lawyer threatened to shut down my lawn care business [cease & desist]

Hey, everyone, It's Mike Andes, landscapebusinesscourse.com and today I'm going to tell you about one of the lowest moments in my professional career. When I thought I was going to close my business, when I thought I was going to get sued, and when I thought I really questioned and doubted all the decisions I had made in starting Augusta Lawn Care. So Augusta Lawn Care, for many of you, you now know we have 40 plus locations around United States of Canada. We're franchise, we're growing really quickly. All the rest of it. That's what most of us, most of you know, because in the past year, 90% of my subscribers have come in the past 12 months when we've already been franchised. But let me tell you about a moment in time when I did not think Augusta Lawn Care was going to make it. And I question everything in starting. So what happened is I was 18 years old, I just dropped out of medical school and the application process for going to my MD after getting my bachelor's degree started in college when I was really young, 13 years old, everyone thought I was going to become this young doctor, all the rest of it. But at 18 years old, I said, you know what, Instead of going and getting my md, I'm going to go start my lawn care business. I'd already been mowing lawns as a kid since I was 11, but I was going to actually make it real. I was going to do it by myself and start Augusta Lawn Care. So in doing that, I was inspired by the fact that I love golf. I loved Augusta National. I loved the Masters golf tournament. I was like, you know what I'm going to call it Augusta Lawn Care. My theme is going to be like having birdie par eagle, kind of like packages all around golf theme. I was going to have the white overalls that the caddies wear at Augusta national and at the Masters tournament. That was gonna be our uniform. And I was like, that's what it's gonna be. And so I actually used the font from the Masters tournament and I actually used the same flag that they have at the Masters logo. And I'm gonna go ahead and throw a picture here of that, of the truck so you can see it's like it's kind of a bit of a ripoff. It wasn't good. I didn't know anything about trademarks, copyrights, or what I could and could not do in patent infringement and all. I didn't know anything like that. I was just getting started. I just want to grow my business and literally the first year of business, now we're starting to grow. That first year I had $29,000 in revenue, so not really growing big. I was part time, I was working part time in my long term business, part time as a personal trainer at Anytime Fitness. And then I was going to school at night to get my master's in business administration. And literally in that first year, I get an email. I'm out mowing with my sister. I still remember the exact place where we were. We were just pulling up to a lawn. The lawn was about $27 cut. I still remember the exact spot where it's at. It's right next to the Birch Bay water slides. And we were pulled up and I opened up my email and there's a new email, and it came from like an attorney's office in Chicago. I opened it up and sure enough, it's a cease and desist letter. If you don't want. A cease and desist letter is. A cease and desist letter is basically saying you, you either need to stop something or you need to stop your business. Like, either stop doing this change or we're gonna sue you. And they basically gave me two weeks to change either my name or make sure that any likeness to Augusta national and the golf course was removed. And that was very, very scary. They did not parse word. They made it very clear that they were gonna take all sorts of legal action. They were going to sue. They were going to. They showed all like, it was a big packet. They showed their trademark. And the fact of the matter is, they can't trademark the word Augusta because the word Augusta is a place. There's Augusta, Georgia, there's other Augustas in the United States. You can't trademark the name, the city name, but what you can trademark is likeness. And they had attributed the word Augusta with golf, and more specifically with a little yellow flag and more specifically with that font that I used in my lawn care business. So somehow they thought I was a threat to their branding. So they basically said, hey, look, you need to completely make it very clear you have nothing to do with Augusta national, nothing to do with our golf course, nothing to do with the Masters golf tournament. And so that was, for me, it was like, look, I had just spent $3,000 getting uniforms, putting decals on my trailer, decals on my truck, everything, business cards, flyers, advertised using this brand and this logo. And now here I am doing a trademark infringement against one of the most powerful organizations when it comes to sports. They basically have unlimited funds because their memberships they just basically take their members, divide up their costs every year, and everyone pays because you're talking about millionaires and billionaires that are members there that never play golf, but they're just a member of Augusta national. So they have like unlimited resources to come after and pay lawyers. It was very clear that that's what was happening, because the amount of time and eff, those lawyers put into that packet to send to me was crazy. And I wanted to email back and be like, look, bro, I'm just doing like 15 lawns here with my sister and this is not a big operation. But they did not buy that. And sure enough, they're like, no, you have to change your brand. You have to change your website. You cannot have a picture of the golf course because you can't have pictures of Augusta national on your website. It's a no. No. So I learned a lot about trademarks. Trademarks are basically something that protects a logo, protects the likeness of a brand. And so in that time, in that moment, I remember thinking, you know what, this is crazy. I'm out mowing lawns 10, 12 hours a day in the heat. I had really bad allergies. So I would be sneezing, coughing, I'd get a rash along my chest. I would have snot coming out. Your eyes would get all itchy, and then when you scratch them, they get all red and puffy. And usually by two or three o' clock, I couldn't see very well because of that. And so I'd actually have to stop working, go put ice on them and all the rest of it. It was horrible. And here I had just like kind of showed my whole dream of going to medical school. That was the thing I was gonna do for so long. Everyone knew me as like the young kid who went to college early, was gonna become a really young doctor, become a surgeon, and was really good at research in the lab and all the rest. That's what I was known for. And here I am now, and I'm mowing lawns and all the emails from professors. I remember professor calling me to his office the last week before I left college. And I had made this decision. It was like right around graduation time when I actually walked and called me in the office and basically told him that you made him made a horrible decision. You need to think long term. You think about what you can do for humanity and society and healthcare and medicine. And like, that was a lot of pressure. But I knew that I couldn't be in that system forever with the insurance and bureaucracy and stay in one thing for 40 years. I was an entrepreneur at heart. I wanted to go scratch other itches. I wanted to grow, I wanted to build. I didn't want to have to have red tape and insurance and bureaucracy and the medical system and pharmaceutical industry telling you what to do. So anyways, in that moment, though, you question a lot here now I'm just getting started. I am just working with my sister a little bit. She helped me, like, part time. And we're mowing lawns. And here we're gonna have to shut the business down or change the brand. So, yes, we ended up changing the brand. Augusta Lawn Care now has nothing to do with Augusta National. We make it very clear. It has to do with Max or mascot. We changed the whole likeness, had a whole brand. RE infrastructure, like, re changed everything. Had to redo the truck, all the rest of it. Drained my dollars down to almost nothing in this change. And over the next six to 12 months was an absolute struggle financially just to get off of that. Like, yeah, when you're a kid, allows like four or $5,000 to kind of switch everything out. Change the website, change the. The uniforms, change the logo, take all the decals. I just put all my trucks and trailers off. Like, that was a big expense. Took me a while to get out from underneath that. But maybe you're there. Maybe you just got a cease and desist letter, but maybe you've gotten something like a family emergency or a medical issue or something that's come with the family, the business, an employee left. And there comes a moment in time where it is absolutely that moment when you have to decide whether you're going to get back up or you're just going to give in. You're going to. You know what? Maybe this business thing isn't for me. Maybe this entrepreneurship thing isn't me. Maybe I should just go back and get my job. And, you know, without that, without that moment of really a gut punch and that reality check, that, no, no, I'm going to keep going here. Like, that was a turning point for me because I knew from then on, like, there was no turning back. There was no going back to medical school. It had been a question mark in my mind for a while. Like, maybe I just do this for a year and I go back. I'd still be young, I'd still have that whole rec, you know, kind of like, thing in people's mind. But I was like, you know what? I'm going for this. Like, this is we're all in. And that moment when you kind of like, cut ties with your road back, your bridge back to safety is an incredible moment. As an entrepreneur, you really can go for it. I encourage you, if you're in that moment, you're going through that tough time, the bank balance is low, you can't make payroll, you're discouraged, you're completely overworked, and you're tired. Go for it. You got one shot at this. And maybe you can always get another job. You can always go back to school, you can always go back to the job that's safe, but go for it. Just go 110% for it. I still remember having that moment in time where I had to make the decision, hey, after this, cease and desist, I could just close it down and go back to school. Or am I going to really go for this? And I encourage you, have that discussion, sit in that moment and really make a conscious decision. Am I going to go back? That's not a bad thing. I would become a good doctor, probably, and help people. Not a bad thing. You going back and having a good career, having a safer job, not a bad thing. But ask yourself, are you going to regret that in 10 or 15 years when you look back and you said, man, what if? And I encourage you, like, what Ifs are something you don't want in 10 years? You can always go get the other job. You can always take the safer route. But what if you would have stuck it out? Maybe you're not even entrepreneur, maybe you're not a business owner, but what if you would have stuck with that company and worked through that hard moment in time when you didn't really like your manager or. Or there's really, really tough hours, but you worked through it. And now they started to grow, the company started to thrive, and now you're a leader in that organization. Like, what if you don't want to live with that? You don't want to leave your place of employment because it got hard, or leave school because it got hard. The what ifs of life down the road will eat you alive. And I knew in that moment that if I quit and I just said, you know what? We're going to cancel it. Thank you for that. Cease and desist. We're just going to close the business out and I'm gonna go back to school. I know that today, me, now, looking back eight years ago, I would have a lot of what ifs. What would have happened if I would have kept running Augusta Lawn Care? What if I would have actually gone and just changed the brand and hired employees and really gone for it. What if you don't want to live with what ifs? So if you're in that moment, that discouraging moment, that time when it just seems like you hit the ground floor, I encourage you ask yourself, will I live with a what if moment? If I look back at this junction in time and would ask myself, what would be different now if I would have made a different decision back then? Maybe you don't have a cease and desist letter, but maybe something crazy is going on. Maybe you've hit rock bottom, but I encourage you, keep going forward. I'm Mike Ganise, unseenbusinesscourse.com See you in the next video.