Marketing, Software & the Future of the Lawn Care Industry (w/ Jonathan Pototschnik)

And so it's kind of to me, the wild west right now. Yeah, I believe that could make double the profit margins was my general belief. Boom. This is what I want. If I can acquire clients through marketing, this is magic. So we felt that in the green industry they had the most pain. I am grateful for the time that you're on my team and we get to work together. But what I want is in 10 years to be able to look back and say my career is better and my life's better because I worked as a service autopilot. I have no illusions you're staying with me forever. But I was the only non funded company left that mattered in any way.

Let's start off with the past. Obviously you've moved on from a lot of the different ventures you've started and I really want to dive not just into lawn care specifically, but into the evolution of you as an entrepreneur. So maybe just start off though how you did get started in cleaning and lawn care. I know those, those are two industries you were kind of got got started in. And how did you get into it and how that evolved.

I basically from 14 on have been working probably like you, at least that's what I remember of you. You're always hustling. So early on I started mowing lawns and I went to college, got a degree in computer information systems. Whole time I work at vending machines, lawn care, did all this stuff. I never wanted to be in that stuff again. I wanted to be in tech. Started my first software company when I was 23 with my business partner who in service autopilot didn't make it after two years. We were trying to build something incredibly complex mapping based system before Google. Well, we ultimately threw in the towel. And the reason I tell you that is because when I threw in the towel on that, we were like, what the heck do we do? And he went and got a job. Man, I want to be on my own. And I started doing consulting, tech consulting. And a buddy of mine from way back basically just did me this massive favor in life and I was just trying to figure out what to do. He's like, hey, come help me out at my cleaning company. Pay 1500 bucks a month, just do whatever needs to. I need a website, I need a bookkeeper, that kind of thing. Ultimately ended up partnering up with them on that business. That's how I ended up in cleaning. I always wanted to be back in tech. And the whole time I was doing that I kept doing tech consulting, programming consulting. And then in 05 I don't remember exactly when started City Turf and that was a total fluke. Didn't think I was ever going to be back in the lawn care business, but still I'm doing tech consulting. City Turf has never been anything but part time for me. I've never worked it full time and I was really doing the tech thing and I did some other tech stuff. And then through the cleaning business and through City Turf, John and I kept talking. We weren't working together anymore and I was like, man, I think I've got the idea. He's always pitching me tech ideas. Let's start this tech company, start that tech company. I just never could get quite excited. I think I got the idea there's a massive opportunity in the services space to have a full on web platform. And so this was about 2010 and we were talking about 2009 and that launched service Autopilot. And I've skipped some other stuff I did. I did a software company in the health care space from my consulting clients. They brought me in and gave them some equity in the business to help them get off the ground. So I've done a variety of other things, but that's kind of the gist of my past.

And so obviously you start with the cleaning side. What was that business model looking like when you exited and kind of the evolution of that even. Was it mostly subcontracting? If I remember correctly, you're mostly doing movie theaters.

Yeah.

What was that model when it came to cleaning specifically?

You kind of alluded to it. And also, by the way, I don't, you know, I don't know what this story is because I don't talk about that one. I actually walked away from that business. I didn't sell it. So I don't know if that's when you said exit. I just want to make sure people didn't think I walked away. The gist of that is at that time I had four things and I just, I had to get it down to two. I had two little kids, I had a wife. I was just, it was too much. I had to get it down to two. And it wasn't completely fair to those business partners. Just a variety of things. And so I picked the two things I thought I had the best shot. City Turf and Service Autopilot. And so I also ended up exiting another tech company.

So just anyway, that's kind of story. So that model on that business was we would go win the contracts at. It eventually became just theaters and we would go win contracts and at Those theaters to clean their properties and then we would find the people to clean them. So imagine that you win a, a movie theater like Cinemark movie theaters in Ohio. We're Texas based company. We have guys that their sole purpose is to get on an airplane a week before we have to take over the cleaning of that property every single night. And they go find seven people to clean that theater every night. And they, when they find that person, one of them, you know, we, you start out with 30, you find 30 people to have seven or 35 and you get it down to, let's call it seven or if it's smaller theater, maybe three. It just, it varied. We were, we are in 22 states, all the major movie theater chains. And, and then, you know, by the end you're, you're down to your seven or whatever number. You're like, do you want to own a company? We'll help you in a company. You guys all work for this guy now, that kind of a thing. And, and so that's what we did all over the country. And, and then, you know, ultimately you added in all kinds of services where we had carpet cleaning trucks in Florida and Texas, they go through Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana. They were cleaning carpet in theaters. We were cleaning screens and theaters, cleaning wall carpets. And we called that special projects, all kinds of stuff like that. But it, that, that was the, that stuff was all employee based. All the cleaning was contractor based.

Interesting. The some people don't know is like actually the second year of doing Augusta lawn Care, I actually started Augusta Cleaning services. Very quickly I realized that I couldn't get the same margin just because I couldn't get the same hourly rate. What was the reasoning for you to get to city turf over the cleaning? Was it simply that or was there something else that was playing into that factor?

There were a number of things. It wasn't. I didn't start that business. I got brought in when it was really, really small. It was, you know, the guys I was partners with were awesome guys. It just wasn't really my business. It was their business more than mine. I was a partner with them, but it was their business. And I was never passionate about the cleaning business. I liked it. I learned a lot. I want to be in technology. I mean, I just knew that you had to get really focused. So that, that was one of the reasons. The other reason was I do not like businesses that have a few customers. And in the movie theater industry, even in the time I was in it, it just kept consolidating down. It was Already very consolidated. Cinemark, Regal, amc. You know, there used to be movie company Florida, then Cinemark bought them and Cinemark bought this, this 30 chain.

Theater group in California. And so, you know, you'd go from having, I don't remember our numbers, but eight clients to four. Well, when you have four, one, any one client, that's millions and millions of dollars a year. It's kind of scary. I didn't like that. I didn't like contractors. You know, I didn't, I like, I didn't like it because that game is tough politically from, we're not seeing it now, but from one political environment to the other. Sometimes they're hard on contractors, sometimes they're not. Sometimes they're hard on, you know, out of the country labor. Sometimes they're not. Just it's a, this ever moving target that you're trying to build a, you can't build a big business around something when there's not some level of stability. And I didn't think there was stability in labor. I could just keep going on and on. And so I accidentally ended up back in the lawn care business. And I started City Turf as commercial. And.

And it was interesting business, but I kept running numbers like what if I could have a thousand residential clients? And you know, eventually my ambitions grew past that. And I just love the model of diversified, a very diversified business across thousands and thousands of clients. The same thing. It was same concept with service, automatic. I wanted thousands and thousands of diversified clients across different industries. I love that model. I think there's a tremendous amount of safety. It's like the same way I've invested since I was 20 years old. I like a level of diversification in investments as well. You know, you don't get as rich in some sense, like you don't have the run up in your investments, but you also, it's, it's a lot safer and you get very steady growth. Well, I think, you know, the same can be said in a business. You see some of these guys in commercial, they get in with a property management company and they just blow up. But they're now beholden to the property management company. I'm not insinuating commercial is not good. Commercial is awesome. But this is true in cleaning, it's true in a lawn or green. It's true in all these segments. Like it can be the rocket ship that helps you go because you got in with the right group. It also can be the very same thing that brings you back down on the other side. And so I love volume and Diversification.

Well, I'm glad you were in the cleaning business for movie theaters in 2020.

Brutal place to be now, I'm sure.

What was that like, transitioning now from a commercial to the residential side? So just a few more minutes on the kind of level of your entrepreneurial journey. But like, what was that deciding factor? And you know, that transition? I know some people, maybe they're going the opposite way, residential to commercial, trying to make that decision. What was the deciding factor though, outside of just diversification? A higher price point that can be charged in a premium price. Were there other factors that went into that play and how did that transition go?

Yeah, I believed I could make double the profit margins, was my general belief. And, and so that was incredibly interesting to me. I also believed that the competition level to go big into the 10, $20 million range was there was less competition, sophisticated competition in residential. Right or wrong. That was my belief. I believe that, and I believe this more than I've ever believed it, that the homeowner is a great market, like the home services space, and the homeowner market is a great market. I also, as I was switching and I was still living in commercial and residential, one of the greatest pain points I encountered was we'd figured out how to acquire clients in commercial by just selling. But I couldn't acquire clients in residential by just pure sales efforts. I had to become a marketing engine and machine. And that was painful at first, and then that was like, boom, this is, this is what I want. If I can acquire clients through marketing, this is magic because I don't have to scale up this mat, this massive force of sales force of people. There's just a whole ton of things I liked about marketing, a marketing driven organization over a sales driven organization. And I felt I could do that in residential more than I could do that in commercial. And so it was, you know, a few things initially that started with diversification, more profit. I thought it's where a big long term opportunity is at. And then as I got into it, I discovered all these other things that I liked about residential.

Now I'm going to come back to kind of your role with City Turpin as it evolved. But before I do that, like, obviously you're doing cleaning, you're doing lawn care. You're not what you're actually passionate about in terms of the technology side. What would you say to someone that is also trying to use a home improvement industry type business to kind of grow the capital required to go do something they actually love? Like, I'm assuming that's the kind of money you needed to start service autopilot, get it off the ground, have a bit of a Runway. What was your thought process during that time? Doing the cleaning, doing, you know, city turf? I'm assuming not super passionate about necessarily the service itself, but really just trying to create that financial pillar.

Yeah, I wasn't passionate about the service, but I do have this general belief that when you get good at something and you get into it, you can find more passion in it. So I've become much more passionate about, say, city turf as an example or home service. I would. I would have zero desire to sell that company. Zero. Actually, I was more passionate about service autopilot, and I guess everybody kind of knows I sold that as a different factor. There's a different reason. But. So I just realized what I said might. Might sound a little strange, but I was very passionate. I became passionate about city turf. I like the client that we serve, so I don't think you have to be just incredibly passionate about something. Two thoughts came to mind as you were saying it. One, I see a ton of individuals trying to leave home services too early to move to their next thing. And an add on to that is the beauty of building a home services business, or frankly any business that you just stick with for a long period of time is you learn the skill set to go build whatever the other business is. So, you know, I've had a technology companies, I've had services companies, and at the end of the day, it's still all about people. That's the entire game of business is about building out your leadership team, it's building out management, it's about coaching, it's about training, it's about all. It's all people. And so there's a lot of individuals that want to build, let's call it the services company, get to the next thing and you know, they hit, we'll call it a half a million bucks and they're like, I'm out, I'm ready, or whatever the number is. No, you're not, dude. I mean, like, maybe you are because you. I'm not saying you can't go start another thing. Absolutely can. But you haven't really learned the game yet. And so as you get that thing bigger and you encounter more problems and you build a bigger team and you have to build a bigger marketing engine and a sales engine, like those skills are so unbelievably valuable. If you'll stay in the game and build the bigger thing, you could take all that to whatever's next. And so all I'm trying to say here is that it doesn't really matter what you're in. The game is business. The game is not home services. It's not software, it's not retail, it's not, it's not real estate. It's none of the game is business. Being an operator. I mean, the first thing you'll realize if you, you know, for those that as you accumulate a lot of money and you're like, where the heck do I deploy money over the years? As you take money out of your business and you deploy it, you're like, okay, go put it in public markets and go put it in real estate. I can go put it in bonds and go put it in versions of insurance. I can put it in all these things. The best place to deploy is right back into business because that's where the best. You can get the best yield on your money. So if you have the skill to build something, you have one of the most valuable skills that exist, period. And so stay in the game long enough to really build that skill set. And then, then you could become an investor, then you could become an operator of all kinds of different things. And so that would be what I, that would be the single most important point I would make to someone that's wanting to just pivot quickly to the next thing or they only see this as this temporary thing, is like, stay in the game long enough to really get good because it will set you up to go way faster in the next endeavor that you start. Did that make sense the way I worded that?

Absolutely. And I think, I think one thing that's beautiful about the home improvement businesses, if a brand is created, is that in times like we're in now with high inflation, that it's one of the products and services that can actually ramp up with inflation if you've created that brand. And that's where I see a lot of the commercial guys having trouble right now. It is dollar versus dollar compared to, hey, if I'm going to raise a cost per cut by $10 on a $50 lawn, now all of a sudden I have a 20% price increase and most people are going to stick with me.

Yeah, there's a lot of price elasticity in the, in the home services space that people just don't realize.

Absolutely. Before I move on to service autopilot, I want to talk a little bit more about city turf and what your role is there now. Obviously probably different varying levels of involvement and, and what's your role now with City Turf? And partly I'm asking this because that's what the Internet wants to know. The Law and Care millionaire hasn't been making any videos recently. So what's your current role, kind of at City Turf? Just for those that are listening?

I don't really have a role. I mean, honestly, I don't. I haven't had a role for years. The only way I know to describe it is that.

Big strategic stuff. Directionally, where are we going? What's the future opportunity for that business like? I'm very interested in robotics. I do probably think most about robotic stuff.

It's that stuff. It's like, it's that I actually have a desire to be more involved in the business and I will get a little bit more involved for a period of time here. At some point it's going to be a bit. But my involvement is near. Probably drives them nuts, but near zero. So.

And so. So. So you mentioned there about robotics. I know that you were, I believe, I believe on the. On the board or chairman on Robin and what they were working on. Is that still something that is evolving and comments in is developing the technology or is it more. They're focusing on the service side of robotics and just leveraging manufacturers, current technology.

I'd say they're working. They're on all. They're trying to be on all sides of it right now. It's a very evolving industry, or we'll call robotics the industry. It's very evolving. It's a difficult and interesting time in that space right now. And there is no winner. I would say they're winning in terms of what they're doing.

There's some pretty like Husqvarna is doing really well in the residential side, smaller properties, you know, and you've got all these other brands that are popping up. But, you know, even with Husqvarna, it kind of feels like in some ways winning in that space. They've been in it longer, you know, there's no just obvious winner at all. It's a wide open space and there's a lot of the big brands that, you know, we have all used or used in our businesses that are that feel they have that I would say have virtually no presence in robotics. And that will change. They're going to go buy stuff. And so it's kind of, to me, the wild west right now and everybody's just trying to figure it out. So when you ask, hey, what's Robin doing? Well, Robin's in the middle of helping Everybody figure it out. And so that means that they have to be involved in lots of different aspects of the robotic space.

Now, poke holes in this theory of mine, because this is how I think robotics might actually have some legs or create traction. Right. Just the theory, probably wrong. But like Roomba was just bought out by Amazon, right inside the house, they're able to now get quite a bit of data in terms of square footage, etcetera, Potentially to target someone better when it comes to their purchasing decisions. Would it be too outlandish or crazy for you to think that a prime member gets a free lawnmower? And like the whole mail package theft thing is solved by, hey, we now have this GPS track device. You throw the package in there, it's not going to get stolen off your front porch. And it potentially now has. It can measure the property, potentially have ring integration in terms of video cameras and security dogs, things like that. Is that something that you like? I personally feel like a massive player like that coming in, willing to have billions of dollars worth of losses as a loss leader for their other products, potentially might be the start of this actually getting traction more in the market. Or do you see it from a different angle or a different player in the market?

Yeah, my perspectives evolved. So in 18, I think it was 2018, at the SA conference, I gave a talk and I specifically mentioned Amazon and robotics, robotic mowers. And I thought about that quite a bit. Now that I'm closer to it, I think that's further out and the reason. But I, I wouldn't put it out of the realm of possibility, out into the future. But I think Amazon's very sophisticated. They'll swoop in when the time is right. And the time is still quite a ways off. So I wouldn't say it's impossible. I'd just say it's going to be a long, longer period of time. If that were to happen, it's going to be longer than we might guess. And the reason for that is the challenge on the robotics right now is you need all these different tech. You can't really depend on any one technology. So as an example, a lot of the robotics have a guide wire plus a line like an invisible dog fence. That technology is okay, but because of that technology, it necessitates the need to bounce them around in a random pattern like a Roomba. And there's some more. There's. Because usually they're using GPS plus that technology, and that's not good enough to get, say, straight line mowing to a large degree. So then there. So then you can bring in some other technologies on that piece of equipment to try to get. So that you can do straight line pattern mowing and so that the GPS signal is more adequate under. When buildings are close or when there's large tree cover. So now you've got to employ another technology. Well then, okay, that's good. That gets you another step closer. But then you might need line of. You might need a. I won't go into all the technical stuff, but you might then need a few more technologies on this one piece of equipment at some point so that it's actually good enough that you could drop that piece of equipment on a property. It could just mow. And that's the reason why I don't think Amazon could accomplish this in this scenario and the reason why many of us aren't adopting in mass scale right now is because there's really not any mowers that are ready for production that have all those technologies on them where you can set it on the property or just take it around the edge, send the property and it really works everywhere. A lot of them that look like they're working are pretty exciting. You'll notice they're almost always in big open areas. They're not under tree cover, they're not close to building. As soon as you do that, most of this stuff kind of blows up. And so we're just not there. So in Amazon would have to. If they gave you a motor, it's like, okay, you're gonna have to put in a guide wire. You're gonna have to do this. You're gonna have to. It's not ready for prime time yet in that you need the homeowner. It's gotta be so simple. You just set this in the property or maybe you go around the perimeter and that's all you gotta do it. It figures it out. So all I'm saying here is that it's gonna be a while. It's gonna be a while for the technology to iterate to get the mower to that point. But that's what everybody's working on. That's where everybody. Well, not. I think most companies are marching in that direction.

For the actual lawn care professionals and business owners out there in terms of using in their businesses and not necessarily use case of one mower per lawn, do you think there's ever a chance of having something like a lidar package being put on an existing mower and being.

Yes, that's one of those technologies I just wasn't going into. But yes. Yeah.

And is it really just price? Really that has to come down to the point where it makes economic sense.

Then.

This is total speculation. It's, it's going to definitely be partially price. It's, it's companies getting more and more because the techno, the hardware is one piece. Then you've got to write all the technology and troubleshoot it and deal with all the exception errors that that thing works in a reliable enough fashion that you can actually deploy it into production. So it's scale of people inside these companies to write the code and do the testing and iterate and such. And that's the second. And then a third would be, it's. Well, that's probably the, the other one is. It's the same. All these companies right now, they're all saying, well, hey, I'm going to do this. I mean, is this technology or this technology or these two technologies? It's just the industry as a whole continuing to iterate and learn from each other and figure out what are the best technologies that we need to, to put on the equipment. So not everybody's trying to do that right now because it's expensive, because you need the teams. And so it is one of the technologies that might move this forward. It's just going to take years for it to work its way through the engineering departments of all these robotic companies where they have the people and the budget and then they believe they could sell the equipment at the price point with all these technologies on it that anybody will actually buy it. Yeah.

I could talk to you about hours, I could talk to you about hours about that side. So I talk. So let's go back.

I'm optimistic. I'll leave everybody with. I'm optimistic. But it's going to, it's just, it's not going to be here tomorrow. It's, it's. I know you want to move on. I'll tell you one thing. I thought that there might be this last first mover advantage, right. The first mover advantage doesn't exist in my belief right now, meaning that if you don't deploy immediately, you're not at risk. But what I will tell you and what I do believe is that if you don't start testing or paying attention or trying things by the time that your brain says, ah, I should have done this, it's going to take you two more years to have any significant number of robots deployed in your business. So you're better off starting sooner than later just to start learning the game and thinking about and figuring it out. Then you are to wait two years from now or three years from now and then I'm going to predict at least two years after that you'll have any meaningful deployment. So while it's going to take a while, it's worth thinking about sooner than later. It's coming.

Do you think that the self driving aspect for cars, for example, needs to be figured out and then the technology trickle down to other industries like lawn care that don't have the market cap or you know, Wall street doesn't have the appetite?

No, I had a theory one time around that too and I don't think so anything. I think this is now. I think that the amount of capital that has come into robotics, we're talking about mowing robotics in the last two years is finally will make you. Makes me feel like, okay, now we're seeing, we're seeing action, we're seeing acquisitions, we're seeing investment capital. It's like, okay, now we're moving forward. And I think it can move forward in spite of what's happening in the automobile industry and waiting for that technology. We need similar technologies. But there's, there are legitimate differences. And so this will iterate on its own cycle separate. And so I don't think we have to wait.

Okay, we're going to stop that rabbit trail. So back to city turf real quick. I know that there was a lot of transition at least several years back in terms of subcontracting model pay for performance. I don't know how involved you know, I am with P4P. We have software now around pay for performance. But I know you all were doing that. I heard a rumor. Rumors happen and that is that city turf no longer does P4P. Okay, lies. So tell me a little bit though about why you moved then towards P4P and what services worked well and did not work well.

We were, we moved like eight years ago, a long time ago.

I don't remember when we moved. Could have been more than eight years ago. We moved a long time ago.

And I couldn't really tell you.

I couldn't really tell you everything we're doing. I'm not involved. But I know you know. So I could be giving you some inaccurate information now, but I know back in the day and I have no reason to think it's changed. It was for sure mowing. That's where it first implemented. It was fertilization and weed control. We never implemented it on tree and shrub care to my knowledge. We never, we may or may not have. I don't know I haven't been involved in building out that side of the business in any way.

So the arbor side, I haven't been involved in that pest control side. I feel like we were doing it, but I can't remember. So. But those, those are actual segments, though, that in my opinion, work for pay for performance. I find, you know, from my experience, pay for performance was more difficult and say, bed and bush work, hand weeding and trimming the bushes and ornamentals and things of that sort. But generally I think it works in almost every area. But you have to, you know, step one is you figure out the pay for performance plan I'm overly simplifying. And then step two is you fix all the bad stuff that happens because you implemented a pay for performance plan in terms of people rushing through the job or things of that sort. And so there's things you have to then implement to overcome the negatives of pay for performance. But when you do it all right, it's a massive win. It was a big win for us. And so we, you know, we. I would. We felt that we were probably one of the better managed businesses in our space. And in terms of just managing people and inspecting work and training people. And I think that was a legitimate belief that we had. And we had really good people. Like people don't leave our business or historically haven't. And so we would have people that have been with us for years and years. And so we didn't think way back when we implemented pay for performance that we were going to see a big bump. And we still saw a big bump. It was like, huh, okay. In spite of doing the management right, in spite of all the training, in spite of everything else, you know what? People really are motivated in life by incentives. That's how the world works. And it works pay for performance. So I don't know that I'm giving you all the details you were looking for, but I'll tell you that we had it implemented across a whole number of segments of the business. I just don't know for sure if we pulled it back in some areas, but I know for a fact we've not eliminated it from the business over.

The past three to four years. How is the labor? You know, let's just call it labor crisis affected sea turf disaster in the past, you know, in the past, administration and with immigration, H2B program, a lot of pivots had to be made. What has that meant for such a large company in Texas using that program? What does that have to change and evolve over the past few years we've.

Let thousands and thousands of mowing clients go and pivoted the business into other stuff and we haven't got our people two years, two times and we're talking 100 and something people each time. It's disastrous because we don't use undocumented team members. We follow all the rules. We do insurance 401k. We do the whole like we are 100% legit. We don't cut, we don't play any games, we don't pay in cash. We paired, we do everything 100%, I mean to building sustainable long term business. And so.

When you're trying to do that, it's really hard. So disaster is the best word I can come up with. It's been very hard on the business. We're not, we're half the size we should be. We're bigger than, we keep growing each year but we've essentially reinvented the underlying business. So we used to be a ton of mowing and now our biggest revenue side of our business, fertilization, weed control. We do a ton of bed and bush work. We do a lot of arbor, a lot of, a smaller amount of pests. I mean we just, we do a bunch of irrigation and mowing still one of the bigger services. But it's, it's a shell of and it's to me it's a shell of what it, it would have been otherwise. And the margins have come down in, in mowing. Even in spite of price increases and everything. The margins are not even in close to what they used to be.

Got it. We gotta move on from that one because I'm already overtime so give me a few more minutes.

Oh sure, sure. I'm fine. I don't have anything to do.

Okay, so the transition into service, autopilot, obviously that was your passion. I still remember as that was happening. I did not know it was the beginning years of Service. All put 2009, 2010. I think for most people probably watching up to this point, they were those original, you know, listeners on lawn care Millionaire listening to those original videos. How has it changed in terms of marketing? Let's just take that segment for a second.

How is what changed the marketing, the.

Marketing side of things. When you know, I go back and watch a lot of your videos from 2009, 2010, a lot of talk about flyers, door hangers, et cetera.

In service, Auto city turf. How has it changed just home home.

Improvement in businesses in general. When I go back and watch the videos that you made, not about Service all pot necessary, but just home improvement in general. Has that evolved and changed or do you think those same methods are applicable to today?

Yeah, it's both. It's both. My early model was I built and said don't anybody do this. Now it's a terrible model, but back in the day it made sense. I built 30 or 40 websites for city turf. And so that was a digital model. It casted a wide net. We were doing search engine optimization to go capture a wide net of clients and then when we get them, we would market more services back to them. Now the strategy is one site, you build one site, you put all your effort into that one site and you try to capture as much organic traffic as you can. So that's similar but different. Then when you get a client, you, you, you try to grow the value of the client over time and you grow the client, the value of the client by marketing back into them. We used to do hard mailers or offline marketing as you might call it. Basically print still works, absolutely works. So that hadn't necessarily changed, but you know, what's. What maybe you do more of now is you might do more email or text marketing into that client instead of as print marketing, but it doesn't mean you don't do all of it. The print marketing works. And so that's kind of changed, but also kind of the same.

Physical offline marketing to a street that you want to build density on, which was our model way back. You know, we cast a wide net with organic. This is before we started using pay per click. You cast a wide net with organic and, or capturing organic through for. If people don't know what I mean, basically you're just getting your website optimized so people find you online through Google, Bing, whatever, search and, and then they come to your website and then your site, your website converts them. They buy well. So that just. I call that a wide net because you're going to just get people all over town and then, then you build density by going direct to the streets that they live on. Well, the game is really still the same. If you want to build the density, you got to go directly to them. And you can't go to a street level with pay per click, whether it be Facebook or Google or whatever, you still got to go with print. And so that still works. You know, so what's changed is that now what I would think of as what search engine optimization used to be now is to me more of a content strategy today. And that's a big change. Another change is that, and this change happened years ago, but you really start spending on pay per click with Google and with Facebook, you're running your digital ads. I mean without question, you up your social game. Those things have all changed and evolved over time. Door knocking still works. I mean so it's a story of every door. Hangers still work without question. You just. A lot of cities block them, but they work and they, you know, and so I think all of it still works. It's just a matter of figuring out where you want to allocate financial resources and time resources and then getting really good at that thing. And so did, did that answer your question?

Absolutely. So in, in terms of those are the beginning days, I was watching those videos, I saw the subliminal messaging of service autopilot shirts.

Absolutely.

Jonathan Patosnik. So I was like, I should check that out. That was great, great marketing. I love it. Uh, and so I think a lot of members that joined service all probably saw those videos and it was very lawn care centric. Again, outsiders, just out outsider looking in. Probably a lot of lawn care professionals on the software. Again, if you don't haven't heard of service, it's a CRM for home improvement businesses. What was that? Discussions like and thought process in terms of like, hey, we got to get away from just lawn care because that's where your network was from the videos and in your audience. And how do we get this to become more service based for all home improvement businesses? I'm in a similar position now. Even when it comes to content is like, hey, lawn care landscaper guys. Most of my audience, what happens the next chapter of content when I go after more other industries. What was that thought process for you though when it came to service autopilot specifically?

Yeah. So that was a tough one. And so interestingly, I don't think a lot of people know this. We actually, when we were starting service, all pilot thought we would. We were best actually starting H Vac and plumbing. We thought they had more money, higher ticket items. Yep. And but what ended up happening is we concluded that we looked at a lot of different service spaces and we concluded that the like when you're, when you want to sell something, you think in terms of pain, I'm fixing, I'm solving for pain. So we felt that in the green industry they had the most pain because like I took like say city turf, we could mow 30 yards a day per crew as an example. So whereas a plumber might do one or two jobs a day. So they could put that in a calendar, they could put that on paper. But 30 yards a day or think about a fertilization, weed control business that is not going to run on paper very well. There's. And then you got to bill all that. It's a lot of pain. So we actually decided that while the green industry has less money, they have more pain and we would start there. So if you had talked to me in 2009 before we were starting the business, I would have said we're still going to be in h vac by 2012. It was a pipe dream. And so what happened is it just, you know, you just never stop putting resources into building the technology. And if you get to know your client, we called our clients members. As you get to know your members better, it's like they got this problem, this problem. You have this pain. How can I help them solve as much as possible? So we just stayed in the green industry and stayed in the green industry. So we didn't really even start getting to cleaning, if I remember correctly, till say 15 and 15, cleaning had just been one of the services on the roadmap. And so to step back real quick, Long Care Millionaire was created to be a marketing channel for service autopilot. And that's what the whole thing was. And so I, I just started in the green industry and I'd always thought I was going to go start a channel in the cleaning industry and then start a channel and.