Mike Minutes Mastermind 05/18/2023

Happy Thursday. Let's do this. All right, let me just jump into.

Facebook real quick.

All right, I got a couple announcements before we get there though. Let me just.

On the Facebook group, I create a new community chat. I have never done that before. It could be a bad idea, but I was going to give it a shot. I'm going to show you guys what it looks like here and it is for conference arrangements. So if you want to split a room with somebody.

Split rental cars, have a travel partner, whatever it is, you should be able to do that and communicate about that inside the community chat. So I pinned it and featured. But if you also go to community chats, you'll see it. And it's basically just a chat.

For the upcoming conference in Louisville. If you want to find a roommate, rent a car with somebody, fly with somebody, whatever it is to help with costs, etc. I do think there is value to being on site if you are able to. And I know it's expensive at Omni Hotel. My goodness is extremely expensive. I tried every other hotel I possibly could because so simply due to the fact the cost of Omni, however, if you split it with someone, it's not as bad. So if you get like a room with two, two queen beds, it's not so bad. So I wanted to create that chat. So it should hopefully help especially those that are just getting started or growing their business from a cost perspective in the conference. So definitely check that out if you have interest. If it becomes crazy, I'll just shut it down, the community chat if it gets too much. But I figured it'd make an easy place for people to ask who they could room up with, etc. All right, what else do we got? I got two other announcements, audio only. People have been asking this for this for a long time. Let me see here. I'm not going to guarantee I'll always be able to do this, but I will try it for the next few weeks and see if it is possible. But on the dashboard, if you are an audio only type of person, click on this button right here. It's going to take you to a web page. You can go ahead and bookmark this URL if you want. And so that way you get here really fast and it's just going to be the date and the audio. You should be able to click play on this and then turn your phone off and still play regardless of your phone being screen being off. So we'll see how it works. Is not live. So I would give it within 24 hours of the Mastermind, I will have the next, the the next one up. I'll try to do it right after but I can't guarantee it because if I have a meeting right after the Mastermind I will not be able to get to it till that night. So within 24 hours I'll have the most recent up mic minute Masterminds in here. So for those of you that don't have YouTube Premium like to listen to this while you work. And especially for the ones that get 45 minutes long, obviously you're not going to watch the whole thing so it's just easier if you have an audio only so it is there for the taking. Last thing on the conference or on the dashboard as well. There's now a conference tab and this has all the information and the schedule for both the public conference and the Augusta Nation only conference. So there's two parts of the conference that will be only for Augusta. One is going to be the private dinner on on Tuesday night. Originally we thinking we would have to do the dinner and then just go late into the night with August Nation keynotes and talk, etc. Not ideal. That way we can take our time here on Tuesday night and then Wednesday we'll be able to spend that time at a cathedral that's like a few blocks away from the Omni Hotel. And then we'll break and at 12 o' clock if you want to, you can go to Quip Expo. So it's all in one spot. Pretty cool. We do need everyone to fill out this form that is attending. Please don't fill out the form now because you're like super hyped and then pull out last minute because everyone that comes, we have to start paying I think in July. I have to make put the down payment on the dinner. It's almost 100. It might be over a hundred dollars honestly per plate for that dinner. So please, I do need this filled out for everyone that is going to come. And this kind of walks through the typical steps of like there's two tickets per location and if you need more then you can just purchase them like regular etc. So that's that.

All right, that's all I had for announcements. Let's see if there's any questions.

Right, let's see here. Boom, boom.

Questions.

Share screen.

All right, where are we at? All right, we got 10 today. Let's go. Joel from Lafayette, what are those camera glasses you had in your estimate video yesterday? Oh, they're from Ray Ban. We're going to be Using them a whole bunch. On our trip in June, we were kind of testing them out. That's why we did that video the other day. Just wanted to make sure the tech was working okay. So we have some pretty cool stuff we'll be using in June, hopefully capturing a lot of it. I am going to attempt to make a separate daily video for just Augusta Lawn Care that I'm going to put into a course for the first 30 days of starting a location. So obviously like what we show on the Public channel is not all the behind the scenes because it's not going to do well on the video and it also doesn't. There's a lot of stuff that we can't talk about publicly in terms like how we're doing stuff with command center and automations and stuff like that. So what I'm going to do is each night I'm going to video and it's not going to be available right away. It'll be at the end of the end of the trip. I'll should. I should have 30 days just of me talking to the camera and explaining exactly in detail the behind the scenes of what I'm setting up with command center changes and things I'm going through. Like that I can't put on camera for public, so. Well, then put it together and I'll package it up like a course and then you all could watch it. Obviously it'll be free, but it'll mostly be for people that want to start, you know, are getting started and I would recommend that they just literally watch every day of their first month. They'd watch my videos that are just for Augusta Lawn Care, so should be helpful. Devin from Red Deer, do you recommend payroll every Friday or every second Friday? What do you do? We always do biweekly mostly due to the fact that that is the processing time of payroll costs you a lot. Not. Not necessarily the cost to run performance dollars to be pretty high and give you a larger pool to tap into for yellow slopes.

Hey, do you have any tutorials linking zapier to Facebook messages? I'm kind of lost. It's in Copilot University. That's what you're looking for.

Max from Burnaby. I've noticed a big slowdown in the leads this week. Is it just something local to my market or commands and you're getting swamped work and not getting to all my client requests? That's not happening. I asked because someone else mentioned command was behind, but maybe that was resolved. You know, commands, not behind in terms of like our Market specifically. Max, we did just have like the hottest weekend of May ever. So maybe that has something to do with it. I know the Bellingham shop's pretty far booked out. We have a challenge to beat $200,000 in revenue in June. So we'll see if they pull that off because we've gotten as close as 199,500 I think, but we've never eclipsed 200,000. So that's the goal. But.

I would say, I would rec I would say in mo a lot of our markets when you have that first like really, really hot week, your leads for mowing are probably going to drop down and that's usually when you want to start. If you have only a backlog of one or two weeks instead of three or four, you're probably going to start pivoting to okay, can we go do one click estimate emails for training treatments? It's still early enough in the year. Can we do a one click as property cleanups still early enough in the year or do we do after larger projects and when then we book ourselves out in June, July, August, when in a lot of our markets the mowing slows down substantially. So this is the time. I know a lot of us are still in the depths of spring rush, but especially in the next three to six weeks a lot of us will start going from it's the grass is growing like crazy into it's starting to slow down and be dormant. It's and then now you've got to start pivoting into project and to fill the schedule.

Kyle Tarvin how do you rationalize the idea of starting another business along with your current I keep getting alerted by starting another company, but I keep telling myself I need to focus on my two locations. How do you know it's the right time to actually follow through on starting another company? You seem to do a lot very quickly so just curious how you have it have done it. I have noticed that every single time I get into any industry outside of lawn care, I usually lose my shirt or I I have a much less chance of success.

And so you again I talk about this all the time. It comes to starting other businesses, you have to ask yourself what is your differentiating factor compared to every other everyone else that also has the same amount of money? Because that's called dumb money is when you have 100 grand like oh I could go buy this restaurant, I can go buy this car rental business, I could go start this Turo, I could do this Airbnb. You have to Ask yourself, is someone else in $100,000, what separates you with, gives you a unique advantage over them? Because if you don't have a competitive advantage outside of just money, you're typically going to have average or less than returns, right? And so because the 20%, the top 20% of any market typically takes 80% of the profits. So if you're not in the top 20% in any sort of industry, you probably should not be there. And if you're new to an industry, do not think that you're going to be in the top 20% right away. This is something that you will fight. If you're just getting started, you just got started with lawn care, you're just getting started, you're not immediately in the top 20%, you know, immediately, ideally in the top 2 to 3%, right? And so I've, I've said this before, I feel like I'm probably in the top 1% of like the lawn care industry in terms of like knowing what's going on. So like, that's why I can start other businesses in lawn care and centered around lawn care and understand what the customer needs, have exactly what they, they want, et cetera. The same thing is true for you and your lawn care business at a smaller level for your location level, right? Instead of getting into restaurants or like what other other ever other business or investments or real estate or whatever, it's like, okay, ask yourself.

What percentage, what percentile are you in lawn care landscaping? And if you're new, like first year, second year, you're learning a lot in terms of, especially around spring rush, how to time your employees, like when you need to hire them in order to be able to maximize spring rush. And until in, in my opinion, you have not mastered this industry, until you really get good at predicting the seasonality and matching that up with your supply and your demand, which is hiring people soon enough, knowing exactly what that demand curve looks like in your market, knowing exactly when you send each of your marketing pieces, being able to really dial that in so you don't have to turn off marketing during spring rush, that is important. And until you've done that, I don't think you're in the top 5 or 10%. And it can take you three to four years just to figure out timing around spring rush, timing when you'd hire, getting ready for a rush of demand, knowing to kind of trickle off of natural attrition of employees. And that falls into summer. And then what you need to do in the, in the spring, in the fall time that is typically why in this industry I feel most people take three to five years to get profitable. It's not necessarily because of lack of work or even just finding employees. It's matching up seasonality with supply and understanding that you need to hire more people three to six weeks before spring rush. And that it that increase in demand is going to only be able to be fully realized and.

Cashed in on if you've actually pre dated it with an excess of supply of labor. So and then making sure to do that so that you can market when your customer acquisition cost is lowest. The vast majority of a Gustav nation has either restricted leads or does not do any marketing right now. And that is because we are you are still learning and I am still learning. We are all still learning what exactly demand curve looks like in our climate. That'll be the hardest thing I will not know when I move when I go to North Carolina is I do not know what that climate looks like. I do not know the demand curve. I don't understand the grass, I don't understand the bushes. And knowing all of that is what gets you into the highest tier of an industry. That gives you a unique advantage against everybody else. If you 20 people, you flipped a coin to all business owners, 20 people started a lawn care business, there's a really good chance that all of us would do well comparatively to the other 19, right? You being one one of the 20, the other 19, we all do pretty good because on average we're in this industry. We should know more. Now if you take though just the people in this industry then you rank yourself in terms of percentile. Okay. Out of all the landscapers in your market are you like 50, 50 percentile? I would say that most of us start around there after coming out of Augusta because you should be able to be at least in the 50, 40 to 50 percentile by just having training, having systems in place, back in support, etc. But that rest of that is is comes from knowing your climate, understanding more about this industry, understanding demand and supply and being able to market when everyone else turns off their marketing.

And that's the companies that grow the fastest. And I guess I just consistently see it each spring use their second spring rush it whether or not they actually really take off or they double or triple. Like I know it sounds bad. Like let's say the first year they did 10,000amonth in revenue. The difference between the Companies in their second spring rush go to 20 or 30,000 versus 80 or 100,000. The ones that have can go to 80, a hundred thousand, have two things. One, they have capital. That's obviously constraint. But then secondarily is they, they have figured out the supply and demand in their market and they usually, they, they usually hire up into spring rush and then are able to market and continue marketing throughout spring rush. That's why the second spring rush is way more compounded because not only do they have brand awareness and reviews and they're ranking well on Google now, they also, if they figured out that, that second part, and that is getting labor prior to spring rush so that they can continue to market when their customer acquisition cost is the lowest, those are the ones that typically take off. So all that to say.

Yeah, this is the shiny object. I just genuinely believe everyone should think about their career in terms of their entrepreneurial career in terms of 10 years segments, right? You have, if you're 30 years old, you got four really solid swings left in you, right? 40 years. If you're 20, you got five. Right? Six if you really want to work till you're, you know, you got seven if you're Warren Buffett, right? So if you think of it like that, it's like, well, man, If I got seven shots to really go extremely deep, 10 years in an industry, you have a very good understanding of whether or not that was something you wanted to keep going with, right? So I've been doing long care, almost 10 years now, right. And so then it's like, okay, well do you move on to another industry or do you say, okay, I'm at this fine, you know, I'm in the top percentile of this industry now, I'm going to double down on it, right? And then you expand inside of that industry, you offer more services and you up the chain of leverage, right? So for example, that's why we have the executive model. I don't think people are going to use it for next year or two. But I know in once someone's been in the system for five, six years and they have two locations and they're like, okay, I need to go to the next level of capital, of leverage, and that is going to be taking the 100, $200,000 I'm making profit and I need to go make two or three locations or I need to go take that, go take a bank loan against that so I can go start 10 locations. That is the next level of leverage. And you now your job switches from figuring out how to hire and train employees out in the field and routing and scheduling and software, and it switches to managing managers and it's a completely different business than just doing lawn care. Right? However, you'll be way infinitely more successful at that because you have the base and the foundation of the industry already solved and you're already in that top few percentage percentile of that industry in terms of knowledge, expertise, understanding. And so then when you, when you deploy higher leverage against it, it's usually more successful. So that was a very long answer. Mercy.

Anonymous Would you be willing to have a one on one call if someone had a moral ethical concern with the ongoings of Augusta? I don't want to make this public because it may be a misunderstanding on my part. Just send me an email. Frank says Augusta longer service.com if you think someone else is doing something unethical or something like that, send me an email. Just don't expect me to overreact because there's two sides to every single story and I will do a lot of digging before I convict anyone else. But if it's a franchisee you have a problem with or anything like that, definitely send me. Send me an email. Talk to your coach. Just know that I'm not into like private conversations. If someone says something about someone else, I will just literally take your message and I'll talk about with someone and we will have a talking together. I will be like hey you two. If there's a disagreement, something, I'm just gonna put you two together and I'm gonna sit there and like listen to you talk. 99.9 of disagreements can be solved with this good communication.

So had this the other day and.

What would have been a massive issue was diffused in a matter of five minutes. So.

Landon Smith, Tallahassee, Florida situation. I have an employee right now I'm going to fire in about a week. The new guys can't start until the following week and we have work booked. He is almost unmatched. He is almost unmotivated by PvP and milks the clock to where we are falling behind. He's 100 capable of hitting PvP but he constantly has callbacks for skipping things or just not mowing as a whole. It's like he's just been unfazed by having constant yellow subs. He actually still would have made PVP even with all the callbacks and going to fix the mess ups. But after his third one this pay period we are starting deducting pay because it's hurting the brand. Mind you. These include not edging, being late, blowing, skipping yards, or leaving stuff in the truck. Question 1 How do you Handle employees that are unfazed by yellow subscribers, I assume just for them because they are okay with just hitting base pay and it's bad for the company. Yeah. So you got to find replacements. Right. If someone's just fine with base pay, and this is the problem with raising base pay too high, yes, you attract better talent, but sometimes you don't. And then they get in and they're just like, I'm fine with base pay and they don't care about P4P. So, you know, in the perfect world, you'd say, hey, give them a taste of what P4P set feels like, making sure that they get the reports daily, etc. So they can see like, oh man, that's the biggest thing I would say is like making sure you're sending daily reports on P4P to software so they actually see when they make above PvP and see if he's actually motivated by money. Because sometimes if you're not doing that daily, they don't think it's possible because they're on their, on their, on their bi weekly paycheck. They're never seeing performance dollars. Right. Whereas if they see daily like, oh man, I made 60, 70 extra yesterday because I worked hard, that might kick them into another gear to see if they're actually money motivated. But if they're not, like if that's been established, I would say you got to find someone's replacement. Right. And that's what sounds like what you've done in terms of someone else starting next week. Question 2. Do you have set deductions for things like being late leaving things in the truck, not locking equipment, etc? If not, how do you enforce these things? So being late, for example, that affects profit sharing for us leaving things in the truck. Marcus made a yellow slip of this last year because it got out of hand and people stopped listening. So he just took $20 off everyone's paycheck. They all of a sudden started getting same thing with locking equipment. So I would say don't be super harsh on this at the beginning, but if it's a recurring theme and no one's listening, that's when I would hit on it. But again, you got to make sure everyone's above base pay for this to mean anything. So that's why you always want guys above base pay because you can enforce things like this and create points like cleaning out trucks, et cetera. Only if they're above base pay. If they're not, it's just, it's meaningless. Landon Smith, how do you communicate Breaks to new hires, Assuming they have unpaid breaks, would they just clock in and out on the P4B software when taking it in our state breaks under 20 minutes should be paid. Not sure how it affects your answer, but just for context, for me personally, we just stay, it's the same. It's like look, you get two, you get a ten minute break every four hours that's paid. And if you're gonna take breaks outside of that, up to 30 minutes a day, you can do that. But it's gotta be clocked out. Pretty basic. Leaves it up to the guys. If they just want to work the whole time, they can make more money and not have to clock out for lunch. If they do want to.

To clock out, then they can. Right? The vast majority of, I would say if not all of our crew does not clock out for lunch during the day when they're working because they're, they're driving between things so they can eat during then and they just see, they can see on P4P they can make more money. So. And usually they can get in any sort of personal calls or texting or whatever when they're, when they're in with the crew driving. So.

Yeah, just again, it just kind of depends on the guys. Kind of leave it up to them in terms of whether or not they clock out. But every state's different so you got to check your state parameters. But for us they get 10 minutes of paid break every four hours and then they get, they can have a 30 minute lunch break that they clock out on. So just, I just be. Try to keep it as simple as possible in terms of P4P. I would only have them go on break if they were, if they're not getting paid, if they're, if it was unpaid break time, otherwise just let them stay punched in. Some people I know will just say, hey, you're taking, we're taking 30 minutes off your clock. No matter what today, just stay punched in. The problem I see with that is it kind of penalizes the people that want to just crush it. Right. And like really work hard and they don't, they don't need to or want to clock out for 30 minutes. So. Yeah. Brian Connor from Augusta, Georgia. What is the name or contact info of the ERC company use for the tax credit? I thought we would not qualify since we grew our business in Georgia with a state that did not have mandates causing us to not be able to work. I spoke with a company that bought our treatment division and they use out 200 grand. Did you have to pay the 15 fee. 15% fee up front. You only have the 10. It's either 10% up front or it's 15% after you get the money. I would Recommend Doing the 15% after you get the money. Not upfront, it's 5%. I just recommend paying that in terms of a link. Let me get to you right now. I just had it actually. Give me one second. Again, this is for only people that have been in business in 2019. So if you were not in business in 2019 and did not have employees at that time, just forget about this for a second. Oh, here it is. Just mycandy.com erc. I do get a little piece of that, but it doesn't affect how much you come, how much you have to pay. So basically that company, I, that's who I used, ERC Specialists. And I would highly recommend if you were in business in 2019 and you had employees to you to fill that out. I know Ryan Payne was able to get a good chunk. And so you know it. It's not like it's a, it's a loan, it's not a loan. It is 100 valid. And so just make sure that you go through the, all the correct statements and answer the questions all legitimately. I haven't heard of anyone getting audited on this, but it will happen because there will be a lot of bad actors. So just make sure you answer everything honestly. Karen and Audi, one of our clients had tried submitting a Google review. He served our county for 20 years plus now works for the Secretary of State and isn't in Station Israel and spends most of his time there. I would love to have his review show up. Is there anything we can do? It takes the most recent 5 stars in terms of the plugin. What I would recommend is screenshot his review and then post it yourself and then maybe comment about him because your local community is going to know him very well potentially. So I would just make that more of a personal post and maybe you pin that on your Facebook page, for example. But the actual plugin that we use for your website that shows the five star reviews just takes the most recent five star reviews and shows those.

Question, let's see here.

Is there ever a bad time to invest in the S P500.

If you're okay with average returns. There you go. If you're okay with average returns, there's probably not a bad time to invest in the S P500. I would say you get a better return on your money by investing that in yourself in terms of education or in your businesses. I've never. I don't think I've ever invested in the S P500 ever.

One ETF I have might have a small amount of the. Of their allocation towards the S P500. I know you've said that as the location matures and turns into profit mode, you no longer need to market or very little. Is this still true for larger locations or both small and large? We have about 250k in our area and feel like there's. So there are so many people or is there a maintenance amount of marking like $500 a month? I would say if you. Even if you're a larger company, you might want to use some marketing during the months when you don't have a lot of work even though your customer cost is higher simply to even out demand. Because I'm assuming in profit mode you are pretty close to capacity at spring rush and so you can't really. You're not trying to grow. Right. So you're not going to market during that time. But what you might do is market for projects during later in the season when you're not at. In spring rush. You're not getting as many leads, but you're still might make sense of from a profitability standpoint. If you can get the customer cost low enough, it's not gonna be the lowest spring rush, but you still might spend some. But traditionally a for a profit mode, in my mind they're not. You're not spending any money in marketing. The only reason you would do it is to be able to fill in some of the gaps that lulls in demand.

Hi Mike. What about purchasing an existing business and it being run mainly by my wife in this case. Wow. My wife and I was thinking of buying a. Buying a house. But we pretty much decided to buy an existing profitable business and pay that loan instead of a mortgage. Thoughts? I do not think that that's a bad idea. That's definitely a. You know, if your wife is on board with that. Let's go. I don't know who this is. Let me just check. This has. Who is this? Who is this? Who is this?

Okay. It's Abraham. Okay, good.

You would want to ensure that they. Number one, that the financial. The financial viability of the business is solid that getting the loan after paying the loan, you can usually your 2x the loan, the payment. So for example, you buy a business, it's Gonna cost you $5,000 a month for the loan from the SBA. I would want at least, at least $10,000 in profit consistently. At least. That's how I bought the gym is 10% down $550,000 I paid for it. Paid 50 or 500,000. $550,000 down to 10% and from day one my payments were 5,000 and I was already making about $12,000 a month in profit. So I already knew like from day one I'd be cash flowing. That's the positive thing about buying a new business. Here's the problem. If you're getting into an industry, you have no idea what you're doing and the reason it became profitable and became quote unquote successful is because someone else probably spent five years getting all the industry knowledge. Right. So it's very popular right now to say buy businesses and then run them. You're going to ask yourself why did the business become successful to the point where it could be sold? Typically because someone spent five years, 10 years figuring the industry out, getting all this knowledge, understanding all these systems and procedures. And sometimes most of the time, unless it's a franchise, they have a hard time passing that off to a new owner. Very difficult.

Because they haven't actually like documented it correctly. They haven't figured out systems to replicate management. They haven't figured out a lot of backend side of things. It's mostly their knowledge and their understanding of the industry and them getting higher up in that percentile of, of kind of understanding. My accountants at the ERC is going to cause a lot of audits because of these companies are stretching the truth and going to the max. They said I was eligible for 135 Connors Evansville, but it's the company partner with my bank. So I've been hesitant. Yeah. So like, like you got to answer the questions correctly because you can only legitimately really get the money if you can prove that you had hardship.

That being said, from what I have seen and you can talk to ERC specialists, they're really good at like actually like talking to you if you have questions. From what I have seen, no one's getting audited that have legitimate businesses. The ones that are getting audited are the ones that created random ein numbers and are making up their payroll reports because you could literally just send them in and the money. So based on what I have seen so far, that being said, like with the gym, I closed down for three months and it took us a probably a year and a half to get all back to our same revenues. So I was able to claim a lot of money on that one. So I got hundreds of thousands of dollars, but also I was bleeding out cash for months when we had to be closed and cancel all of our contracts and all the rest of it. So I was able to prove financial hardship because of COVID and I very happy to take that through an audit. So if you. For a lawn care landscaping business, if you had to, if you had closures in your state, for example, you had a mandate that you couldn't do landscaping or that you had to, like, separate the crews or like, you have to clean out all the trucks every single morning. That's all very valid reasons as to why you had hardship. Now financially, you just, like, doubled and tripled your business. That might be difficult to prove, but if you can prove, like, hey, we were closed down. We couldn't do certain services. We couldn't communicate with our customers. We had to do all sorts of safety protocol around cleaning out the trucks. Like, there are some states, like Michigan, I think it was, got closed down for weeks. They couldn't do business. I would 100% be doing the ERC if you were in business and had employees in 2019. Again, the ERC is not like a grant. It is a refund of your payroll taxes for the, for the, for 2020 and 2021. So it's not like it's not a grant. It is if you paid payroll taxes. You'll get that money back essentially for those, those periods of time. All right, everyone, great session today. Let's go. Have a great day. I know it's tough with spring rush. I know a lot of people are pretty overwhelmed. That is honestly par for the course. And as I talked about in this, in the Mastermind today, every spring rush, you'll get better at managing supply and demand. Supply being you're hiring people, demand being how many leads are coming in, Right. A lot of the people that are stopping your market right now, you're in that second spring rush. It's, It's. I know, it's crazy. It jumps, like, a lot. All right? It's extremely stressful. And you start, you start stop to even care or, like, consider where leads are coming from because you're just overwhelmed. And you just get completely, like, shut off to the idea. Like, you have so much on the schedule, projects that are. You have to push off people that are not showing up to work, etc. Etc. Etc. It is like, even if, like, I'm really happy, like Ryan Payne, he put video of his, his team meeting the other day when he opened up the numbers and Talked to his team. I appreciate that because if you notice what he said, they worked on Friday night till 8:30, 8:30pm the crew, because a lawn that they thought was going to be relatively simple took way longer. Right? The Bellingham shop, a couple Fridays ago, they worked till like 9 o'. Clock. They're wrapping up. So like it's part of this industry. The fact of the matter is you'll get better and better at forecasting that demand as well as dealing with these issues when they come up. So for example, the Bellingham shop push off projects. They took the projects that were on the schedule like this weekend or this week and like next week and like, hey, we got to push these off. We're going way behind these initial modes because in our market we had a very delayed spring and then it got hot and the grass just took off like more than usual. At the same time we hired a lot of new people so like we couldn't do solo routes, a lot of double routes. So like, hey, we, we just have to move these project off, give ourselves two weeks to train up these crew and then we'll be fine. But that comes with time and understanding the supply and demand throughout spring rush. And so that's what, that's why I think in June they will do 200k is because they move the projects correctly. Hey, let's focus on mowing. Let's move these off. To my knowledge, I don't know, they like, no one canceled the projects to give themselves some breathing room to keep taking on mowing customers while they can because they know in three to four weeks we're not going to get a lot of mowing customers coming in. So you just get better and better at figuring out that timeline and what that is. And even if the climate does change a little bit, you just have to shift everything.

So it's just, it's just a matter of time. And no one's ever going to nail this thing perfectly because we're dealing with the climate, we're dealing with weather, we're dealing with entry level team members, etc. And.

There for every person that's struggling financially, if you could raise your prices 10 to 15 per hour, you would immediately become profitable, extremely profitable. Now what that would also do is probably greatly diminish your scale, how fast you're growing, etc, so you have to ask if you're in growth mode and you're, and you're giving yourself a whole bunch of flack around profitability. There's a reason. It's because you're not maximizing profit. And you have a 40, 50 close ratio. And if you brought that down to 25 or 30% by raising your prices because you don't want to grow anymore, you'd immediately become profitable, like 10 to 15 an hour. Let's just say you have 100 budget hours per week on the schedule immediately. Just in budgeted hours, just you raised just the hourly rate. You're making an extra thousand dollars in profit per week just by doing that. Just to the labor. All right, that's $10. Just $10. That's going from 70 to 80 per hour if you do that. Do I think your, your close ratio is going to go from 60 to 30? No, you might go from 60 to 45 or 50%. And so if you're in those first few years where you're in growth mode still, you know, keep your head up and, and just realize that it is a decision you are making to have this pain in order to grow and scale the points that when you turn profitability on, it's actually meaningful profit. Because if you have a 25, 20% profit margin business, but you're only doing $10,000 a month, it's nothing to write home about. Whereas if you've scaled that over the course of the first two to three years in business to 50 to $70,000 a month in revenue, now 20% profit margin business means something. And it means enough to where you could hire someone to come take your spot and be general manager and you're able to step out of business. But that takes a few years of pain. All right? So I know it's tough no matter what I say. It's easier said than done. All right, guys, have a great day and we'll see you tomorrow. Take care.