Mike Minutes Mastermind 12/01/2022

Hey everyone, if you're doing super well, let's go ahead and jump in. A couple quick things. Right off the bat.

Liz is going through the dashboard and updating all the videos. So there were several videos in there. There's still like a year two. There's one I saw that was three years old, which is kind of funny to me because it just showed that the dispatch for and service all part has literally not changed at all in three to four years. So anyways, yeah, those videos are all getting updated. They made a spreadsheet of every single one and they just basically read it. A whole ton of them. So you see new videos, they are on there. There's also a couple new ones on zooper with running P4P etc. So definitely check out the academy as might have some more time on your hands as you head into the winter. Just scroll through it, see if there's new videos that might be interesting to you. They are all being or have been redone. Only a few of them are staying that are just tried and true and nothing changes. So take a look at that other thing. I know a couple people had asked if they could see this, I could pull it up.

This is how we were looking.

Don't tell me I can't look at this. Are you serious? Sorry. Give me a second. I'm gonna have to open this up in a different tab. Boom, boom. Drop it in there. Okay, now I can share that tab. Okay. Reminds me, I need to link for YouTube. Okay, so this is.

The area that I am.

Going to be putting my locations in around Charlotte, North Carolina. Sorry, I'm just copying the YouTube link. Give me one second.

Copy that. Put it into Mike minutes. Save. Okay, sorry. Forgot to do this at the beginning. This is the area that we were looking at for my locations in North Carolina. So let me pull it up.

Here. Okay, so this right now is Mooresville.

Oh great. The locations I'm going to be starting are three mile radiuses. So Cornelius, Caldwell, Huntsville, this area here and then Concord, these four probably I'm going to be starting. These are very small in terms of radiuses, like three mile radiuses. But there's 60 to 80,000 people in all of these. So what's nice about that being so close is when you start opening up multiple the the risk you have is a GM not working out or dropping out. Well, if that happens and you're this close, you could literally just dissolve one of your locations into the other one. Or at least have one GM just cover until you found a New GM for the other location. So it's very low risk. If you have a location that's 45 minutes an hour, two hours away, it starts to get where like if something goes down, you're going to be the one going and fixing it. So that's kind of something we're doing. And again, these are pretty populated areas outside of Charlotte. And so this is kind of our map in terms of the location that we want to put in here. And just again, looking at the different smaller city names that we can really exploit and go after because there are big players in Charlotte. This is not a market that is void of national players. It's big. So really focusing small market, really drilling home route density, simple services, the day one, etc. For example, today I was at Bellingham shop in the morning. We had to pay $5,000 for a job we did like a year ago. And we just, we had to buy them new trees. 10 foot Excelsior cedars. I think I forget. Horrible, horrible to no one's fault but my own for allowing us to do planting jobs. So. And what's crazy is I remember that job. It was like an eighteen thousand dollar job. Big ten foot cedars, a hedge. A bunch of them died. What I remember is that we were literally working. Lee went out and helped the guys.

Caleb was out there, Last one at 9pm with lights on, the skid steers, having a big skid stealer with a big auger bit, whole nine yards. And here we are a year later. Because they died. We're just gonna give them the money back. $5,000 of new trees. Let's go. No planting. Thank you very much.

Cool. Let's jump into questions. Nick Reed texted me and said he had a doozy of a question. So I'm really looking forward to seeing what that looks like. He knows what that means. Let's see here.

Cool. I did these live. I told him this morning. I said it's like opening up Christmas presents. You never know what you're gonna get. I love it. It's so fun. Okay, let's see if I can maximize this for you guys. There you go. All right, Frankie, I had Stripe approach me about a loan for $5200. There's a repayment rate of 19.7% per transaction. A 30 day minimum of $621 and fixed fee of 390 making the total owed amount.

That's not correct. You mean 6590. Yeah, because 6, $620 plus 390. Okay. Yeah, okay. So the reason Stripe can do this is because they see your deal flow, they see all your transactions. So what they know is okay, if you make, let's say $20,000 a month, they know that you're going to be able to repay this $6,000, $6,500 in literally a couple weeks. So the couple weeks, basically they're going to make 20% on their money because they're going to make $1,200 on 5,5000. They're making 24% on their money for a two week loan. That is great. See, that's why we need to get into the card transaction business. But that's, that's exactly so it, this would be only something you would use if you were in a tight, tight pinch for payroll. You do not use this if you have money in your bank account because literally you are paying them 25% interest for a two week loan. If you extrapolate that over the course of a year, you're paying like.

Hundreds of percent of interest. So again, don't recommend this unless you're in a very tight pinch and you need money to get literally to the next week. But you are paying twelve hundred dollars for a couple week loan. And if you're making less, let's say you're making 10,000, maybe it's a four week loan, but still like it's a very high interest rate loan. Here, give me one second. Guys. My wifi didn't seem to be working very well. I plug this in, it might drop for just a second.

And we're live. Okay, next question.

Max, if I include a video in a one click estimate, one click estimate, would you recommend adding the video as an attachment to the actual email or creating a hyperlink that goes to Hyperlink.

Unless you compress the video. So here, I'll show you guys what I use.

If you're gonna send a video, you want it under five megs. So there's an app called.

Compressed. See if I can show it to you guys. That's what it looks like.

Allow.

This.

This is the app I would recommend. So you can just shoot on your phone, compress it and then send stuff. It's called Video Compressed. I might have paid some money for this one. I don't remember.

I don't remember if I paid five bucks for this or not. But it's helpful because if you ever want to send a video, you can. That being said, if you open up the Gmail app, let me show you guys this. For those of you that get videos from Me occasionally. This is what I do. Okay, so open up the Gmail app, Boom. And then I go compose. Okay. So when you're in here, okay. Which by the way, if anyone gets an email from this email right here, that is me. It's a real person. What's cool about this is check this out, see if I can show you guys. Push on this little attachment button, click down here on photos, go to video and then it shoots the video like so, just like this. And you could be, you know, 30 second video, whatever it is, but it compresses it live. This is like super cool. This is basically the same technology Zooper uses to be able to attach project videos instantly. So boom, use the video and literally we're talking about 10 seconds max, 5 seconds and I could go ahead and send this to myself. Email.

Boom. And I just go ahead and click send and sent. So I highly recommend compressing videos if you're going to attach them. So if you're going to attach them.

I would recommend compressing the video under five megabytes. That's what we do at Command Center. If you are going to do it as a video link, what I would recommend is make a thumbnail with a video with a button that looks like it's a play button and they click on that and it's just a hyperlink to a YouTube video. So if you want higher quality videos, probably like an or longer like three, four minute videos. If you're making those, do the hyperlink with a thumbnail image. If you're doing like a very quick like hello, thank you, whatever it is. You could just use compress, attach to the email and good to go. Or use the Gmail app, which all of your emails from Augusta are through Google Workspace. So you should be able to Gmail log in and then use that to be able to send videos like instantly. So three different options. One, use a compressed file thing like I just showed you. Two, use the Gmail app that compresses it live. Or three, use a hyperlink to a YouTube video.

Okay.

Hope that was helpful.

Max. Does SA have any plans to allow us to auto populate job notes? It'd be nice to have standard notes for all mowing jobs rather than manually enter them. Each job is created. Yes, you can basically go to your service and go to the notes that are automatic. So you can already do this if you always have the same verbiage, just go to your services, go to estimate description and put in what you want there all the time. So it's actually already like that. It just. You probably don't have any notes in there.

Okay, so this is supposedly going to be a doozy of a question because Nick literally text me beforehand and said it's going to be so high expectations. All right, next year when we hit capacity, can CC still take client info and set them up for an estimate and then on the back end later I will contact them and let them know we cannot service them, give them.

An estimate now, but we can later, etc. I didn't do this the last couple years because of the fact that lots of people could potentially get upset, but I've hit myself later for not having as many leads to work with during the slow times. I would not recommend doing this because your cost of getting the new the contact is going to be high and they're unhappy with you. So if you're going to follow up with them later on, they're probably going to unsubscribe from your one click estimate emails. I would recommend doing. If you want to do this, leave your estimate request form open and then when you get the forms just have a standard email that you send back to them of explaining exactly what you just said. Like you're too busy right now, you'll get back to them, et cetera, et cetera. I would recommend that, but I wouldn't recommend having command center set them as opposed to profile and all the rest of it. They people. It'd be like I want to buy something great, let me get all your information, let me get your credit card or whatever. And it's like oh yeah, by the way, we're busy, we're not taking any clients. It's like so why in the world did you just ask me for all that information? Right? So I don't think if you have a good customer experience, it'd also be costly to have each person put in like that. I would recommend just allowing on the estimate request form and then you getting those and we can redirect them to you if you want. And then you just copying and pasting a specific, you know, response. If you would like it to be done that way, that'd just be my personal recommendation. That wasn't so hard. I'm assuming there's another one coming up. How much should you help your GM's example? Loaning trucks employees from one location to help them out, filling in personally when needed out in the field to manage things. Sick days. I don't want to hurt my GM's locations, but also don't want to be the knight in Shiny armor all the time. They are all getting paid to manage things in my opinion. Need help defining that fine line. This is tough. Like I would say at the beginning, if they're learning, if they're new, if the location is new, I'd be more inclined to give help. And then as time goes on, I step back. So I can't say a whole of us because my locations aren't. Most of them aren't close. So I can't go help.

But if one was close to me, I would probably help for the first couple months and then just slowly bring back your involvement and how many days that you show up, for example. I would just slowly reduce that over time. But the first couple months, a gm, you know, is going to need more help. They're going to need more hand holding and assistance. Okay, maybe this is. Oh, this is a long question. Oh, wow. It is a doozy. Okay, here you go. Okay, long question. This stems off Connor's question from yesterday about doubling up guys in trucks. I did the math for two guys mowing. Okay, there's a lot of numbers. Here we go. I did the math for two guys mowing 10 budget hours in a day and at $90 per hour to the client. And it is possible for them to make ppp. If they hit budgeted hours on all the jobs that day and work an eight hour day each, they would make approximately $22.50, which is $2.50 more than their base wage, which is great. Remember to read all of this. These numbers are subjective based upon your $90 per hour rate and your base pay. Right. So keep that in mind. That's why having that differential is so important. Because if you have an 18 per hour base pay and a 90 per hour wage hourly rate to the customer, they're almost always going to be above base pay even if they don't hit budgeted hours. Because your percentage is like less than 20% of your base pay towards the hourly rate to the customer. So like when, when someone says they're that their base Pay is like 20 or less than what they're paying, what the customer is paying per hour guarantee, your guys are always above base pay, guaranteeing you, unless you're really bad at overhead, you're crushing profits. What? I've seen something about 15% and I don't even see anything else. I know you're going to win. You're going to be very, very profitable.

All right, Next year I'm planning on lowering my mowing rate to the client to take market share and Grow the recurring side of the business. Let's say I lower my rate to $80 per hour, which is my plan only after I see we aren't closing at 90. Okay, good. The part highlighted is very important. I would recommend that because I don't think it's going to make an incremental difference. A huge difference going from 90 to 80. Okay. Because you got to remember. Oh, man, here we go.

The impact of price on consumers behavior. It looks like this.

Oh, come on, Michael.

Boom. Marker, marker. I want the marker. Thank you. This is what it looks like.

Try to do this live. Okay. Oh, wait.

Story time with Mike. Here we go. So.

No, we gotta have it thicker. Okay. There we go. Very good. Okay.

Seriously. Okay, so if this.

If this is your acceptance rate percentage and this is your price. So this would be like free $0. This would be, let's just say, like crazy expensive, Whatever that is for you, $150 per hour. I just say that your close ratio or percentage looks something like this.

So what that means is.

Changing your hourly rate in between that, in that middle zone doesn't make a massive impact in your close ratio because they're going to accept either way.

So when you really start to move the needle for your close ratio is here and here, outside that kind of middle zone. Okay. So that's why I'm saying when people are like, oh, I'm going to lower price, it's like, look, if you go from 90 to 80, I bet your close ratio will go up like 5%. So just keep that in mind.

Yeah. Hope that is helpful. Because until you start getting crazy expensive or you're really cheap, you're gonna have a lot of change. And you can see here, like the percentage of close drops fast as soon as you literally start charging anything. Because some people are like, if it costs a dollar, they're not gonna use you. So there's no point. As soon as you start charging anything, it drops fast. But then this middle part here is like the middle of the market.

Not a lot of changes. A little bit. But just keep that in mind. So.

The reason this question is. Dizzy. I've already stopped twice and we're on the second paragraph. Okay, so if two guys were still doing. Oh, here we go.

Okay, so if two guys were still doing 10 budget hours at 80 prior to client, they hit exactly budget hours at the whole day and work an eight hour day. They would only hit base pay. Both these assumptions are based on 40% of labor revenue to the spring going to the crew. Good, good. Job. The question is, how do you solve this? Would you sacrifice margin by lowering the rate to 80 for the client and increasing the percentage of P4P or keep a margin higher? Higher margin at 90 to the client and your guys will hit, will hit P4P. But the cost of growing and taking market share, again, I think this is the part that you're overblowing. When you're moving your hourly rate by $10 an hour, we're literally talking about three to five dollars per cut, which again is going to increase your clues, improve your close ratio, but probably not to the extent that you're thinking.

And the headache of dealing with everyone hitting base pay or you increasing percentage and then one day having to take that back is going to be more hurtful, in my opinion. I love this dilemma because it has so many potential solutions. This was a long question, but to summarize, how do you balance growing quickly and making sure the guys make good money on P4P to stay motivated? I would say this. What was your problem last spring? Was it getting more jobs or is it getting. Getting your crew members to stay the majority? And I know for you, Nick, it's finding good people and keeping them stay. So Let them make P4P. Focus on that. I would highly recommend that if you're, if your close ratio is like 20%, we're talking about a different conversation, right? But if your close ratio is 40 to 60% and you can keep it there, I just let your guys make P4P grow at a slightly slower level. But keep your guys on board. The extra profit you make, you can roll that into marketing and get more market share that way, right? So you got to remember the reason that when people talk about turning the profit knob on, on a second location or in general, once you hit a certain growth level, when you turn the profit knob on, you now have more money to spend on marketing. So if you want to keep growing, whether it be a second location or even that one location, the possibilities are way better because now you have extra profit to spend on marketing, and marketing dollars will get a whole lot more new leads. And if you even have a decent close ratio of 40, 60%, I don't need 70 to 80% because now my profits are higher and I can afford to put more leads into the system. Right? So the only solution I see to is what I mentioned above, which is sacrificing margin on both ends, lower rate to the client, and higher percentage of labor revenue to the guys just for the sake of growth. Let me know what you think I would play with trying to do a lower rate? Again, I don't think it'll move the needle as much as you think. And the extra margin that you're giving away is making your crew unhappy on P4P. Or it's eating your profits to the point that that profit spent on marketing brings in five times as many leads as what you're losing because of the price increase, if that makes any sense. I hope.

Is it realistic to open a new location every year?

Let's keep reading. How do you explain to the GM of the current location you'll be taking some of his profits to use a fund a new location? Won't that lower his pay? No, no, no, no, no. Okay, let's explain this. So is it realistic? I talked to someone the other day about this. I said if someone's goal is, say, 10 locations, because this individual, he's like, I want 10 locations in 10 years. I said this is the most realistic scenario, is you're actually going to get two locations in the next five years or six years, and then you'll go from two to 10 in a matter of just a few years. That's the more likely scenario because it takes a few years to figure out the systems. It takes a few years to have confidence in the systems. And furthermore, it takes a few years to figure out what a good GM looks like to you.

So I do believe one location a year is possible. However, I went six year old. I went what, five, six years without starting a second location. And I went 1, 4, 8. Right. So again, that, that same trajectory, that hockey stick will happen when you have, okay, now I've got confidence. My first location is pumping out cash. Okay, now you have a tax strategy. Go. Right. So again, this goes right back to the seven stages of wealth at Augusta. You've got to get through all the stages before you start thinking about multiplication. And like more looking, you've got to get through all the first ones. So my, my inclination, my response to this is yes, once you're at the appropriate stage of wealth inside of a destination, if you're trying to do this at stage three, when you haven't even built a business to 500,000, no, don't do it, please. We will not let you buy another one.

It's absolutely realistic. Obviously, I'm starting for next year. It's just a matter of you've got to get through all the different stages to get to the point of investment. Like even stage six.

You know, is fine. But stage seven of investing is when you're like okay, let's do four, let's do 10 at one, at one time. That's a different level. You've got to just work through your way through stages and realize it can take you five, six years to get through the first five stages. Right. If you need a refresher on the stage of growth, I can do that.

We are going to be recording the entire training in two weeks that we have locally. We're going to record the entire thing and I think that'll be helpful for those of you who have been around for a couple years but might need a refresher on things like the seven stages of wealth, three stages of growth or three stages where it's most profitable, the five stages of growth, etc. So that'll be coming up.

In general, how much marketing dollars do you need to start in the second location to have it be a decent size the first year? Personally I recommend.

In our my locations I use about $15,000 over the course of the first three months, about $5,000 per month, which is about 120, $140 per day on marketing. I expect though after those three months for us to be at around 30,000amonth in revenue and us turning the profit knob on and being profitable to then on. That's like our ideal scenario. Three months of investment.

Followed by profitability consistently each quarter. That's the goal and, and a lower performing GM might take in that second quarter to become profitable because they just didn't grow as fast. But that is the goal and the benchmark.

Going into a slower season, many of us have more time on our hands and want to save as much money as we can. Besides payroll, our biggest expense is command center. It makes sense for CC to do everything for us when we're in season and don't have time for. But if you want to reduce costs from CC over the winter, what tasks would you recommend taking back? Categorizing, scheduling, invoicing, etc. I'm on full service. Yeah. So what I would recommend doing is looking at your invoice and seeing what's the biggest thing is because some of these things take minutes and you might literally pay 20 or $30 for the whole month to get taken care of for you. So I would be looking at the biggest tasks and seeing what can you take back there. I would not take away calls because it's reactive, it's making you stop whenever the customer calls. Things that are you can schedule like invoicing for example. I would take that back if you have like if like for example, the day's December 1st, you're like, I don't really have much work, I got nothing to do. I would take inventory back.

Those things that you can schedule, you can do them at night, et cetera. Things like the phone calls though, don't touch those. I personally wouldn't. Right. Like obviously my locations are full service too. I don't want the GMs doing any of this stuff. But if you're going to take stuff back, take stuff back that you can schedule and do yourself like scheduling invoicing. You can do it at night, evening, and those are going to take commands that are longer than something like categorization of QuickBooks. That takes probably a few minutes a day and you don't have to worry about it. It's done and your books are clean and you're literally paying. If it's two minutes a day times 20, you're looking at 40, 50 bucks a month. Again, if you just spent that time focusing on selling one more job, it'd be better use of your time ultimately that should be the synthesis. The only time that you would take stuff back is if you have nothing to do. If you don't have enough work on the schedule and they're doing your scheduling invoicing, yeah, you should take it back and you should be taking. Before you even take it back, you should be taking, making sure you're, you're following up with people calling yourself in addition to the automations doing that work.

So I would be taking back the things that are not reactive that you're able to do on your own time because.

That will prevent you from focusing on things that are not revenue producing. That's the scary part of getting into that habit though. You start focusing on non revenue, non revenue producing things. So don't be like, oh, and now I'm doing scheduling invoicing. So like I don't do my, I don't need to call it my back, my estimates. No, like if you just sold two or three extra jobs at $1,000 a pop, you would just paid for all of that extra time. So you got to realize that the highest leverage use of your time is going to be selling when you're slow. So it is like you call every single estimate three times. You go to their house in person, if they don't answer you and you print off the invoice doing that like, oh, that's crazy, why would I ever do that? No, the extra five minutes it takes you to print that off and take it to Their house might lead to a $2,000 job with 700 $800 worth of profit. That would have just covered the entire whatever you just took back from command center. Right. And you just did it in half a day or a day or whatever. Right. So that'd be the synthesis. And then once you've done all the sales activities, once you've done all that work, then you start taking stuff back. And I would be doing things that are non reactive.

Can we have the other end of the conversation regarding next question. Our limiting factor this spring wasn't employees are keeping around. We expanded our capacity for recurring work a lot and increased recurring from last year about 30%. Okay. I pumped a lot of money into marketing, but I was hoping for more of a growth percentage. We ended up doing lots of landscape this year to keep six team members busy. I want to go into the spring with five to six team members. I want them on as much recurring work as possible. Great. Couple things. Keep in mind, I will come back to the question, but keep in mind when it comes to the number of years you've been in Augusta, this correlation is true. The vast majority of your revenue will come from project based work and over time it'll slowly diminish. And as as that diminishes, typically your profit margins go up and the amount of headaches that you have goes down. All right. The reason though is when you're scaling up, it's very you can easily in terms of speed, use project work and one time jobs to fill a schedule. And you'll want to do that to be able to grow second locations or keep a GM busy. You can't. I was talking to someone the other day, said you could take three months, crush it and get a hundred mowing customers, but if they're all paying you $150 a month, you literally have a $15,000 per month business after three months. Whereas if you just did 50 mowing customers, but the other 50 were jobs that do two $3,000 like small moats jobs, clips, you're going to be twice, you're going to be like 30, 40,000amonth in revenue. You have two crews. And that's the more generalized path that happens when someone's trying to grow quickly. When you're doing marketing, you're going to that split and a majority of your revenue, like I'm talking 70, 80% of your revenue will probably be one time jobs and projects as your second, third, fourth and then especially your fifth year happens. Typically what's happening is you're Removing the most complicated services. Your recurring work is a slow build. And over time you use the way you, you're simplifying your services on projects, that slowly brings that number down. But your revenue, total revenue is fine because now your recurring work is on the rise. But recurring work is a trickle. That takes time. Okay, so if you change nothing, Logan, next year, what would probably happen is your percentage of revenue on projects would slowly go down, maybe, maybe down 10, 15%. And, and your recurring work would fill that void. Right now into your question though, in terms of this, what I'd be looking at is your close ratio, right? So if you put money in marketing, you grew by 30% on your recurring side. But you, and you really want to focus on that.

And let's just say that your revenue didn't grow by your top line, revenue didn't grow by 30%. What that means is you gave you up a little bit in projects in order to be able, and then that was filled up by having more recurring.

I would be looking at your close ratio. I'd be looking at, okay, was it 40 last year? Because if you go from 40 to 60, you're gonna have a 50 growth in recurring next year in terms of your close percentage, right? So I'd be looking at your close ratio first. It looks you're getting plenty of leads. It looks you're not having problem with getting more guys. So the first thing I've been looking at is how you improve close ratio. And that would be following up, going to them in person, whatever that is. Like if you have excessive employees, it's a matter of, okay, let's put a better compensation, better reward system for getting them to get more work for us. Let's put a better system in place for not only them getting up sales, but people who go to projects to sell those projects. On mowing and recurring, like how do we reverse it? So instead of giving them $50 to upsell a customer or find a new customer, maybe I give them 100 or whatever. If they take, oh, you know what, that's what you could do. So right now if you, someone takes over an existing customer and upsells them, you give them 50 bucks or you give them $10, they get the 50. If it is a new customer, you might say if they don't have mowing and they're a project based customer and you sell them into recurring mowing, you still get 50. If you do that, that's a good incentive for them to basically make sure every time they do cleanup, every time they Do a project, they ask for review, there's 50 bucks and they ask for a try to pitch them on a mowing service. And literally they could ask you what the prices, get the price from you based upon square footage and then try to pitch the job. They can look at $100 on a one one day cleanup. So again it's line the incentives with your crew to upsell into recurring instead of just projects and give incentive and just focus 100% of your time on close ratio.

So I hope that was a good response. Something meaningful.

Is planting not a simple service like anything out of outside of trees, boxes, hostas, or is it just more hassle if customers aren't watering mother nature, going to the nursery, etc. Yeah, like if you have lots of experience doing it, great. It's just a challenge when you start having a lot of.

Frontline team members or gms that don't have that experience as much as you. To be able to do it consistently and not have like one bad planting job like the one I just mentioned can mess up like three other jobs. This is why some people will let go of sod. Because one job where the sod doesn't take it dies and the customer freaks out and you go to replace it all wipes out the profits from like five other jobs. So I just know that I have like, I know that like 99.99 of the time I'm not going to have a thousand dollar repair on a mowing. There's probably like a 1% chance on projects that are like more complicated. So it's like a hundred times more likely. So especially when you start trying to get GM and you're not in the daily operations for I would challenge, I would challenge people to ask themselves and look around and see the guys who design build in big projects and ask is the owner not around. The percentage of landscaping companies that pull that off are few and far between. And typically companies have been around for 10 or 20 years or more where their generational companies have been handed down because it is very hard to find the talent to create the systems. Like I'd rather systematize simplicity because I can do it faster than taking 10 to 15 years to try to systematize excavation, pavers, et cetera. I'm not against those things. You can make good money doing them. But can I copy and paste them a hundred times and I own them all? No, it's hard to find 100 GMs that could all do those type of work. So boxwoods, hostas, et Cetera, the level of them. Need to know the watering schedule, when to prune them. All the rest of it is challenging.

Yeah, this is exactly right. Planting is simple. The problem is a lack of control whether the customer properly waters the plant or if it, if it just up and dies. Yep. And even things like a crew member puts too much soil up against the bare, the root or the stem, or we install mulch and then like it's too much on top. Like all these little things. Right. We quit the surface soil once we return. Yeah. So this, this is what we're talking about. Projects will take off you, you offer more services and then as you start adding your, your recurring is picking up, you're like, okay, I can cut out this service, I can cut out this other service. So your projects start going down while your recurring is going up, but your revenue stays the same. Right. And that's why it's like, that's why we always say, like, scale, grow to size, grow to like the three different stages of growth, 200, 500, 800 plus those three stages get there as fast as possible. And then when you get there, you turn the profit knob on, you increase prices, bring down your close ratio, and you start cutting out projects that are sapping your energy and just sapping, you know, all of your focus. Because your recurring work is picking up enough.

For Nick. Instead of dropping prices, it might be worth adding more flat rate prices in the square footage calculator. We aren't lowering hourly rates, we're adding more pricing in between. Our calculator, like our minimum is dropping to $40 for 3,000 square feet or under and then adding increments between 6,000, 8,000 to help look like it's cheaper. But it's not. In reality, it's not great. Great point, by the way. Yep. Especially in your lower end. Like if you're doing, you might, instead of lowering price, you might lower your just your bottom floor and then add more increments inside of it. So that's definitely a good idea. And if you need help with that, estimate@augustalongerservices.com and they can make sure your square footage calculator and all the rest of it gets set up. By the way, great job everyone for signing up for conference. 80 people already signed up, which is the majority of us. If you haven't, please check your email, fill out the form. We've got to do the scheduling for food, all the rest of it. And we are going to have to shut down public registration because we are going to fill everything up. So I want to make sure everyone in August Nation is in. And by the way, if you have a third or fourth person coming and they've got a regular public ticket, they are more than welcome. Like, please, I want them to come Wednesday evening for dinner all Thursday morning. Like, yeah, like if they get a public ticket, you don't have to get another one or anything. Like, if you get a public ticket for your third and fourth and fifth people, they can come to Wednesday night and Thursday morning breakfast and the lunch and everything. So just hopefully that's clarified. Yeah. Work on some really cool stuff. Looking forward to being on share at conference. It's gonna be a great time. So. All right, everyone, have a great Thursday. Take care.