Lead Services are STEALING your Money!

Next caller is coming in from 9, 8, 4. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.

Hey, Mike. So I called in earlier, but I have a new question that I just thought of.

Go ahead.

So piggyback off a previous call about somebody that was having a hard time with the phone calls and such because they're busy doing the work. Somebody in this situation, because I know you're running the max AI, can you like give any statistics on what your experience with the max AI is and how customers are reacting to it?

Yep. By the way, I'm gonna drop people out of the call once they answer a question because there's, they're piling up. So feel free to keep calling in, but I don't want people have to wait 30 minutes plus in these call cues. So yes, in terms of, if you do this, you will have.

10 to 15% of people will be unhappy about it. They don't want to talk to a robot. That number will continue to go down the same way that when you required credit cards on file. There's, there's people that used to give, have a problem with it and now it's basically standard. So that will continue to go down. If you are using something out of the box, typically it's extremely robotized. It's a long delay, like you're, it's very, it's very painful to sometimes talk to them. And so I would be careful about using something out of the box right now. I'm always monitoring what they're doing. We have full customization of the code. So like we have a big leg up. But as an independent operator, you're not going to have that leverage to spend on getting your own, you know, set up. So I would just keep watching it. I would say for now I would really prioritize just answering the phone. And you could have it where even if you had a call service that only if you missed a call, they would pick it up. Super valuable. Even if you're paying 2, 3, $4aminute, like it's worth it because only 37% of people that when they hit voicemail are going to leave a message. That means 63% of your leads that call you after hours or when you're busy, you're missing that, that customer. And yes, you can call them back, but the likelihood of them picking up is low. And so I would say before you start doing the AI stuff, I would currently it's going to be cheaper and it's going to be a better customer experience if you're getting a Few calls a day that are missed, have it forwarded to some sort of remote call service. There's Call Boss, there's Jill's office. Are they the best? No. But they're going to answer the phone 100% of the time instead of 37% of the time you getting the actual information from that customer. And so I just. That would be my, my general kind of overview of, of AI. Like, I think it's going to take over the next five years, like until 30, 20, 30. This will eventually become commonplace. Unless you have the money to spend a lot on customization of the model. I would just wait for the technology to get to you and in the meantime, pay for missed calls to just be forwarded to a call service. That would be my recommendation. Like bluntly. And I'll tell you when that changes and when I think some of these out of the box stuff is good enough. But if the 37% is not 70%, like by having a robot answer the phone instead of the voicemail doesn't go from like 37% to say 70%, you just. It's not worth it. And a lot of times I see the out of these box services, the, the, the amount of people that leave a information with the robot is like 40 or 45%. So it's like, yes, you're going to get leads. They would just list a voicemail otherwise. So that's where like what we're always measuring. And until we got above 70%, we never rolled out Max AI because there's not enough benefit to, to actually implementing AI if they're getting the same amount of people leaving information as they would otherwise with just a voicemail.

Hey, Mike. So this year my name is Hector and this year we doubled our profit or we made double than we made last year. But I just feel like it didn't. I don't see much profit.

Yep.

So I just, I'm struggling with that. And the.

So you doubled your revenue, but there's not a lot of cash in the bank.

Yeah. Not that I said I would like to see, like this year we're 420 and last year we made 220.

So I'm just trying to figure out where I am lacking. Where, like where. How can I figure out, like, why there's not enough profit.

Yeah.

So I know for sure I'm gonna raise processes for next year.

Okay.

But.

I just don't know if you could help me out with that.

Totally. So, like, first off, I would say don't beat yourself too much. You Basically doubled the size of the business. Your growth rates, like, over 90%. So growth sucks cash. Anytime you're growing by more than 50% year over year, I consider you in a high growth stage. So you probably had to buy another truck. You have to buy more equipment. If you just took that cash alone out of your bank or put it back in your bank account, you'd probably be feeling, okay. That's an extra 30, 40, 50 grand that's in your bank account. The thing that's really deceiving is you look at your P and L like, man, I should be profitable. Your profit and loss statement does not show asset purchases. So if you bought a truck, it doesn't go in your P and L, it goes in your balance sheet. And so you look like, man, I see all this profit. I'm supposed to be profitable on my profit and loss statement. Well, your truck was purchased on your. Your balance sheet. And if you pay it with cash, there's not even interest expense coming on your P and L. So, like, growth sucks cash in so many different ways. That'd be my first thing. The next thing I would say is, like, what you're determining now is, like, what is your pain threshold for growth versus profit? Because if you're gonna keep growing super fast, next year, you're gonna do 800,000 revenue, you're probably not gonna have a lot of cash in the bank. But if that's so painful, like, not having that cash and it stresses you out, then we spend a year, we raise prices, we don't buy more trucks, and we stay in profit mode. And so it's really. This is not a matter of, like, why is this happening? It's a matter of you're growing, therefore you have less cash. If we stop grow capacity and raise prices, this pain will go away. But is that pain of not growing greater than the pain of not having money in the bank? That's really only a question you can decide on. Does that make sense?

Yeah. Okay. Okay, I see. Well, I guess a lot of people have asked. It is like, when they figure out if you buy another truck.

Yep. So when you're at capacity. So when you're using that truck every single day, when it's filled with employees, and the only way to get more out of that truck is working on the weekend. Once you have so many customers that's happening, then you're at capacity. At capacity. You now have the determination, do I stay in growth mode and get another truck and keep getting more customers, or do I stay in profit mode? And that's going to be determined by answering the previous question, which is what's your pain tolerance and your threshold that you're willing to have in terms of risk when it comes to growing the business? Next callers from 401. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.

Hey. Hey, how's it going, Mike? Thank you so much. So I was giving a call. I know you did a whole video on this before, but. So I'm going from one location where we're doing $3 million, but we. We do a residential fencing.

Okay.

And I'm opening up two new locations, so I'm going to Connecticut and Massachusetts. So. And I really couldn't grasp the concept of, like, the accounting. Like, how should I set up the accounting? Am I overthinking it or what would be the best bet? Because I do want the ability in the future to sell off, like, an individual location.

Got it. Yeah. So you're probably overthinking it. Almost everyone does. I did when I first started. Multiple locations. Generally, what's going to be the. The way I recommend is an S Corp on the top or your holding company underneath that. You're going to have three different LLCs. So that way down the road, if you wanted to sell one of them off, you could sell one of the LLCs. So, you know, from a financing perspective, you're still just going to file one tax return with the S Corp, but you could break those LLCs off because they have different ein numbers down the road if you want to sell them off.

Okay. And not. Not dba. So open up complete businesses. So the pushback I'm getting from people is, well, that llc, you won't be able to get your own credit for each llc. Or will I be able to?

So two things. First off, the reason I stated to do the separate LLCs instead of a DBA is twofold. One, you said it could be out of state. Second is because you stated that you wanted to potentially sell them off. It's going to be easier to sell them off if they're separate entities than if they're just DBAs under one entity. The second thing is, in terms of. What was that last question you said? I was going to address that last part.

Yeah, like, like, like getting their own credit card that way. Yeah.

So, yeah. Like you can. Yeah. Like, are you worried about building their credit, like the business credit score, or you worry about getting actual credit cards and opening accounts?

Yeah. So opening credit cards because we're able to, like, get that 5% cash back on things like that and do things like that.

You know, if you have a different LLC with different ein numbers, you'll be able to open up credit cards underneath each one, have different accounts under each one. I would recommend keeping them all under like one bank so you can easily transfer money between the two. Do journal entries of say your general liability, which might be over the S Corp or admin costs that are split between the entities. But you can absolutely open up credit, different credit cards underneath each of the LLCs. And that's why also having the different LLCs allows you to have a different ein number and be able to open up separate, you know, checking accounts, credit cards, et cetera for each location.

And you would say brand new Google, my business account. And how about should I do brand new Facebook page or just based that off of the one that we have that work.

How far away are these locations? Like from a driving perspective?

Yes. 50 miles.

Okay, that's not too bad. I'd probably keep it under one. Do like a different branch locations. So like home service web design, we do this quite often and that is like have different branches underneath in different locations. For a website you could do that. And then just be cognizant of the fact that probably doing different Google listings for each because 50 miles, I wanted to be showing up in those markets separately, but I'd probably do different Google listings each for one quote location on my main website, but it'd be tied to one. So the domain authority within that triangulation of those three locations would be improved.

That makes sense. Okay, awesome. Thank you so much, Mike. Thanks for everything you do.

You got it. Absolutely. And local number three six zero. Welcome the show. Thank for coming on. Can you hear me? Do we have. Yeah, I can hear you. How you doing?

Hey Mike, I. I wanted to ask you. So you said that you did the.

You started like you're testing out the door hangers for the instant. Like the instant quote winter service door hangers. What. What type of response have you seen so far like this from doing it like with the franchisees or location.

Is that for mowing or what services are you talking about.

For winter service? Like the instant cool door hangers.

Yeah. So like we haven't finished an entire season, so I don't want to speak on it yet. We've seen much better results when we're able to do instant pricing drive traffic from online to the forms. So we've been testing a bunch with that and that's what we're going to be focusing on. The actual door Hangers, it's tough to in a door hanger explain to someone that they actually can say like what you want to focus on is saving the money. Because if you just focus on the pain, the problem is with during winter is like they don't think they have a pain.

Yeah, nothing's growing.

And so it's really a matter of like trying to get most of your mowing customers convert to winter services. And then if you're gonna actually try to sell, you know, people who have never done service before, you really gotta pitch the savings like hey, you will save $500, you will save a thousand dollars by simply using us bi weekly instead of twice a year.

Okay, I got that.

Cool. Yeah, so probably by like early next spring once we've actually seen an entire season. And we're also doing a whole bunch of testing around the actual online instant pricing form. And how do we get. Because bottom line, if you're doing a door hanger, the amount of people that need your services for winter services so much lower. And so how can we use online to kind of use as a filter to get as many people to the form as possible versus with door hangers like instant pricing for mowing. Everyone needs their lawn mowed. So I can, it's way easier to instant pricing for that because everyone has an actual pain. And so when they see the solution, it's easy for them like yes, I'll take it. Whereas with winter services I really need to convince them that it is a cheaper option. It look makes their property look better year round, et cetera. So. All right, cool. We had some other callers in the queue. Again just as a reminder, welcome everyone to the Q and A call and show. If you've never been here before, I take these calls directly from your phone. This is 361-733-3333 is the call in number. I'll answer your questions and throughout today I'm going to be having some gifts to unwrap and give all of you. So let's get started. Got one here from Wally. I'm old. Have two successful residential home service businesses debating whether to get into lawn care as our current client demographic seems to fit well tons of competition in here in in central New Jersey. But that does not mean there's still not opportunity for a well oiled machine. Like if there is a lot of competition it says that there is a lot of demand for the service. And so what I'm usually looking for is a growing population. I don't really look at the amount of Competitors, because the vast majority of them, 90% plus of them will not have a good website. So I can kill them there in terms of ranking. And then there is the other, you know, small fraction of the. Even the 10% that have a good website actually do professional service, show up on time, answer their phones. 24, like answer their phones at all. And so it's really a matter of I look at the amount of competitors as like, oh, there's plenty of demand. I've just got to figure out how to carve a piece of that out. Bugout Termite. I'm not a long guy here, but learn more about marketing side of things. Very similar to pest control. Yes, absolutely. Okay, cool. Let's go ahead and go to the phone. Next callers from 9, 8 5. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.

Hey, this is Cody Graber with Trinity Tree llc.

Hey Cody, how you doing?

Good. So the question I have for Mike is when would renting a vehicle, not leasing when would renting a vehicle be better than purchasing a new vehicle? If it's short term, yeah.

How short term are we talking? Like a couple days or a week or two or a couple months?

What are you looking at, six months to a year?

Yeah. Like if, if, for example, I had a contract that I knew was only going to last six to 12 months, I might consider renting a vehicle. I would bake it into the pricing of that contract knowing that at the end of that six to 12 months, I don't need the vehicle and I don't want it sitting on the books. The fixed expense for insurance I have to store it for after that, et cetera, or have excess capacity in the business after that contract is completed. So the only time I would usually do it short term is if I know for a fact that I am not going to need that piece of equipment in the future. Otherwise, what I would recommend is grow to capacity, get enough money in the bank account so that you can expand once you get that piece of equipment using marketing to be able to fill it up and use it consistently. You could also look at it as like instead of renting a vehicle for 12 months, which is going to cost you an arm and a leg if you do that. If you're going to spend 12 months on renting a truck, I would also set aside just some money. Hey, say let's. I know I'm going to need X amount in marketing to basically fill this truck up after this contract to ensure that I actually fully utilize this piece of equipment. But like right now, are you looking at a contract that's going to be like a 6 to 12 month stint, Cody?

So it's not a contract, it's month per month. Right now all my work vehicles are down. And rather than spending 12,000 to fix old vehicles, just looking at something short term. Yeah, to get the work done. Because I have bigger financial purchases that want to finance to help production go up within the true service.

Yeah. Like if you're, if you're looking at a contract that's month to month renting might actually make sense because what you don't want to do is go buy or lease or get into debt for a truck and then literally two months into the contract they just drop you. And so renting in this case actually might make sense, especially assuming that this contract is lucrative enough to actually make sense of spending the extra probably, I would imagine 2,3000, probably $1,500 $2,000 a month for renting the vehicle. Also, keep in mind there is liability associated with the fact that you're renting a vehicle. And if it gets damaged, you know, there is liability and there's insurance issues that could potentially rise to this. And if you damage it, like your insurance alone on a rental vehicle especially, they know you're using it for commercial, could get extremely expensive. Like you might be able to go get a truck or a, you know, some sort of a vehicle for rental. But if you tell them that you're using it for commercial and using it for tree service immediately, it's going to go up in terms of the liability insurance because they know what's going on. They know you're going to be around trees and heavy equipment, et cetera. And so I'd be careful about this because a lot of times if you don't disclose it and then you go, you rent the vehicle and then you go, it gets damaged, you know, tree chipper rolls into it, a tree falls on top of, et cetera, you might actually be in a worse position then. So from a liability perspective, like I feel obligated to tell you to keep that in check. Next caller from 3 1. 3. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.

Hi, Mike, how are you? Thank you so much for the landscape business course coming out for free tomorrow. Can't wait to watch all those videos and everything. I've been watching every video you probably ever uploaded. I just had a few questions. So I got like a pretty expensive like marketing plan coming up for the spring I'm doing. I have like 10,000 flyers I want to pass out I was wondering, like, how long does it usually take to pass those out if I have like a electric scooter and everything? I know it sounds dumb, but I thought you were doing that too. Like, how long can I estimate to pass all those out?

Yeah, it really depends on the. The neighborhood. Because if you have a cookie cutter neighborhood, you could easily get 100 plus out per hour. Now, if you're, if you're not doing the electric scooter, if you're walking slower, etc, you might be more on that 50 to 60 per hour, and they have longer driveways, etc, but easily you can do over 100 per hour. Especially if you're walking quickly, you're using an electric scooter. Like, all those things add up. And ultimately, when it comes to door hangers, assuming you're not, assuming you're canvassing, just putting them out instead of knocking on the door and actually talking to people, you can dramatically increase your results by simply increasing the speed at which you put them out and so optimizing where you put them in your bag, how many you're holding. If you have, like instant pricing ones, I'm gonna have, like two different prices. I'm not gonna write a new one for every single job because I can just get so much more out if they're just two prices only, like, small and large. And so I would say somewhere between the realm of 50 to 150, depending on the centrality, like how localized all of the. The properties are, and then also just your setup in terms of speed, how you have everything packaged, etc.

Okay, awesome. Thank you so much. And I had one more question. Like, I like two more questions. What? I feel like it'll be like about a 1 to 3% response rate. I'm sort of hurt.

What, so 1 to 3%, is that what you're kind of shooting for?

Yeah. For the response rate?

Yeah.

Like, for mowing me?

Yeah. Like, the only time I've ever seen 1 to 3% and like, especially on the higher end of that is in the dead heat of spring rush, like, the most high demand time. If you get 1%, I'd be pretty thrilled. That means basically every hour you're getting a new lead that's really, really, really good. So I would not expect 2 or 3% unless you are literally in the one to two weeks where the grass is just taking, like an absolute tear every three to four days. It probably needs cut. That's the only time I've ever seen where a 2 or 3% response rate comes up. If you can do 1%. Usually the math is so on your side because you pay someone that's 25, 30 bucks an hour with commissions, etc. And taxes to put out, put out door hangers, you're basically getting leads for 30 to 40 bucks. And that's. I would do that all day long. I would keep pumping money into that if you're trying to grow. But yeah, hope that answer your question.

Nice, nice. And also just one more. How big of a service area, like should I be shooting for? So like the city I'm in currently is like about 100,000 population, but the surrounding cities are probably like 60 to like 80. Like how big of a service area should I focus on when I'm just starting?

Yeah, ultimately, when it comes to service area, the smaller the better. The fastest way to grow your business in terms of top line revenue is add more services and add more service area. And so because of that, we always go after adding more services and adding more service area, we keep expanding how far we're willing to travel because it's the easiest and fastest way to grow revenue. It's also the least profitable because the further out you have to go, the more windshield time there is, the less your guys can make on pay for performance. The more gas and fuel you use, the more wear and tear in your vehicles. The list just keeps going on. Same thing with services. It's like, well, if I just add one more service, it's simple, it's easy. You know, we're already at the property. Yes, you're right. But again, that's another thing you need to train employees on. It's another sop you've got to create. That's another thing your office staff has got to be trained on and you create more and more bottlenecks by adding more service area and more services in the business. And so the thing I'm always thinking about is how do I take a one mile radius or a two mile radius and just boil the ocean? Because if I can take a one mile radius and I have 100,000 people, like you have plenty of opportunity to grow a big business. So the reason I say is because we built to almost a million dollars in annual revenue in blaine, Washington. You can look it up. B l a I n E. It's like six or seven thousand people population. But I was able to hit every single house for like 1000 bucks. With every door, direct mail, I was able to get in the local newspaper, full page, like $800. And so everyone knew who I was. Even though I had 1, 2, and 3 trucks when I was first getting started. For a few thousand dollars, I was just pummeling like Facebook ads all the time. And so you're able to get way better penetration. I would rather boil the puddle than trying to go after the ocean. And so even 100,000 people in my mind is too many to go after. I would be much more centralized and focused on, you know, 2,000, maybe 3,000 homes that you really want to go after. They're your ideal customer. Because if you get inside that market and you have door hangers and, and you have yard signs and you're knocking on the door and you're running Facebook ads in this small area, all of a sudden they start to see you everywhere. And you actually get the benefits of brand awareness instead of just direct response marketing. Brand awareness being that they think of you when they think of your service without you having. Having to see an ad. And it's only achieved by you constantly touching them. And the easiest way to touch someone more frequently is either A, spend way more in marketing or B, just go after a smaller market, a smaller area. And so this is why, like, in Blaine, everyone knew how I was. They thought I had like 10, 15 trucks when reality, it was simply a function of like, I do not. I do not market outside of this small area. Let's go to the next caller. I might have accidentally set this up where only 10 people can get in here in the call queue. So be patient in the call queue. I will get to you. Next caller is from 9:5:1. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.

Hey, how's it going, brother? This is actually Joey with bug out, termite and pest control.

Hey, Joey, how you doing?

Pretty good. Awesome. Yeah, I've been following you for a little while and I really appreciate all the education and stuff you put out there, man. It really helps. Going into my second year and I am trying to re exit from what I did this year, and there's a couple things that I know would help me that I struggle with. And reviews is one thing. Like I got 2020 this year. I wanted to get 100 like everybody else, obviously. And it's funny, is like you get people that are like amazing customers or even return customers and, you know, it's just one of those things. I'm horrible about it too, is actually leaving that person a review you forget or whatever. And I'm like starting to wonder if I need to do an incentive thing for all of my reviews and how to go about doing that through Facebook, Google, that kind of thing.

Yeah. So there's a couple things you can do. One you could do an incentive. I would be careful about saying hey, if you give me a review I will give you something. What I would probably recommend doing is like you just can't ask for a five star review. What you want to do is like if you give me a review there's a benefit and then their review could be a one star and I still give them the benefit. I would also say what you can do is for example tap into something other than just an incentive. Like if you're like hey I'll give you a gift card or whatever. Most people aren't going to go out of their way for that and usually their reviews aren't that great. What I would recommend doing, for example is saying hey, for every review I get I'm gonna be putting $50 towards a community outreach project. I'm gonna put that money towards giving that away to the local area of overgrown lawns or a community project. Everyone that leaves a review, we're putting that money all towards that and I'm gonna match it on top of that. So $50 from you, $50 from me. You don't have to put anything in. I just need to review and that money will go towards something good that might work. You can do where it is a function of really just making sure from an automations perspective you have this set up so when you a customer gets.

They'Re happy with their service or even if they just pay like an automatic payment to an invoice should just trigger off to them an email saying hey, are you happy with or satisfied with the service? And what we do is we just have a picture of yes and no. They click on yes it goes directly to Google Reviews. If they click no it goes directly to leaving us feedback on a form. Now all of that to say like we're actually doing this exact same thing in Copilot where in the Rate Us page if they do four stars or less on their feedback it just opens up a text box box where they fill that in. If they click 5 stars it immediately will just go to Google Reviews. So I would just automate it number one and then number two is anytime you're doing a walkthrough I would literally have we have it on our business cards in the back, a QR code and I would have it on your iPad or on your phone just like hey, I'm really thankful. I really appreciate. Usually this is like a highest point of activation for a review is after you've completed the service and they're happy you just finished the walkthrough. They're super excited. And especially one time projects even you could do this on first time mo's if that's what you're doing or you're in pest control. Right Joey?

Yeah, yeah.

So anytime there's like a pretty good transformation or you're doing a walkthrough of a property, there's been a big change. I just literally make sure it's super like it's part of your process to ask for a review and you could even just tie in like hey, in order to get. We will actually come back to your property in one month. It's gonna be a free inspection assuming that you leave us a review and tell us how we did on your service. So something you could tie the incentive also just around a follow up service. A lot of times like we would look. You would look at that as probably customer service is like hey, if there's a problem a month later I'll come back. I would tie that into the estimate or even in the walkthrough process like hey, if you leave us a review, we actually come back one month no matter what just to do an inspection and ensure the quality is still high.

Yeah, that's a really good. I actually really like the idea you had about making a go towards something because one issue we have is bed bug treatments for people that are low income because it is expensive. I'm actually one of the cheaper people to do it. But it's still really expensive for people to afford. That actually like that idea. I can try to promote that. And yeah, a lot of my customers are, you know, return customers. And even still they forget to get on Google or leave me the review. I'll text it to them. It's in their, their email receipts. But I do like that idea. Maybe I can start pitching that more that it's gonna actually it will help people because I've been trying to figure that out as far as like some people have like GoFundMe and stuff for that same thing other other pest control companies. So that's a great idea. I should definitely, definitely gonna attack that. And the only other quick question I was gonna ask you was what do you think about storefront locations? Like how much you know, is that traffic gonna really bring in if I get a storefront office? Because there's a few spots here in my small town where I'm like man, if I was there with a sign, how much more is that gonna Bring me in. On top of, I've actually adopted your instant door hanger quote thing too. So I'm gonna. This is gonna be the first year I try those. But just wondering, you know, what does storefront really bring in as far as, like, extra traffic?

Yeah, like a storefront for a home service business usually doesn't bring a lot of traffic in. What will bring the traffic in is the sign. And so what you can usually do is just negotiate with a business owner that has the property or the location you want to get a sign on their property. For example, if you went to a strip mall or a multifamily, like apartment complex and said, hey, I want to put a sign out next to you the highway, I will do all of your pest control for free indefinitely. As long as that sign is there, you'll get just as much exposure from that sign as if you would go pay 1500, 2000, $3000 a month for a retail space. And trust me, your walk in traffic from that, you would be lucky to get one or two a week. Like, there's just hardly any traffic for home services. When you have a physical space for services. If you're selling other products, like, if you were like, hey, we're going to open up a line of where we sell traps and bait and other pest control products, that becomes a conversation of probably getting several people in their day, and then you try to upsell them from the product into the service. That could make some sense. I could, I could see, I could get on track with that one. But in terms of actually having a storefront just for the sake of marketing, I think if you spend that 2, 3 grand on rent, then you have triple net, then you have utilities, then you have Internet, then you have the fact that you're gonna have it manned, like you're gonna have someone there. If you don't, then it's useless. So by the time you add all this up, you're literally probably talking about five to $7,000 a month in fixed expenses. And that doesn't probably include labor. Like, if you have someone there all the time, you're looking at 10, $15,000. And so now all of a sudden it's like, well, if you spent 3, $400 a day on Facebook and Google leads or Google Ads, would you get more traffic and lead flow to your website? And the answer usually is yes. Next caller is 91 8. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.

Hey, how's it going, Mike? This is Walter from Walter's Lawn Service.

Hey, Walter.

How you doing? I had a question. I'm doing good. We went through the copilot where we kind of went through the whole year and one or three years. So I ended up removing some of our services like like French drains and like fire pits and like we used to sub out sprinklers. But we do get a lot of. One of the things that we're not doing is fertilization weed control. We get a lot of phone calls. Even in December we had about a couple handfuls of just fertilization weed control. But we always pass those on. Do you think it'd be a good idea to offer that now that we got rid of some of the other things that were kind of taking up a lot of my time and it would be an easier upsell to my current customers and future customers?

Yeah. The big question is like the issue I have with adding more services is if the demand for that service is the same as your core service. So if you're doing landscaping and lawn care and that's your core thing, by adding fertilization weed control, which I'm a fan of, the problem with it is that the demand for that service is the exact same as when everyone else is calling for mowing and other landscaping services. The only time I personally want to add is any service to my business is if I am filling in the off season. So if I am making sure that it's a demand curve that is outside of my core service, because otherwise this is what's going to happen. You're just simply going to create more excess capacity throughout nine months out of the year because you're going to have to staff up for this extra boom of spring rush that happens already. And so you're already overstaffed, you're already over equipped in terms of trucks and equipment for the spring rush peak. By adding another service that has that exact same demand curve, you just make it. You just make it even that much more demand. And so I see most of the time when people do this, yes, it will increase revenue again. Adding more services will always increase more revenue. And it's easy to be like, well, people are asking for it, I should offer it. It's just like sitting there, free revenue. But by adding complexity to the business, you are going to have more trucks, more equipment, more insurance, high higher levels of training required for your office staff, for your team out in the field, certifications, licensing, insurance, all this stuff starts to mount. And what you're doing is, all you're doing is compounding your spring rush to where you have to buy one more truck, you have to get one more employee and that's going to add to the excess capacity for 8, 9 months of the year when you're not in spring rush. And so I would personally ask like, do you think you can grow to your goal of 800,000 next year without fertilization, weed control? If the answer to that is yes, I would not add it now. What I would probably say is if down the road you're in profit mode and I know your situation more acutely, Walter, because of the onboarding copilot. So like I would say if you hit 800,000 without it now it becomes a matter of hey, I'm going to go into profit mode, I'm going to raise prices and all my mowing, all my recurring services and then I'll add the fertilization, weed control and make it super profitable from day one because I don't need it to grow. I'm just going to add it as a supplementary service because I enjoy it because customers are asking for it. And more importantly, the reason I sometimes give a green flag to this one is, is customers require you to do that in order to get their mowing. But I genuinely believe like you've grown the business so quickly. I would not. I don't think you're going to need this service to get to 800,000. And so adding it's just going to add more complexity and is ultimately a distraction from the core services.

Okay, perfect. Then I'm probably just going to try to hit my goal first and then see where I'm at and then see if that's a good option to add it in the future.

Awesome. You're the man. Take care, Walter. Alright, next caller is coming in from 4:1:7. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.

Mike, can you hear me?

I can. How you doing?

Hey, good. This is Jesse Edwards in Springfield, Missouri.

Hey Jesse, I saw you signed up for Blue Summit. Let's go.

Yes. That's awesome.

We've really turned it around.

I saw that. Good job man. You crashed it.

Thank you so much. Yes, I, my question is we have, you know, we bought a lot of or all of our trucks have just been deals that I found over time and I, I mean like they're just getting up there in miles and the truck market as you know is used truck market is terrible now.

But it is what it is and I want to look at introducing, you know, debt like as in truck payments. But it's like just like a scary thought and I Don't want my profits to go down. We're 24% profitable at the moment. And from doing like research and asking other guys, you know, once you start getting closer to 1 million, we're right around 750. It's harder to stay profitable. But I'm trying this to just get it through my mind, like I'm for one, I'm gonna have to have these payments, I'm gonna have to have trust. But I'm also looking at like doing the Isuzu route.

So I guess my question is, is like, how do I, how do I fit those payment into my, into my, like, you know, into my numbers and make it make sense.

So.

And stay profitable.

So why not keep doing what you're doing? Because your 24 is good. Is it just, it's just a matter of like, hey, you got older trucks, you now have the money. It's like, do I go upgrade the trucks, like, or are you trying to get more trucks? Is it more trucks or upgrading the trucks?

Kind of the, the main question, really upgrading. Then there, you know, we been salting and plowing and then some of them are only two drives, two wheel drives. And it's like, it's really hard to, I mean, picking out your fleet can make a huge difference. I mean, I've thought about going your route, but it's like with where we live and the size of our account, it's really served us well to, you know, have a 20 foot trailer with two 60 inch mowers and a 36.

Totally.

So that our routes, we can always, you know, fit them in instead of driving to two sides of town twice.

Yep. Yeah. Like ultimately what you're going to do the math on is like, okay, 20, 24. And looking at your P now, like, what, what? Like, I'm not asking the question. Just like I'd be looking at how much did I spend on repairing the trucks. Right? Because I would imagine on your fleet of several trucks, you're probably spending 15,000 on like, okay, this motor went out, this, this, you know, whatever cylinder, it just goes on, right? So if you're paying 15, $20,000 a month now, it's a matter of, okay, a year. If you're paying that now all of a sudden becomes where you can spend two or three grand a month and basically break even. The thing is you're taking on debt, so you're adding risk to the business. And so I think at 24% profit margin, at 750,000, how I'd be making sense of this Is instead of trying to get to a million, I would personally be like, okay, I'm going to raise prices. And, and by raising the price I'm going to pay for these trucks because if you raise prices on all of your mowing accounts by even 15%, you'd immediately be able to afford brand new trucks for the entire fleet on the payments. And so the leverage at 750,000 that you have with a price increase is so substantial. And so I think you're in a really good spot to raise prices. Like I saw you send the financials over. The media team, they sent it over to me and like, like my first inclination, now it's time to raise prices. And I, my immediate thought was like, I knew the trucks were older and like you will be able to afford for literally probably what, 30, probably 4 grand a month in payments. You'd have a brand new fleet of exactly what you want. If you raise prices by 15, a lot of, if you raise prices by 15%, this is how you make sense of this. If I do this price increase, I get new trucks. All of a sudden people want to raise price. Like I would do that. And then it also adds a lot of value to your brand. It add value to your existing customers. And, and you would you pitch the price increase based upon like all these additional things are doing for the customer. And I genuinely believe less than 10% of people would leave. Yeah.

And that's why you market, to fill in who leads because you raise prices the most time those people come back and for the listeners, like, who is listening, Like, I went from 480 to 750. Yeah. And I'm doing the same amount of customers, but it's.

I raised, let's see, I mean, probably 20 of my customers.

Yep.

And that's really the big change. But I have one other question, if it's allowed.

Go ahead.

It's about VA's. I've got two and we're just starting out. And it's kind of you. You knew I had Holly, I had my brother trying to do it. I realized over time that I probably hired the. I could have hired the wrong people, but I didn't have the systems in place.

I guess my question is like, what I'm scared of is like being the face. And you talked about that. And it's like I've been really good about, you know, being the one on the. I did everything this year. But it's like, how did that transition go for you? Whenever you were the one on the phone, the face you Were answering everything.

I guess it's creating the system. Right. And then the VA runs the system.

Yeah, like anything you can do to simplify the business is going to allow a virtual assistant or an office person to operate much easier. And so I've always thought about in terms of creating systems, it's like I just. Before I even think about creating a system, I want to say simplify it and standardize it. If I don't do that, I can't expect anyone to do the same job or even 80% of the job that I did. And so if it's like, oh man, this is gonna take forever to create a system around it, then just cut it out. Especially when it's 750. Like if you watch my recent content, I wanna be growing around that 7750 marker and then just raising prices and optimizing. I don't wanna buy more trucks, I don't wanna hire more people. And so I can make a lot of sense over the next 24 months in this business by getting new trucks and hiring an office person and paying them well by simplifying the business and raising prices. So if I simplify the business, I cut services out that are requiring me to be there. They're requiring a lot of hand holding by an admin person. And you're always on the phone with these type of contracts or customers. I'm going to get rid of them. I'm going to raise prices to my existing customers so I can upgrade the trucks. Which also reduces the amount of admin because it's very difficult for an admin office person to schedule and route when the trucks are constantly breaking down. They're inconsistent or they're not the same. Like by having five different types of trucks, which I'm a fan of, to get started and grow the business. Like just get what you can, get them used. You get out there and hustle. But as the business gets to profitability, if you can standardize the trucks and standardize the equipment, it makes it much easier to hand off to a va. And so in my opinion, this is a matter of, okay, let's raise prices immediately, get more steady trucks. Cause the ones that currently are falling apart, let's get that squared away. We could easily pay for it with just a price increase. I also think that price increase would be enough also to pay for this admin person and paying them well, like we have at the at our command center over the past few years. Increased pay base pay by more than 50%, added medical benefits, added 401k added PTO in this the past four to five years and the quality of your candidate does go up and the amount, how long they stay with you goes up. And so like this year will be our first year going to spring rush where like 90 plus percent of our team in the office has been here for more than a year. They're not new employees. Like I don't even think we're gonna be doing new training cause everyone stayed. And so there's definitely benefits of paying people more and giving them the incentives and giving them the bonuses. And so especially when it comes to office and admin, if you have one or two people, especially if you have one, they have so much inherent locked up knowledge of your business, it's scary. And so the only reason I would ever want to give someone the keys to my business if I know those keys don't leave with them when they walk away. That's why I want standards systems, procedures and simplification because I know if they walk out the door, I can quickly give those keys to someone else and they can pick up where they left off. And that is the I see over and over again at that 800,000 to 2 million dollar marker, you have one all star in the office that juggles all the balls of admin. And as soon as they leave, no systems were created and, and therefore when they leave the business will literally cut in half because now everything just falls back on the owner and they can't, they don't have the systems to give it off to someone else. It's a very dangerous thing.

Hey, this is Pete. I have a landscaping business in Northern Illinois and we do about five, we did about 550 this last year. This is my fourth year taking it like seriously. And basically I'm at the point where I'm trying to figure out like the, I guess GM role or somebody to take off like some of, some of the tasks off my plate. I do have like a full time admin person dealing with all like the paperwork and calls and invoices, but I'm kind of trying to figure out a how to pay them and like what some of their tasks should be like the GM person. So I can just kind of focus on selling and growing the business.

All right, so next year like 20, 25, what's your revenue target?

See, I think if we don't get this person, we'll be capped out at the same amount, like 550, 600,000. Because I was working all spring rush for seven days a week for like three months, right but if we do get the, if we do get the person, I think we can get maybe 800,000, I think.

So this is, this is the part I want you to think about. And I'm not dissing this idea, I'll come back to it. But this is what I want you to think about is at 550 going to 800,000, that's $250,000 in additional revenue. Now if you said basically that's going to be unlocked by having this gm, keep in mind that GM is going to cost you, by the time you pay them, like a base salary even and little of incentive and taxes, et cetera, you're looking at $75,000. And so what you want to be careful of here is you're going to pay $75,000 to unlock $250,000 worth of revenue. And so the profit of that $250,000 in revenue will likely be completely absorbed by the extra overhead and of having this general manager. And so I would first off, just make sure that you're aware of that. Like it's not going to be a, this is not going to be a cash flowing year if you do this strategy because literally if you're, let's just say you're 20% profitable or 15% profitable even, all of the profit of 250 is the 75,000 you're paying this general manager. And so the reason that is is because usually from 500,000 to 700,000, a business, unless it has been in profit mode and been raising prices consistently, cannot afford two overhead people. Because by the time you include your salary and his salary, all of a sudden we're at $150,000 in just overhead costs. And on a $600,000 business that is 25%. And so I would be very careful with adding this person if unless you have the cash reserves required to grow to the 750, but then you got to throw it into profit mode or grow to 1.5 million. Like I can just keep growing with this person. And so as long as that's like established, then I can answer the question more about like what's their role? But like based on what I said, there is any response or like any follow up on that.

So I'm kind of confused on like, so if I understand like they're going to cost like roughly 75 grand, my kind of like main question about it would be like, what task would I have them take over for me? Yeah, if I was going to focus mainly the sales aspect of it and Then like if we could, like if, if I could just focus on sales, I don't know if I can grow that fast, you know, to a million five, you know. Yeah, but I mean we do have the capacity for, for it. I think this year we were like, so we did like 550 and we're, we took, took home about 100 profit after paying me and the admin person. So.

We have that as like cash reserves. So I don't know if that would be enough to get it to go to you know, 1.5. We do have like four trucks and trailers and basically our main services are landscaping and then lawn maintenance. So I don't know like a good.

Strategy, like assuming you have that much cash on hand, that's great. I think I would probably give you the green light to stay in growth mode. I would probably say go get that person and then I would grow that 750 this year. But then I would probably the next year throw it into profit mode, raise my prices and the next year maybe do 800 or 850 but be very profitable on it and then be in a good cash position to make that next big jump which is probably going to be hiring a full time office person. Now in terms of what they do, this is what I would personally do, this is what I did seven, eight years ago is like I wrote down every single thing I do in the business. Scheduling, answering the phone, answering the email, unlocking the gate in the morning, every little thing. And then I just literally put them into three buckets. Sales, operations, admin. And so the eventual $1.5 million version of this business looks like you probably is doing sales, having an operations manager and then having someone in the office, I. E. Admin. And so I'm going to build around that. So right now what it's going to look like if you're going to focus on sales is everything operationally. And admin is going to be handed off this general manager, operations manager, whatever you want to call it. I'd probably call them a general manager if they're doing admin and operations and you're doing sales. And so I would be basically everything that I put into those two buckets of operations. Admin would be their job description. These are the tasks you do every day, these are the tasks you do every week, these are the tasks you do every month. And you would already know what those are based upon. What do you currently do now for the business? And what I'd probably do is literally just have on your notes app as you're going throughout your day like oh, I just opened up the gate, bup bup bup bup. That's probably gonna be for the admin or operations person depending when they start in the morning. Okay. I locked up at the end of the day. Okay, who's the last person now? Is that the gm? Is that the admin person? Like I would just start creating the buckets of everything you do and then putting them into those three different buckets and then you realizing that the only things you're gonna do as the salesperson are the things in the sales bucket. So follow up calls, going out and visiting customers, all of those aspects of sales. Even if you wanted to throw marketing in there, you could. That's how I would kind of delineate between the roles. And then when I hire them I would have an exact checklist of everything they're responsible for. And, and it wouldn't be a guessing game of like am I, should I be doing this? Should I not be doing this? It's like these are the three distinctions and categories of the business. Sales, operations, admin, I. E. Getting the work, doing the work and greasing the wheels for the work to get done. Next caller is coming in from nine eight four. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.

Hey Mike, I hope you had a fantastic Christmas with the family yesterday.

Absolutely.

Okay, so I have a question for you.

I am looking at potentially my long term goal is I would like to get into the pest control industry. I have a couple of years experience with it. But you know, the licensing and stuff will definitely take some time and it's going to take a while to build up a customer base for it. But I currently have a, a lawn care business. It's just a solo operator truck. Me and a couple of helpers doing about 150 or so mowing and weed control fertilization is super profitable now when going into the winter. I've been trying the winter services and the leaf cleanup. However I'm still losing money on that and I was thinking about completely cutting out like the wintertime work and dropping all my expenses down to practically nothing and just focusing on working on doing like the pest control licensing stuff in the wintertime and the weed control stuff. You can do that still through the wintertime here. So I was wondering if that's a viable plan or if I should strictly charge anything that's not mowing and we control fertilization an hourly rate.

I was just wondering what your thoughts on that would be.

Yeah, so I'M always very careful about thinking that another service is going to solve the business problems because yes, chemical application has a higher gross profit margin. There are also, there's more liability, there is a lot of competition and there are really good marketers in that as well. And so like, I just want to, like, I'm not downing that. I like the pivot, you know, if that's something you're more passionate about, if you, if you want to be doing that more long term. But I would just put as a massive asterisk that thinking that you're going to switch services and going to fix all the problems, I would just be cautious over that. Even the fact that you have 150,000 in revenue, have a couple helpers, like if they're part time, you're probably making decent. If you're, if they're basically working full time, you have three people out in the field, that's going to be a very low margin service. You, you probably have a lot of room to raise prices. And so I would personally not get into the weed control fertilization game unless you have a dialed in website. You have great marketing because there are great marketing companies in the fertilization weed control because of the high margins and because they can afford a much higher customer acquisition cost. And so I think it's more a matter of like, what do you want from the business? If you're like, I'm just more passionate about the pest control, I'm more passionate about that sort of thing. And I want long term that to be the business. Cool, go for it. But I'd be careful about thinking that it's going to solve all the problems of the business because there are issues, not issues, but there are challenges with that industry as well. There's challenges with that competition base and the people that are playing in that game are going to be much more sophisticated than Billy Bob and one helper that's doing lawns because he doesn't even have a website. And so I would just add caution around it. But is your question mostly should you pivot to fertilization or what's your kind of question, if you could summarize?

Oh, so my question is I'm, I'm licensed in the weed control and fertilization already. Okay. I've been having a lot of customers requesting that work from me and so I got licensed and I'm offering that now. It's really profitable and working out very well. But in the long term, I would like to bring back my structural pest control knowledge and get back into that as a completely different business. So I was thinking about using my lawn business as a bridge into the pest control industry, since I understand it's going to take a while to build up.

Yeah.

And stuff.

My question, my question on this is. Yeah, like my question, this is always the same. That is, if you're at $150,000 in annual revenue and you're starting to add other services that are profitable and you're going to switch to another, like structural pest control and think about doing a different, essentially a different business or different brand or like a branch of your current company. If you deployed that energy, time and money that you're going to spend on this new venture and you just put it into what you're currently doing, usually the returns are actually better if you just focused on the current thing. Like doing more and better instead of new usually pays off in Spades. And so 150,000 annual revenue, I don't think you've addressed your total addressable market. I don't think you've tapped out your market for those services. And if you're adding services to them that are more profitable, like the spraying or the weed control or the pest control for them, instead of going to.

Structural pest control, I'd probably just keep doing what you're currently doing because there's way more total addressable market than $150,000 in your market. And so this is a slippery slope because what you can easily do, like I bet if you add structural pest control, you'd probably next year do 300 grand, right. You do 150. You probably 220,000 in your current business and like 80,000 in the new thing, because as you say, like, it's going to take a little bit of time to grow. I also believe you could do 300,000 if you spent all of that time and energy in the first one. And I think it'd be easy to find people, employees. Your marketing would be all on one thing. Your website would be on one thing. And so you can make it where you make the same amount of revenue, but simplified services and less services is going to eventually lead to much more scalable business. Because I'm mostly thinking about, as you grow this business, how do you pass it along to an employee? Not pass it along in terms of ownership, but how do you train an employee? Is it easy to get a third, fourth, fifth person once they go full time? And so instead of you creating this Frankenstein of $100,000 business here and $100,000 business here and$100,000 business here, just focus on one that does 300,000 and it has employees and you can train them up easier. And so I'm not against the idea of doing structural pest control. Like, I think it's a great business. There's a lot of really good businesses. You could do concrete, you could do building decks, you could do fence staining, you could do Christmas lights, you could do. There's so many services and almost always the grass will look greener on the other side. It's simpler, it's easier, it has better demand year round. And when you get into those markets, you start realizing, oh, look, there's different margins. The customer acquisition cost is very different. And so I like the idea of a supplementary service before you do a new one. And so if you're already doing mowing, et cetera, I like the idea of doing like the lawn weed control or fertilizer or pest control because it's serving your existing market. If you go to structural pest control, you have no crossover and you do create basically two different businesses. And so that's what I would be careful of. Hopefully I didn't come across too negative, but that is the reason I almost always am pushing in that direction. Next call is coming in from Florida 41 7.

Hey, Mike. Adam Mitchell. Mitchell Long landscape down here in Joplin, Missouri.

I have a couple questions.

In regards to.

Growing a location to the point of handing it off to a gm.

Okay.

And then, and then starting a new location. We are, we.

Are at 37% profit right now. Let's go about 430,000 gross. I'm about.

Okay.

And.

We, I'm like an virtually like the octopus you talked about, except maybe a little more tangled up than that and everything.

Okay.

And I think that's how we were able to get to where we are now.

Right.

We, we have about probably $250,000 of mowing. And then we did landscaping, mostly upsells for those customers. I have two employees currently working full time.

We're still doing leaves. And then we were, we were between two and five employees for the year. But I don't have a lot of, have a lot of systems in place.

And I have a key employee who's moving on this next year who is like my second, a second me who is helping things run. And I just don't know at this stage. How do you get over the bridge from being mixed up in everything to having someone who can run at least the mowing side. How do you get, get out of the field is mostly my My question. And then when from that point, do you have the ability to start another location?

Yes. Like, a general manager is going to be what everything hinges on in terms of the profitability and success of a location. So finding them, that's a different topic. In terms of how do we actually build the business in a way where we can actually hand it off to a general manager. That's what we want to address here. Because everyone wants to work on their business instead of in their business. They don't want to work in the field. And I agree. This is how you grow the business, is how you are able to expand, is how you're able to think of more of as an investor in the business instead of that of an operator. I agree. That's what we should be doing. The E myth says it all. The thing is, most businesses don't have enough systems to allow anyone else to be successful doing what you do. And so again, going back to, like, what do you do every day? What makes the business 37% profitable is your juggling. And so either A, we need to reduce the number of balls, we need to reduce the number of things that we have to juggle every single day, simplify the business, et cetera, or we need to make sure that the next octopus that comes along, that is the general manager, has extremely detailed SOPs, standard operating procedures on how to juggle all the balls. There's only two ways to make this easier. Improve the effectiveness of training the next octopus, or B, reducing the number of balls that the octopus has to balance. And so I always go to the easiest one first, which is going to be reduce the number of balls. And that is going to be simplify and standardize the business. So I'm going to look at when I get contacted from my crew throughout the day and they're in a panic and I need to jump into the business. What are those things? I guarantee you 20% of the services you offer are creating 80% of the amount of times you get dragged back into the field. And so if you're gonna hand off something like mowing, usually a little more simplified, I'd do the same thing. Okay. On these mowing jobs, which customers do I need to get rid of? Is it the ones that are way outside my service area? Is it the ones that have a certain size property? Is it a certain one on a certain side of town? Is it the people that don't have full service? Is it the ones that don't do the weed control? They're always complaining. I'd be Always thinking about, what are the customers, what are the services, that if I cut out that 20%, would make the job way easier for someone to come in and become the octopus. And so, again, if you think about yourself as the octopus, you just reduce balls or you figure out how to train the octopus better. I can do both of those by removing balls. So I do that first. Then once I say, okay, I've reduced my service count, I've reduced the amount of issues that happen throughout the day. I've reduced the number of employees that I need. I've reduced the amount of services that I offer and therefore the amount of training required to get an employee to being profitable. Once you've done that, now I start figuring out, how do I standardize everything inside the business and make an SOP for a general manager. So how does an estimate get responded to? How do you answer the phone? How does an email go out? What does an estimate look like? What's the template for it? Like, you start thinking about all the things you do throughout the day. It would be super helpful for almost every one of us. Every single day that you operate as an owner, just keep track of all the things you're doing. Because the question is, how do I focus on the growing the business is. You usually let go of many of those things. Now, I don't think everyone should do that. From day one, if you're doing 150, 200,000 in revenue, you are not going to start being on this delegation quest of, like, all the 30, 40 things you do in the business. Like, oh, I should. Like, I should have someone else do my marketing. I should have someone else answer the phone. I should have someone else do my email. I should have someone else open up the gate in the morning. No, you're in grind Mode. You're at 150,000. It's you and one other employee. Stay there. You've got to be in the business right now at that stage of business. But if you're at that 700,000, 800,000, you're starting to go from manager to architect. We have to step away from the building and actually start to analyze it. If you're at that stage, it's now a function of what are all the things I'm doing in the business and how do I hand those things off? So if we look at 0 to 200,000, as this is labor mode, laborer, like your job as owner is labor, then as we go from 200,000, 800,000, that's the role of a manager. Now, as you get up against the 800,000, that's when I generally believe you're ready for a second location. And I generally want to make sure you're very profitable at that stage. Because the big overhead expense of a general manager stepping in is going to cost the business and they're not going to be as good at balancing all the balls as you as the owner are. And so that's where the 800,000 steps into. Then as the role of the owner being architect, you're doing multiple locations, you're potentially scaling up a different service, you're doing other things that are not in the business operations every single day. And so I always think about those three different characters. A laborer, a manager and an architect and the architect. The main job of the architect is to hand off things to a manager. And that manager will only be successful if you have simplified the business and standardize it. And the effectiveness of the labor hinges on the manager. And so it's a trickle down effect that if you don't get that jump correct, you'll just constantly be burning through GMs over and over and over again. And it is absolutely a skill to be able to become the architect and hand things off to a general manager.