Mike Minute Mastermind 07.25.22 (Capacity-Based Growth)

Hey everyone, hope you're doing super well. Let's go ahead and get started today. I do want to go over quite a bit of new material from an education side of things and talk about something I call capacity based growth. I'm going to just quickly share the YouTube link. Some people struggle with the Facebook side. Give me one second. Copy this in. Boom. Alright, let's go ahead and get started.

So let me pull this up. Sorry, give me a second here. I accidentally went live. Any announcements? So first and foremost, yesterday I put out on the Facebook group the service Autopilot One click SM email for the Christmas lights Zooper will be probably come out Wednesday or Thursday of this week. They are making some changes to their document editor which are positive but I need them to be done. So they said by Wednesday end of day they would have that done and I'll get that out for Christmas lights asap. In terms of announcements, I think that's all I have. Let's go ahead and do some questions. There's a few that came in on the form. I haven't looked at them yet, but let's go through those and then I want to really spend most of our time today on the educational side and talk about capacity growth, capacity based growth, the three stages of.

When models work at a gust of nation like we talked about last week and how to use capacity growth, capacity based growth to get to those stages. So we're gonna talk a little bit about that today. Let's first though talk, take in some questions. I can share my screen.

Boom. Share screen. All right.

Here we go.

Tyler, how do you break through periods of unproductivity? Haven't had the same energy and work ethic as spring. Couple things. First and foremost.

Human nature is to always look forward to and, and make things that are ahead of us look better than they are and then look back at old times and think that they are better than they were. So that's why people like always fondly think about like their childhood or like the 50s and 60s was like a simpler life. Like it was better back then when really there was still issues and problems and societal problems and economic issues back then too. Same thing goes for when you're looking forward to something. So what I find a lot of times with spring rush is we're so looking forward to the year growth, the opportunity. And we get so wrapped up in that and so we have more energy. And the same thing goes for when we look back in times like, oh like spring was great. Spring was great. There was lots of work coming in. But we forget about how bad it was back then too. So just realize that to stay more even keel, you gotta realize that, you know, the human brain will typically enlarge things that are ahead and make them look better. And we look forward to expectation of something. And then we also, the things in the past, times in the past always seem better than they actually were. Cause we forget about all the struggles that we were going through. And so what that tends to create is a sense of dissatisfaction with the current moment. Cause we're always looking back and seeing, okay, that it was better back then. You know, my job was better. This is why people quit entrepreneurship all the time. Job was better. My. My relationship was better back then. And then they look. People look forward and like, oh, I could make something bigger. I could do something different. And there, those, those juxtapositions being past and future, they forget about the now and living in the moment. And so I'm not giving like any advice on this. I'm just saying this is how I kind of deal with it. I know that from a human psychology. Psychology standpoint, like we are wired to think that way. And so just realize that you're gonna be more productive when you are looking forward to something. And that's why the spring rush. Most people can get through the first month or two because they're so amped up for the year and growth. And then usually physically they get worn down. Then now you're in June, July, August, and guess what? You're like, man, we don't really. Like, I didn't really grow as much I wanted to, or I had to retreat because I didn't have enough employees, or I'm not doing as good as I wanted financially because I had a big job go south. And. And so now it's like, well, there's nothing to look forward to because the rest of the year isn't growth. It's a matter usually of more maintaining and, you know, profitability unless you are actively growing your location. So just. I just try to keep that stuff in mind.

I'm interested in hearing your opinion on services or equipment that we would say you say 10% of the year, I. E. Christmas lights, leaf back, stand on narrator. I'm finding myself having a hard time spending the money on these assets that, that are going to sit for 10 to 11 months out of the year, Especially when we don't have a huge client list in these services already. Great question. The reason most people get allured into new services is because of higher margins, higher Margins are typically associated with any sort of equipment or asset based expenditures that are required for a short period of time. So aeration, typically a higher margin service because you only need to aerate once or twice a year. Mowing, on the other hand, would that you do 30, 40 times a year for somebody is gonna be a lower margin service because you use that equipment all the time. Therefore supply of other vendors that are willing to do mowing is higher. So same thing with Christmas lights, snow plowing, etc. In our market, for example, we can get away with 500, $600 an hour for snow plowing easily in some markets, 100 or $200. But it's because they use their snow plows and their snow equipment much more often. We charge two or three times more than some people when it comes to salt, but it's because it hardly happens here. So there's always a trade off of high margins and asset utilization. The less you use an asset, typically the higher margins you're going to be able to charge because there's less competition and less people have that piece of equipment because it's only used so often. So what the balance is, do the margins compensate for the lack of asset utilization? So if I'm doing Christmas lights, I'm only going to use them for a couple months at the year, I'm only going to hang them once and take them down once. Is it high enough margin? Well, no. If you can pay for all of the supplies in the first year and then every year after that you're basically making 80%, 90% margins, that becomes really interesting. Now that being said, if you're doing. I'll just use this as an example because it came up on the Franchise Advisor Council, if you're doing hydro seeding, you're gonna spend $30,000 for this great hydro seeder and you only use it once or twice in the year when. Well, that's a horrible investment. And so in terms of offering services that we don't have a high asset utilization and I am not a fan, it's not a good use of capital. What it really comes down to is are you going to use it often or B, is the margin on that service so good, so good that it compensates for the fact that you don't use it very often? So that's why aerators, we didn't, we did not buy an aerator until literally we had probably 80 to 100 aerations. We just rent it because I knew that we could rent it for two or three days in the spring and two or three days in the fall, and that was it. And so that's why renting is usually the thing you want to do unless a, everyone else is wanting to rent it at the exact same time, which is difficult, or two, you use enough to where it makes sense financially because you use it, you know, a couple times a week or a couple times a month when you're using something once a year, twice a year, three times a year, it's very hard to make sense of that financially instead of just renting it.

So same thing with leaf vacs. Like in our market, you know, most of our work is going to be done around a house or in flower beds where we have to rake the stuff out anyways. We're only going to be able to suck it up once it gets to the truck, which is 90% of the work's already been done. We already have to put it in a bin. Why would I just not throw it in the back of the truck? So we don't get leafvax where we're at. I know there's some markets you need to have a leaf vac and you use it for consistently for three or four months, like Kevin Fairburn in Mississippi. Like it's a great investment. But if you're not using it every single day and it's not something that's super common that you're using, you better make sure those margins are through the roof. So, yeah, I hope that made sense. Either have to have good asset utilization or high, high margins. And when those two things are not there, that's when I get worried. What is the best time, best way to implement and keep up with PTO that's paid time off? Is that something CC can keep us keep up with or. Yeah. So if you want to institute paid time off, you just have to let command center know if they're running your payroll and they'll just bake into your QuickBooks. So they'll. So they'll set it up based upon the hours when people clock in. That'll automatically go up. It'll automatically start to show on the pay stubs of employees as that time accrues. And then all you'll need to do when you submit payroll is tell command center if someone wants to use paid time off. And so we'll just put like, you know, the typical hours and stuff for P4P that you give them. And then the next you take once, eight hours pto and then they just take that out of whatever's accrued. So. And it's actually kind of a way don't, I don't recommend this, but it's kind of a way you can do pay advances because someone like falls short on a bill, you can say, hey, we'll just go ahead and do, we'll release PTO for you. And then if they don't have any pdo, you could theoretically do a negative number on pto. I've only done that one time, but I'd rather do that because then it just, it falls right into natural cadence of payroll instead of like doing it outside of payroll and you have cash and you, you know, tax stuff and all the rest of it. So I really like PTO honestly because like it definitely helps with.

People asking for pay advances because like if someone wants to pay advance, like great, you have pto. Just use your pto. Like that solves the problem. So.

Last question and then we're gonna jump into some other stuff. Allstate Insurance update. Yes, thank you for the, for the reminder. Yeah. So Allstate we are working with, I've been working with them for months now and we're trying to get it to where basically all you have to do is fill out a form, a Google form, and then it automatically will get the information Allstate and they'll send you a quote. And my goal is that you don't have to have 70% participation. I just talked to Ryan Payne last night and he said in Texas, or at least with what the current provider has, 70% of his employees have to use the plan or else it's inactive, like they can't use it. So we don't want that because that's brutal when you grow and then secondarily is to where you only need three people. So that's what we're trying to work on right now. And I think we're going to get it. And that is. So if you, your spouse and then one employee got on the plan, you could have a group health insurance plan. It's great, especially for someone who's self employed. That's one of the biggest drawbacks sometimes being self employed if you're a little bit older. So all that to say hopefully next couple of weeks. We already have the Google form. I've looked at it, but they haven't said it's ready to go to submit to everyone. But I will basically be able have send a link to everyone from the dashboard. You'll click on it, fill out your, your form with the employees ages, information that's very basic and they give you a quote and then if you accept the quote, there's more information that's required, but it'll give you a very good idea and like very accurate estimate here because like age and whether or not they smoke is the biggest factor as to whether or not insurance, the cost of insurance. Cause they can't change insurance premiums based upon pre existing conditions and all sorts of other things and weight and all the. They have to do it based upon like age, smoking. Those are the two biggest driving factors of insurance, especially the age part. So cool. All right, I want to talk about a few things. Let's go to the educational piece of things real quick.

And that is going to be a few things that came up with the Franchise Advisory Council that I wanted to go over together. First and foremost, capacity based growth. This is just the term I came up with yesterday. But what it means is everyone's always wondering, well, should I grow, should I not grow, Et cetera. And I think that what you have to realize is what is your capacity without spending any more money on assets. So trucks, equipment, you could look at employees, but that's not an asset. Right? It's just a variable expense. But mostly trucks and equipment. If you're not using your trucks and equipment all the time, there is capacity that is able to, you're able to grow into that capacity. Let's just say you have two trucks. This is a real example that I was talking with one of the owners about. So let me just use it because all the numbers are fresh in my head. Let's say you have two trucks, okay? And you're at 15,000amonth in revenue. And you're like, man, should I grow like recession, like should I be saving cash, all the rest of it. If you have capacity, that is two trucks to get to 25 to 30,000amonth in revenue, and you're gonna literally spend a couple thousand dollars, get some tools on that truck and hire someone and you can immediately go from 15,000amonth to 25 to 30,000amonth. That is an absolute 100%. Go grow. Like go build the business. Grow into the capacity. I don't care if you have to lower your prices in order to increase your close ratio. Get to capacity, then raise your prices. And the same owner I was talking about yesterday, he just tried to double his prices in May. And literally he didn't hardly lose anybody. You lost four people. And the thing about that is, that's why I'm such a big proponent of grow as quickly as you can to the three different stages that we talked about last year or last week. In terms of when I talk about, hey, these are the three stages in your business. We're going to be the most profitable. Sorry, I'm going to sneeze at some point here. I can feel it coming on. We talk about 2000-005000-00800,000 plus being the three different stages where you're probably the most profitable. And in between those is kind of a weird gray area where a lot of times you don't see any increase in profitability. What I would recommend is grow to capacity that 200,000 level as quickly as possible. That 200,000 level is probably going to look like either one truck with one and one employee or two trucks with one employee. Right. That's the kind of solo operator model. Okay, 200,000, you can get there quickly as possible, grow to capacity that 200,000 level, and then focus on profitability. And when I talk about capacity, that 200,000, 500,800 plus usually aligns with your assets and aligns with your capacity using those assets. So if you're asking yourself right now, well, should I be holding on to cash or because of the recession and waiting for like to buy out people or like when the labor market's better, if you're saying that and thinking that and at the same time you have the trucks and equipment to be able to double the business should absolutely keep growing the company. Absolutely. And I don't mind you staying in that hyper growth mode of 70% close ratio. And even if you have to lower your prices in order for that to happen, because I want you to fill capacity and then focus on raising your prices, bringing down close ratio. And like the owner I talked to yesterday literally doubled the prices and not too many people left. And so if you do that, you're going to fill the capacity quickly. Because the alternative to this is you keep growing very slowly to each of these levels to 200,000 to 500,000, 800,000. Those can all be done in one year in increments, just like I just talked about. 200,000 the first year, 500,000 the next year, 800 plus the next year. That is possible year by year by year. Now, you can do that slower. You can do that by saying, okay, well, I'm just going to get several customers, I'm going to grow slowly. And you can do that over the course of 10 years. And that's what most companies will do, is grow the course of 10 years to 800,000 plus in revenue, and that might be more sustainable. It might be a little bit less risky, etc. But in my opinion, the better way to do it is grow to capacity and then focus on profitability. You can do that all in one year. You can grow within spring rush to capacity, like fill up your trucks, fill up your equipment, get enough employees and you're like, okay, if I have to grow any more, I'm buying more trucks in a bubble right now. I'm buying more trailers and equipment in a bubble right now. I'm going to focus on profitability. So grow to capacity. And typically that capacity is going to be around that 200,000, 500,000 or 800 level. And so what I'd encourage you to do is grow to your capacity and then you have to this question, do I buy trucks and keep growing? Do I buy equipment and keep growing? Do I employ more people and keep growing? Or B, do I stay here, raise my prices because I've been growing so quickly and actually start to become profitable on all that work? Because you raise your prices one time, once you've grown to capacity, you immediately become much more profitable. And it's the lever of the service based business that is incredible that you can raise Your prices by 5, $10 a cut immediately, making a couple thousand dollars extra month straight profit and not lose anybody. And so.

Two things I want to talk, I want to emphasize on number one, these different levels of business, the 200,000, the 500,000, 800,000. But more importantly, if you're asking yourself, should I be growing right now? I'd be looking at what's your capacity? What's your. Without buying more assets, trucks, equipment. Now if you have a lot of cash, if you have plenty of capital, you might go ahead and buy trucks right now, you might buy equipment, you might go employ more people because you're just on this rapid growth trajectory and that's fine. But when you want to become profitable, that's when you're gonna raise your prices. Your close ratio will come down, but you'll become much more profitable. Okay, so I'd be asking yourself is what's your my revenue right now? And then what from an asset point of view is my capacity without buying more trucks and equipment, how, how large could I grow? And if there's a big delta there, if you could grow a lot more with the current assets that you have, I would keep growing, I would keep getting more customers. I would focus 100% like we talked about in training on only close ratio, fill capacity and then get to capacity and have this question, do I Focus on profitability right now because I need the cash, or B, do I keep growing because I want, I have plenty of cash at hand, I have employees ready to go and I can keep scaling this thing up. And, and that's what the coaching calls are for. Because when you get to the capacity level is when you're going to talk to Lee and go over all these numbers and determine, do I split here, do I do, do I do the profitability thing, raise all my prices, stay at around the same capacity, don't go buy more trucks and equipment, or B, do I continue on this growth trajectory because I have the capital available, I want to buy the trucks and equipment, I have plenty of employees, I give you tons of employees. Like that is a huge opportunity to keep growing. But that's all going to be determined on your individual basis at that point of capacity. Points of capacity is where growth versus profitability decisions are made. If you have a whole bunch of of trucks and equipment sitting around half the week, you should be keep, you should still be growing and you should grow to capacity as quickly as possible. Because trucks sitting around cost you money. You want to get, fill the capacity, close every job. I don't care what the prices are. I don't care if it's like 20, 30, 40% less than what you think you should be charging. Fill the capacity, do a good service, flip to profitability by raising your prices and you might lose 5 or 10% of your people. And that's fine because you're at capacity and now you're really profitable. That's a much faster way to grow than just growing super slowly with a 15, 20, 30% close ratio. I'd rather you do 70% close ratio, fill your capacity, then flip it to 30% or 40% close ratio and be very profitable at that level. Okay, so that's capacity based growth. The other thing I wanted to talk about is based on what I just said there, it's very important to realize that different stages of growth demand and require different.

Advice. So what I mean by that is when you look at the Bellingham shop right now and we are cutting out services left and right, we are standardizing, simplifying, and over the past three years have gone from 40% to of our work being maintenance to now 70 to 80% of our work being maintenance. If you look at that, you're like, oh, well then that's what I should be doing. No, they're in stage five of growth. Okay, if you look at like Ryan Payne, another large location, just cut out Concrete, cutting out, I believe you just cut out irrigation. If you look at.

Over in Augusta, Georgia with Brian Connor doing the same thing, cutting out treatments, cutting out big projects, cutting out planting, you have to realize that they're in a different stage of growth. Okay. In stage one and two and three, if you look in the manual I talk about you're going to use projects, you need projects to fill in the gaps. Because mowing isn't going to go from zero to a million in one year. It's going to be a slow burn all the way up because you're getting customers or they're recurring that you're slowly build up to that. But you're not going to go from zero to $1 million in revenue in even a couple of years just using mowing. You're just not going to, you're going to need the projects to even out your workload. And then when you get to stage five is when I start talking about cut down services. This is after 800,000 revenue, you, you're starting to cut out services, cut out the more complex things. And you say, well, I want to do that from day one, that's totally fine. You're just not going to grow as quickly. So the expectation of I'm going to get to a million dollars in revenue in two years is not, I don't want to say it's not possible, but I have yet to see someone to grow from zero to a million dollars in revenue using mowing only in residential. You need so much capital to do that because you would have to blitz the market with marketing. You just have to saturate it and it'd be extremely inefficient. And so I've seen no one do that. I've seen company go from zero to a million very quickly doing a blended strategy where 20, 30% of their revenue is coming from recurring. And then they slowly over time try to move that from 20, 30% up to 50, 60, 70% of recurring. That's possible. And so the reason I'm saying that is because I don't want the expectation is like, oh, I can grow a million dollar business just following what Bellingham's doing. No, Bellingham has taken years to get hundreds of mowing customers and all the locations that have a large percentage of their work coming from recurring revenue and they're large, has taken years to do that. So I would recommend, as we talk about the stages of growth is you gotta realize that when I talk about raising prices, when I talk about cutting out services and just like we keep raising prices at Bellingham Shop, like on everything. That's not the right thing for you to be doing. If you're in stage one and you have a whole bunch of capacity that we just talked about that you haven't filled up. If you have two trucks and one truck sits in the parking lot four days out of the week, you should not be focusing on raising prices. You should be focused on filling capacity at all costs, getting the 70% plus closing ratio and filling that with an employee. So that way you can go from 15,000amonth to 30,000amonth in revenue. And then. And then you have the decision, do I focus on profitability or keep growing? And if you're focusing on profitability, you're going to jack up your prices. You're going to be at 30,000amonth in revenue and being very profitable versus being at $15,000 a month in revenue and one truck sitting in the parking lot all day long not making any revenue. Okay? So you have to keep in mind that the advice that I give anybody gives is completely subjective to several things. Number one, how much capital do you have on hand? Very important. Do you have an excess supply of labors? Do you have employees literally ready to work for you, which most of us don't. But if you have that, that's a big deciding factor as to whether or not certain information is pertinent to you. The third thing is, what's your goals? Do you want to actually grow the business or is it getting overwhelming for you and you should actually scale back? And how you scale back is raise your prices, decrease your close ratio, cut out all scheduled estimates. All those things are going to simplify the business, streamline it, and make it much more profitable. But that's not the right thing for everyone to be doing. If you're listening to someone in stage five growth, whether it be myself, a different owner in Augusta Nation, someone on YouTube, you have to take all those three things into context. How much capital they have, access to, employees, and what the goals of the business are they actually trying to grow or not? Because I'm not trying to grow the Bellingham shop. So don't follow what we're doing. If you're trying to hyper growth, we are very happy with our 41% close ratio or whatever it was last month. I think it's 41%, whereas in the. In the Mount Vernon location, at 56% close ratio, it needs to be at 56, because I still want to grow that location. It still has excess, excess capacity. There's Trucks that are sitting in the yard today, I don't like that. I need that close ratio to go up. So the way that you take information needs to be synthesized through all those three things. If you listen to someone like Brian's lawn maintenance or Keith talking about raising prices, that's fantastic. But if their only goal is to have one or two trucks and they have 100 calls coming in every week, yeah, they're going to jack up prices. Yeah, their close ratio is going to be 10 or 15% because they're not trying to grow. So that third part, their aspirations, their goals, is not aligned with what you're trying to do in the business. Okay. So what I'd be asking myself is, are you at capacity? And then go to those three questions. Okay, so if you're at capacity, should I grow or should I become more profitable? Okay. It's gonna come down to what capital you have, what access to employees do you have? And the third thing is, do you actually want to keep growing the business or are you burnt out? Because if you're burnt out, probably a good time to raise your prices. Slow growth at one of those stages. 200, 500, 800 in revenue and focus on profitability. Okay.

I think that was all. If any of the franchise advisory councils in the comments and want me to add anything to that or based upon our conversation on the weekend, feel free to let me know. But remember that capital at your how much capital you have and access to capital is also a massive determining factor at that split if you do profitability or growth because ultimately all of us would want a bigger business. Whether or not someone wants growth is pretty usually a pretty dumb question. It's really like, do you have the capital to go buy the trucks and the equipment and then spend some money on marketing to fill capacity? Because you are less efficient when you go buy a truck and a piece of equipment and now your capacity on that truck and piece of equipment is basically at zero. So how quickly can we fill that capacity on that truck? That's an important piece. Well, that might have to do with can I spend money in marketing? So all of these things are the type of things you're going to be going over with Lee on a coaching call when you hit capacity is, well, do I raise my prices? Do I have the capital? Do I have the access to employees to keep growing? These are all things that are going to go into that decision making process and the matrix of why it is so important to have a coaching call, why these masterminds are important to Ask these questions because not all advice is meant for everybody. Coming from myself or any other influencer or even another owner might have very good intentions by telling you something. And, and I always have a good intention trying to like help you grow your business, obviously. But what's right for me at stage five is not right for you at stage one or two. What's right for one of my locations that's in stage one or two is not right for stage five. Like, I am not trying to get 70% close ratio in Bellingham. If I saw that for one month, I would literally raise every single price. I would double E fees. I would triple dump fees If I saw 70% close ratio. I don't want that. I don't want to keep growing revenue. So all of that to say when you talk to owners and they're like, this is the best thing you should be doing. Let's just say, for example, certain type of fertilizer, this is the best thing ever. You can put this stuff down and it costs you like five bucks and you get $100 for it. And I sell these like hotcakes. Okay, great. But if they're in stage two or three and they're trying to get to 500,000 in revenue and you're at a million, you should not be listening to that. You're in a different stage of business when you should be focusing on cutting out services and focusing on profitability and simplification so you can move on to a different location or a different investment vehicle. Not focusing on getting more services and inventorying more product and materials. Okay? So very important. And if your expectation is to grow just using mowing, that's fine. Just don't expect it to happen in two years. You're going to build a million dollar business. That expectation is flawed. And that's why in stages one, two and three, I talk about using projects as a way to build out the infrastructure of the business and afford another truck, another employee. Have the projects fill in the gaps of mowing. And then over time, you start to relieve yourself of that need for more projects by focusing more and more on the mowing. And that's going to be a slow, slow build over the course of time. So I hope that made sense.

See here. Hey, Mike. I keep going back and forth on doing lights. We typically busy with leaf clamps through December. I think lights would be a nice little moneymaker. Help me decide if you're going to be busy, in my opinion, throughout December without any problems whatsoever. I would not do lights. That's why we're not doing lights. We're very busy all the way through December with cleanups. And this year especially, we'll probably be busy beyond December. If you're. Because look, think about it. If you're going to go and start a new service and train guys up on a new service when you don't need the work, you already have something that's high margin, like leaf cleanups. If those are high margin for you, I would focus on if you're really hell bent in the balance about this, raise your prices on leaf cleanups. Because either A, it's going to push you like, man, no one canceled. I'm making a bunch of money on leaf cleanups. Yeah. I have no temptation now to do. To do Christmas lights. Or you raise your prices, increase your margin on leaf cleanups and.

Bunch of people leave. Well, guess what? Now you have excess capacity. Now you have the work. Now you have the employees to go do the work for Christmas lights. So if you're in a rock and a hard place there, I'd raise your prices on leaf cleanups and it'll be very clear as to whether or not, okay, all of a sudden this margin, my margin just doubled. I'm going to keep doing this leaf cleanup thing or B, I lose a bunch of customers. I have now capacity because now you're not busy enough to go do the lights. Capacity based growth is just a term I made up yesterday, but it is the essence of being efficient when it comes to your business. You've got to have asset utilization and use your equipment and grow to the extent where you're using all of your assets at their maximum, maximum amount. And then you get to that stage and you're going to become profitable by raising all of your prices because you don't want to keep growing. And if you do want to keep growing, just know you're going to need access to capital, you need to buy more trucks and equipment, etc. I feel like one of the big advantages of lights is being able to take them down. January, February, what do you think? I 100% agree with this. I 100% agree with this. I would be tempted to do lights because of this reason. January and February for us is when we are slower. Taking them down is a massive plus. Here's the problem. Taking them down, if it's done right, should take like very short amount of time. So I might be able to take all of my lights down in say like a week. And my question is, is it worth putting up with three to four or five weeks of chaos in November, December, when I would have otherwise had a whole bunch of other work. So I'm not against Christmas lights. I'm just talking about each individual location. You figure this out yourself. If you're wrapping up leaf cleanups by mid November, and you're like, man, I don't have much work in late November, early December, Christmas lights are the thing for you. But if you're gonna be already busy with cleanups and leaf cleanups and property cleanups all the way through the end of December, the only really advantage to you is it's a higher margin service. And. And b, you could get a little bit more work in January, February, taking them down. But it's not very much if you're doing things right. According to Ryan, is like, if you've done things right and label everything correctly and you take it down correctly with magnets, it takes very short amount of time to put them, bring them down compared to putting them up. So just something to balance out. But I would say the biggest thing is, like, just raise your price on leaf cleanups. Either increase your margins where it's no longer tempting to do lights, or B, people cancel, and now you have the excess capacity to grow into excess capacity. Is that you? I would. If I was everyone right now, I would sit down and ask myself, what's my revenue? And what is the capacity of revenue I can get done without buying more trucks and equipment. That is the most profitable stage your business will be in. If you have six trucks and you're using four consistently, probably a good chance that you're doing.

50 to 70, 50 to 60,000amonth in revenue, and your capacity is at 80 to 90. You should be growing to 80 to 90 as fast as possible by simply increasing your close ratio. And if you need to lower your prices to get there, I would 100% do that because you'd get the capacity, you'd get a bunch more customers, you'd fill the schedule, and then you raise your price once you hit 80 or 90. And guess what? People stay. Okay. Awesome. You guys are great. Have a great week, and we'll see you tomorrow.