Mike Minutes Mastermind 07/18/22: When a Location Gets Closed Down

Hello, guess the nation. It's actually Sunday early and I know I'm earlier than usual in terms of recording this, but I had enough to create a mastermind. And I know tomorrow when I get back in town, I'm gonna be pretty busy. So I wanted to have enough time to go over all the questions that came in. There was about seven I saw that were coming on the form and then actually got quite a few from the Franchise Advisory Council. We were texting a little bit this morning and they had some really good stuff to bring forward. So I wanted to go over all of those things and first and foremost, big, big thank you to everyone that made the Memphis meetup possible. It was extremely rewarding to see, you know, everyone helping each other and really starting to grow into their own and helping other franchisees and owners without me even being involved. And so it was just awesome. It was the coolest thing ever, honestly, for me to be there. And so it was a really quick, quick trip in here to Memphis. But I appreciate Kevin Fairburn specifically for just the amount of effort and work that goes into putting an event like that is quite extraordinary. Even though there was only 30, 40 people, it's just a great group. It was just so much fun. So I'd love down the road to have a couple of these other extraneous kind of one day, two day events around the country, closer down to the Southeast as we continue to grow. So a big thank you to Kevin though. Nick Dennels Beck, Brian Connor, Speaker Ryan Payne, Chuck Fought just the, just the course on. A couple hours of material on Christmas Lights is probably worth, I don't know, 500. A training course, literally like a business in a box about what you should buy, what you should not buy, and how to price things and everything. So big thank you to Ryan and for being so sharing of all that information and knowledge. And so I will get the recording up on the Academy and then send a link out probably by end of this week. I got an SD card in here somewhere. Just a whole bunch of files. But big thanks to Nick Daniels, but for making sure we did get a really good quality video. So I think everyone will enjoy it. It'll be really good listening, honestly. Cool. So let's go ahead and jump into. I'm gonna do education first today and then I'll jump into the question that came in on the form. So what I wanted to talk about a little bit today was actually all the part here in the education is actually from the Financial Advisory Council. And again, thank you to all of them that had volunteered to be on that. There are seven members of Augusta Nation on there, and I'm going to post them. I need to make note of this. I'm going to post the FAC members on the dashboard just in case anyone forgets who they are.

But they brought forward a couple things that they had. People have been talking to them and asking them questions they didn't really necessarily know or thought I should clarify on some stuff. So really, really appreciate them for bringing those things forward. And I want to talk about three locations that we've closed down over the past few years and show why they closed. Red flags prior to closing, et cetera. And obviously for me and Lee and Liz and everyone at the top, a closure is like the worst thing for us.

Mostly it just, it pulls all of us in in terms of we don't want it to happen. So there's never a moment where like, oh, we hope they close. Never. It's very, very bad for the brand from a franchising standpoint to see closed locations. And it's very bad.

When we look at, okay, if we want more franchisees, we want more people to join Augusta Nation.

If the closure rate is above 20%, you're toast. If you're under 10% in the franchise world, you're crushing it. And so anything between 10 and 20% is typically accepted. Right now, we're right around that 6 to 7% marker, which is not bad, but every single one kills. And so. And typically the reason those numbers exist that way is because an independent usually is about 40% closure rate. And so if you can have a sub 10, it's. It's phenomenal. McDonald's is like four or three, I believe now.

And typically, the bigger the franchise, the more money up front, front it costs, the better that number is. Because if someone has $3 million and they're an investor type, like.

Having a one bad season or a truck breaking down is not going to put them out of business. When you start having solo operators and people getting started in the industry brand new, that's where your failure rate is going to go up. So we always are balancing out. We want. We want new people. We want to give opportunity, a destination. Flipping that with. We have to protect the brand. And we also have to make sure that people aren't $2,000 away from broke the day they join. And that's one truck going down. That's, you know, a rough week. Literally, someone's out of business. So we have to balance that. It's very difficult because I don't want to just open it to institutional investors where it's like you have to have a million dollars, you have to join with a minimum of five locations. Like it put all of us immediately out of, out of the running. So I want to make a place where someone can start with very little to nothing under $50,000 and ramp up. I want to keep it that way. It will always have that as a starting point, but it does affect our close ratio and when I mean close ratio, I mean number of locations that will close. So I know we could get that down to 2 to 3%. If we said, okay, you have to start with two to three locations, you have to have a minimum net worth of 500,000 and you have to have $200,000 liquid, we'd immediately have a really good open rate. Our ramp up time would be way better. People would ramp up to a million dollars in a few years if you had that much capital sitting around and that much net worth. But that would also really demotivate me from why I do augustination. I'm not really super interested right now in making someone who's rich richer. I'd much rather try to give my 17, 18 year old self, someone that was trying to get out of financial issues with my family, the opportunity to get ahead. So that's in a box. Okay, so three locations we've closed down. One was a year and a bit ago. That was Ridgefield, Connecticut. Ridgefield, Connecticut had a good thing going. They did over $30,000 a month in their third or fourth month in business.

What happened with this location is they grew too fast, way too fast. And we had been warning them quite often and they fell into the trap of, of let's get someone on salary and they'll take care of the business. Then that person left. Then the owner needed to go back to their job with the fire department and sorry, not the fire department, the union, the city union over in New York. He worked in the union. And so.

That was by no means fun because honestly it was a good location. They ramped to like, I believe they only had about 30 or 40 million customers. But it was because they in a few months gotten there and had a lot of projects going and he bought another truck and he just really exhausted all his financial resources to the point where it was such a cash crunch.

And then what happened is he just stopped showing up to properties. And the first red flag for us that we raised internally is when someone is having complaining customers and then the franchisee is not responding to Us. That is our first big red flag. That's where we will start to push calls off of Command center and say, hey, look, we're not going to take your calls because we can't have it where we're costing you so much because every day people are calling multiple times and you're just not showing up. It's literally, it's a spiral effect. Right now, all of a sudden, your command center build doubles because every single estimate, every single job and every single invoice is getting called on from your customers and you're just not showing up to anything. You're getting estimates reschedule three, four or five times. It's extremely inefficient. So we usually will push your calls off and say, hey, look, it's no longer in your best interest to use command Center. We're going to push the calls back to you. And then when that happens, if someone doesn't step up and rise the occasion, that's when the location will fail because they're not answering the phone now. And then the customers cancel. Then people start charge doing chargebacks on the card. So this is like worst case scenario, I don't know anyone to ever get there. But prior to that happened, there's so many red flags. Typically the first thing is unhappy customers. Second thing is franchisee doesn't respond back to us at Command center when we start raising red flags, like, hey, we need to show up. Hey, so and so just called and said you haven't showed up for the past three days. So and so just said you didn't show up last week to do mailing. You know, this invoice is being charged back. Is a charge back because they said you didn't show up for the entire month. When that starts happening, we start having red flags. We start having internal meetings about a location and we are typically calling this per calling whoever this person is. And this happened significantly with Ridgefield. The location starts to get into closure mode. I get involved. There's never been a location closed or even thought about closing without me getting involved. And so it's not a matter of like, oh, like one day you're gonna be surprised. Like, oh, you're closing down because we don't like something you're doing. You will know far in advance and it'll typically mean a call with myself. But a lot of these things are why I push the coaching calls Lee so much because he'll see the red flags months and months before you ever think about having to close your location. All right, so sorry about the intercom thing, the airport here in Memphis. But I think the biggest concern that I completely agree with is, well, what would ever happen for the franchise? Like, what happens if the franchise steps in and says, you have to close your location? Like, we're taking it, taking the location down. And so this is a big part of the franchise agreement, and that is that we actually, if we need to seize a location, we actually control the customer base. And so legally, if we have to kick someone out because they are hurting the brand, we actually control the customer base. Now, do I ever want to do that? Never. Never will. Never want to, never have. I shouldn't say never will. We have. We have it legally that we can't. So the reason we do that is because if someone goes off the rails, we have to protect the brand. Number one, it is my. My duty as the founder and CEO to ensure that that is put above personal interest, family interests, monetary interest, and that's protecting the brand. And that's why Ridgefield was closed. Like I said, they had done 30,000amonth in revenue, growed up within three months, had 30 to 40 mowing customers. And all. All those things I just started talking about started happening in about six weeks. That was our fastest closure. Because he dropped off so quickly, wouldn't respond to command center, would be respond to Lee's calls, my calls, wouldn't respond to Liz, anything like that. And so when someone just falls off the deep end and then we have to say, okay, we can't take your calls anymore because we can't help you. You're not responding. You can't help these customers. Well, then we push the calls back on, and the location just implodes. And so I had a call with Thomas Hickey. Sorry, not Thomas Hickey.

Ah, snap. I got Thomas Hickey in my head.

Snap. Blinking. His last name was Hickey, and I'm Frankieon's first name now. Sick.

Oh, man, it's so embarrassing. But his last name was Hickey and it's not Thomas, because Thomas of Maryville, he's great.

Or in. In Washington. So anyways.

I. I talked to him and just been like, hey, this is a warning. And then we talked about, hey, like what the options for the business. Because he had ran the business so tight and had grown too quickly. And we've been warning him like, hey, you need to slow down. You don't have enough cash on hand. You need to slow down. You need to start collecting on these payments. But he kept leaving jobs like, half done and they're not finishing Them because you go to the next one and they, the customers weren't paying. So it's not like we had cash to go collect on. Like we've done for some. When they get in that cash card, it's like, okay, let's go collect cash, let's go get, you know, deposits that are due, let's go get invoices that are overdue. Let's collect on projects we're halfway through that wasn't possible with them. And it literally was like, hey, either A, you've got to go full time in your business and start taking care of these customers or B, you've got to let the business go because he was trying to do this union thing, union job and the business. But now it got to the point where if he wasn't involved, the business was going to fail because he couldn't go hire a manager. He can afford any debt. And what he needed to do was be full time business owner, maybe go to 15,000amonth and just take care of the mowing customers and then could scale later on. And so we decided together that it'd be better because he was getting so much pressure from his family to just close the business down. And so it was mutual agreement. And I think if you talked to him, he would. Sorry, Kevin was his name, not Thomas. I apologize, Thomas. Kevin Hickey was his name out in Ridgeville. And so I think if you talk to me, there's nothing but good he would say about how we handled the closure because we could have done a lot more in terms of financially hurting him, but we did not in terms of penalizing him, charging for last month, stuff like that. We actually refunded some of his customers after the closure of his location from the franchise just to keep the brand alive and keep the brand down the road. Someone could start an Augusta lawn care location in that area and it would be just fine. So all of that to say before you ever were being forced to close by franchise, you would have massive red flags. We warned him about cash flow, we warned him about growing too quickly, we warned him about getting multiple trucks too soon. We weren't having a salary, general manager. And we warned him that when he went back to work, if the business wasn't running on the systems that we had prescribed, that it would fall apart. And that's what happened with the manager leaving and then two of his employees left. It just started falling apart. So you have massive red flags and warnings prior, especially if you're staying connected with the likes of your, on your coaching calls. With Lee. That's why those exist. All of these things that I talk about in these closures were talked about on coaching calls prior or we were reaching out to the owner. Second one is Waco, Texas, and this one's really recent. This is the only one we've closed down this year. And it's our first, in my opinion, failure in terms of location that did not take off and did not actually financially do well.

And there's a few things behind that. So Waco, Texas is a great market. I actually really like the market. Same thing with a few other of our suburb markets in Texas. And so this specific owner had medical conditions that did not allow him to be out in the field working. He did not really know about this fully until after he got started.

So as we were trying to help him get started up, ramping up, getting more leads, he was like, oh, I need more leads, I need more leads. And so we would help him with his marketing, get more leads and things. But then there was one day, for example, he went out and did four fertilization treatments. And because of his physical condition, he said he couldn't walk for almost four days because his feet and his ankles and his knees were so out. And so he could not do the work himself.

And the problem was, okay, well, then what? Let's figure out a plan that is. We actually paused his offer to offered to pause his franchisees for three months. Hey, we know this physical thing was a surprise to you, and you were expecting to go out and work, knock on doors, etc. That's no longer a possibility. And so we said, hey, we will freeze franchise fees for three months. And during those times, what we want you to do is go find someone that can go work out in the field. Because literally that had been what had helped. Sorry for the noise.

We had for a few months been trying to like, hey, here's a lead. Like, let's get some leads. We need to get Google views. We only had two Google reviews in three months. And one of the things that.

What should I say? Not annoys me, but I don't understand, to be honest with you, is when someone reads training and I give me a checklist of the things I need you to do immediately. And the number one thing that I tell you to do is get. I used to have 20. Now I say 30 reviews, like, as soon as possible. It's the biggest, biggest impact you're going to have on marketing dollars. And every dollar you spend will have a great impact with those reviews. And so he only had two after three months. And I had personal calls with him after him. Already had any calls with Lee, Lonnie, Liz.

And, you know, I think he was fixated in some regard on getting the leads. So we said, hey, let's fix that. So let's get your Google review, local services actually up and running. Let's actually get some Google reviews. Let's go find someone to even work part time, even if they have to, or work full time even until school starts. Because, like, we are going at the time in June. Okay, Find someone that can work June, July, August, and September. That will give us where we can get up to 50 clients. They'll be mowing, you'll be managing in the morning and evening with them, making sure that they're fine, etc.

And there were no Google reviews in those couple weeks after I talked to him. And then we actually got leads because we got Google local services firing, got some Google Ads up for him, but he did not show up to the leads. He did not show up to the estimates. And so we're getting calls from command center saying, hey, there's no one showing up, and we're rescheduling these estimates. And then he's not showing up to the second one. And so when that starts to happen, it's affecting the brand, and we cannot allow that to happen. And so I did not forcefully close Waco. It was a voluntary decision. And Trey, I don't think there'd be anything negative for him to say either. Someone contacted me. I don't think he'd say anything negative about Augusta. We did our very best to help getting more leads as well as actually giving him an opportunity to have three months of no franchise fees just to spend that money on getting it higher so he could go focus on selling. But.

Yeah, the bottom line is when I give a checklist, I say, these are the things that must be done. I have a very hard time feeling bad when something doesn't turn out in the other end. I tell someone, like, the only thing I want you to focus on is X. And then they don't do it. Even though I'm financially trying to give them.

A buffer to make that happen. I don't have a lot of sympathy. I'm just being honest. Chuck is a little more cut and dry and a little harsher than I am. If you listen to the Memphis, you'll know what I'm talking about. But, like, let's just be honest. Like, if I tell you these are things that you must use to be, must do to be successful. And on a one on one I tell you this is the one thing you must do to be successful and it's not done. I'm like, look, I've tried.

You've seen this now enough where I know it's usually the one thing. Lee knows what's the one thing we got to focus on change the business. And so.

I understand that the lay of market is difficult, but you can find somebody. If you, if I was in that situation I would literally have said okay, I'm willing to pay someone three or four dollars more per hour to get them onboarded and keep them for the next few months while they're out of college or high school or whatever. And I'm going to do on a 10 to $12,000 a month business. I literally try to run the 650 plan. I try to focus on recurring only I would keep it really simple. I would probably take my own calls instead of having compensator do it because I didn't have anything else to do. So yeah, that was the Waco one. But again there are only two Google reviews. We were only on the, we have the very top of the second page of Google which is always a tell tall side of media but the SEO is on point, the ranking and optimization is great but someone has not gotten Google reviews and that's what happened. He was on the top of the second page of Google and I still think there's only two reviews on his website or his Google my business page. So that was Waco, Texas. Now the third one that had a lot more questions was about Mount Vernon. Mount Vernon is a location that was owned by my brother and I purchased about seven weeks ago. Now May 23 is when it was finally.

Agreed upon and then the 25th is when I took over. Sorry, the 21st agreed on the 23rd is when I took over.

And so let me just make sure. I had a couple notes just written down from the franchise advisor council, things that they had said people asked about. So what's the difference between them say and Ridgefield or Waco, Mount Vernon? If I see there's value in the location, I will offer someone to buy it and I'll put a general manager in place. And if I don't think it's salvageable, I'm not going to, I'm going to say, hey, you could sell this if you wanted to. In the case of Waco, Texas, it wasn't sellable because they only had several mowing customers. There was nothing sellable. It was literally just the cost of whatever he paid for a franchise license, that's all the value there really was for Ridgefield. They just got started, they had 30 customers. A lot of them were mad at him, 30 to 40 I should say. And a lot of them were not happy. So I knew it'd be a ton of work to turn it around. And it's only they just got started. So it wasn't like brand awareness, brand saturate, there wasn't leads coming in for free, anything like that. And so there's enough bad Google reviews too that I knew I'd have to get 50 or 60 just to balance it out the rating correctly because there are so many negative reviews starting to pop up. I think they had like a 3.8 or 3.7 and like 50 reviews. So I knew I'd have to get so many just to bring my rating back up. But more importantly, it was a time situation. And that is when you have a time frame that a business has to be sold or transferred ownership in and it's short, the value of that company goes down precipitously because it means that you as a seller are in massive disadvantage. And so Ridgefield, for example, had a one to two week window of where he needed to make a decision. Either keep the things open and service the customers and find someone, find employees, or jump back in himself going into it full time, or he needed to close down. He had like a week or two of cash and so that's why he made that decision. There's no way you're gonna find a buyer in a week or two. Now the only reason that Mount Vernon I could do this and I step in within a matter of a couple days and turn the whole thing around is because it was right next to the Bellingham location, is in 30, 30, 40, 40 minute, 40 minute drive from the Bellingham location. And so I determined, okay, first and foremost, this location has been around for a few years. I started this location in 2020, so I guess it's been two years. But over two years I started it, sold it to my brother, he was a general manager, became a franchisee and scaled it up. And he scaled it up pretty quickly. Bought a lot of trucks, but had a mental issue, mental illness and causing him to really go off the rail in terms of spending. So he started buying property for the business, buying lots of trucks, hiring too many people, doing things outside of his lease. And so again starting to hurt the brand too, because he was starting to try to get away from daily operations way sooner than way should have. And this is again why in the stages of growth, you start talking about certain areas and times when you start getting out of the business out of daily operations. And that is not at 40 and 50,000amonth in revenue when you start getting out of daily operations, unless you have a general manager. And he did not. And so financially, the business was going downhill because he started to get out of the systems of Augusta in terms of not using P2P, having everyone on salary, basically everybody on staff was on contract to become the general manager. And I'm not joking. And so because of that.

Pressure.

He was gone for a few weeks. The business started to cater, employees started leaving, employees started stealing. Employees started coming to command center and saying, like, this thing is going down. And lots of negative reviews started to pour in. And so that's again the first thing as much it was about my brother and. And there's obviously familial ties.

I have to step back and realize that I'm not allowing one location to take down others. And we have a lot of locations around this one. And so a negative impression of brand would easily affect four to five locations very, very quickly. It had a lot of customers and so there was value for me because it was close to another location. So I offered to buy it right away. Also, he did not have the time financially to put it up for sale. Otherwise I would have told, hey, put it up for sale, let someone else buy it because I don't want to buy another one in the middle of the year. It's not, it's not good business. It's been a pain in the neck for the past few months.

And so for that location specifically, I saw value. I knew I could, I could turn the location around. It was existing. And in terms of me forcefully pushing up, that didn't happen. There was a mutual agreement and it was a purchase agreement that if he would not have signed, I would have had to enforce pushing him out. And the reason for that was because all those things combined, I will not ever push someone out because they're not using the systems. They can do that whatever they want. And a lot of the systems we talked about at Gustav are optional in terms of P4P using service, auto fight using command. Those are all optional things. I don't have anything against someone for not using command or not using P for P, whatever it might be. I believe that the best thing for your business, I do for all my locations. And my goal is to prove over time that it works. After location, after location, after location. That I own and I recommend other people do it to themselves. He was starting to go way off on those things and starting to negatively impact other owners. And when I realized, when we started the six week emergency plan, the locations that went on, every single one that went on the emergency plan, let me make sure that's correct.

All but one that went on later. So all but one. There's three locations that went through the six week plan. All but the one that went came later a few weeks ago. The two that were joined right away both had direct ties to Tim. And I had to make sure that his bad decisions and what he was saying was not impacting people negatively. Because I know that as my brother, people like, oh Tim's Mike's brother says it like I got a whole weight to that and they're less likely to tell me stuff or the franchise advisory Council for example, because this is Mike's brother. I want to be very clear that my decision making when it came to the acquisition was 100 about Augusta and the brand secondarily was my familial ties.

And so the purchase agreement part I wouldn't mind sharing. I don't have it with me now. I can definitely share that. And how I structured the deal I had to structure in a very specific way because I knew his condition and he struggled with this before. And so I knew there were certain things I had to say in terms of that were very, very legally binding. And the number one thing was if he said anything about negatively about Augusta Lawn care immediately 100% of the acquisition price would be forfeited. And so there's a couple clauses in about that. And he did end up losing out on probably about $15,000 of revenue that was owed accounts receivable because he said something to the employees. And so I, I helped to that I gave him a very, very fair, probably over paid for it slightly to be honest. And that's where that's just a personal thing for me. It's my brother, he had a lot of debt he had gone into outside of the business that I knew that needed to pay off. Otherwise literally there are not PP on the table. So that was, that's a personal issue on my part to how much I paid for it. He also had a lot of assets to balance that out in terms of six trucks, a vehicle and a lot of recurring mowing customers, three dump trailers. Like there was assets tied to this. So that's why the valuation would be so much more than if someone just has client base now if someone gets closed down forcefully. I want to be really clear on this, because this is the big question of all. The reason I just, like, spend the past 30 minutes going through this is because these locations have closed down. Either recommended, asked to, or forcefully done. The one in Ridgefield was mutual. Even though I would have. I would have closed that one down if he didn't turn things around. It was agreed upon that I was his best option. It's just we let him out and we ended up covering some of the charges back to his. To his customers to protect the brand. Waco was also mutual in that he realized that he was not physically able to do it working out in the field, and he felt he could not find any employees that could do the job for him. But it was a mutual thing. It wasn't like I was forcing him out or anything like that. Timothy also signed and agreed to a purchase agreement. It was not forcefully. So I can't really say we've actually done a forceful closure, because at every single stage, it becomes a mutually positive thing for them to close down. So Tim signed a purchase agreement. If he would not have signed that purchase agreement, I would have stepped in as a franchisor and said, within the next six weeks, if these things are not changed, we will be seizing the location. And so I realized that offering him when he. The business was of something of value still, I could pay him what I paid him. But if I would have waited two to three weeks, the location would have been worth only asset value, value, and would have been half of what I would. I was able to pay for him, pay him because he still had all the recurring customers, still had a good brand, relatively, and we could fix the problems.

So.

After a location is forcefully seized, which we have not done yet, legally, every single customer is now part of the franchise and. And we own that. I, again, never want to enforce that. I just want to be open and honest. That is what is in the franchise agreement. The reason for that is because we also allow someone to leave and go start their own business, do whatever they want with those customers. And that can happen. Someone left Augusta and everything was on good terms in terms of they weren't hurting the brand. You can leave at any time. That's part of the benefit of Augusta. There is no, you must pay this over a barrel for the next 10, 10 years. I don't care if your leg hurts. I don't care if you're going through a mental illness. You're gonna pay this. And that's how most franchises operate. And you can Google it you can look up other franchisors, they will make someone pay franchise fees till the end of that term regardless. And it goes into their will too. So if someone, if they pass away, it will go to their heirs in terms of who has to pay for that franchise. So we don't do that. I've never done that. We won't do that. That being said, if someone is hurting the brand, we have the right legally to seize their customers. Not their property, not their assets, but their customer base if we feel like they're not being taken care of. So that's ultimately the line that you don't want to cross. Serve your customers well, be a good representative of the brand. I will step in if I don't feel like that's being heated. And let's just be really honest. There's no one I'm thinking about right now, by the way. There's no one I'm thinking of like, oh, like I need them to hear this. This is not the reason for saying this. This is to be open and honest and answer any questions in terms of why I've done what I've done with these different locations and how they're handled. Every single one is handled differently and very customized. But we do have the legal backing if someone was.

But we do have the legal power if needed. We need to enact to take a location and take all of their customers. We do have that power. I never want to enforce it, but it is there in the case that someone is hurting the brand and we will take those, those customers back. And even if that is a matter of just finding them a place to go, we would do that. There's no reason I'd really want to do that unless I was taking location over and sending a general manager and was buying them out. I'd rather offer value to the owner and they able to get financial benefit if they're moving or if there's health issues, etc. Or at least them try to sell it and spend a few months trying to sell it on the location. We have two locations. I think it's three soon. One, one, two. There's two. There's one up there. I think the second one's going up now. That is going up for sale. And so those owners aren't in a pinch, they're not in bad standing. Customers still love them and it's just a matter of trying to find a buyer because they're wanting to move on, do something else, move, get it, got a new job, whatever it might be. And so if I see value in those, I will, I will buy those and I will offer them to do it so they don't have to bring in someone outside the franchise. It's a bit of a pain because you got to train them up a bunch. Whereas I'm able to take a location, send a general manager and like the previous owner doesn't have to worry about anything. So I will buy something out if I felt there's value in it. Otherwise they can put up for sale. And yeah. So if any questions about that, let me know. I want to make sure I got all of these. Can you start another business if you get closed down? If you get closed down, you in the franchise agreement you cannot. There is a clause in the franchise agreement that says you cannot. However, a purchase agreement will supersede the franchise agreement because you are selling the rights of that agreement to another person. It's the franchisor can weigh that.

That no compete. So there's a non compete. If someone is to leave the franchise. Right. They can't basically like okay, I'm leaving the franchise. I'm now going to, you know, start taking all these customers. You cannot take customers from the past inside the viewer CRM. So when Tim left, for example, this is a question that was good. He actually started his own Andy's landscapes back up in our area. And that was through the discretion of the buyer, which is me. If I wanted to with one more sentence in our purchase agreement I could have enforced the franchise agreement, said he cannot do that and all of you can do this if you ever sell and I just put a non compete. It's in the franchise agreement that they have to abide by that. If you put in the purchase agreement. I did not put in the purchase agreement allowing him to keep operating underneath another business name in a local area for several reasons. One, I do not think of competition like most people do. I don't think in terms of scarcity and I do not am not concerned with someone getting another lawn care business starting with. I have no problem with it. Second thing is, is I personally again this comes down to more a family thing. I knew personally he didn't have any other marketable skills besides landscaping and he would have to do that. And if I was to tell him that he could not do it in our area, it would force him to move his family. And so I, I had to balance out. Do I want my nieces and nephews to go hungry and literally not be, not be able to provide for his family or do I allow him to compete with us. And so inside my, my purchase agreement I told, I stated that he was allowed to do landscaping, long hair. But if he ever contacted Mark of the two or didn't work for.

If you ever did any of those things, things to an existing or past customer or anyone that was in the database.

Final boarding two four, seven.

But basically if you, if you would have contacted anybody inside of the database, past customers.

Past customers or customers that are in the database at all, they were immediate, he would immediately have to forfeit the whole purchase price. So he didn't do that at all. He's been really, really good. He's got medical attention he needed and is now coming out of all of this. He actually really was pretty depressed about just honestly not being in touch with all the owners. He really loved a lot of you, made connections with a lot of you. And so as he's now coming to himself and realizing what he said and did, now he's had medication, he'll do some really good brain scans from down in Seattle. Really, really good stuff. And so he's coming to himself and he feels very bad about what was done. He's realizing what business decisions he made were poor and he really misses a lot of you. So I don't have any thought that he's going to be malicious, but there is, there is legal stuff inside that purchase agreement, purchase sale agreement that if he did say anything about negative about Augusta, if he tried to market to any of our customers, he would immediately have to forfeit the entire purchase price. And that's in perpetuity. And so it's in the legal document. I can enforce that. So.

Yeah, but if someone, if someone got shut down forcefully, you cannot do a location in your local area.

Unless the franchise waived that right. And we do that to again protect. Because if you, if you just dropped and you just like abandon your customers, we brought someone else in and then you started up next door, that's not gonna be good for the brand. You just go pick off all the customers. So yeah, it's 100% of there to protect the brand. I never.