but in the last 3, 3 minutes, okay, I couldn't let this opportunity go by. So, okay, you, you asked really specific questions like City Turf and Augusta. So I'm gonna ask you really specific questions.

Okay.

All right. I'm gonna re— I'm, I'm gonna, I'm gonna not recant. What's the word? Take back my other questions, I guess.

You could have extra questions. You don't have to take 'em back.

There you go. Yeah. This is my third and my fourth question.

Okay.

Cause we're the moderator, so we can just, we can just do this.

Yeah.

So if you were running HomeWorks right now, knowing what you do know, which I know is limited, but like knowing what you do know about the technology space, Service Autopilot, where you wanted to take it. Current players and even business owners that you know in the market, if you were like dropped into my shoes, what would be the first things you'd be looking at or which direction would you be pushing me in the direction of focusing on?

I think I need a little more context there. When you say focusing on, are we talking about building the tech, selling to client? What do you mean exactly?

Great point. Um, I think just more or less like, I know when you left Service Autopilot, you have clear, pretty clear vision of what you wanted to build. And you obviously saw that there was a need for, in the market for that.

If I were to build a new thing, yeah.

Or even where you were taking Service Autopilot version 2.

Oh yeah. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so Service Autopilot was a little stuck. So what I'd build now is different than what I'd build if I still owned Service Autopilot.

Okay.

Oh man.

Okay. So that, that's much more, that's so much more blue ocean way of looking at it. So assuming you are back in Service Autopilot where you feel a little stuck, cuz you do have, you have clients, you have infrastructure. It's not like you're building from scratch. What would you be thinking next, like, few years? Because for example, from my perspective, I am very much thinking of us as what will AI not be able to replicate, being really, really good at that, and then making it easy for people to port into. So for example, dispatch, routing, elements around some payment stuff, but like a lot of automations, reports, et cetera. I feel like AI's gonna do a fantastic job of that. And so I'm really trying to focus on like, what's our differentiator? What do we do so well that they're not gonna be able to copy and that they wouldn't want to put all of their data into some, something they just spin up, uh, vibe coding. That's where my head is at right now. But where would your head be at from the next 36 to 60 months in this space? CRM world.

I don't know if I'm gonna answer exactly what you're asking, so man, redirect me here cuz there is so much we could talk about. Mm-hmm. But it may be different now because you can vibe code so much stuff. But when I was thinking about the next Service Autopilot, I was— one thing I was gonna do that you can't, that I don't think you can or should do. And then the other thing that I was thinking about, I think, uh, applies. The first thing is I was gonna go way upmarket. Smaller business, fewer clients paying us much more money. And I don't think you can do that. It's not, it's not that you can't serve bigger clients. You will, but I was gonna exclusively focus on, and they might be a smaller client that was willing to pay up cuz they know they're gonna be big someday. The problem that we had at Service Autopilot is it's almost impossible in the technology to serve the smaller company and the big company doing— I'll use the example of a company that does 100 job, 50 jobs a day, and a company that does 2,000 jobs a day. They are literally completely different organizations in the way they think and the way they the, the stuff they have to do on the, in within the UX.

Mm-hmm.

And so it's really hard to serve both of them really, really well. So I was just gonna go way up market. I, you can't do that though, because you've got Augusta and you've gotta build for Augusta and the broader market anyway is a smaller company. And so, um, so I think you have to kind of understand, as frustrate, as much as you won't like this. Who you, who you're going after and say, I'm going after $3 million. Just an example. I'm not saying this is the number, but I'm for $3 million companies and less, which is at the end of the day, like 90% of the market. So, but I think you have to kind of decide because, and I can't figure out how AI changes this yet because a city turf operates completely different than, and operate completely different than a lot of the Service Autopilot members. City Turf never got the functionality they needed. They just didn't. And the small guys got functionality that was just— they didn't need it, and it complicated the screens. And so like, how do you find the sweet spot? That'd be one thing to just put a lot of thought into. Who is the sweet spot, and how do I only build for them? And I'm totally okay turning away the City Turfs and certain other types of companies. One thing you do have going for you is because you're building for Augusta, you have to be able to handle franchises and or multi-location. A lot of software products don't handle that. And that, and if you look at across franchises and multi-location, they tend to be smaller. They'll fit right into your world. So like, that's an advantage right there. The serving the franchise people or the multi-location people is also very different than serving the one-off guy. So, uh, it's, it's just back to this clarity. Okay. That's one thing I think about. I just don't know how, if I was doing another ServiceAlpine, I could live in both worlds. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we could have. I just don't know how. I talked to too many people, listened to too many onboarding calls, too many sales calls, too many everything, too many feature requests. It's just, I don't know if it's possible to go too far upmarket in the same software. And then the one that you, the other one that I had decided on, and this is the, the thing I don't know for you. And I, because of where we're at in the market, I, if I was building a new Service Autopilot, I was going to build hardcore scheduling, costing, that whole, like, just be the best of the best at that and not do the other stuff and build APIs into HubSpot, Salesforce, whatever other system. But that was— that made sense because I was going upmarket. Even in a world with you being able to vibe code and turn out all kinds of functionality, we won't know the answer to this for years. Our system's going to become so Like, like Service Autopilot could never build everything we built, we dreamed of, and we promised this in the early days, this one system to run your business. It was a pipe dream. Well, now maybe it's less of a pipe dream, but can you even build a really organized, well-put-together, focused system when you can build anything as fast as you want it every time you have an idea? I suspect the new problem is systems are just gonna be a ginormous mess because now you can do everything you want to do. But should you? And that's something I've been thinking a lot about with technology. And so for you, I don't have the answer, but I think you still have to have one hardcore lane that you are by far the best at, and everything else is good, but it's not really a focus. And I think scheduling and costing is the defensible lane in an AI world, like really having all that data and being incredibly good at it, like even in a world where an AI model is going to be able to do the scheduling for a company. There's going to be a long period of time where it's like, okay, yes, all this could be contained inside a model, but people are never going to be comfortable with that because they have to verify on a screen. They still need the CRUD database that puts data back out to the screen where it's like, yes, that did get done. Yes, that did get invoiced. You got— they need to see it. So where I— this idea that the user interface is going to be completely reinvented and changed, I don't buy it because while it's possible it could be reinvented and changed, people are not gonna let it happen. Ms. Smith, who's 53 years old, answering the phone inside a home services company, is not gonna live in a completely new paradigm where all she does is talk to her system and trust that everything's happening correctly. She wants to see it on her screen, and that interface is gonna last a long time. And where I'm going with that is that if we still have to have a lot of interface, if you have a massive system, people's brains shut down. So it's like on one hand you guys could build it all and it could be great, but what will accidentally happen is because of the audience you're selling to, it'll be too much. Like they'll love it, the sales dream will be great, but when they're in the system, it's like, oh, it's too much. Like, so I don't have the answer to it, but like really saying this is what we're about and being really focused on that, I think still matters in a world where you can build anything. And I think it's clearly scheduling. And then how can you start like, I think about the new product still, even though I'm not building one. I can't, I'll never be able to stop thinking about what would be next. How can you completely reinvent inputs? The idea that my team, I've thought about this a lot. The idea that my team uses a mobile device to put in what they did makes no sense to me. If that is what the world looks like in 5 years, we, I just, I can't fathom it. If I was building today, I'm building something totally— you're using an old device, you are not typing in your device. My technician is not typing. I, I have a lot— I've actually already code vibed— I've already vibe coded something around this just to see what it would look like because Philip and I were talking about it. And, um, so how can you reinvent the entire input? I just like— if I'm asking a guy that speaks Spanish to have to type in all this stuff and like what chemical he used and how many products he used and Customer notes, like, this is what I want to tell Ms. Smith versus this is what the office needs to know. This is what the tech that's going to be back on the property in 3 weeks needs to know, or 2 months. Like, you don't get anything because they have to type. Like, you get like no information. So what's the input mode that would capture the most amount of information and then automatically take the information and send it where it needs to go? This needs to go to customer. This needs to go to chemical tracking. This needs to go to office notes. This needs to go to the notes to the next tech that's on the property. Like what's that new mode of capture? And then also, if you think about a lot of the guys, they're so busy like that, they don't want to write all this stuff. Like at CityTurf, we have this really good process of leaving stuff on your door and a tech still writes on it and it's personal. That's great, except most people don't write very good, you know, and I'm not knocking anybody. I think My writing's got worse too. I'm not like, like putting myself out there as better than anybody else. But, and so that on one hand, it's a nice experience for the client. On the other hand, it's like, can they read it very well? So, so how do you get the information and more information to the client better? Those are the big things. Like, so if you think about where you guys spend your brainpower, it just keeps pulling you back to scheduling, billing, and costing, in my opinion. Like, yeah, there's all this other really cool stuff you should do. I'm not saying you don't do it because it's just that you have to pick a lane that you're just gonna dominate and a lot of other stuff is gonna get ignored. And at the end of the day, my belief is people buy your system for scheduling and billing and understanding their data more than they're gonna build. I'm not saying you don't do marketing, but if you have to rank it, they're buying you for that. They didn't come into your system because I need marketing data. I did because they wanna send an email blast because I wanna create a to-do because I wanna respond to a text message. That's not why they bought your system first. They bought your system first. For scheduling and billing, and that is the unique selling proposition here. So it has to be the thing above all the other things that you destroy all the competition with. And the other stuff, you know, it matters. I'm not saying you don't do it, but that's how I think you have to think about it when you allocate resources.

You mentioned job costing. Um, would that be mostly for projects? No, no. So still at the—

I want to know my COGS by division, by service. I, I have all of it at City Turf.

Mm-hmm.

But it not, it's, but I have to, it requires, we, we, uh, we have had it forever. It's at City Turf. I can, we can tell you our COGS, our gross margin, our man hour rate, our labor rate. We can tell you all of that.

Do you not think that's something that would be done very easily with vibe coding or not really?

Oh no. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You can. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It needs to be in your system is what I'm saying.

Oh, I see what you're saying. The inputs need to be there. Got it.

Okay. Yeah. This is what it, when I say The most important things for your system to do are scheduling, billing, and that. Give me the data for the operational side of the business. So, well, you're— well, we've talked years ago, like, tell me what to do with the data. Like, we finally can live in the— that's really hard to do in Service Autopilot days, but now you guys can run models across the data and say, this is where the problem is. This is what you should do. You can start surfacing those opportunities. To your clients. Like if, if you think about just what you could do going down scheduling, billing, and giving them data to figure out how to price better, to figure out where they have density problems, to figure all that stuff out, it's magic. And that system does not exist. And that system is completely solvable right now. And that's the system I'd be building to the detriment of every other piece of functionality. I'd let, like, to the detriment of email marketing and marketing and all the other stuff. Like, again, I would— the ideal is it's all in one system. But even in a vibe coding world, it's not writing code. Like, writing code is only part of it. Like, designing it is a mass, as you know, it's like the biggest, it's the hardest part of this whole thing, thinking about what gets in and how all the data interacts. And the other thing that I think is really important, hopefully I'm not going too far with this.

Oh, this is great.

The other thing that's really—

My personal coaching call.

Yeah. The other thing that's really important is like, I think when you're writing software right now, there could be this default where it's like, okay, well, I'm just going to let AI solve all this stuff.

Okay.

So like, we're just going to, we're just going to accumulate data and then we're going to run a data model over top. Uh, we're going to run an AI model over top of it and we're just going to extract all the data or we're going to let the data figure out or the model figure out how to do all this stuff. And I think what we're going to, and I know there'll be open source models, but I think what we're going to find ourselves in is people are going to buy software thinking it's going to cost them $300 a month., and when they, when they have a massive dataset, it's gonna cost them $1,500 a month in the future. And so I think as a builder of technology, we also have to be really cognizant of what's being built as an algorithm, what's being built as a, an AI model that's gonna run over data. How do we really get good at carving out just the data needed to pass that into the model? Stuff you're probably dealing with right now. Like that, it's, I use that as an example to say, There are so many decisions that are going to have to be made to be the best scheduling, billing, and costing system out there. It doesn't leave a crazy amount of time to be the best at every other thing. You have to have estimating too. That, I put that as the fourth, that has to be really good. Um, cause it just, it's too tight. I actually don't think you have to have estimating. I've thought about this a lot because I've, I've convinced Riley to build estimating into every chat. So because I'm staying on SA. So I've like, could I give up estimating at SA? Yes, we're moving it to every chat. So I don't think you have to have it, but it is a really nice bundle. Again, I hope we are, we've probably just lost everybody in the conversation, but I will tell you one of the things—

So I did it at the end. I was gonna do it at the beginning. I was like, no, I'll do it at the end once everyone, all the retention curve is off.

So, so the value of having estimating in the same system is if you can create a mechanism where you can click a button and auto-schedule all. Do you guys do a package concept like we did? Okay. Can you automatically create the packages? Can you automatically create this? That's where estimating gets really cool. We had some of that in Service Autopilot. It worked best for packages. I don't know how much it was actually used though. And that's why I said, you know, how far do you need to go with estimating? I'll tell you if you go too— this is estimating, perfect example for big companies versus small companies. If you think about Service Autopilot estimating, we had costing. I don't know if you remember, but we had all this costing stuff in there, all kinds of things. It was never enough for the big companies and it blew the mind of all the small guys, blew their mind. Like just like number one thing that people wanted off the screens because they don't actually do that stuff. And so this is, it's a perfect dilemma of how do you build something that works for both markets? And yeah, so those are some, I mean, I got a lot more ideas, but those are some of the big ones that I'd be thinking about.

Okay, that's great. That was my first one. Now I gotta place my second one.

All right.

I'm in this, I won't say strange position, but like a lot of the things that I currently have in the oven, I need to just wait on. I have great teams working on certain problems in all three departments. So we have Homeworks, software, franchise, Augusta, and media. And as much as everyone in those individual departments would be screaming for my attention, like, "You should be focused on this, you should be focused on this," I know I have great people working on these problems and some of it might take some time to bake, but me getting involved is actually going to cause more problems than anything. If you were in my shoes, what would be some of the questions you'd be asking yourself to determine where should I be deploying my energy or my time without causing undue frustration for the internal team that For some of these things, it just is literal, I need to wait and let these things bake. So like the MCP thing is a great example. It is now past my level in terms of like what they're trying to figure out. I know that this is a matter of iterations, multiple layers of beta testing, figuring out where things break, and just 6 months of really honing this in. Me getting involved is gonna probably cause more damage than anything. But there's multiple instances of that. But from those 3 kind of layers of the business, what would be some of the questions you'd be asking yourself to be like, what should I be focused my time and energy on?

So let me, before I try to come up with questions, let me tell you what first comes to mind that you should be focused on, right? What you just said, this is not what you're asking. What you just said is why I would tell you you should absolutely not do a coaching business. You, you have so many things going and these things have the potential to be so good and so big. You don't wanna get distracted. You've got, even though you don't have to run 'em, it's a lot still because your brain has to think about 'em. So then how do you action your time within them? The thing I think about is two things. So let's use the example of the MCP project. Your job is you can't possibly be as technical as your team. You can't possibly know all the little fine details, But what you can do is you can ask questions all the time, even if it's a little bit annoying for them, because it, it creates this element of challenging them and making them think. It's really easy for us to just knock projects out and sometimes not think about them. We just want to get them done. And so your role in this is to ask the good questions just to make sure things are going in the right direction. So it's not that you're trying to layer on more to-dos into the project. It's that do you have a demo cadence in the company where that team is demoing to you or its stakeholders what is being delivered? So in other words, I'll go back to my estimating project. You're building estimating. There was a design, everybody agreed to the design, and then the design starts getting built by the dev team. Then the dev team should periodically on a probably every 2-week or less cadence depending on the project, demo to a small group what's been built so far, that's when you get to ask questions. That's when you get to make sure things are on track. That's when it's like, yeah, you're not the smartest guy on this topic. That's totally cool. You are the business intelligence. You are the best understander of the franchisee. You're the best understander of the— it's a weird phrasing, but you like really understand the franchisee. You really understand the buyer. You are that person. So you have this level of knowledge that they can't possibly have. No negative on them whatsoever. So there does need to be an element of your involvement because this is where I think Service Autopilot started making some mistakes. And I, in, in other businesses, I've the same thing. Like you're, you're very involved, then the business starts to scale. You're working on other things and everything's still going, everything's still growing, but you weren't Like that level of knowledge, the, these conversations convey training and knowledge to the team where they really understand the customer, what the customer's worried about, what the customer needs. There's just expertise that you're gonna have that unless you're still having conversations, it doesn't get transferred. And then you're gonna have some of the best questions even though you don't technically know how to do it. So just, you can solve part of that through demos. Does that make sense? Mm-hmm. That resonate? Okay.

Yep.

So I, I would tell you, be careful not to say, oh, I'm not the technical guy. I don't know, like they just need to go do this thing and say, I therefore, I don't need to be involved. You should still have some involvement because these things can get off track and you could be shocked at what you end up getting delivered simply because you didn't have a cadence of these demo days or meetings. That'd be number one. The second thing is I think the swarm concept is the way you run the business as it gets bigger. So if you, if your different businesses are having surfacing issues and those issues are getting stacked rank, ranked, it's, I think your role as you get bigger is you're a coach. And a lot of coaching happens by getting involved when things are, when there's a big hard thing that gets to, needs to get solved. So I think this idea that you can float. It's like the issues are getting surfaced across the business and the biggest issues are the ones you jump into for a moment of time and you help that group and then you're back out. And that's, and I think that's really valuable. And then, so that's like part A. Part B is there's other areas where stuff may not get surfaced, but if you don't have a cadence to check on it, even if you have a really strong ops leader, because you're the visionary of the business. If you're like, there could come a day you stop checking on onboarding or you stop checking on what's going on in customer service because you got a great leader there. I think that's a mistake. And so as you think about where you allocate your time, I think you're still periodically allocating your time to certain parts of the business, even though there's not some big brewing problem you have to be in. You just make yourself go kind of check on it. It keeps you in the loop on the business and keeps your finger on the pulse of the business, but also I think it does another thing. It tells that part of the business, like customer service is the perfect example. I actually think I dropped the ball here in Service Autopilot. We had, we, I wish I had spent more time just sitting in that room with them as the thing got bigger, like in the room versus them coming to a conference room where they felt like I was really paying attention at a closer level. I wish John had done more of that too. We, it's not that we ignored them. It's just like we could have done way better. So. That sends a really powerful message as a leader to be involved in the different parts of the business. For almost a year in Service Autopilot, I moved outta my office and I sat with the onboarding and, uh, training or onboarding training and writing team and sales team, like in a big area. I thought it sent a message and I wanted to hear what was going on. And so like, there's lots of ways to have this conversation. Like there's that, that you keep on your schedule, and then there's the surfacing of issues. This is what I think Elon Musk does. I think that's his model. He just swarms to the biggest problem in the business and he jumps in, co-works with the team, and then he moves on. And I think that accomplishes a lot more than just solving a problem. Yeah. Wow. Did that make, did I answer what you were asking?

Yeah, it was great. I got lots of, lots of things to do. Okay. I think the one part, the one part that like I probably hit me the hardest, or like I'm gonna have to think about, cuz everything you said was, I will take action on. The one part is, you said like not doing the coaching thing. I agree. I think the part that is pulling me in the other direction is I feel like the owners at Augusta, a lot of them are outgrowing a lot of the systems that got them to $1 million and they're failing in leadership like that, that talent acquisition, like the elements outside of the business, even like health stuff and like other elements. And I'm trying to figure out a way if I can I think it's, go ahead.

I think it's different for your, I think of your franchisees as your team members. I could think of where you might argue against a few points here. I'm saying that you aren't building this big, broader coaching organization across the industry. Oh, because it will take a lot from you. That's what I thought you were saying.

Oh yeah. No, this would be like more like maybe I could allocate an hour of my time a week. To really getting the next level for the owners.

I'm glad you— okay, I'm really glad you brought this back up. That is not what I was talking— I like, that to me is a no-brainer. I, I, I believe as you become a more senior leader inside an organization, your predominant job is getting the right people on the team and coaching people and getting the wrong people off the team. Like, your job is to grow people. When I sold Service Autopilot, I went to the, I went to the office every day. I worked A full day, I did all the stuff. And then whenever I was kind of done, meaning I sold the business and I like, I could stop doing anything I wanted to stop doing. I realized how much of my day was not actually spent doing any service help. It was coaching the team, working with the team, talking to team members about personal stuff that they were asking me questions about. And, uh, I think that's a, that's what makes a person feel very different about an organization and wants to be at your organization. So I think about your Franchisees as your team members, like you're all in this thing together. You gotta grow them. Like I would want to grow my COO. I'd wanna grow my head of op or of customer service, of onboarding. I want to grow them, give them more skills. So whatever you, I would invest in them. Franchisees are exact same thing. You, whatever you gotta do to invest in them, you do that. That's how you grow this business.

So frustrating. It's just so probably my biggest frustration this year has been seeing them hit roadblocks. I have no, I know I have nothing to do with the business or it's just they're entrepreneurial, it's just like outside life, like stress stuff, like, like out of whack diets, like things that we're, I, I feel like, can I just get these people aside from people that need the tactics around door hangers and running your ads and get them aside and kind of almost like an academy situation, uh, a little bit more on non-business.

Yeah. So this is a uphill battle right here. We used to do a, I think it was like a monthly lunch and learn and we talked about all these things. Like we did the health thing, we did the finance thing. You had to be a little careful on the finance thing because you're an employer. You got to be a little, but you know, we did all, it's like some people are receptive to it. A lot of people aren't, and I don't know how to change them. And I, and I think that's team members and franchisees will kind of be like the same. Like you'll, this, you're going to have the same problem with both groups. And so some people are going to be rock stars and some are not. And it just, they're just going to have to arrive at a place in life when they finally decide. By looking at other franchisees that are living a certain way that, wow, look at the results they give. Or they get to a place where they're so frustrated with the life they're living, they're ready to make change. And so all you can do is keep showing up, having the conversation. And, uh, one of the ways I like that, I think when you alluded to Academy, is I think where we got a lot of the value in Academy was getting everybody together. I don't know if you kind of alluded to that. So how can you have— I think you do stuff like this already, but And I don't know what you're experiencing, but I think there's magic in getting the people together and, um, and they become friends. And so it's less about Mike delivering the messaging and eventually it's, you know, two guys on your, in within your world talking to each other via text or whether they're being challenged and they're growing themselves and they're excited about doing new things because they see what the other people that they've become friends with and they respect are doing. And so it's constantly about, about you, I think, setting the example and then teaching, but you've got to bring them all together. That's what I would— I think you're doing that, but that's how I would, uh, that's what I think worked best in academy. So how can you get them together more often?

Yeah. Well, thank you. I have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 things I'll be doing here next week.

So, It's too much. It's a journey over time.

All right. Non-financial advice. Did you come prepared?

I came. Yeah.

Yeah.

I, this is, I came, I came, I actually did a little data work to come up with this one. I have, I have non-financial financial advice. I have financial advice. This SpaceX IPO thing, man.

Oh man.

That was mine.

I have it written down right here.

So, um, I did, and I did invest in the SpaceX IPO. I said I was not going to, but I did. I only did it. It's like a couple hundred grand. It's like there's nothing.

I was gonna slide it in earlier when you mentioned like having, like you could be more risky. I was like, you could have invested in the SpaceX IPO, but sure enough you did. This guy. Yeah.

Yeah.

But this is a dog new tricks.

Well, and I bear, I mean, I barely put any money in it. I took no risk., and, um, I sold it at— went on the open. So I, I bought it $135 and sold it $150.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

So yeah, you didn't wait till like $230? That's crazy.

Well, I had just given instructions that I don't want to hold the investment, so I thought maybe they'd sell at the end of the day. They sold at the open. Wow. So anyway, shot up such a— but whatever. Here's the— here, but that's— it is annoying. I will tell you, it is annoying. But, um, but I, I never, I never, the IPO does not make any sense to me, but that doesn't, it doesn't have to make sense because Tesla Elon Musk stuff doesn't make sense. But I, but I do want to say a couple things about this on why, and I, they're gonna, I don't know if anybody's ever thought about it this way, and I just want to make a few points. This is why I did, I was not a fan of the IPO. I am so glad that they're not letting SpaceX onto the S&P 500 index for a year. Because I would be very nervous. All right, so are they—

is NASDAQ allowing them?

They're letting them, uh, the— yeah, they're letting them faster. I think it's like really fast. So yeah, okay, so let me give you a couple— let me give you analogy. I'm gonna give you a couple analogies, and I did the some research yesterday to put these numbers together. Okay, all right, if City Turf was valued like SpaceX—

oh yeah, this is fun, I did the same thing—

we'd be worth $2.7 billion. Let's go, beach Revenue are, I guess revenue, because they don't have— they're both based on revenue.

Yeah.

So we do our $2.7 billion. That's how crazy this is. Now I understand City Turf doesn't matter to the future of humanity.

You really got to work on your messaging, bro.

Come on. Exactly. We're going to do a trillion dollars in the next 5 years. So anyway, all right. But here's, I'm going to give a couple more stats like that, but let me, this, this is something I theorize a lot. So I did a little research. It does seem. My theory was retail investors are driving this more than institutional, and it is. So I have this theory because I've talked to several people that have asked me if I'm going to invest in the IPO. And I'm like, no, I'm not really into IPOs because 70% of the time they're down. And when the walk-up comes, comes.

And there's some crazy ones on this one.

Yeah. Okay. So I theorize that a lot of people will think like, hey, if I had invested in Google or Amazon or whatever, I'd be rich today, so I don't wanna miss out on SpaceX. And the, the, the point I wanna make is this one. Okay. If you had invested in Google, you would've been investing at a $27 billion valuation. That's how much the company was. So you would've 167x'd your investment to get to become rich because you invested in Google. If you're investing at SpaceX, I haven't looked at SpaceX today, but as of yesterday, I think it was worth around $2.8 trillion. So if you were to get, if you were to get rich, like investing in Google, to make that happen, SpaceX has to become worth one half of a quadrillion dollars to get the same return on your money.

That's good.

A quadrillion. 500 quadrillion. Okay. Like I just like, so I think people imagine that it's gonna, you know, that they could get that. It's like the math can't even work.

I'm just hoping when we, when we go public in about 10 years, I'm just hoping the current Like pers— like ideas around going IPO is something like that then, cuz it's always up and down, right? Like 3 years ago you did not want to go public. Now, my goodness, the stage is set for Anthropic and OpenAI. Yeah. Uh, OpenAI and it's even Stripe and all these other companies. But it's crazy.

But let, but let me give you two, two more numbers.

Okay. Okay.

All right. That just like, this is like nothing else. So I, so I'm like, well, it's clearly the Elon Musk premium, which, go ahead.

Sorry, I have a question. Uh, just for the audience, cuz they're gonna wanna figure this out. What, what's the revenue multiple? Do you remember off the top of your head?

150 times revenue.

150 times. You get it. All right, cool. So for anyone watching, just take your revenue, multiply it 150, and that's your valuation.

Yeah, that's accessible.

So SpaceX, your lawn care business. Yeah. Yeah.

So SpaceX, uh, did like $18 billion, $19 billion in revenue times 150. That's how you get the multiple. Okay.

That's good.

All right. So then you're like, okay, well it's the Elon Musk. Premium, right? Except, and it is, but except the premium on Tesla is only 13 times revenue. Think about that. So Tesla does almost $100 billion. They're valued at $1.2 trillion. I think these numbers are pretty close. And SpaceX does $18 billion and is valued at well over double what Tesla.

So that's probably going to buy, and it's probably going to buy out Tesla.

Probably. Yeah. And now's the time. If he could buy Tesla right now, this valuation.

Oh, he gets control back. He'll get control back of Tesla.

Yeah. And then I'm going to give one more. This is my last one. So if— so Cisco, I was like in my early 20s during the '90s, the dot-com boom and bust, and, um, Cisco was the poster child of insanity in the stock market. And then when Cisco crashed, it took 25 years for their price in 2000 or 1999 to get back to where they were, they were valued at 46 times revenue. And Tesla and SpaceX is valued at 150. It's beyond comprehension. So this is why I was scared of it going into it. And I thought, you know, it is Elon Musk. This could go really good. But I just, I'm not a gambler. I don't go to, I don't gamble in Vegas. I don't bet on things. I just, it's not who I am. So that's why I had a hard time buying the IPO. So when I had an opportunity to sell immediately, they, like, when I had to put in my order, we didn't know yet how well orders were going to do. And, um, you know, so it still felt like gambling, so I hardly put any money on it. Anyway, I think a lot of information.

One thing I thought was interesting was the revenue from, uh, from X is basically halved. And so he's basically, he spun, that's now in SpaceX essentially, but he does, he won't look like he has an L there. Like most people, if you buy a business, at a premium, like $40 billion, and then revenue halves over the course of 4 or 5 years, that's an L. But this is not going to be an L because it's wrapped up into SpaceX.

So there is nobody like this guy. It's unbelievable.

Like, crazy.

It's unbelievable. He's so good at what he does.

My non-financial advice was to not buy SpaceX. Um, I think the lockups are going to absolutely obliterate There's a very low float. Only 5% of shares are for the public market.

I think it's 3%.

Is it 3?

I think it's 3, but you should double-check me. You might be right at 5. I, I have been listening to a couple of things and I thought they said 3.

Okay. All right. Um, so here's, here's the, we're going to end on this. 365 days from now, it'll be June 17th, 2027. All right. We both got to figure out or come up with what our prediction for the stock price is going to be, and then we'll revisit this in a year and see who's close.

Okay. What is the stock price now?

Uh, it's like $215 this morning.

I'll let you look. I don't— yeah, I can't get to it on my computer. So yesterday it was probably over $200 to get to $2.8 trillion.

Okay. Just for the record, $195.

Okay. $195. What's the market? Can you see the market cap on there?

Yeah. Market cap right now is $2.53 trillion. 2.5. Yeah, I just want to highlight, I just want to highlight that you could have been 30% up on your money if you just want to hold a few more days.

This is— yeah, thanks for that. I trust me, I already, I already think about it. It's like, I already think about it. I don't need to think about it.

Okay, so currently $2.53 trillion market cap and the stock price is $195. Um, it hit an all-time high of $130.

Well, $135 was the entry price.

Sorry, I apologize. Hit a top of $230. That was its peak. That's crazy. That was like— it's over $3 trillion. But for today, it's $195. Are you doing some sort of discounted cash flow or whatever?

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Yeah.

So if this happens, if we get to Mars. Exactly.

Yeah, no, I was— I'm doing very simple math. I got my number.

Okay, all right, I got my number. Go ahead, go ahead.

$97.

Ooh, so just basically a half.

Yeah, and it's— my logic is that the market cap will be closer to the market cap, but dang, they're gonna bring Tesla. Dang, that complicates it.

Oh yeah, you're tough. Okay, let's assume they do bring in Tesla, which is right now $1.4, $1.5 trillion. Really? Yeah.

Oh, that complicates this. That's harder math.

Um, man, now they're making it difficult on us. You can't just—

it is—

see, I thought 50% discount. That's what I'm thinking.

Yeah, I was thinking it's going to get closer, valued closer to Tesla, but it— which would still be an extreme valuation because the revenue is 20% of Tesla's revenue. And Tesla is a really exciting story too because that's the robot story.

Robots. Yeah.

So I think the robot story is like way better than the space story.

Like, oh my goodness.

In the near term.

The prospectus for the IPO was so hilarious. Like you could have literally ripped that out of a cartoon book and been like, here. And then you're like, oh, Elon said this, definitely going to happen.

I was listening to a podcast that I like quite a bit. It's called Compound and Friends. And it's a financial show. And they were saying on the show, I think this is where I got my 3% float from. They were saying, man, they were given some example of something Elon just said. They're like, if he, if somebody had said this 20 years ago, they'd be in prison. This would be a violation of securities law. And he can just do whatever he wants to do. Like he's just like such a promoter anyway. Um, yeah, I was kind of thinking that the valuation would still be really crazy extreme, but it would come down to closer market, uh, market cap closer to the $1 trillion number. Which would still be way high— more highly valued than Tesla. Yeah, but when you bring Tesla in, I don't know.

I forget, something, something along the lines of 13 times more shares will be available in one year compared to now. So like, just the amount of supply of—

yeah, we'll change everything.

Market— like, it just will. I think it's gonna be half. So I guess we're right around close.

That's—

that stinks.

Yeah, I should have—

I should have just made up like, we're just gonna be 400— we're going to— we're going to $7 trillion market cap.

You know what the problem is? I wouldn't want to be a short seller on this thing, even though I feel like 95% confident this thing is going down when the lockup comes out. I'd still be scared to be a short seller on it because you have no idea what insanity is going to happen.

Yeah, man. Is it— is that because of Elon or is it because of the technology you think it's going to get there?

I think because of Elon.

Yeah.

Not because of— I, I think the tech— I, I would— I wouldn't bet against the guy. It's just that I think Starlink's a really good business from everything I've heard. I mean, great business. I don't— I, I think he'll figure out the AI thing. I do. I think I wouldn't bet against him on that.

He gets cursor at these—

this small stock. Ah, I wouldn't bet against him at all on those two things. It's just that the— and I wouldn't bet against him on space. It's just that that is a very long story out into the future.

And so, um, I didn't, I didn't feel so bad about saying, hey, in 8 to 12 years when we go public, we're going to be focusing on robotic mowers. I was like, I feel like somehow I might be undershooting, you know. Maybe you're going to be— we're going to be mowing it from outer space We're going to be dropping helicopters or something, you know, a data center is going to be running it from outer space. That's right. Command center is going to go to space so we don't have to pay taxes in Washington state. There you go.

I do think what this teaches you is you need to bring in some kind of a space AI element into your—

that's right. That was the actual real truth of what you wanted to tell me.

Yes, that's what you need to do.

Oh man.

So cool. It's fascinating. It's amazing stuff. I don't know how you have it, folks. Yeah, go out there, pump the stock, put all your money in it, all your money into it.

Let's go. Awesome. Thank you all. Appreciate it.

See you later.