Living a Millionaire Lifestyle with ONLY $2000 in the bank 🤯

On this episode of Business Boot Camp.

She was just a pain in the ass to work for.

Hopefully we can replace the guy that I'm firing with somebody that's solid.

I would like yourself to be able to understand the picture before I take your advice.

I truly believe Aaron has the ability to sell.

Dazzle them with your brilliance or baffle them with your bullshit.

Son, a bit hectic. I don't know if we can pull this one off.

Maybe you just want to get their attention. It's my train horn.

60% of businesses will fail in their first three years. I'm Mike Andes and I'm on a mission to fix this. I know the fear and I felt their pain. For the next 30 days, these owners will be sweating it out while trying to avoid becoming another statistic on this season of Business boot Camp.

Last week on Business boot Camp, we checked in with Aaron Espinosa from Arizona yard Maintenance. When you only have 2,000 in cash, but there's, you know, almost 300,000 in liabilities, that's very scary. His business had hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. That is all of his profit being wiped out because of loan payments. Massive equipment that was not being used.

Frequently, you know, so that's why I got all this equipment, is because I know it's going to be. I can just easily make money when I have this equipment.

And he was running his entire business doing over half a million dollars in annual revenue off of the reminders app of his cell phone.

I just use the reminders app on my iPhone.

Okay. We told him we had to get onto some sort of software and start organizing the business. If you wanted to take it to the next level, you're one big job that doesn't pay on time, away from like a really very stressful moment. Let's catch up with Aaron and see how he's been doing.

Just woke up from a nice little nap about to do a job estimate slash sale. My father, he once told me, dazzle them with your brilliance or baffle them with your son. So that's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna go make the sale, make it happen. Dazzle them with my brill. Got to be charismatic, charmful, happy, smile. Yes, we want to do it. We're going to make it happen and we can get it done. I have a couple job estimates today. The meeting with Mike, my 6 year old stepdaughter, she has surgery today. She's going to start chemotherapy today for her brain cancer. So hopefully that goes well. I pray that that Goes well, all of my guys, they have it off except for my foreman. I had him go back to wrap up a job. They didn't get back until like seven o' clock last. Had to go back to a property which job was not done. Had to go remove some more weeds, pull the whole property, remove a few more limbs, and then do a walkthrough with the customer to make sure he's satisfied. They did some stuff that they weren't really supposed to do, so ended up causing a delay. There's a little bit of work that needs to be done today, so we have a meeting today with Mike. We're gonna go over, I think, Jobber, some of the challenges I've been facing. This is the Reminders app. I got it on my iPhone. The downfall in doing it this way is it kind of works off the honor system and it works off of my brain. You know, right now, one of my struggles is I'm getting all these accounts, and if some of these people don't pay, I just may overlook it. I noticed, you know, one account, I'm like, man, I don't think I received a payment from this lady. And it's been. It was three months. You know, essentially we provided service for. For three months without getting paid.

My concern is that the business can't grow much more with that being the bottleneck. Actually, really interested to see, even next week when you're gone, how things continue to operate when your manager takes over. Not having the Reminders app, or potentially there is. So maybe educate me a little bit.

Yeah. With that, I think it's just the initial fears of change. I don't want to make things more stressful on myself and end up causing a bunch of havoc in my business and make things worse. I would like, you know, yourself to be able to understand the picture before I take your advice. I am a little leery of implementing something before, you know, someone actually understands. Be, you know, be smart about it. You know, this is my livelihood. I got a family to support. So, you know, with that being said, I looked into Jobber, but I was hesitant, you know, and I know that you're smart. You know what you're doing. I mean, you. You've really delved into this business, you know, more than I have. I think it may be difficult to completely understand everything, but I know that we all mean well.

It'll definitely be a transition. Be very, very difficult. Because right now, the Reminders app, so simple, and you understand it like the back of your hand. Here's where my Concern is and why I push the job aside because in my mind there's, there's two directions. You take the business. One, you scale it up and use all this equipment to its full capacity so it's not sitting in the yard for four days out of the week. It's actually being used all the time. And that is you got to grow that business to 150 plus thousand per month in revenue. And I think you have the capabilities as you. In terms of your confidence.

I might be broke, but I look like a million dollars.

If you're going to do that route, that's where I see you have to have a software because you're going to need someone else to start handling a lot of the stuff that you're doing currently, like scheduling, dispatching, invoicing. You're not going to be able to handle it all at 150,000 plus a month in revenue. And that's the size of business. I feel you're going to need to grow to, to make it worthwhile to have all this debt and this large equipment. Route 2 is you stay on the very simplified route, but you take, get rid of all the debt structure and you focus on simple services and then just raise your prices. And I think that's the right. You don't want to go because you, you, you, you know, you're confident in selling the larger projects and there's definitely money to be had there. At Augusta Lawn Care, we mostly focus on the simple services and running a much more lean model. But if you're going to go big or go home, you better make sure that you really go all in and get more projects. You can't have a tree chipper sitting around for four or five days a week. You can't have trucks that are worth $120,000 not pulling massive loads every single day on big projects because you bought the equipment to basically triple the business. And that's why you're hitting this cash crunch, because you've invested so much for the, the upfront of what you're going to grow the business into, right?

Yeah.

And that's fine. You've obviously bought into vision and you know where you can take it. We've got to get there pretty quickly though. And in my mind you're going to have to eventually hand things off that are not sales related to somebody else. The team showed me this message from Aaron that he had posted on one of my YouTube videos. This is the time to get scrappy and start paying some of this debt down so we can actually Put some profit on the table.

I don't know. They must be a lot stronger than I was when I was six years old.

Let me just say that none of this is staged or fake. Business Bootcamp is real. These are real business owners going through real things. We do not stage things. It takes a lot of time and effort on the part of our media team, and I'd really appreciate it if you just did two things for me. Number one, if you have not subscribed, please subscribe. It tells YouTube that this type of content needs to go to other business owners. Second thing, if you could share this video in like a Facebook group or with other industry experts or you have a WhatsApp group with other people in your industry, please share it. It really helps us. We spend a lot of time and money and energy, and if we're gonna keep doing this, we gotta see some good results. So please share the content and subscribe and help us out tremendously.

I don't want to do all that extra cleanup.

Last week on Business Bootcamp, we talked to Dylan Moy, who has built a $400,000 lawn care business called Urban Roots Landscaping. My concern is more a matter of the work life balance, the amount of hours you're working, and the fact that that it's just not sustainable. However, Dylan has big plans for the business and wants to take it to a million dollar company.

Did you say you think we have.

A potential of 60 to 80,000amonth in revenue next year?

Absolutely. Yeah. I think that would be as a minimum. In order to do that though, he's going to start working on the business instead of in the business and allow and empower other team members to take things off his plate.

Feeling pretty pumped about their buy in and this whole process growing the company.

Let's see if Dylan can empower his team and take the business to the next level.

All right, so we have two people out sick today. So this might push things back in terms of the calendar and may have to do some rescheduling, call some clients around, but we'll see if we can scramble and make it happen. Bri is going to drive the trailer. We did some trailer training last week. She did great. So we're going to have our train. We are going to downtown Tacoma area. So it's a little more congested down there. So this would be a test.

This is one of those jobs where we opened up a whole can of worms. Just feeling a bit frustrated by the scope of work this is turning into. So we decided or said we Would limb up this holly here. And once we did it, exposed the ground. There's some complaints by residents about all the leaves on the ground. So we picked up all our clippings. The unfortunate part is the leaves were not from our clippings necessarily. Necessarily. It was just about a foot, foot and a half deep of leaves that accumulated over the year. So again, at what point do we just like say we gotta call it good and maybe re estimate. I do want to get to a good spot where it looks much better than it did. But at the same time, cleaning up a foot and a half of leaves after we just agreed to trim up a few, few branches is not what I thought we were signing up for. So loads of fun over here. So I'm just getting it, getting it cleaned up.

I was gonna tell you. I checked in with Jose. Didn't hear back yet. He's probably sleeping. Yeah, I don't necessarily expect him to be back. He sounded pretty sick, a bit hectic. Two people out. So five people, including myself on our crew, you know, obviously makes a big impact in terms of keeping up on jobs. I don't know if we can pull this one off and get all the work done this week. I may have to push one of the cleanups back. We'll see if our guys are healthy and ready to be back tomorrow. If not, we'll switch things up again. Just another day. I'm kind of delaying my. My goal to look some of that Google marketing stuff, look more into that, learn about it and post an ad. But I'll get around to it once things slow down in the next day or so.

We haven't had a lot of hectic weeks like this before because we had one guy out for two days sick, another guy out sick, you know. So with a smaller company like this, that's going to make a big impact. We made some adjustments. We moved one cleanup to next week. Yeah, just kind of scrambled work later nights. So we got through it though. It was okay.

Okay. So for Jo and, and Michael, did we have any sort of feedback or update on them this week?

Yeah. So we did our kind of staff Monday quarterly type thing that we hadn't done for a while.

Today we did our staff fun day. Well, basically it's just an off site meeting where we had some breakfast and then we went to a cool place called Top Golf.

It was fun, had a lot of fun. I think everybody enjoyed that part of it. So it was good to kind of build camaraderie. This is the first time that I'VE truly kind of opened the books to the team. So we looked at a profit and loss for the first time. I went over just some of the.

Basics of it, but then we did a pretty lengthy conversation and I actually did include the other workers there. It was just more of a full group thing and I felt inappropriate because they're small enough and the other two, even though they're not being kind of essentially promoted to a new position, I talked about the value that they bring as well and how important it is that they help us build. You know, Michael felt that 22 an hour was reasonable for starting hourly. He's always been kind of going along with the flow a little bit, whereas Jose, he tends to kind of advocate for himself a little bit.

And so how did the other team members react?

They don't have that same buy in. But I'm hoping that after hearing this, they go home, they start to think about it like, oh, this guy is really taking his business serious. Truly. They're pretty quiet, quite honestly, like maybe a little bit checked out at moments, you know.

So yeah, that was a little tough at times because I felt like I was a little bit long winded. There's times where I felt like I was losing my audience a little bit. But there were also moments where we had great conversations, conversations and discussions and good ideas were thrown out there on how we can improve things.

Yeah, like the off site or like team meeting type stuff where you open up the books. Typically you're gonna have most of the guys check out and so you are looking for the ones that do kind of gravitate somewhat more towards what you're talking about. It can be a challenge when you're talking about specific positions inside the company in the future and what they're gonna be paid. Sometimes that individual won't wanna open up because now they're talking about their pay in front of all their peers. Especially if it's greater than what their peers are making. I would consider, if you think after that meeting that Michael and Jose are still the right people, that one on one with them, because they now have time to think about it and actually digest some of it and they're not in front of their co workers talking about their own pay.

I threw a lot at them. It was a long meeting, probably way too long. I mean, I think we're setting our goals high. It's not going to be an easy year. We're looking to grow and it's going to be an investment monetarily and time and I think I need to have another one on one with some of the guys who are going to be the key players and trying to grow the business. I'm going to check back in with them sometime this next week, have a conversation more individually with each of them. Again, hopefully I gain more of that confidence that we're all 100% bought in and just push forward and be ready to meet these new goals for next year.

This job was done two months ago, and it's just now coming up. The customer has missing stuff and damaged stuff.

Last week on business boot camp, we checked in with David Wagner, the founder of headband movers. But he was having some real serious problems with his team. And I think for you, like, the struggle has been finding people. So these guys, you kind of let them do their quote, unquote bad behavior because you just need bodies. Is that right?

Yeah, that's right. Yep, we spot on.

And two of his employees were not showing up on time and were dragging down the culture of the business.

Yesterday, one of my guys didn't show up. It's been tough working with some of the guys on the team.

Let's check in with David and see what's changed since we recommended he open up the books and share the numbers with his team.

Yo, yo, yo.

Good morning.

Good morning. Got his truck rolling out right now. Had some jobs come in last minute, which is great because we had zero jobs on the books for Monday through Thursday. So it's. It's always great when jobs come in last minute. Jobs, people are unorganized, forget to book their movers. I don't know how they let that happen, but some people do. One of my guys is late. This is a young kid on the team. He just hasn't been waking up on time, so had to have a conversation with him in front of the team. I did not get the chance to let one of my guys go yesterday. So I'm gonna do that today. I'm gonna give him a call within the next hour, just let him know that he's not gonna be a good fit for the team. I got an interview already. Somebody's gonna come in within the next hour. They haven't followed up with me yet. Hopefully they show up. Hopefully it's a good interview. Hopefully he's gonna be a good fit.

Were we able to talk to them about open book management and kind of show some of the numbers? This past week, I was able to.

Sit down with my dispatch manager and then put together a game plan for the meeting. Waiting on my cpa, My bookkeeper To get back to me. So they're going to put the books together and have everything ready for me in the next week, week and a half.

So this past week, how was it with the team? I know there was the two of them that were not super bought in. The other four were pretty gung ho. How did that play out this week?

Yeah, so I ended up letting one of the guys go and then he's friends with the other guy that I've been having issues with. He actually just sat down in my office the next day and then put in his two weeks notice.

Got it. Do you think four guys is going to be sufficient to for now or is it really those end of month of which can be a little bit tight now?

Yeah, it's going to be really tight at the end of the month. I just, I just hired another guy yesterday, brought him on. He's an experienced mover, but I need to have at least six guys to be able to operate at a profitable level.

Have you thought about trying to do something where you have like a team lead for the truck that's the driver and kind of the one that is more experienced that you're going to keep on longer term? They're at a higher percentage and you actually give a percentage of the revenue from the job to the lead and then a lower percentage to the crew members. My thought on this is if you did that, you could potentially turn your team leads into kind of where they're recruiting because they kind of have their crew underneath them that they have to go find. And they know if they can generate more revenue in a day, they get more revenue themselves because they're getting a percentage of the revenue. I really believe that if David can figure out out how to pay his employees a percentage of the labor revenue and give them a piece of every project, it'll really help reduce the waste between all the jobs and it'll keep the crew accountable to showing up on time. You know, have you ever thought about giving them a percentage of revenue or doing more of a performance based pay instead of just hourly?

Yeah, yeah, I was, I just had that conversation with one of my mentors a couple days back.

My thought is, okay, why don't we look at the books when we get them back and see, okay, what percentage of our revenue went towards wages? Let's just say it's 40%. Okay?

Yeah, it's right around 40%.

So let's say, okay, it's 40%. We need, we need to have a healthier margin. Let's give 35% of all revenue to our crew. And how do we break that down? Well, okay, we're going to give 38% of that to the team leads and we're going to have 30% of that, the revenue split to the crew. So that way it's like, okay, if I have a truck, I'm going to have one or two guys underneath the team lead and they're going to be at a lower percentage of the job because you, you're doing by the hour. Theoretically, they could go slower and make more money. The thing is they have that boss there all the time, which is the customer, to keep them honest. And they're going to want to make sure they do a good job because they are on hourly. It's not like they're going to try to skimp. I think that'd be really interesting. Not so much from a making more money perspective. We could take it from 40% to 35. There's obviously margin there for you. And so if they kill it and make more money, that's fine. Like you're okay with it because you know, you locked in this 35%. And then furthermore, it's a matter of you don't have to be as micromanaging because you know that team lead is, is busting their butt to make sure their crew stays on task, gets the job done because they're making a really good amount of money if that customer is happy and there isn't issues.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I give, I give my, like, I give my leads a lot of autonomy out in the field to, to run things. And that's something that I've been doing over the last three months just because I just have too much on my plate in the first place. But if I can incentivize my leads to, to, to be in more control of the job, I mean, I'm all for it.

I think it just, it shifts in their mind though, when they know they're getting a percentage of that. And what that does is cuts out all the, the lolly gagging that's not actually producing revenue. So getting to jobs happens way faster. Fueling up, breaks, all of that is where you're going to see the increase in profitability because now they are not getting paid for that. They're getting paid for to be on the job site. So like, I can give. I'll. I'll set you up on P4P software. And what's nice about your model is you can use the simple version of P4P, which is you simply are Getting a percentage of the labor revenue, it's just straight across the board. It sounds like that's one of his biggest frustrations right now. Is people just not showing up to work or being 15, 20, 30 minutes late. If the whole crew is getting a percentage of the revenue from the job, they do not want to be sitting around Waiting for their crew members. And so they're going to put internal pressure on each other and keep each other accountable. Instead of him always feeling like he's micromanaging or breathing down people's neck, no great performer wants a boss that does that. And any crew member wants to keep their team accountable. If their paycheck is being affected. Right now, the only thing that keeps them from being late. Is you getting mad at them. When the crew is getting a percentage of the labor revenue, they will absolutely demolish other employees that make them late to the job because they're sitting in the truck, not making any P4P. And then if they're able to make, you know, $4 more per hour, I think your attention will go up, too.

Yeah. I mean, and if they're more efficient, we could book more jobs.

Right.

Like, I think that'll put some things into perspective for me, too.

Let's head back to arizona. And see if aaron and his crew Are on the right track. To getting out of debt.

You need to grind out more that way so we can put the concrete back. I know it's not loud, guys. What I'm trying to tell them Is that we need to grind out the root further on that other side. That way, we can put this concrete edging back. We need to make it perfect. So right here still seems a little high.

Bajo. Someday I may run for president.

Have you guys ever ran into the situation where one of your employees is about to get hit by a car? If they're having their backpack blower, or maybe you just want to get their attention. Well, I came up with the solution for that.

It's my train horn. It gets their attention. Right now, I'm probably going to get a few guys asking me what's going on. They're all to going.