Mike's 1 Year Plan To Build a $1M Business in Texas (Will It FAIL?)

The greatest risk is that something would happen to John. John needs to move. There's a life event, something doesn't work out. And so you do everything possible to make sure that the incentives of that person are aligned with the business objectives.

Here's just who I need to fill that gap. Go find them so you can do this too.

Ultimately, I have one swing and that's the, that's the part that's actually my biggest fear. When you publicly state something like this is I got one swing in spring rush to get there. That'll be the hardest part.

You could have a killer business, just be going 100 miles an hour. Everything's working, but then you run out of money. 'Cause like, oh crap, that little cost problem.

The first time I said this, yeah, right now my budget is $130,000. That assumes that I get there in 6 months. I've never ran a location where the technicians take the trucks home. I've also never ran a location that uses vans. We've always used pickup trucks. I think all of it comes down to confidence in your numbers. The reason I can say it publicly is because like I can run the math. If you just know the basic numbers, you can forecast much better.

Hey everybody. Welcome back. Mike, how's it going?

Fantastic. I'm not in the studio today. You have an edge on appearance. Oh yeah.

Where are you?

Michigan, doing a turnaround.

Oh, okay. All right. How long you been there?

Just 24 hours. So turnaround is like fast. I just move, move, move. So the other day I was— Turnaround. Yeah, the other day I was in a different state, so.

Are you heading home after this?

Yeah, tomorrow. Yep.

All right, fantastic. All right, if you've been listening to us for a while, you know that Mike is moving to Texas And for a period of time, and he's going to show everyone how to build a business from zero to $1 million. And I, the, the stated goals within a year, I believe that to be accurate.

Yep.

And I think we've talked about this before. I think it's super interesting and I wanted to make the theme today everything about how do you do that? Because that's a big goal. I've gotta imagine you don't think it'll necessarily be perfectly easy. Would you agree, Mike? Or do you like—

I have no concern. 100%. I thought, I saw the question in the docket though, and there was one part where it was like, it will not go as planned, period. I'm like, wow, that seems very definitive.

Yeah, well, I wanted to get you thinking about that question. So yeah, I mean, I, if I was putting it out there that, hey, I'm going to a new city, I'm going to build a $1 million business in one year, I'd be like, golly, I hope I could do this. So I mean, You know, not easy. And so I think it is an awesome topic for anyone that is like, has the desire to do such a thing, or you've got a business and you're, it doesn't matter what number you're at, $500,000, $1 million bucks, $5 million bucks. How do you add $1 million in revenue in a year? So this is a, that's going to be the theme of everything I wanted to talk to Mike about today. And I've given him some heads up on the questions so he could give these a little bit of thought. That's what we're always referring to when we say the docket. So I want to talk through this, and as you hear Mike talk about it and I ask him questions, and, uh, we'll just make this a conversation. Think about how you'd apply it to your business. You'll hear him say, this is what I'm going to do, or here's how I'm thinking about it, or here's what I'm not sure about yet. Like, think about those types of things as you think about your business. That's what I'm hoping to get out of this. And so that's the gist of what we're talking about. But before we do that, I guess I kind of know what you're working on this week. It sounds like turnaround. Anything else you got going on, or is it a continuation of last week?

It's actually like a whole bunch of MCP and API stuff. So, okay, yeah, it's getting released. By the time this comes out, it'll be released. And we just kind of— we try— the hardest part has been just like, how do we describe this in an easy way and package it correctly? So we're actually likely rolling it out under— because it's actually two very different things. API is very different than MCP. And so we're trying to— we're likely branding as like Homeworks Agents and then Homeworks Connect. And really just trying to create the differentiation because a lot of people will just say, um, there's other softwares that have APIs. Very few home service softwares have an API and an MCP. And so we're trying to differentiate the fact this is actually two very different things. And so we've been working a bunch on the kind of the go-to-market strategy and the packaging around that. So that will be out by the time this, this is released.

Okay, fantastic.

And what about you? What have you been working on?

Well, a continuation of last week, which was sort of everything pest control. That's what I mentioned last week. So it's everything around marketing across different channels, the offers, the USP, the copy, uh, acquisition and expansion. So it's all of it. But frankly, for the first 3 days of this week, I haven't even touched it. It was just— it's— I've been moving projects ahead inside the business. So we've got Copy projects, design projects, data projects. We got all these projects running that are generally involve me, someone else that's on the team, and maybe contractors. And so it's been all about, and then Stephen who's on the team, it's been all about moving everybody forward and keeping them all working. And that seems to have consumed my days so far. I'm still the bottleneck in almost everything because I've got the vision for where we're going and I wanna keep my finger on the copy. So anyway, that's, uh, that's where we're at right now.

Did I mention that, uh, copywriting book called— from Sugarman? Did I ever mention that to you? I think it's like, uh, Principles of Copywriting or something like that, from way, way back. Yeah, yeah.

So Sugarman was a massive copywriter back in the day, responsible for all kinds of stuff. I've read his book, but I'll bet it's been 20 years. I don't know if that's the same book, but yeah. Well, no, I don't remember you mentioning.

So it's excellent. Yeah, I read it, I read a couple years ago, and then like Like you said, there's all these projects. I'm coming up to one though where I'm really looking forward to, and that's just a lot of copy of what we're using on Augusta changing. Okay. 'Cause we really heavily index towards SEO and AEO and like optimization, but like there's also, you gotta balance it with like copy. And so yeah, it's old, old book. And I actually love those books, the old ones where it's like, okay, this is timeless because it's still relevant today and it's more about human psychology and sales. And so that project is soon approaching. I'm actually looking forward to it.

Okay, yeah, he was considered one of the best. He was a direct response copywriter, uh, highly cited even when I was paying attention at stuff back in the day. He was older at that point, so I think he's passed away, I think, some time ago, but I may be mistaken. So yeah, very successful. All right, so I want to talk through this whole idea of you coming to Texas and starting from zero, and I know If I remember correctly, your general concept is you've just got to get here and figure some stuff out and spend a little time here and understand the market. Is that accurate?

Yeah. The challenging part is like, I'm going to be showing up there end of September, and that's kind of the tail end of the market. We have about 6 to 8 weeks where I can still get customers for a decent CAC from what I can tell. Um, and so it's a lot of us learning so that when Spring Rush comes, I can go all in. And yeah, so a lot of learning in the first little bit because I've never done a lawn care business in Texas. And so I will have to learn. And that's where I obviously have to lean a lot on my operations person to be able to give me that feedback that I can learn faster. But ultimately I have one swing and that's the, that's the part that's actually my biggest fear. When you publicly state something like this, yes, I got one swing in spring rush to get there.

Right.

And that, that'll be the hardest part.

Yeah. So we'll probably talk about that later, but to continue sort of setting this up, and again, I wanna encourage anyone who's listening that's not gonna do the same services as Mike's gonna talk about. This applies to everybody and everything if you're in home services. So you're thinking lawn mowing. I see that. Well, I know you're, lawn mowing is the basis. Are you, did you, you also said, if I remember correctly, you're gonna do fertilization, weed control.

Yep. Just those two services.

Just two. Okay, perfect. All right. So that's sort of the setup here. And so the way I want to approach getting started with this is I know you got to figure out the market. There's a lot of question marks. How do you think about what, what feels like the fundamentals? Like, I kind of know this is going to work. I've got hundreds of franchisees. I've seen this game over and over again. We've been in different markets. Here's the tried and true. So when you come out swinging, what would you say are the hands-down 3 biggest acquisition levers you're going to use or means of acquiring clients?

Yeah. So what's funny is you just mentioned like, this is agnostic to industry. And I scanned quickly what my answer to this question was. And it's 100— you're 100% right. Like, this does not matter what industry. If I was trying to build a business, I was trying to build it fast. And I was trying to build it where I could leave it within a matter of several months. This is exactly the same thing, no matter what industry. So the first is finding a killer GM. And you've said it before, like you've made this distinction, like, are they a killer? And I think that was really the— it is the underlying theme. If you're not going to be the operator in the business, you have to find someone that's just an incredible operator. Ideally someone that's already managed more technicians than what you're going to ask them to do. And so I am only asking someone to get to about 8 technicians and then be able to move on, but The individual I've hired, John is his name, he's managed more than 20 technicians working for the city. And also, I'm also, when it comes to a killer GM for myself being the fact that my weakest link is I don't have local experience, I need someone that has roots in the local area. And so he's been there for 20 years and very tenured with the current, his previous employer. And so like, I look for that a lot when I'm looking for someone like, I'm gonna be gone, I need this person to be established here, want to stay here, already have their family here and have a lot of experience in this area that like, is my weakest part, which is I have no idea what I'm walking into when I talk about Texas. And so if someone's looking for a killer gym, one of the biggest hallmarks for me is all of their questions revolving around operations. Like if you're hiring someone for admin, you want their questions to kind of revolve around admin and like, what kind of phone system? Well, when it comes to operations, when all the questions are, how are we hiring? What's our base pay going to be? How is it going to work with the equipment, the vans? What's the maintenance going to That is when I'm like, yes, I found my person. And so I interviewed, man, probably almost 100 people, um, all digitally, and then narrowed it down to finally then coming out and visiting with John and his wife and making that decision to hire him. Uh, so that's the first thing is like find a killer GM.

Uh, did you find him on Indeed, LinkedIn? How'd you find him?

Ran ads on Indeed too. Then we use a video platform to be able to then screen them. And then I did videos, interviews with quite a few, and then eventually I narrowed it down to him. In terms of acquisition, to answer your question directly, the second thing I listed was really just establishing as quickly as possible what my customer acquisition cost is on Facebook and Google, and then just starting to refine that over the winter. It's going to be challenging because I know I'm going against the tide of demand as I'm in October, November, December, but I can refine it. That's why I encourage anyone, if you're starting a business, instead of trying to do 30 things, I know enough about Facebook and Google to know we can do well, and just refining it. Split testing what works better than another, what happens if I change the copy, what happens if I change the offer, what happens if I change the picture, what happens if I use video, what happens if I say the name of the neighborhood versus not. These are all little things that you can just keep tweaking and tweaking and tweaking, and if you give me 12 to 14 months or 12 to 14 weeks, I think we can refine enough for when spring rush hits, I know I have a method that works. And so just establishing that, I think a lot of people test so many things, they really— it's hard to do lead attribution. They don't get clear numbers. They don't really have confidence that this is how much I spend to get a customer. And so I've just got to establish that first and foremost. But Facebook and Google will be where I spend probably 95+% of our marketing budget.

And when you say Google, are you talking LSA and Google Ads?

Well, by that time it will be the same thing.

Yes.

But yeah, but yeah, I would include both of those in there. I'm obviously trying to max out LSA as it currently stands in its format. Once it goes into PMax or Performance Max inside Google Ads, we have a lot of experience, fortunately, using PMax and we don't think it's actually changed a lot for our workflow, so it won't change much. But yes, now you'll be able to max more on the PMax budget.

When you think about LSA, will you run LSA— there's not really a listing for fertilization, weed control, so you're just going to buy lawn mowing leads? Is that the idea?

And then increase the gears for the, the cross-sell.

Okay. And then on the Google Ads side, I assume you'll run ad copy for both services and buy all kinds of keywords? Is that the— just—

it's going to be like gateway service for mowing. We can get way lower customer acquisition cost typically Yeah. That being said, I'm really interested to see how it works more like December and January when the grass is not growing, but there might be weeds. So that's again something I have to learn where I might pivot towards some more fertilization type of ads. But generally speaking, I can get a mowing customer much cheaper and then either on our instant quote forms or just after the sale, try to sell them the second service.

When you're doing Google Ads, do you create different landing pages for the different keywords, or do you just drive everybody to the same landing page for mowing or for fertilization, weed control? How do you think about that kind of stuff?

We usually just do it to one, um, mostly because I have seen the juice being much more on how I'm setting up the campaign instead of where they're going. And like, I can see some results when we've changed out landing pages, but more if I just optimize my campaign, whether it be on Facebook or Google, where I'm driving it has usually lower returns the time I spent on like creating better creative or testing different creative or focusing on PMax specifically, like you can do images and do video now on YouTube. And so usually I find more juice to squeeze there, but we are not doing landing pages. We just drive them to our main website. From there, they can choose different services on instant quote form. And so in the past, I probably would have done different landing pages. And we did have, we still do have landing pages where on every site you can make a different like landing page form type situation. But now we have where they can choose multiple services from the same form. And so we just drive them to our main website. It also helps with just getting a lot of traffic to your site, 'cause for retargeting. And so there's several reasons why sometimes I'll just, I'm willing to put some money into it, drive a lot of traffic, and then retarget them afterwards, 'cause retargeting is where I can really get a great customer acquisition cost. And so they're just slightly interested and click on my ad, had, then I go after them hardcore later on. I can call them out a little bit better because I know they've at least visited the site.

So just to make sure I'm understanding, you're saying that in the past you've done— you've driven some of your traffic straight to a landing page, but the returns for the effort haven't necessarily been there. So you just spend all your time on the front end getting the creative, the ad, everything right to even get them to click. Is that what you're saying?

Yeah, yeah. Mo— mostly the real reason though is we recently made it where on the instant quote form, they can choose more than one service, right? In the past, they choose one, there was like an upsell kind of at the end. Whereas now right from the get, they can like, I want mowing and fertilization, and immediately just shows the prices for both. And so the flow is now where I'm confident I can just drive traffic all in one spot. And then that way too, if someone clicks on the ad, they don't want fertilization, they might still accept my mowing, or vice versa. If I'm advertising a different service, I've found when I do landing pages for a specific service, it does do better. But I also am losing out on occasional person that might not accept that service, but they'll accept another one. But because my— I'm so focused on this funnel, I lose out on that, that free lead.

Yeah, I'm curious about this, and I ask, uh, for everybody listening but also for myself, because I don't know where the diminishing returns on this are. But I will say with absolute certainty, in the Service Autopilot world, if I was going to drive you from an ad and that ad was something around hypothetically estimating, and I drove you to a landing page that matched exactly the thing you just cared about estimating. So when like you're, you Google search for estimating software, you see an ad for estimating software, you click on the ad, you end, end on a landing page. The headline is estimating software. It's like, this is exactly what I'm looking for. And so, but I've not tested in this world to know how relevant that is. So example, fertilization weed control. You search on weed control, you don't search on fertilization weed control. Am I better off just throwing you to a page that shows fertilization weed control? Now maybe my form presents alternative options, but I don't have the answer. That's why I was curious if you had any data on that.

Yeah, we used to do quite a bit of this a year ago, but once we changed the form, um, we stopped. And honestly, I 100% guarantee you're right, that like one service, you know, whatever you're saying in your ad, if it ties to the next page and it's that service only, you are going to have a better return. Typically, the cost in building out all of those is high enough to where it's just like, just spend more money on ads and you'll be fine. That being said, with, with AI, this is definitely more of a topic of like, well, can I spin up 10 of these different landing pages now in a matter of a day and drive differently? Certainly an option.

Yeah.

So also the other part of it is with our instant quote form, we can capture abandoned carts. So if someone just starts the form, even if they see the price and bounce, I can capture that data. And so that is—

you need an email address though, correct? You need them to at least have given you that or phone number.

One of the— yeah, yeah, yeah. They have to have one of those two things. And so that allows us to be able to remarket to them. So driving to another form or other forms that might not have that same ability, I usually don't get as many leads. And again, I'm just like maximizing for leads. I'm driving a lot of traffic. I understand there's gonna be a lot of inefficiencies when you're trying to spend so much on marketing, uh, there's gonna be inefficiencies.

And I think you, I think the right thing for all of us to do is say inefficiencies are fine. Let 'em, let 'em happen because otherwise we're gonna spin our wheels on lots of low value things. Again, back to my point, like I know it works, but is it worth the effort? It might not be worth the effort. That's why I'm curious what you were seeing in the data. I'll, I'll retest it. I'll test it for myself at some point. I'll probably test it more on pest, pest control than I will on say fertilization, weed control. Like on pest control, maybe I can hit on, they saw a roach, they're searching for roaches, or they're searching for wasps or something like that. Instead of just saying generic pest control, that's where I would probably start my test because that's a different emotional reaction. A roach is a different emotional reaction than say an ant versus termites that might cost me tremendous amounts of money. And so that's where, whether or not that's accurate, that's how I think about it.

So yeah. And just to be clear, in case someone clicks on an ad, I will likely do split tests of different landing pages. It just, my effort will probably be 5% towards that. Versus 95% towards different creative and adjusting very, like the iterative process. And ultimately when you're trying to grow quickly or in general any business, we have to, there's trade-offs. And so if I'm gonna spend a whole bunch of time around landing page optimization and getting the button in the right spot, I'm a little further down the funnel, which is after the click I'm optimizing, I'll likely spend just most of my time on top of the funnel and optimizing clicks to that landing page.

Yeah. And I think that's an absolutely critical point to be making. And for people to understand, if you kind of think about from the moment Miss Smith at her house says, oh my gosh, I need this weed control, weed problem solved, to the moment she actually buys, in that funnel, there are all these steps. And certain of those, certain steps will generate you way more ROI than others. And so how do you think about stack ranking the 90 things you could potentially do and think about and just work on the few? And that's what we're You know, that's what you're saying. That's how I'm hearing it.

And I would say to lean into your strengths, like if you're great at web design, maybe landing pages are the thing to do. If you're great at vibe coding landing pages and like you love split testing where the buttons are and what the text says and copy and the offer, then maybe that's something to do. We have a unique advantage on the front end, the creative side, by having a media team in Augusta. So like, that's why I'm focusing. I'm just like leaning into my strength, knowing that there's going to be inefficiencies. But if I try to do all of it, nothing gets— nothing ends up happening.

Yeah. A minute, a few minutes back, you mentioned YouTube. So when you talk about Facebook and Google, are you buying ads on YouTube or Display Network, or what were you referring to when you said YouTube earlier?

Yeah, so in Google, there's what's called PMax, or Performance Max, and that includes video, display, and search. And so display being usually display banners, they're images essentially. And so most people, when they think of Google Ads, they think of search. The problem with search is you're 100% relying on someone with intent to buy, which is why we all love Google, because people are literally looking for your keyword. That being said, you can also show that same person that searched for that term a video or a banner in the places that they are doing their business online. And so whether watching YouTube video or they're scrolling through a news site, I want to show up to them if they've searched certain keywords. And so it is a typically a lower quality lead than someone literally searching your keyword because they're not looking right now for nothing active. Exactly. And so you are absolutely going to usually have a higher customer acquisition cost, but it's also a place where I can deploy more capital towards. And again, the strategy I'm using is not the most efficient. I'm not going to be trying to optimize my customer acquisition cost. I'm going to be optimized for number of customers and how fast I can get them in the funnel, which means I will likely have an inflated CAC of probably 100% more than I would like, but I have to get the budget in and I'm going to deploy it towards places like PMax instead of just search where I'm limited by how many people are searching in my local area.

But you tend to find the video display network, that all is absolutely worth— is it worth it in a normal business where you're worried about CAC, or are you only using that strategy right now where you're less concerned with CAC and you're more concerned with speed?

It's the number one thing that we are very pro on in Augusta Leads right now is optimizing PMax. Google is putting a lot of attention on this. Obviously they're moving LSA into the platform. And so they are doing a better and better job because like Display Network used to be one of those things you turn off on Google Ads. It was trash leads, horrible locations. But if you have the right negative keywords, which means it doesn't show up in certain spots, if you have a—

Can you elaborate just a bit on negative keywords?

Hope—

just for those that don't know.

Totally. So for example, I want to— my keyword that I want to show up for might be lawn care or landscaping or pest control or whatever it might be. My negative keywords might be I do not want to show up for hardscaping, I do not want to show up for landscaping, I do not want to show up for paver patios, I do not want to show up for— here's a good one— lawn care equipment store or lawn care fertilization, like fertilizer supplier. Like, I don't want to show up for those. And so negative keywords are just as important. And then to the same way you put in which URLs in the Display Network that you want to show up on, and you can put in the ones you don't want to show up on. And you don't want to be showing up in front of a 9-year-old on a gaming site, you know, someone playing Minecraft, like they're not going to buy your lawn care service or whatever service you're buying. And so any children's site, gaming site, you can just get rid of all those. And we've just compiled over the years like 16,000 sites, like you don't want to be on them, we know we get bad leads from them. And so as We've gone through time, we're just like, get them off, don't show them on the Display Network. And so we've been able to get it where we really like PMax. Like, even 3 years ago, I wasn't a huge fan, but Google's putting a lot of attention on it. It just takes a lot more effort because you need creative. It's not like I can just throw keywords at it and throw budget. That used to be how it is. And now with all the AI features that you can enable, you can waste money so fast on Google. It's crazy. And, um, So I'm just leaning on my strength. We have Augusta Leads, they know what's going on, and I will let some of the other chips fall where I, I'm not going to go after, squeeze the last 5 or 10% out of it.

Actually, I know you were going to go somewhere else, but I want to stay here for just a moment. So talking about the creative, so if you think about where the person is in the funnel, you know, the awareness versus I'm ready to buy, uh, and you think about Facebook as being very different than Lawn Mowing Company Near Me, the creative that you work on and you test on Facebook. So somebody that wasn't looking for you, doesn't care about you, just wants to drink their coffee right now and, and browse Facebook. Do, do you find that some of that creative that works on Facebook can be taken to be, can be used as creative on, for ads? Not, not search, but for the visual ad on Face— YouTube? You're saying yeah?

Yes. Yeah. Like Pretty much always our pictures and videos that we use just have to be reformatted in terms of sizing, but we use pretty much the same creative. I will also say, it is insane to me how demographically dependent which creative works. It's insane. And so we have certain trends that we see across all of Augusta, but many times someone like, this one stinks, and another, it's just crushing. So you have to test. And that will be like, that's why I'm not going in with too many preconceived ideas of like, well, I'm gonna like definitely make 20 different versions with different neighborhood names. Like, yes, I could do that. We've seen that not work as much as just saying the county name, and then it is able to get more traffic. It gets like, so I think for anyone, just don't hear one thing I say or anyone says, like, oh, that's what I have seen this be so geographically dependent of like pictures versus video, whether they have a flag or whether they don't, whether you show an employee or whether you don't, whether you show before and after versus just the after. Like, there's, there's so many variables, and I, I can't— I really get frustrated when people give like definitive, you should do this on social media ads specifically, because I've just seen it, the same ad do really good and really bad in two different markets. And so, uh, I just put as an asterisk next to everything I'm saying.

Yeah, that's fantastic. So I don't know if you'll remember where you were going earlier. I made you pause and describe negative keywords. So you were working through— do you remember where you're going to continue on?

Yeah, like beyond, beyond Google and Facebook, I think the only really other strategy from a, uh, at the beginning especially is just like making sure we're ranking organically. And you had a great video on this, like how do you get customers with for $0. It's like the basics, like make sure you're in all the different listing sites, make sure you're getting reviews, make sure you're like— from day one I'll be asking reviews like every single lead. And we won't be doing any in-person estimates, so it'll have to be all through automation, but we found that you can actually get usually quite a few good reviews even if you just ask customers when they have accepted an estimate, before services have even started, and then what we usually ask for is like, hey, can you review how the process of getting started, how was the call, were they friendly, was it fast, and so if you prompt them a little bit, you can get the reviews, and we don't even have to like say, hey, your first lawn free, we don't do that, And you will still get a lot of them. And so it's been really, really, um, that's been the focus to make sure that like organically we're ranking well. And we have obviously a big advantage with the domain authority of Augusta to be able to rank very quickly. But I'm still making sure like every dot of the i's and t's crossed in terms of doing the basics of organic.

Will you do anything other than digital, or is it pretty much what you said?

Unless I get there and I hit a massive roadblock. So 3 years ago I did North Carolina and I was in the middle of the summer. It was like super hot and, uh, it was kind of past the growing season. We were not as good at Google and Facebook in terms of ads. And so I went much more door hangers, yard signs, holding a sign on the side of the road. I was also trying to show like getting started with very little. So my marketing budget I think was like $3,000 to $4,000 if I remember correctly. Okay. I will spend that per day in some days of the spring rush here. And so it's just a very different playbook and you can spend a lot more. And I don't have to worry about the deployment of like physical things like postcards or hey, I got to work. Yeah, it's just, it's literally just complicated. And so the CAC is probably better if I did door hangers. Like I know enough about the CAC that we could probably get away, beat out my Google and Facebook if I'm pouring a lot of money into it because there's diminishing returns. But I'm not gonna go train people on door hangers and all the rest of it, right?

Anything else that you know for a fact you'll do when you spin this up?

Oh, that's tough. Um, not, not besides run ads.

Okay.

Uh, I have a great GM, John. Shout out, John. And then, uh, really a lot of testing around, uh, onboarding training and even our equipment setup is some stuff that I've always wanted to test for Augusta, and specifically vans and the vans going home with the technicians.

Yep. Okay, we've talked about that before.

And all of these things might not work. I just want to be very clear. Yeah, like that, that's the hard part about making content is like I'm trying to call my shot, but on that, on the other hand, I'm going to this very much open-minded, the fact like I might test something, it might not work, we will have to pivot. And I think that's the part that as much as it's sometimes a humble pie, it's also like it's the realities of business for anyone that does watch of like, you will have to change and you'll think something is true and it will not be true and you'll have to adjust.

It also makes it super interesting and people can see, like, there's almost more value in it not completely working to see how you adjust. It's like, like hypothetically you hit $600,000 and it was way harder, but we get to see that it's like, oh wow, this thing didn't work. So here's the way he thought about engineering a solution to it and still getting to a really amazing number. I think so. I think it's of great value even if you don't nail the number. Hope you do. Yeah. So if somebody came to you in that market you're going to be serving and they said, hey, I've got 100 accounts I'd like to sell you, that— and you look at those accounts and they're priced generally about how you would price them, would you buy accounts?

So I'm not going to in this test, um, specifically. And if I was to, and for just to provide someone that might be thinking about doing something like this or starting on buying and acquiring. Like, I don't rarely see these work out well. And I think that there is so much content about buying businesses. I think we've talked about this before, but it is way harder than it sounds. And I think it is completely overblown about how easy it is. Also, a lot of times finding a good deal. Right? Like, if I was, if I was going to do this and I was going to get a small operator, um, I would just be buying in their accounts essentially. I'd be looking at my customer acquisition cost, which I would establish, and then I'd go out to buy. And I'd just be really honest. I'd show all my ads, I'd show everything, I'd show all my leads, I'd show all my customers. I'd be like, this is my cost per lead and here's my cost customer acquisition cost. I'm willing to pay this much per customer you give me, and I'll take the risk on that they churn As long as you let me confirm pricing. That's usually how I approach a smaller operator. If they're a mid-size operator, I might use something like seller discretionary earnings, which for those that might not know, it's not EBITDA. So EBITDA gets fancier for bigger businesses typically where the owner's not involved, but if the operator is still in the business, seller discretionary earnings is where you take the net income and then you add back the owner's compensation, any interest, any non-cash expenses like depreciation, add it back in, and then, then I'm going to remove the cost of hiring a general manager to replace them. And then I just apply an industry standard multiple on it, usually 2 to 4x in home services. So for example, if they had $100,000 of net profit that they have, and then they took $80,000 of the salary, plus they had, you know, $40,000 depreciation and one-time expenses, okay, that's $220,000. They're like, well, it's gonna cost me $100 grand to get a GM in here. So that would put me at $110,000 of seller discretionary earnings. Then I would just multiply that by— I just show them like, this is 2 to 4x. I think you're at 2.4 based upon this industry, and I'm going to offer you 2.4 times $110,000. That's probably what I'd do is if I was trying to do an acquisition of a mid-sized company where there was an owner-operator and they had a good brand. I didn't really want the brand, but I was just buying the business. But I'm not going to be buying any accounts.

Yeah, the— my experience with the accounts has been similar to yours. We've bought some— it's been a long, long time since we bought any accounts, and they've always been small little deals. Even if the pricing is right, it's like— and even if they'll sell them to me for what my client acquisition cost is, it's just still more difficult because they never picked me in the first place, meaning that account never picked me. So as soon as You buy the accounts, like, well, maybe as the homeowner, it might be, well, like, maybe I should look around. I didn't choose City Turf or whomever the company is. And so you have to go through the whole education process, the win 'em over process, all the communications, like, ah, this just feels way more difficult than just getting our own accounts. So the way I tend to think about it personally is it's the strategy used for speed. Like you're already spending so much money in digital ads, maybe even offline print ads. You're just put— you're putting money everywhere, trying to grow as fast as you can. It's like, how do I juice this thing even more? If you're at that place, that's when maybe the, the pain of acquiring accounts or other businesses starts to make sense. But if you aren't even doing that, it's like, it's probably not even worth it. It's been my experience.

Yeah. And a lot of times too, even with to that point, what I usually come back to is like, well, maybe getting set up new clients, you've made it too hard. Like if you required to roll a truck, well, yeah, now it takes a lot longer to grow your business. If you had to roll a truck for every new lead, um, and you're, you know, have a 40% close rate, and now you have 3, 4 salespeople. Well, yeah, now buying accounts does buy you speed. My question is, though, like, with instant quotes or over-the-phone estimates, or maybe you get someone to be able to fill in part-time during the busy season to take more calls so that you can answer more calls, like, I should be able to get as many leads as possible and drive them through an efficient system that puts a— turns a lead into a customer. And so a lot of times, even the argument around speed, it's like, speed compared to what? Like, I can put ads up tomorrow, and I can put a lot of budget into it. And as long as I don't have a bottleneck around getting them from a lead to a customer, I don't have a big long sales process and meeting the customer and a lot of costs and admin and salaries, then I should still go towards getting the customer myself.

Yeah, yeah, I agree with that.

But it would be very fun just for the sake of online social media that if I was a little bit short of a million, just go buy the last few. That would really make people mad.

You'd get people all worked up. It'd be a giant— yeah, you're scamming.

Exactly, exactly.

Do you meet many franchisees or other business owners that buy accounts? How often is this even a thing?

Um, I would say maybe once or twice a month inside of Augusta, someone will put on the mastermind and like they'll put the numbers and things. And I would say I have seen, okay, to my knowledge, I have seen one acquisition that was over $1 million and it went well. Oh, and I think, and I think he would be satisfied and happy. There was definitely a lot of learning. There was a lot of meshing with the other owner. And he, I actually had him speak at our last year just because it was like, It was the first time that size of it got integrated and he learned a lot. It was trial by fire, but very rarely, and it's happening less and less now because we are getting better and better at knowing our CAC. If you know your CAC, very rarely spending $500 per client makes sense. And the stories of them going, those acquisitions going bad where someone pays $1,000 or $2,000 per recurring customer and then half of them not being there in 6 months. That's circulated enough to where people really put pause on it. Um, and so I'm sure I'm making a lot of enemies with people saying that we underbid them when we, we acquir— when we make offers, but it's just, it rarely works out.

It's not underbidding in my pers— it's, this is the number that we as a company can pay. I'm not telling you it's the greatest number you could possibly get. There may be a better deal for you, go get it. But if you don't find a better option to take care of your accounts We're here for you, but this is all we can pay. That's to me the presentation. It's not— you're not screwing anybody.

I think the more you know your numbers, the more that comes across as genuine instead of as a sales pitch. Like if you know your customer acquisition costs and you can show them— and that's like I mentioned, if I was buying a smaller operator, I would show them this is how much I spend on my Facebook ads. Here's how many leads I got. Here's how many become customers. This is what I pay to get a customer. I'm willing to spend that with you. And maybe there's a small premium in terms of speed, but usually I say there's a small premium I'm paying by the fact that if I have to adjust prices, I'm going to lose some people. And so that's the premium I'm willing to pay if I'm going to acquire an account.

Yeah. So I believe you said your ops guy that you hired, his name's John. Is that accurate?

Okay.

So John's going to be part of the team here in the local area. You're going to be here local. So there's going to be actions and activities you're personally doing. And one advantage you have is that you will have a support team behind you that will be a little different for Bob that just started today and has never done this before. So you got a little bit of an advantage there. And I thought it would be interesting to kind of talk through a little bit of what you'll personally be doing and also a little bit around who behind the scenes will be assisting you. And what kinds of things will they be doing? And the idea of this one is it helps anybody listening who wants to add $1 million a year in revenue to say, oh, these are gaps. Like, oh, I, it's like, I can't just run Google Ads. I can't just run Facebook ads for thousands of dollars a day and solve this problem. There's like these other little holes that have to be filled to make this whole machine run, such as you gotta actually talk to the people, convert the people, you know, so. Can you talk a little bit in whatever order you want to? And I'll ask you questions around who's going to be behind the scenes, what will they be doing specifically, and then also what will you be doing?

Yeah, and I, I'll try my best in the videos when I'm making them to make it very clear, like, the Mike Andes channel is there, but like, this has nothing to do with me. This, this will only work because of the community and the people involved. Um, I will be there, I will be orchestrating things, I will have the camera on me, but like, it'll be because of the people. that are making this happen. So like very first though, in terms of making happening and making sure that this works, this experiment, number one is Brianna. So that's my wife. Um, I really tried to stay as neutral as possible on the idea once it was presented till she actually wanted to go.

Presented it to her first? Is that the—

Yeah, 100%. Like no one knew about it. No, no, no. Yeah. Nothing floated to any other team member or leadership team because like if I don't have her support, like it just, there's just no point in even trying. And so once she was on board, and because it's gonna be a lot of travel, because I'm still flying back and forth to like training conferences, turnaround shows, like lots of stuff, I'm still traveling. I'm not going to be there the entire time. Every single month we're traveling. And so she was the first person I talked about. She got on board. Once she was on board, then I proceeded. The second, the kind of second group that I would say is like the backend support would be Augusta Leads. I mentioned them already. It's a huge advantage. I'm not going to try to cower away from the fact that they have a huge advantage. They will run all the ads, they will manage them all for me, they'll optimize them for me. I pay $7,000 a year for all the digital stuff. And that's very discounted because it's part of Augusta. So we have the bulk, everyone's doing the same ads, like we can make this happen. And that's a huge advantage. We have the knowledge of all the locations, all their ad performance, what works, what doesn't. So I'm not really starting from zero. And this is why Good.

I'm not trying to, I'm not trying to set you up with this question. It's more of, uh, helping people understand, like you just gave a clue. Okay. Like, so if I'm going to do this and I want to go fast, I probably won't know everything I need to know to manage all my own Google Ads stuff. So, okay. I need to find somebody to help me with that thing. That's what I'm trying to surface here. I'm not, I'm not trying to call you out on this thing and say, this ain't legit. This isn't right.

Yeah. Especially if you're new to a market, like you just don't know what you don't know. And so, And even if you want to grow fast, like if you haven't done something before, leaning on people who have done it before is just like such a hack. And so the $7,000 for the whole year, it's Facebook and Google ads.

So it'd be like getting an agency or someone that has— can do this for you, help you spin up your SEO. They'll need a little more lead time than you guys will need because you've got a more established domain. You've, you know, exactly what to do. If you go hire a company, they're going to need to learn your business, going to need you to learn your market. So they'll need a little more lead time. That's an advantage you have there, but they could hire an SEO company to help them. And I'm stating this so you can agree or disagree. Then they can hire maybe that very same company or a different company that focuses on managing digital spend, the Google ad, the Facebook ad. Maybe those should be two different companies. You could, they, maybe they could be the same company depending on their area of expertise. I'll add one more. Uh, maybe that company has the expertise to do copy and creative. Maybe they're like, nah, better at managing. And you need to still find somebody that's good at copy and creative to help you. So that's, that's how I'm kind of thinking about this is how you could replicate what Mike's doing to go have his, the equivalent of his backend team help you get there fast.

Yeah.

Anything you agree or disagree with that?

No, 100%. And I also say, don't, don't fall into the trap that you need to hire a full-time position for this. Um, this is where everyone thinks they need to own their IP or they need to own the way they do ads. It's like, no, just go get an agency. I was— the turnaround we were on today, we'll probably do like $250,000 to $300,000 in annual revenue. And she has hired a marketing person.

I'm like, hmm. Oh, gee whiz.

If you just took half of that salary and put it towards an agency, you'd have a much more qualified person running your ads.

And you, you only have a little bit of money. So how good could the person be? Not to— the person may be a killer, I don't know, but odds are not because you don't have a lot of money.

I think just being humble enough to be like, I don't know everything, so I'm going to have to lean on all these people. And if I'm going to go fast, I'm going to have to pay for it. 'Cause I could learn all these things. Yes, you could learn how to run ads, you could learn how to build your website, you could learn to do a lot of things, but if you're gonna go fast, usually renting it from someone else to build the enterprise is the faster move.

Okay. So yeah, so, okay. So people kind of know SEO, ad management, maybe some help with creative, 'cause even if you think—

Website stuff.

Yeah, yeah. You might think, well, I'll just do all that myself. Will you? 'Cause this is gonna be a lot. Like if you wanna add a million in revenue, or go from zero to a million in a new business. There's so many other things that are gonna be so distracting and pull you in so many different places. This is where it's like, well, you might say I could do the creative myself. You probably shouldn't try cuz it won't really happen and then that will become the bottleneck. Okay. So we've sort of established that. What are some other things that, uh, that you guys kind of already have built that somebody else is gonna have to spin up to be able to do this?

Yeah. Ultimately I say this all the time, like a location when you're not there as an owner, 100% depends on the GM. And so, The fact that we have the franchise to support, like all the coaches, Nick, who's the regional manager to support that GM, gives them a better likelihood of succeeding. That's good. And so, whether it be the dashboards and all the numbers being done for them, like there's so many things being done for him. The QuickBooks department, the command center, like his phones are being answered for him, like all these things. And again, like if you're going fast, you just want these things taken off your plate because you can only focus on a few things at a time. And ultimately my main job here is support my general manager when I'm there. That's it. Like everything else will be taken care of by other people that have, are hired to do their job. And whether it be an agency or the websites or answering the phone or doing email or running payroll, like that's not the highest value task in any business. And I'm trying to get away from like my experiment and more just general advice. Like if you're growing fast, there's only a few key things that actually matter out of the 300 things that you could be doing. And so the less you can do of the 295 lower things and just focusing on the 5, if you're trying to go fast, you will hire those things out and you're okay with taking the hit on the— and you don't need to know everything. You just don't.

When you say, I'm going to support my GM, that's going to be my biggest function, biggest number one goal. Describe what that means.

So we kind of have a 120-day, 4-month, uh, handoff when a new location gets started. And it essentially just falls into the category of do it for them, do it with them, and then supervise. And so that allows me the opportunity that if anything were to happen, because life comes up, if something ever happened to John, I would still have time to get that other person, a secondary person through those 4 months. And so, uh, it's, that would be something that a lot of this, the whole reason I'm doing this is like, I can talk about theoretically all the time based upon me seeing statistical differences between different locations. And we've seen now 200+ locations. But me doing it and documenting is so important. And the reason I believe this is because when we did 2023, and I started from zero and basically got the first month, the first like 20 or 30 customers, it was just getting it off the ground. But like, to this day, I believe we're known for door hangers because in that video, in that series, I ran like half a marathon doing 500-600 door hangers a day. I was doing door hangers. Oh yeah, like I was just over it. And then from then, like, The owners got it. They saw the math. We started running the numbers. Everyone started iterating on it. So what I want to happen is whether it be people watching the videos or in St. Augustine is being able to take what I'm doing at a much larger scale and going fast. I'm like, "Oh, he didn't worry about learning how to run the Facebook ad. He got an agency to do it. He had someone else answer the phone and they're not going to be as good as him and he had someone else run the payroll and it's not as good as him, but it doesn't matter. I just need to support my general manager." The only thing I'm there for. And so I hope he feels that support so that when I leave, he can continue with the vision of the company. And I hope that that comes across to anyone that's trying to build a 7-figure or 8-figure business quickly is you can't do everything. You will have to let things fall through the cracks and you cannot pinch pennies. You cannot be the maniacal boss that sees every single detail and then go, go in 100 different directions. You'll have to just focus on these are the 2 or 3 major things and everything else just has to fall by the wayside.

But when you say support, are you talking coaching? Are you talking, hey, let me show you what's worked within our organization, here are some things to try and you demonstrate it? What is that essentially what you're saying? Or is he saying, hey, I need help with this, I'm not sure what to do, or what, what are—

I think that's the proximity of seeing his performance and then giving him reinforcement. And so if I was not there, I could have a weekly call with him, I could have a monthly call with him. But when I am actively with him and like, oh, hey, say this slightly differently. Hey, when we did onboarding next time, address this topic a little differently with the team. Hey, when you, when we did like the feedback loops are faster. And so I believe that someone can learn so much faster just by decreasing the time between hearing what needs to be done and taking action. And if someone doesn't know what to do, they won't take action. And the delay until the next time I give them the feedback, like, hey, you should change this, or a coaching call, or, uh, even a mastermind that we do daily. Like, if— but the closer I can get to that feedback loop, the better. And so what I'm looking for in a general manager is someone who can take that feedback and can execute on it. And that's someone who's really strong in operations and is humble enough to learn. And that will be my main focus, is getting really fast feedback loops to John so that he can excel very quickly and then establish and just keep growing.

If, and if John were to not make it, like it doesn't work out with John for whatever reason, how fast do you think you'd know in a role like this?

3 days.

3 days.

Yeah. And so I think the, the, the hiring process needs to be slowed down. And the reason I'm, I'm confident it won't happen in 3 days is because I've spent so much time on the hiring.

Yeah.

And getting to know the person. Um, so many different aspects of making sure, like just slow down, like Anytime stuff is done fast, like if God forbid something happened to John, he had to move away, for example, and I had to find someone else, what would be demonstrated in the videos is how slow I will then find the next person. And, um, that would definitely put a strain on the 10-hour per week limit for sure.

But, but, um, back to my strategy. Yeah.

Yeah. Like I think hiring really slow and like, I went out and visited him and his wife and took him out for dinner and flew out there with Brianna so that my wife could meet her wife.

Yeah.

Or his wife. Like, these are the little things. And it was weeks of back and forth and videos back and forth and questions. And here's what the strategy is and what— poke holes in this. What are your questions? And that's the part that I think some people miss. And so therefore they do find out in the first few days, oh, someone's a bad fit. And so in terms of my confidence in John, like, I would not be doing this if I didn't have 100% confidence in him. But life does happen. It just does. Stuff happens. And so, uh, if that were to happen, then we have to pivot and we have to find someone else, uh, and we would— the show must go on. Yeah, yeah, literally the next day.

When— well, it'll make for good drama if that happens. Hopefully not. All right, so if— so you'll start mowing in, call it March, depending on when you start spinning up fertilization. Well, there's other things you could potentially do, but the real mowing season is going to start in March. Uh, real weed control season starts whenever because there are pre-emergents and things like that. And in our market, you generally see most the weeds start pop— but February's the prime selling— is when you can start selling fertilization weed control.

The easy—

it's easier to sell, let's put it that way.

It's not—

you could start selling it before, um, but you— people are seeing more weeds in February, and so that's when it's— it works better to sell. Okay. How do you guys think about staffing when you get there? Uh, you and John are working on the business and will you wait till February to start staffing mowing or will you start— wait, how do you think about backing into getting enough team members? Because you've got, it's this, you're also doing something else that most people don't do or struggle with. And that's because you're going to be moving fast. You have to balance, you have to almost predict. To a little degree. I think I'm gonna bring in this many clients. I'm probably gonna need this many people. I'm gonna get this many people ready in advance. Like, that's the thing so many people forget about when they're thinking about growth. They just, I think we can grow by $700,000 next year. And they think about the marketing function, but they don't think about the hiring function, the training function, the management function, the everything else. So how will you be thinking about that approaching this?

Yeah, the biggest advantage I have here is that I do know relatively what the customer acquisition cost is in that market. Um, we have 2 locations that are 45 minutes from there, so that gives me a good idea. Again, some good research with AI, like, you can get pretty close. Um, but specifically because I have seen ads performance within a decent radius of that, of that market. So I take that and then I start putting against what we see when people start spending more on a platform. And because there is diminishing returns, you're not going to get $40 customer marketing cost, and then go dump $2,000 a day on Facebook ads and expect $40 per customer. It's not happening. It would likely triple. And so, depending on the size of your market, and so because my market is relatively small, you know, 100,000 to 200,000 people, I can't dump tons of money on and just expect it to not have huge diminishing returns once I hit a certain level. And so that's the thing that we're forecasting. It's like, okay, Okay, we have seen certain sizes of markets, we have seen certain customer acquisition costs, and then let's try to be conservative with how much that's going to actually be. Let's, okay, if it's double the customer acquisition cost, can I still hit the target? So in all reality, the reason I can be confident with the $1 million is because I can project that number out with a lot of confidence, assuming nothing operationally goes wrong, going back to the importance of the general manager, because if that stays intact, I have done the due diligence to know, okay, this is what I'm pretty confident I can hit. I'm going to use this as my assumption and I'm going to backfill with how much I have to spend on marketing to be able to then do that much work. How many trucks and how many employees do I need to hire? And so it's just backwards math, starting with customer acquisition cost. How many customers? What's my annual customer value? That's how much revenue I get to. So there it is. And that's why I actually had to add in fertilization, weed control, is because the mowing side, I would not get there with the level of content I want— wanted to, as well as the fact that during the offseason, it is something I can still kind of sell, especially during February. And so those are the two reasons I actually added that back in, because I can spend more on CAC if my annual customer value is a lot higher, because I have a second service. And so in terms of hiring, we're going to immediately get 3 trucks, 3 vans, and immediately be hiring within the first week or two we need there.

I assume your $1 million goal is based on run rate, not actual revenue for the year.

Yep. I'll be, I'll be tracking recurring revenue. So like monthly recurring revenue, I have to— is what, $84,000 or whatever it is? And so if you do the math, okay, like let's say there's $200 per month per customer. So $200 divided out by $84,000, that's 400, 400 customers.

I didn't even I just was waiting on you to answer.

Something like 400 to 500 recurring customers, if that's their average monthly ticket. That being said, we're not going to be able to hit that likely. $200 is higher for those two services that I think I can achieve. And so it is, it is likely that we'll have to hit, based on projections, somewhere between 550 and 700 recurring customers. Depends on my hit rate on Fertilization Weed Control. Yep.

I think you can hit this number. I know a number of people have spun up contractor-based businesses just mowing and have hit that number.

Yes, I'll be honest, like, there's already owners in Augusta have done this. Yeah, yeah, they just came in with a lot more capital, right? So they immediately hit the ground running. They had a couple hundred thousand dollars, they spent a large budget. So it's been done. Oh yeah, I want to document it. And my hope is that this becomes the standard for Augusta, but also that it's a playbook for someone that wants to grow faster. And it's not like, well, if I want to start a lawn care business or any home service, you don't need to go start doing the work. I will not pick up a tool at all through this entire event. And like, that's part of the challenge. Like, I can't pick up the tools.

Yeah.

So I do believe that this also raises the level of professionalism because we get investor types that are going to come in, they're going to pay higher wages, they're going to be more professional, they're going to pay for agencies and for office staff or people to answer the phone. And so I don't think it's a bad thing for the industry. And I would like to have an alternative for some people that might be watching content where all you see is people mowing grass. And that will not be these videos. It'll be a lot of whiteboard strategy, mapping stuff on AI, showing the screen. It's gonna be a lot of strategy. Uh, and so I hope to just show that angle.

Yeah, I think it, I think it demonstrates a lot. It, for the audience who will never do any kind of business with you, it demonstrates how could they do this for themselves. For the person that's like, hey, maybe I wanna be part of the Augusta world someday. What would my experience look like? How could we get there? Like, how would they help me get there? And so there's a, there's a lot of different things that are shown here that are of value that in a whole lot of different ways. When you think about, and I'm about to ask a question that I don't know if you can, I don't know much about franchising, so I don't know if you could legally answer it. Um, I have no idea. Like if you were to think about this as an investment, if like, let's say I, I'm you, you made me think of this cuz you said investor. So as an investor. If I could write a $300,000 check and buy $150,000 a year in profits and get my money back in 2 years, that's like an interesting math equation right there. So is there any kind— again, I don't know what you're allowed to say, or maybe you answer it from non-Augusta franchise terms. Like, what do you think it would cost to spin up a million in revenue? What do you think a million— if I was the investor, not the guy running it. I guess I'm kind of involved if all I have is a GM. But what do you think profit could be on something like this? Can you even answer that question?

Yeah, I can. So we are— as of last year, we have our item 19, so we disclose all this. So it's on the website, it's all public. Um, so I would say if someone's going to grow at the speed that I am going to, it'd be what we would call an executive level, which is you have to have $500,000 of net worth. Like you have to have that. I shouldn't even say net worth, I should say capital to spend. Now, will you spend $500,000? No. But if you're trying to grow to $1 million in the first year, and then likely keep that kind of growth rate, I don't want you going in this with $60,000 or $70,000.

I don't.

And so I'm going to be trying to be really realistic when I'm making the videos about like, here's what I'm spending on marketing. It's a lot. And the customer acquisition cost is not going to be low because I'm spending a lot of money.

Yeah.

And I'm trying to, while I'm spending a lot of money, trying to figure out what's working, what's not. And so I would personally say if someone was trying to get from zero to a million, um, I would be having at least $150,000 to $200,000 of cash ready to deploy. And I would personally, like, from a franchise perspective, we're looking for over $500,000 that you have access to. So even if you were getting something like $300,000 of debt, $200,000 cash, we have seen 100% a huge, uh, indicator of success is just, do you have access to capital? Because if things are going really well, you can still run out of money and fail. And the worst thing that happened is you run out of cash because you grew so fast and everything was going so well and you run out of money in your first offseason because you haven't established your offseason yet. So having enough capital is something that we— I've always had a deep passion for people with less money, but I consistently see them come in to Augusta specifically. I would say a broad stroke for business is like, If you're going to grow fast, you need capital. And so your point about the investor type is like definitely a big reason why, from the franchise perspective, we're doing this is I want to show that like your return on invested capital is better inside this than other mechanisms, whether it be you're comparing a Taco Bell, like, or you compare it to something else. You, if you're going to start a lawn care business and start doing door hangers, you can't compare that investment to starting a gym or a fast food restaurant or another franchise that costs $800,000 or $1 million to start. You can't even compare the two. And so I want to be able to take more of the approach of like, if you're an investor and you have the capital, here's the, the alternative way to use home services to scale quickly.

Is— do you think this is like a $200,000 in spend kind of scenario on marketing to get to $1 million? Do you have like some guesstimate you're coming in with?

This is the first time I said this. Yeah, right now my, my budget is $130,000. Oh, okay.

A little less than I would have— I have not done the math, but I would have guessed a little higher for going this quick.

Yeah, that assumes, uh, that I get there in 6 months.

Okay, so get to your number in 6 months.

I think I can get there in 6 months. That's my goal.

What month will you deploy the spend? Do you know? You may not know yet.

All in the first 6 months.

Yeah, but you're going to be there in September, so— oh, starting from September to the end of spring?

Correct. I'm only there 6 months, and the publicly stated goal is 1 year. I'm gonna try to get there by the time I leave. So everyone that heard that can just exit that off of their memory. It's going to be a year long before I hit the goal.

Yeah.

But as like the last— to get me from like 99 percentile to 100 was like, okay, I'll make it a year, but I'll plan for 6 months. And so my goal is that by the time I leave April 20th, we've hit over the $84 monthly recurring revenue.

Towards the end of April is when it slows. Mid-May is when it really slows.

Yeah.

Okay. And then how many trucks will that be? To hit a million?

A lot of it depends on my penetration rate with fertilization, and I am strictly guessing on that. Yeah, to be honest with you. And so I have a pretty good idea of how many technicians we need, how many vans we would need. That basically a full location, which for us is 6 to 8 technicians. But I don't know what rate I'm going to be able to get from lawn care into fertilization. I don't know that number. And that's going to really hinge what that looks like.

A typical person running a million-dollar lawn mowing business, how many trucks is that? It depends on market and factors.

Yeah, if you're doing double trucks, if you're doing like two— so we're gonna do solo routes. Okay. So, but like, for, for us, we can get there with, with 7, 6 to 8 technicians, um, which would be 6 to 8 trucks, which is very capital intensive. I think someone that was like, hey, I have less money, okay, great, you'll double up your employees. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Okay.

That just, I'm asking, just kind of gives you an idea of the math behind an investment like this. And then, you know, 'cause you brought up the word investor, so very interesting. What's the, what do you think the selling window tends to be in a lot of markets? So lawn mowing, fertilization, this one's a little more specific to these services. Let's use lawn mowing in most US markets because you have a lot of experience. Is that typically a 2-month, like prime selling window? Like this is, this is what makes or breaks the year kind of thing. Are we talking it's normally a 60-day, 90-day window, 120? What, what do you have, any number that's pretty typical?

Most markets are between 70 and 90 days. We have though a few in the transition zones where they have kind of a double spring rush. So they'll have a little bit of, of a rush in like March when you have some cold season grasses, but then like warm season, all of a sudden they have like a July rush when it gets hot. So like for example, I'm thinking of Charlotte North Carolina, some markets like that, they have kind of a double whammy when the different type of grasses start coming up. Um, but in general, we call spring rush pretty much March, April, May, June, somewhere in there across the country.

Yeah, makes sense. Earlier you were talking about— you made brief mention of being known as the guy that did door hangers. Didn't know that. Uh, tell me a little bit about door hangers, like like, from this advantage, from the view of— it sounds like they worked really well for you. What are your top 3 or 4 learnings? I— it's been forever, but I did door hangers in a major way in the early days. Door hangers and SEO built the business in the early days. And so what— tell me some of your biggest learnings on door hangers.

Yeah, so first off, very, very time, time sensitive. So like You have to hit them when there's pain, and if you put that door hanger, same thing, you know, a lot of this translates from every door direct mail or any mail. It's like, they're getting that in the mailbox, and if there's not pain, the next day if it's sunny, everything could change. And so, the size of testing is the part that I've seen the most important, because if you test out 100 door hangers, you're probably not going to get a customer, or you could have a false positive and get 3 and think that, oh my word, I know I'm going to get 20,000 of these, So like test size is important and then if you're going to compare, this is the hardest part with door hangers or mail in my opinion, is because it's so dependent on timing, you really can't compare this week to next week or this month to next month. You have to wait 1 year to really get a solid split test. That's why I love social is 'cause I can just flop them like ABCD test like so fast. Whereas with sprint, to get a real test you have to test year over year. And most people, I have hardly seen anyone have the patience to do that. And so that'd be the first thing is like testing. I see most people do it really wrong. They'll hear someone like me say door hangers and go get 1,000 of them and put them out tomorrow. I'm like, wait, well, Spring Rush was 3 months ago. And I know in your market it works, but you're 3 months late to the party. So timing is the first one. And then the second one is just refining your pricing strategy. And we have found door hangers to be really good at entry level. Get your foot in the door. You're not going to be a premium price. And so we get plenty of hate because people will snap photos of our door hangers at a $39 or $49 per cut price. But we know we can get in. We know that within 3 months we can get that price back to what it might need to be and people don't leave. And we can also sell them to other services. And so when you look at it as a gateway, it's get your foot in the door. It's not going to be perfectly accurate. Because we give a price on that door hanger, then that is when it can be a really good tool. Then there's so many little optimizations, like do you have a QR code, do you have them write on the door hanger, do you have them text it to you, do you have them send a picture via email, like all these little other things, and it's just trial and error. It's literally the same thing as any other ad platform. You've got to keep testing and then making little refinements, and most of us do not have the patience because they jump to another ad platform or like the next shiny thing that you or I or someone else is talking about.

Yeah, I definitely don't think most people should be messing with print. I like door hangers the most for the small— again, I haven't done door hangers in years, but the way I think about it right now is I like them most for the guy that has a bunch of time and not a lot of money and not a lot of clients. Like, oh, what else am I gonna do with my time? Go get clients. Like, that's the only thing that matters. It's that thing they can go do themselves, and I like that.

We know you love door knocking after last week. Let's go.

Yeah, yeah, love it. And so, but the print will— could just— can just spread, especially mail, can just wipe you out financially really quick, and it could be a big setback. So I consider the mail to be highly risky, a very advanced late-stage strategy in the business, but it's got power. But it's— you got to be ready to use it and a lot of work has to go into it. So on the door hangers, did you ever have— do you ever have problems? Again, haven't been in door hangers forever. Do you get many bad reviews because of putting out door hangers?

Not a whole lot, honestly. Okay. And usually two things have happened. One, a lot of them can get their reviews taken down because we haven't actually done service for them. If you just say, hey, like, this was never a customer of mine, they haven't been, they're not even in our database. So a lot of times Google actually take those reviews down. The second thing is our responses to those reviews are actually like, I like those negative 1-star reviews because that's where customers are going to look. Like they're not looking at the 1,000 5-stars, they're looking at the few 1-stars. And if the only response to me to the only negative response about my business is the fact that I'm trying to go out and get more business, I think that a high-quality customer usually is okay with it, depending on my response. So usually our response is like, you got to be professional, you don't let their attacks hinder you, like, just be professional, apologize if needs be, depending on the circumstance. And especially if they're like going after like, you know, like solicit, and then like, am I really in the nitty-gritty details of like canvassing versus soliciting in a Google review response? No. And so I'm just trying to make my review response what I would want my future customer to see, right? And I believe if you're professional and someone's like, hey, they're just trying to get— they're trying to get ahead, they're trying to promote their business, they're super professional and apologetic if they made someone mad, I think that's actually a good thing for the brand.

Yeah. All right, some stuff's gonna go wrong, it's not gonna work, who knows what it's gonna be. But again, you've been doing this a while, a lot of franchisees. What if this doesn't go to plan.

Yeah.

And you're just guessing, what do you think a few of the off-the-rails kind of things could be?

So by the way, I made sure I did not use AI in this, this whole, whole thing today. I want to make sure these are authentic and real from what actually I felt. So, all right. So first off is scaling ads will be harder than just increasing the budget. Like it's easy to just throw money at a problem. And every time that is a mentality of mine, it's never worked. Like, oh, throw money at it.

Meaning it doesn't bring you in much additional traffic or doesn't bring much additional conversion. Now your CAC's just going up, or what do you mean?

Yeah, usually the law of diminishing returns is understated. And so it's like, well, it worked great when I was spending $100 a day, but will it work if I spend $1,000 a day?

Right.

And so I think that's the first, uh, area it could break. The second thing you could break is if I— the first, like, I've never ran a location that the crews take their trucks home. And so for each of these areas I'm mentioning, I'm obviously doing my best to facilitate this not happening. So I'm calling people and talking to other owners in Augusta, other owners outside of Augusta, like they've done this model. But like, I've never ran a location where the technicians take the trucks home. I've also never ran a location that uses vans. We've always used pickup trucks. And so, um, I think that's a variable.

Vans work.

Yeah, let's go.

I just tell you.

I just tell you. Thank you. I appreciate that. Also, shout out to Jonathan. I don't know if this was ever caught on tape. I don't think it was, but Jonathan actually mentioned my market to me as a great, a great, great market.

So I've never said— yeah, I told you where I would go if it was me. Swipe and deploy.

Also, also, it was out of your market. I'll be honest, it was out of your market. I really didn't want to start in your market. I really didn't.

I want to— so what I hear when you say this, I want to first perfect it so that when I come into your market, now we're talking.

Now we're talking.

It just gives us more time to prepare.

That's right.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Make sure we get all the bad reviews out, then we'll attack.

We'll be ready. We'll be ready.

So, uh, but yeah, like, I've never done the van thing. Um, I think I also likely underestimate how fast I can learn the market, um, and how I can deal with these two major variables, which is the vans and them taking the vehicles home. I really have the one at bat, like the one Spring Rush And so I think I underestimate because I've told every owner ever, it takes a few spring rushes to really figure out what that demand curve looks like. And I'm walking into this without that. So that's where— this is my last point is like, where could it likely break? And it all ties back to this is like, the only thing that can really derail it is something happening to John.

I thought that's what you were gonna say.

Yeah. Yeah. So again, you just try your very best to guard against all those things, make sure that City Turf isn't, you know, trying to come along and recruit away your general manager, things like that. Um, yeah, banners out next to the road. Let's go.

If we do it, I'll only make your videos more interesting.

Yeah, you write down that name, John, like, hey, I will now target Johns in that area. And let's go.

Yeah, Tiffany and I have already been having dinner with him and his wife.

That's right, that's right. That was a joke for everyone. That was just a joke.

I don't even know who this guy is.

Yeah, so, um, but, but ultimately for all those things, it's a matter of pivoting. And I think for anyone listening, there's going to always be reasons when you go faster, there increase risk. And so the greatest risk is that something would happen to John. John needs to move, there's a life event, something doesn't work out. Um, and so you do everything possible to make sure that the incentives of that person are aligned with the business objectives. And this is where I see the breakdown of most the time when people are trying to scale quickly or trust a general manager is are there incentives, whether it be pay, their time with their family, like everything. You need to know everything about them to make sure it's aligned with the business objectives if you're going to put that much confidence in one person.

Yeah. You, you mentioned a concern around Vans. What is it that you're worried about with Vans? Like, what comes to mind? I know it's new, but what do you think could be the problem?

Mostly just as new. Okay. And so you've never—

it's what you don't know. It's not that there's something you're worried about.

Yeah, yeah. And there's owners inside the Gustav, so I've watched the videos, I've picked their brains, I've talked to probably 10 or 15 other owners that do vans. And so I'm confident, but it's just another thing I have not done myself, and rightly so.

Okay, what about taking it home? What have you heard? What's the concern there?

We had, we had like a whole episode on this before.

Yeah, we—

and so I'm betting that it is a recruiting tool. Yeah.

Um, and I also I don't think there's a question.

Yeah. And so I'm betting on that. I think there's liability around people, you know, taking your customers because they're going to be on the same route all the time. You're doing work outside of work hours, but there's things you can do to mitigate these things. And so there's pros and cons to it. And I'm banking on the fact that retention is the number one secret weapon of every great home service business. And one of the things that I don't think you talk enough about is just how long your technicians a lot of them have been at CityTurf.

Oh yeah, yeah.

And that is, that is a secret weapon, whether it be at management but even technician level. And so I want to demonstrate that. And when, when we hit the goal, it'll be a fact, me being able to say this is why. And one of them will be you make certain sacrifices and you trust your people. And yes, you got to figure out other systems. Like yes, we'll have video and tracking a little bit more, and there'll be some logs and pictures and videos and forms they got to fill each day. And it'll be a little more difficult to make sure we do some quality control. Like those things will happen, but it's at the expense or for the expense of having better retention. And I want to emphasize those things a lot.

Yeah, I think it's a huge value add to be able to take your truck home. I assume you guys have GPS units on all the trucks. And do you— will you— like, one of the things we used to let people take them home, we were— they were geofenced, so we knew if they moved on the weekends and things like that. So will you basically say, hey, once it's home, it's home, you could drive to and from work, but you can't take it to the bar on Saturday. I'm sure you guys are going to do that.

Yeah, 100%. Just tailgating a Gustav Mann. When we see it on the news, we're like, ah, got you.

Yeah, yeah. A police chase.

Exactly.

Might be good marketing.

That ramp come down out of the back of the mower comes flying out while they're driving down the highway.

Car swerve.

Yeah, yeah. Let's go.

Could be good.

All right.

Okay. So, uh, I think that was all your— anything— nothing else comes to mind that you're really overly concerned about?

Not really, no.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You've done this enough. All right, so we didn't really talk about this before. Are you building the exact same kind of business that a typical Augusta franchisee would build? Are you gonna go bigger? What's your thinking here?

Yeah, so the exact same model, just first location, 6 to 8 technicians will get us around to that million-dollar marker, and then John will find— I'll assist him finding a general manager for that location, and then he'll move the next location over. And so I'm not 100% what that second one's going to look like, but that would be the model is just build the same thing again. Our objective is once a year. So essentially what I'm doing the first year, I want to do it again next year and again the year after that and just kind of copy and paste at that same pace. If someone wanted to go faster, you could do two, like you could, um, but I'm going to do one a year. That's kind of my goal.

And Is it tend to be— how do you guys think about the territory? So for you, how do you think about how big of an area you need to accomplish a goal like that? Is it population? Is it a certain number of zip codes?

Yes, we make sure there's at least 100,000 people, and then we generally are having a, uh, between a 3 and a 5-mile radius. So I think mine's like 3.5 or 4 miles radius. And so I uh, we'll be able to service, uh, have I said this publicly, or I haven't said my territory name publicly, but the area that I'm servicing, it's gonna make sure it covers that area. Um, and, and I think inside my territory is about 120,000 to 130,000 people within 5 miles. It's like 3.5. I got a little smaller. Okay. Yeah, if we have 100,000 people, we're pretty confident, assuming that the location can bear it, meaning the financials of the demographic I'm going after is in there, uh, we feel pretty confident.

I know you said before you like this, or at least this is how I've heard it, GM with 8 trucks. Is that remembered accurately?

6 to 8 technicians. Yeah, you usually can get them between $800,000 to $1 million, uh, in revenue once they've gone into profit mode. And then the objective there is just as much recurring as possible and raising prices instead of getting more trucks and equipment.

That's my question. So if this location were to support 16 trucks, would you say, no, no, we're just going to become a little bit more expensive and keep it to a certain size?

Correct. Or break it off. Or I would break it off. So there is, there is an opportunity on the south side. I could break down a part of it if it ever did grow that fast. Generally, though, when we run the math, breaking it off you'd rather just go into profit mode and raise prices and you'll make just as much profit.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, and this is like back to what we've talked a lot about is like, you know, going big or just doing these smaller locations. I think that going big in this market could actually work 100%. Obviously you're close by, so like you can grow a big business in a singular location. The reason I'm doing it is in part for the content and for the people that are going to follow the model. That aren't in that side of market, but also it is because I see so many people build a $3, $4, $5 million business and they're just on this constant 5, 10-year treadmill of grow, grow, grow, and they never make it profitable. So I believe a forcing function, even in a market like near Dallas where I could do that, is breaking off that section. It's profitable. I'm now raising prices. I'm optimizing it and I move on to the next million and then the next million in revenue. Then I know when I have a $3 or $4 or $5 million business, because it's all profitable and there's not like this big moment of reckoning where I realize I have this machine that is sucking cash and not actually profitable and none of the math works. And so, um, I'm sticking up very closely to like what we call the copy and paste method instead of Augusta and just copying those.

Okay, makes sense. How— what kind of facility do you run a business like this out of?

Well, uh, my objective is nothing. Um, okay. Oh, right, take the vans home.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, right.

Yeah, so the general manager will have a van that is exactly the same as the crew but will kind of serve as the service station. That being said, for chemicals, there might be— have to be some storage. So that's something that will be, uh, and then as we would do locations down the road, like, well, where do we strategically place those? Do we need one or two as we expand service area and into new locations? So that's like the one asterisk, but we're pretty confident, uh, there's enough space for 6 to 8 technicians that I have one van that's kind of like the warehouse.

So what— how— where do you sharpen blades? Where do you store backup equipment?

Things of that sort in that GM's van.

Okay.

And so there would be a backup of every piece of equipment, so if something goes down, he can go out, switch it out. He would then be taking that to a, um, you know, dealer or whatever it might be. And then same thing with blade sharpening, uh, we want them to be as independent as possible, so like those be mounted inside of the trucks. There'd still be a weekly gathering point for the vans that we're planning right now, uh, where they do meet up once a week it'd just be like you go to a Walmart or a Lowe's and just everyone back up your trucks, let's do inspections, let's do— exactly, distribute new stuff, supplies, etc.

Does the GM sharpen blades for people and things like that, or do they sharpen their own? Like, how do you think— it's like such a minor little detail, but I got— I'm curious now.

We want to make the technicians as responsible as possible for what they have on their truck. I believe that a lot of even like damaged equipment Blades not being sharpened. All of that is because we share stuff in our, in our teams and there's no accountability. It's hard to pin down who necessarily didn't sharpen the blades when there's been 10 different people use that mower. Who's responsible for that versus like everything on your van is your responsibility. And so it's, there's certain standards of like each day submitting what was done to your equipment, making sure it was cleaned, et cetera. And those are things that like John is refining in terms of like what's his process he wants for those vans. And even like a mowing truck versus— or mowing van versus a chemical van, very different in terms of what process for quality control of just the equipment is going to be taking place.

Okay. Has John already started or is he coming soon?

He starts in 2 weeks for owner training. He'll be flying out. Yeah.

Okay. Very interesting.

Yeah.

What else do you think in this whole thing you're about to do, what else do you think people should know or would be interesting or of value to them?

I think all of it comes down to confidence in your numbers. Um, the reason I can say it publicly is because I can run the math and I do know enough about my customer acquisition costs. I know the cost of the vans. I know what I'm going to have to spend on employees. Like if you just know the basic numbers, you can forecast much better. Most people do not know their customer acquisition costs. They just don't. Like, we've just seen so many times people come in and they tell me a number and I'm like, okay, show me your financials and show me your reports from Facebook ads and Google ads. And it's like, you're not even close. Like, you're 3 or 4 times more what you think it is. And so if you're making decisions based on faulty data, like, it's just not going to end well.

Yeah.

And so, um, I have been extremely blessed with Augusta Leads. It is 100% the secret weapon behind all of this to have the confidence what my customer action cost is going to be, knowing that we can pivot and adjust and change. And so for anyone else, like, oh, it's like, go find an agency, they do this all the time.

That's exactly how I would hope people hear this. Like, yeah, the idea is not to like say, oh, this isn't fair, so this doesn't count. The idea is to say, here's just who I need to fill that gap, go find them so you can do this too. Yeah, yeah.

And I hope that people realize how little— how few things I'll do there. Like I'm not going to be doing a lot. It's focusing on the top 3 or 4 things that will really change the direction of the business. And I see so many people get stuck in operator mode and never be able to build a $2, $3, $4 million business because they're just stuck in like every detail they've got to be in their hands on. Every little thing's got to be perfect and it doesn't. You got to focus on getting more jobs, getting the crew to do those jobs and making sure the work they do is high quality. If those 3 things are happening, you got yourself a good home service business.

Yeah, it's good advice. The place you two are going to be living, did you just find it on Airbnb or what'd you do?

Yeah, yeah. So, okay, yeah. So all of this part is like, I have my wife for 6 months over there, right? So like everything is kind of like what she needs and wants, I'm, I'm all on board. And so part of it is like where we're staying is very central to several things. One, my territory. Two, Dallas downtown. And then a couple other towns up north. We really like McKinney. And so it's very central to all of that. Within 25 minutes, we can kind of get to everything we want to go to. And so that's where we narrowed it down there. And then, yeah, Airbnb, when you're looking for 6 months, not a lot of options. Yeah. So we were kind of stuck with a certain spot. We weren't like thrilled with the house, but we just made do.

Did you look at it in advance or you're just gonna hope it's good.

Oh no, we— yeah, we— oh yeah, we went there. Yeah, yeah, okay, okay. Like, trust me, honey, it's a great place. Yeah, yeah, okay. You know, we showed up, we, we met the owners, did a walkthrough the whole night.

Okay. I rent homes and sometimes they're very expensive, and whether it's expensive or not doesn't really matter, but you really hope you're gonna get what you think you're gonna hope.

And so when they get some really good Photoshop—

yeah, exactly. Yeah, so that's why I was curious, because you're committed. It's not like a week here. You're coming. So I was curious how you, uh, you're doing this. Cool. All right. So let's end with, of everything you've talked about today, if you could give those listening a next, like if they want to implement any, if they want to implement something and just go faster, build a better business based on what you've talked about, would you have a next action to leave them with today?

Um, I think the theme, it's actually been kind of around customer acquisition cost, like figure out what that number is. Like, I know it sounds simple, we talk about it all the time, but I just, uh, I have— we've done over 110, almost 120 turnarounds, and I have met 3 of them that know their customer acquisition cost, actually know it. And so I think you and I talk to a lot of higher operators, like this is common, it doesn't happen.

It's even not coming there.

I was given the benefit of the doubt. No, no, no, no. All of JP's friends have everything perfect. Okay, so no, um, but yeah, just know your customer acquisition costs. I think that, like we talked about last week about knowing your COGS, the advantage of AI to be able to put, put all your data in from Facebook and, and where you're running Google Ads and show it where, like, at the very least have a custom field or some sort of dropdown where you're getting your customers to be able to run a report on, like, are they coming from Facebook? Are they coming from Google? Do they see my trucks? To know where to deploy the money. Um, but the very, uh, best, I would have a customer action cost by service and by month to know when to spend the money and on what, what services you should be promoting.

Yeah, it's good advice. Uh, CAC would have been mine. I didn't know what you were going to say today, but as we were talking, my brain's processing, okay, what's my next action going to be? And that there was very much that theme. And I think it's a great place to start. And I'd also just remind remind those that are listening, maybe even rewind in, or however you're listening to this, when you talked about how the CAC can allow you to predict so many different things. That was very valuable. And it's another argument for why CAC should be the one, but I'll go a different direction because you used CAC and I would say kind of similar to that, what I just said, it's this idea that we all, here we are in whatever August, it's not going to be long before we all start dreaming about next year. Next year's going to be better. Next year's going to be different. And we do our little planning thing and we make up a number. This is how much I'm going to grow. And for most people, I've been included in this, like you make up the number and then you don't hit the number. Like, well, why don't you hit the number? A lot of it's because CAC's an example, but the other is it's just saying that we're going to grow by this amount of revenue. Is like, it's like 5% of the puzzle. The real puzzle is now backing into who are we gonna need to hire? What trucks are we gonna need to buy? What equipment we're gonna need to buy? How far in advance of the Facebook ads going live do we need to work on the creative? Like, there's, you gotta, you gotta set all the dates. Like, this is when the ad needs to drop. This is when we think we'll have the next 100 clients. This is when the truck and the equipment need to be rolling with the people in the truck. And you have to back back all those dates up and start working those initiatives weeks and months in advance. And the reason we never hit— not we never, but oftentimes we don't hit our numbers is because we didn't do that part. The stating of the goal is the easiest, funnest part.

Yeah. The hitting the goal— $5 million business in 12 months.

Yeah.

$20 million. Yeah.

And so, but if you don't back into it, then you don't understand when it needs to start. You don't even understand what it's gonna cost. Yeah. And so, and then to your point, you could have a killer business, just be going 100 miles an hour, everything's working, but then you run run out of money because it's like, oh crap, that little cost problem. So that, that will be my next action item to leave you with. Second to the CAC ideas, you're not going to dial in your CAC number immediately. It's like our ask, I think you'd agree, Mike, is like, can you just start working on this? Can you like really understand this number? And can you start thinking about the number and just be collecting the data?

Can you—

there's some things you're going to need to do to collect the data. And once you got the data, uh, you're gonna— you're starting to get pretty close to being able to report that number. So Any last words?

And just to back up what you said there, like, we— I haven't talked a ton about what, what I'm doing on the, the show for, for next year, but there's like probably 15 to 20 strategy documents, probably hundreds of pages, lots of people's eyes on it. There's a lot of thought that goes into these things. As much as it'll seem like we showed up and like we hit the ground running, it's like, no, no, like all the things that JP just mentioned has been thought out in depth, whether it be customer acquisition costs, what's the lifetime of that, what is our churn going to be if I'm in a new market and I might not be servicing the customer at the highest level. I can't just like pull a number out of thin air. How many lawns can someone actually get done in a week? Well, can I get that higher if I give them a van to take home? These are all the little details you have to keep, you know, playing with. And so if you have an idea for next year and you're A lot of times you got through spring rush, it's now August, September, you're like, okay, I breathe, now I can start thinking about next year. Like, I encourage you, this is the time to do it. It is not next January, February, March, right before spring rush. It is, you've got to start thinking through, looking back at historical data, what was my customer action cost? When did I spend money? Did I spend all my marketing budget when my customer action cost was the highest because no one needed my service and I was just slow? How do I prevent that from happening? Like, strategy is the name of the game. Once capital is abundant. And so this is like what JP's talking about with AI, for example. It's like, you know, you can have all the answers in the world, but if you don't have a good strategy, like, it doesn't matter. And so have a good strategy going next year and don't let it just all be numbers.

Fantastic. I think—

wait a second, I have one final thing.

Okay.

All right. Since you took away my cold open that I love so dearly—

I'm not taking it away permanently. I'm just I'm jumping right in today to see what you think.

I understand, I understand. Now I am going to share something. All right, I just wanted to welcome you— one second— I wanted to welcome you to the YouTube community. All right, now you are a professional influencer. Can you see my screen?

I see you and not me. I don't see anything else.

You don't? Oh, come on, you gotta zoom out. You gotta get something to where you can see my whole screen.

Okay, hold on, hold on, give me a second here. Since you're going to bring something up, I'm going to say, well, oh, okay, hold on. Let's go!

This is a lot we call a professional YouTuber right here. Look at this guy. So JT had his photo shoot and he gets me the feeling that I have to go through of looking at a camera and doing stupid faces like this all day long.

Yeah, it's my— this is my cup of tea right here. I love this stuff.

I saw those photos and I was like, oh man, the degrading that he was going through in his mind is so good.

So awesome. Yeah. Loved it. Actually, since you brought something else up, I'll say, say one thing. So last Wednesday after we did our deal, actually, let me, let me put you back up on my screen so I can actually look at you. All right. So, uh, we, uh, I went to dinner with a buddy who's actually in your group. Uh, his name's EJ.

EJ. Yeah.

So EJ has a Tesla. And so we, last week we were talking about robotic mowers and drones and self-driving cars. Have you been in a— you might have. Have you done the self-driving in a Tesla recently?

No, not recently. Man, I've heard it's good.

I feel better about my predictions. I've been in, I've been in 2 Teslas previously doing self-driving, and I'm like, yeah, like it's choppy, they make last-minute decisions. I just, it's like, okay, cool, someday. So after EJ and I had dinner I, we, I drove the car. I didn't drive anything. I never touched it. And we went all over side streets, freeways, all kinds of stuff. Phenomenal. I mean, they have stepped up the game. So won't be long till your, your vans are going to be self-driving.

I thought you were going to say you're about to go get a Tesla.

No, no, no, no. I want a manual car, stick shift in a big—

You don't want the neighbors seeing a Ferrari and Tesla in the same driveway. Come on now.

I mean, I have to say, I I was really impressed. It's really cool. But, and if I, if I didn't care about cars, I'd own a Tesla maybe. It's really cool, but I prefer to drive my car.

Oh man.

Anyway, I just had to tell you. I was like, golly, they have stepped up their game. That thing was fantastic.

I think the crossover, you're stepping up your YouTube game. Tesla's stepping up their full self-driving game. It's beautiful.

I'd rather be Tesla. Better game.

Wasn't it awkward though? Taking those photos?

Oh yeah, it's terrible. I hate that.

It's so horrible, isn't it? I hate that. I hate that so much.

There's a reason I have no headshots. The one time I got the headshot thing done, it was for like a Service Autopilot conference. It's that blue shirt picture I took.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That one time when you said, I'm like, please don't use that picture anymore.

Oh man, I'm gonna make a website just with these thumbnails just to make sure they rank well on Google.

I'm killing the share link right now. You probably already downloaded them. Anyway. All right. Good seeing you. Have fun in Michigan, right?

Michigan.

All right.

Yeah.

Fun.

Take care, Mike.

See you next week.