MUST-HAVE Steps to Building a Million Dollar Landscape Business

Okay, so we're going to go ahead and get started and I am going to get out of the chat box. I've been replying back to you guys, but feel free to post your question throughout the entire webinar. So on your chat box, if you're on a desktop, you're seeing it off to your right. It's below. If you're on a mobile device, feel free to put your question in the entire time. Welcome, Josh. Thanks so much and good to see you, Josh. Thanks for coming in. So today, if you have a question throughout any time of the webinar, just post it. I will come back in the chat room at the end of the webinar, but as we're going through material, if you have a question, make sure you post it in the chat box so you don't forget. And I'll go through every single one at the end of the webinar. So I'll teach for about 45 minutes or so and then we'll do Q and A at the end. But throughout the whole time, just post your question in the side there and I will get to it at the very end of the webinar. So I'm gonna go out of the chat room. But like I said, feel free to post those questions. I'm gonna go ahead and get our slides rolling for today. Start. Here we go. Alright, so today, oh, by the way, I'm down here in the bottom right. I'm still on your screen. So today we are talking about steps to growing your lawn care business past $1 million. You might have been on last week's webinar where we talked about getting from, you know, getting past half a million in revenue, which is a completely different game. And on that webinar made it very clear that what gets you to 500,000 is not going to be what gets you to a million. And what gets you to a million is not going to get you to 5 million. So, like, there's different steps of the journey, there's different things you have to change in your business. And so today we're going to be talking about really like, so if you're at 100 or 200,000 revenue, these things are not the things you should be focusing on necessarily right now. They're important that you'll want to know them. If you want to grow a business, that's a million dollars plus. But if you haven't listened to last week's webinar and you're still 1 200,000, you need to listen to last week's webinar because it talks about the systems you need to get to even half a million. And if those systems aren't there, the foundation isn't built. You know, getting to a million is just not going to be possible because all the things we're talking about today are built on the foundation of systems. And so listen to last week's webinar. If you are still not up to half a million in revenue. This is for the business owner that's doing 4, 5, 6, 7 in revenue and trying to break through to get to that million dollar marker in their lawn care and landscaping business. So first off, let's go ahead and oh by the way, you'll see this offer thing depending on what device you're looking at. If you ever at any point want to schedule a time to talk to me about the Augusta Lawn Care franchise, feel free to just click on that button and you can set up a time with me for 30 minutes to talk on the phone. But anyways, let's go ahead and get started. Alright, so today we are going to be talking about. This is kind of the outline of what we're gonna be talking about. First of all I wanna kind of discuss why a million dollars, like why is that the number we're talking about in terms of growing your business? And why do you need to grow your business to a million? Why can't you just grow it to a quarter million or why do I think a million is so important? If you listen to the podcast that will be a little bit of repeat and kind of overview of stuff we've already talked about on the podcast. Myths. I'm gonna talk about myths about a seven figure company that is kind of comm of people that think certain things about making a million dollar business in the landscaping industry. Next thing was we're going to talk about some numbers. We're going to talk about the financial statement, the important aspects of the financial statement that you have to stay focused on and a couple key elements in there. The next thing we're going to be talking about is the big three, which is hiring, firing and selling. We'll talk about that. Next thing we're going to be talking about is delegating minutiae. So really becoming a leader, beginning to delegate things in your business. And then lastly we're going to talk about the Augusta Lawn care business plan that you can become part of franchisee. Alright, so first off, why $1 million? And if you've listened to the podcast, you heard me talk about this before, all the benefits of building a million dollar business. Let's start off on the left hand side though. Number one is with a million dollar in revenue business, you can afford to be out of the field. So you know when you actually stop doing the work and you're not out mowing lawns, raking out beds, trimming trees, once you stop doing that, your salary becomes overhead in the business. And so you know, if you're taking 50, if you need 50 or $60,000 just to live, you know, provide for your family, put food on the table, get your house, etc. If you need 50 or 60 thousand dollars to live and that's the money you're taking out of the business, well, it used to be that you would be out in the field generating 150,000 in revenue and then taking your salary. Now when you stop working out in the field, that money, that 50, 60,000 needs to come out of the business. And yet you are not an employee that's generating income. You're strictly overhead. You're a manager, you're doing sales, whatever you're doing, but you're not actually doing the work that your business is getting paid to do. Because if your business only gets paid when someone is shoveling, when they are trimming, when they are mowing, you do not get paid to drive around. You do not get paid to even make sales. You get paid when the work gets done. And so when you're not in the field doing the work, you are an overhead expense to the company. Very important. Obviously you have to have the elements that you're providing for the business, but you are an overhead expense. And it's something to be thinking about even as the owner once you step out of the field. But when you have a million dollar business, it can afford to pay that overhead expense. It can afford 50 or 60,000, it can afford 5 or 6%, that million dollars to go towards an overhead expense of your salary. The money you need to take out of the business to basically pay your expenses. The next reason why a million dollars is so important in terms of revenue is you can create a business that is systems centric. If you have a small business, it's very, very hard. If it's making 200, 300,000 revenue, you have one or two employees. It's very difficult to create systems that are actually repeatable because like, it's just, there's just, it's hard to make a system when two people are there. It's hard to have team meetings when there's two people there. It's hard to have delegation when there's two people. Like, it's just very difficult to create systems and patterns and procedures when they're just a couple employees. And the reason for that is not even so much that there's systems in place. Because I know some small, small businesses that do a couple hundred thousand in revenue, have a couple employees and have good systems. But yet if anyone in that business, employee or owner gets hurt, has to go away on an emergency thing for their family, whatever it is, the business is personality dependent. When it is such so small of a business and has so few people working there. When you have systems in place and you have more people in place, then it's no longer relying on one individual or one manager or a great employee, or even you as the owner. Because the systems run the business, not the personalities that are strong. And for most of people watching this, you're the owner. You are that strong personality that runs the business. And the more and more you grow, the faster and faster you grow. You have to let the systems grow the business instead of you always managing the business. So for example, I'm just going to throw one example. Pay by performance is a system that polices efficiency within Augusta Lawn Care and the business that we've created. The reason for that is because I do not want have to hire a manager. I don't want to have to be there. I want the system to manage the employees and do what's right for the business. So less about the personality. Like I have great managers, but I don't even want the business to be relying on them. I want the systems to be the undergrounding foundation for which the business is built. And then that leads to number three, which is why a million dollars, because now you can actually afford to pay managers and top performers if you're making 200,000 in revenue and you have an incredible office person, like, I mean over the top, can sell, knows a lot about the industry, great in the office, great on the phone, like just an absolute all star. There's just no way you can pay them what they're worth and you're gonna lose them. And so one of the biggest reasons for having a million dollar business is it's enough scale to afford to pay managers and top performers. And the reason I specifically talk about them is because if you have stability at that higher level of management, that stability usually you'll trickle down. So if I look at a lawn care company that has a huge turnover on their frontline employees, a lot of times I can look to their management or middle Managing managing team and they have a bunch of turnover, people are leaving, people are unsatisfied, people are getting better job offers elsewhere in other industries. If you have a rock star office person and you're making 200,000 in revenue, if you give them a $50,000 salary, you're G25% of revenue to one person that's very vulnerable and you might not be able to afford it. When you're that small of a business and you will probably lose them because some other person will be able to afford to pay them 60 or 70 grand. At a million in revenue, you might be able to pay that 60 or 70 grand in order to keep someone that's worth it and you can actually afford it. And by keeping that turnover low on the higher level of management, you're able to keep the frontline staff satisfied and keep that stable atmosphere in the business, which is a huge part of the culture that you build to make sure you don't have a huge turnover and you retain people that you want to keep. Alright, so the fourth thing here is why a million dollars in revenue? The numbers actually start getting interesting and like it gets fun to play with. Some people talk to listen to my webinar and they love my podcast and they're like I love all about systems and about efficiencies and all those things. And then I ask them, well, how much are you doing in revenue? They're like oh like $10,000 a month and so $100,000 a year. And in my mind I'm like the time you spent to make the system.

Is more than any of the efficiencies you're going to get from the system simply due to the fact you don't have enough scale. So saving two minutes on your drive time is not a big deal when you're the only, you have one employee, it's not a huge deal when you start getting a million dollars in revenue. 10, 15, 20 employees. Now when you make little changes and you start working on the business, you actually get measurable and it becomes the best use of your time. And like I said in the last webinar, I see some people working on their business that really should just be working in the business, making revenue, generating income to actually put money and like stack cash and start growing the business. But yet they're working on the business when in reality them making incremental even if they make 10% change and like make incredible make their business 10% better, which is like huge, like 10% better of a small piece of pie. Is not very much. And so with a million in revenue, it's actually getting of size where when you make incremental changes, when you make efficiency changes, it actually has a measurable difference and thus becomes the best use of your time. Because if you can shave off 5% of your expenses on a million dollar business, that's $50,000 that's going to pay your entire salary. And so now it becomes worth it for you to actually work on the business instead of working in the business from a financial standpoint.

All right, so in some of these are, these are some of the myths I could, I probably have 20 of them. But I wanted to talk about some of the ones I hear most commonly myths about growing your lawn care landscaping business to a million dollars. I'm going to jump back real quick. Okay, good. I'm just making sure everyone can hear me. Everyone is. Audios and videos are good. Perfect. Very good. All right, back my slides. All right, so miss About a million dollars in growing your business to that point, number one myth is that it takes like 20 plus years and that's gonna take a really, really long time. And the thing is that that might have been the case in the past because everything was built around word of mouth marketing. And just you slowly grow your business and there's, excuse me, there's nothing wrong with taking a long time to build your business. But it's a myth that you have to have 20 years, you have to have a long period of time before you can build a million dollar business. And the reason for that is the Internet. The Internet has really sped up the rate of growth. You can afford via two ways. Marketing. So like to your customers, marketing your customers, and then two on the efficiency side, communication. So internal communication, using, you know, cell phones to have mobile, a mobile app where people can get routing, they can put job notes, they can take pictures, you can do videos and voice notes to and from the customer, to and from your project managers make things much more efficient. And so because of that, you can scale the business much faster if you have the systems in place for sales, for lead generation and things like that. And the Internet has really facilitated the fact that you do not need 20 years to build a million dollar business. Second, is that another myth about building a big business, a million dollar company in this industry, which by the way, only a couple percent of landscapers in this industry actually build a business that's a million dollars in revenue.

So when people just throw that term around like all day long, like, oh, I want to make a million or two million dollar business in the lawn care industry. Like it's not easy. And not everyone, it's not like everyone gets that. It's very few. You know, literally a couple percent of landscaping businesses do over a million in revenue. But one of the myths is that in order to do that you have to have, you have to do commercial work and you have to get into either commercial maintenance or you have to get into commercial installation on really, really large strip malls and large apartment complexes and school buildings and city and government contracts and you have to go commercial. And residential does take longer, and I'm not about to lie about that, like going residential does take longer, but it also allows for greater value, price elasticity, which means the customer is more elastic or more fluid on the amount they're willing to pay due to the value of what you provide. That is the professionalism, the speed of communication, the uniforms, the trucks, the logos on the trucks, everything, the systems of the business being efficient, all of that is value to the customer. And therefore they're going to be a little bit more elastic, they're going to be a little bit more willing to pay more money. Whereas commercial traditionally they're going to get more people bidding on the job. They're going to the lowest bidder. If you're going to a government bid, they literally might in the contract say whoever is the lowest bidder is going to get the job that as long as they meet certain criteria. And so it's a race to the bottom. If you're competing against a massive Brightview or Brickman or whatever like and they come into your area, commercial is going to be tough if you're trying to go for those big contracts. And I don't mean tough in terms of getting to a million dollars revenue, I mean making the millions easy in terms of revenue wise, but actually generating a profit. And having a business that's based upon value instead of just price is going to be hard.

Third thing, and by the way, I think the first thing that automation will knock out is those commercial type jobs where it's very much based on labor and less about value. And so that's the biggest risk in that industry as well is just automation, bigger equipment, the bigger the equipment, the lower the price can go and just absolute race to the bottom. I see. So commercial is not the only way to build a million dollar business. Number three, that a myth about having a million dollar business is that it allows for frivolous spending. That because you have a million dollar business and now you're, you're Running this massive business that you can now buy stuff, whatever you want. And like you can go into debt because you're making so much revenue which is going to pay for it. You can afford the loan, you can afford the monthly payments because you've got so much million dollars coming in. The more and more money you make, the more and more you realize that a million dollars is basically nothing. And it's not a lot of revenue in this industry where as you get bigger, your margins tend to decrease as you scale. And so the thing that you got to remember, and one of the myths like, oh, if I can get up to a million dollars, I'll buy like new trucks for all my, my guys and I'll buy The brand new 52 inch mowers stand on, and then I'll have like a stand on 52 and then I'll have like a 36 and then I'll have a walker and I'll have those on one truck and I'll do. That's when I'll go get the bigger trailers. Like, just because you get a million dollars in revenue and have that size of a business does not mean you need or want to get the biggest and the best, because that's not what you got. You there. What you did not get to a million in revenue because you had the nicest trucks, because you had brand new trucks every year, because you had a $70,000 track loader. And those are not the things your customers do not see your balance sheet. They do not see how much the equipment's worth. They don't see how new it is. All they want to know is value. And I can put, I can paint a five year old vehicle, pay a fifth of the price as a brand new one, and I can paint it and it looked brand new. It's 5 years old and 20% of the cost of a brand new vehicle. So just because you have a million dollar business, the myth out there that if you get to the promised land of a million dollars in revenue, that somehow you're going to, you know, new equipment is there and big trucks are there and bigger contracts are there, it just does not allow for frivolous spending, personally or in the business. Another myth about a million dollar business is like I said.

A million dollars is not a big business. All right? You're still vulnerable. We're still small businesses until we hit 50 people. Like the SBA determines up to 50 people.

Employees, you're still a small business. And so the small business, we're the most vulnerable at a Million dollars. You're doing good in this industry. Like I said, you're one couple percentile in the top in terms of revenue of this industry. But you are still vulnerable. And so in that position, in that position of making a million, 2 million in revenue, you're still vulnerable. However, there's two options. One is to protect and there's no good and bad here. It's just like there's two options to go here. One is protect and defend. Which means, okay, I'm going to make a million dollar business. I'm going to make a $1.2 million business, something right around that number and I'm going to protect it. How do I do that? I'm going to make systems, I'm going to train people, I'm going to really get my, like make videos about my training methods. I'm going to really create systems that are very, very precise, have an operations manual, have everything laid out and really protect what I have. Or two, you go on the offense and that's like, you know what, I'm still gonna go pedal to the metal. I'm still going to, you know, push. I'm gonna continue to grow the business. I want to make it even bigger. I want to have it where eventually one day it gets acquired by, by a big player in the industry. And so there's. Those are two different ways to do it. Most people opt for number one, which is like usually the safer, better option for most business owners, which is create the systems. Make sure that you are increasing efficiency and making more profit. Once you get to a million, 2 million in revenue. Very few people have the desire to actually go on the offense during this time which is like accelerate to 5 million. And so that's just the decision you make as a business owner. Do you defend and protect and make systems and like build the moat around the castle or do you go on the offense and continue to go on conquests and continue to, you know, take out other lands for using that in that analogy. Alright, so let's jump into it in terms of what you need to know to grow the steps you need to have to get to a million dollars in revenue. So I'm just going to make sure everyone can still hear me. Good. All right, Fantastic. All right, so the first thing first is the financial statement. And the first thing you want to think, I want to impress upon you tonight is the top line of the financial statement is the most important thing if you're trying to get to a million dollars in business.

And I'm going to put Fine print to that obviously, but at the end of the day, you're a sales organization that just happens to be selling lawn care and landscaping services. All right? So you really have got to get focused on growing top line revenue. Everyone had like, you know, financial statement at the top. You have your revenue and you have all your costs and then you have a bottom line profit. And some people get really wrapped up in the profit. But if you're actually trying to get a scale and you're actually trying to get to a million dollars in business, it's okay to like focus primarily top line revenue and just drive to a million as hard as you can. And that's just like focusing on selling, selling, selling, getting better at the sales system, refining the sales system, really focusing on the sales aspect. Because then when you get to a million, and I'm not saying that this is for everyone, but if you get to a million fast enough, you get there, maybe you weren't super profitable, maybe you were running like a 10 to 15% profit margin, but you get there and now you make it more efficient because you're of size. Those efficiencies, those changes, those systems that you implement and are refining, they actually start moving the needle. So you go from a 10 to 15% margin business to 15 to 25% margin business. So it's just two different ways of looking at. More conservative approach is going to make those systems early, like we talked about on the last webinar, make them at 2, 300,000 and you're gonna grow the business that way more profitably and more of a systematic way of getting to a million dollars in business. Or you accelerate top line revenue. Get to a million, don't go in debt, don't do stupid stuff, but just keep pouring fuel on sales, like focusing primarily on sales to drive top line revenue. Get to a million and then, okay, I'm in defense mode now and I'm going to create the systems, make the efficiencies and it's actually worth my time now because of size, where it actually matters and it moves the needle and is measurable results. So the top line of your financial statement, important. Figuring out a sales process is important. The top line of your business, that, that income is all you want to be looking at now. I don't know our profit was the first one or two years of at Augusta. I definitely know what our top line revenue was. I definitely know what our projections were at our off site meetings. I can, I can recite them off exactly what we were trying to hit. Where we got like all of those percentages because I was focused on one thing and as grow top line revenue. Because I knew that I didn't want to be out in the field. I knew that in order for me to go step away from the business 100% like I am now, it had to be of size enough, had to be over a million, it had to get a size enough to actually matter and for me to be able to afford managers. And so I accelerated to that million dollar marker, focusing primarily on top line revenue growth. Figure out how I can just get by and grow top line revenue, grow sales, make better sales systems and then once I got to a million, then you figure out the systems, then you make it really efficient, then you increase profit margin and then you have all that in place and I was able to step out of the business. So in saying that, in saying that, that you should focus on the top one inch of your financial statement, that is the income, the sales, the revenue that you're generating. In saying that, do not forget about number three.

Don'T just spend it all. You can focus on the top line revenue all you want. But if you just are pathetic in the way that you spend the money, at the end of the day you're not gonna have anything left over. Alright? So as I say this, I say it with a word of caution. As I say focus on the top line revenue. What I want you to get out of that is that you are a sales organization. It's not something to run away from, it's not something to be annoyed by, it's not something to be cower away from. This is super important that you are a sales organization. If you believe in your product, you can go with confidence to the market and sell. And it's not like, oh, I'm just advising, no, no, I'm selling and I'm there to make the sale. And I want my people, I want my employees to be sales driven, I want my people in the office to be sales driven. I want people in the field to be sales driven. Everything in our business is a sale opportunity because we are a sales organization. If my frontline employees, if they are about mowing, they have business cards that say their name, they have door hangers and they know they have a way to make more cash by getting sales because that's all we think about is making more sales. So today, Saturday, I wasn't at the office, they're probably wrapping up right about now. But like they were working and I know that they finished a job and then one of the project managers upsold the customer and they went back to the job site and did more work. And so why? Because he knows that we incentivize sales. So that customer had other need. The need need to be met by next week. And we were already, you know, our schedules booked out. So the product manager went back to the job, sold the customer on the price and everything and performed the work. Why? Because we incentivize and we train around sales. We're a sales organization. We just happen to be mowing lawns. Happen new landscape. But we sell. And it's not something to think that slimy or bad. If you have a good product, if you have a good service, there's nothing to be ashamed of in saying that you are a salesperson. And you got to teach your people in the office, definitely in the office, you got to teach them in the field how to sell.

All right, know thy numbers. This ties into kind of the fine print that I just talked about. So we talked about your top line revenue focusing number one on revenue and sales to get to that million dollar marker. But that expense column, you've also got to know your numbers. All right, so on the top there you can see the. Excuse me. The.

Founder of JCPenney had a quote. He said growth is never by mere chance. It is the result of forces working together, as by James Cash Penney, founder of JC Penney. So the forces that are working together, that means like the revenue's got to be on point, your systems have got to be pointed. All these things, all these forces working together is what allows for growth. And so growth is never just mere chance. That's what JCPenney was saying. So you've got to know your numbers. Look what I set up here, you've got to know your numbers for every hour, every day, every week, every month and every year, for every employee, for every crew, for every truck, and for every single job. There is absolutely no reason why you can't use software and use systems today to know these numbers. How much are you making every job? How much are you making on every employee by the hour? How much money did you make yesterday? How much money are you making today? Every hour? Are you losing money? Are you making money? How much are you making? Like you should know these numbers. You know, when you were small, I'm assuming that you have a business that's doing like 5, 600, 700,000 in revenue. Maybe now when you were small and doing 100, 200,000 revenue, you, you knew every single day when you went home how much money you made when you were working in the truck by yourself, you would go home, and you are every day, I can guarantee you, you were calculating in your head how much money you made. But somehow, as we grow and expand and everything, the forces that should be working together start going in different directions. And so we get employees and we get office and we get people calling and we get customers complaining. All these things pulling our mind in different directions. And all of a sudden, we lose focus on one thing, and that is, how much money did you make today?

And it's got even broken down further than that. If they're actually going to get profitable and make systems and procedures, you've got to know per truck, per every single job. Like, and I don't mean just big projects. I mean, like, how much money do you make on a $40 pushmo job? Like, how much money is there? How much did you spend in labor? How much are you going to spend in fuel and overhead and truck expense? And, like, it all adds up. And you got to know these numbers. If you don't know these numbers, you can literally grow yourself into a massive hole. You can be making a billion dollars in revenue. Great, that's fantastic. But spending 1.4 million because you don't know what you're spending every single day.

One of the best ways for me to measure where a landscaper is at is to ask them a few things about their numbers. First thing is, like, easy. Everyone knows this. What's your revenue from last year? Most people know that. Depending on how. I can know a lot about them by how exact they are. When they give me that answer. Then I asked them, what do you. What's your projection for this coming for this year so that you know, right now we're in August, as we're recording this last day of August. And I give. If I ask someone, what do you. What's your projected revenue for 2019? If they don't have a really good answer for me, and they're like, oh, it's like, we'll make, like, between six and 800,000. Like, okay, come on, we only have, what, four more months left in the year? You got to have a pretty good idea of where we're going. Because if you don't, it obviously means you don't know your numbers. You're not looking at projections. You're not looking at what you did last year. You have no idea what you're going to make. And you're guessing. Most people know a pretty good number on that one. When I Asked them that question. But when you start digging deeper and you start, okay, so you're paying. What is your labor ratio? That's another one that most people don't think about. It's a really important one. At Augusta Lawn Care, we expect our franchisees to report that number every single day. What's your labor ratio? In other words, what percentage of sales was given over to labor? Because labor is going to be your biggest expense. It should be something that we meticulously and are just obsessed about keeping efficient. But how do you know if your efficiencies are working or not if you're not measuring the results of those changes? And so we look at labor. So let's say you made $1,000. Then your labor was $400. You had a labor ratio of 2.5. So basically, 2.5 times your labor was your revenue. All right, so now if you were getting down to where like, 50, 60% of your. Of your. Of your revenue was going towards labor cost, we start having a problem. Different markets are different. Some places in the US it's like 30%. You can get away 30% of your revenue going towards labor. Some areas the country where the, you know, minimum wage is higher, things like that. You know, in our state, minimum wage is $15 almost is in Seattle, you know, to get someone to work at Augusta, they're starting at 18 if they just have hands, right? So, like in our. In the airplanes like us, you're gonna be more around 40 to 50%. But if you're like 60, 70% of your labor of your revenue is going towards labor, we got a problem. And so knowing that number is something we require franchisees to know every single day. There's, like, we can talk about later about some of the reporting that we do at Augusta. But, like, every single day, we have what we call max metrics. So that's Max. He's our. Here, I'll tilt this for you. That's Max. He is our. Whoops. Our mascot. And we have what we call max metrics. And that means every single day, the franchisee has to do a report. Takes them like two minutes to know these numbers. Every single week, they got to do those numbers. And the weekly ones take maybe five minutes, but they are some other key numbers that need to know every single week. It's the scoreboard for the team. It's the thing they show publicly to the team every single month. Again, those are the numbers we're going to go over with that franchisee to know where they're at. We're going to have that monthly coaching call where they're going to go over their max metrics. That's the biggest part of the call, is what numbers are you at? And then comparing that against everyone else in the system. Because if you're going, if you're too high in labor, okay, maybe someone else can teach you how to reduce five minutes in the morning, reduce time at the gas stations, reduce the time that takes to load up the trucks. Can we move those things around? Every single year, you got to be doing a lot of reporting. So every single year I take an entire day, one entire day. Usually at the very end of December, I take an entire day and I do one thing as knowing the numbers of all my businesses. So I have several business now. I have the gym, I have Augusta Lawn Care, which is the shop in Bellingham. I have Augusta Lanka, the franchise now, I have the gym next door, I have business Boot camp podcast, I have the books and all that I do underneath that. And so I take all my businesses and I got to know my numbers. Every single one of them got to do the reporting and I've got to know these things every hour, every day, every week, every month, every year. And then for landscaping, for every single employee, for every single crew, every single truck, every single day, or every single job, I've got to know those numbers. Alright? So reporting is super key because people, you can catch issues with your systems and catch issues with your people and catch issues with your pricing way in advance. Far before people are thinking about bankruptcy or going into debt, they can figure that out way in advance if they just started reporting their numbers, tracking them fanatically every single day, knowing what the cost to do business was, knowing what the cost to of every hour on a zero turn really cost. People laugh and mock me about how I'm doing this trailerless setup for mowing. And the first question I asked them is, have you ever measured it? Have you ever looked at the numbers? Have you ever actually reported on what size of property tips the scale to when it's more efficient to use a zero turn? Have you ever looked at the numbers? Because most of them haven't. And the only way that I know that there is if you're having most of your properties under 6,000 square feet. I, I know from a number sample in my market, with my labor rates and things like that and all the numbers we have, I know that if it's below that a trailerless setup without a zero turn is going to be better for you. All right, so you Know, if you're doing commercial everything, it's a totally different ballgame. If you're doing 50,000 square foot on average properties, it's a different ball game. But I know my numbers, and you have to know your numbers. You've got to know, have an answer for why you do what you do. And I talked about at the conference last year about sharing your numbers with your team. And some people after the conference, when I followed up with them, they said, well, we didn't do it. I asked why. They said, we don't know our numbers enough to where if they ask questions, we'd have answers. Why? Because they were guessing. And so if you're guessing, you've got to figure out a way to get reports and start knowing your numbers every single day, every single hour, every single job, at least every single job. You've got to figure out how much you're making on these jobs. And you've got to start figuring out, okay, we made 50% on this one job. Well, we made 10% on this other job. We made 20% on this other job. And then you start seeing a track record. Oh, like you start realizing that on all the jobs with a certain project manager, you always get really low results. Or maybe you realize that you have a really low profit margin whenever you do a certain type of service.

Or you're way behind on budgeted hours, or you're way over on materials, and you start figuring out patterns and systems and fixing things. The problem is, people don't fix things because they don't even know what's doing good and what's doing bad and what the results are. They aren't doing any reporting. And so know your numbers. It's easy to say that everyone knows that we should know our numbers. Everyone hates looking at their P and L, though. Everyone hates looking at their balance sheet. No one takes the time. It takes a few minutes every day. Like, literally a few minutes. So now at Augusta, I don't do the reporting every day. The office assistants, we have three office assistants and one office manager at the local shop. And one of the office assistants, her job literally every single morning, is to take five to 10 minutes and do a report. That report is going to go to all the managers and me. I get one text message every single day from Augusta, and that's that report. That's all I want to see. And then at the weekly meeting, there's one thing we're looking at, the report, the scoreboard. That's all we're looking at, all the numbers, everything is revolving around that. If we have a low score on our scoreboard, that's what we're talking about at the team meeting. If we had a really, really good score, that's what we're talking about at our team meeting. Because everything in the business revolves around those numbers. If we want to give someone praise, it's because that number is high. And if I want to give someone a raise, I'm looking at the numbers. There's no guesswork when you actually start measuring things because you know who's performing well, you know who's not performing well. And so reporting and knowing your numbers is imperative.

Alright, so now let's talk about the big three. And there's really kind of the thing I just talked about. Knowing your numbers is really the. And reporting is really the fourth thing. But it's not as important as the big three. The big three is number one is hiring, number two is firing, Number three is selling. If you could do these three things well and you've got to figure these out to get to a million in revenue.

I have yet to see a landscaping business where the owner is not really strong in one of these areas. Like you don't have to have all three to be a million dollar business. But I've never seen a million dollar company where the owner didn't one, get along with people and was really good with sales or two, had a really good knack for hiring and training and getting people onboarded and it was good at firing people when they weren't doing good. I have yet to find a million dollar business that the owner doesn't have one of these three things done. Really, really, they're really good at. If someone could have all three of these things, they're slam dunk, they're going to do very, very well. And these are the three things that move the needle. Once you start growing, like when you were small and you had 100, $200,000 in revenue. Yeah, your equipment mattered because if one piece of equipment died, you stopped revenue for the whole day. Now when you have more scale and you're starting to grow your business past a million in revenue, it's all about your people in this labor economy, it's all about who you're hiring, finding those people, attracting new talent to your business, finding as you're growing and scaling. The majority of the business I talk to that are at 5 to 800,000 revenue. I just talked to one yesterday. Actually the reason they claim they can't get to a million or scale beyond where they're at now is labor. Why they're not focusing on the big three. They're not focusing on that first one and it's hiring. And then I asked them like, well, how much time do you spend every week focused on hiring? And they're like, well, I just put an ad up, like, maybe 1% of my week is spent on hiring people. Well, yeah, that's why you're not growing. It's one of the big three. You got to focus and spend time on hiring people. You got to focus energy on firing people. The firing part is going to be the thing that keeps your culture. It's going to be the thing that maintains and dictates your culture, thereby helps retention. Alright, so hiring is getting the people in. Some people are really good at hiring people, but they can't, they can't figure out how to fire them. And the firing part is going to be the thing that retains all the good players and gets rid of the bad ones. Because not getting rid of the bad ones, you'll get rid of the good ones really fast by doing that. So hiring people, having a system in place that hires people really well, having a system that fires them. And most people don't know when to fire someone because like they just kind of put up with things until they're like, okay, we should fire them. Well, guess what? If you're not doing reporting and knowing your numbers, you're not going to know when they're underperforming. When someone is underperforming and we have to fire them at Augusta. I can show them the numbers. I can like, look, this is how much you are making. This is how someone else is. How much everyone else is making. You're way behind. That's usually at a warning. That's kind of like when we have a meeting. And fortunately we've never actually, I'm thinking, yeah, we've never had to fire someone because they were not making enough money. We fired people before, actually, take that back. There was one gentleman we did. So basically my point was, is that usually in the meeting we have before we fire them like weeks in advance, we give them a warning if they're underperforming. We show them the numbers, we show them reports, we show them their daily production rates versus everyone else. And that's a warning. That's always been enough to propel them to do more besides one person, now that I think about it, gentleman by the name of Hank. So.

Traditionally though, what happens for most lawn care, landscape business, they just don't, they don't even Know that someone's underperforming until like a year, two years down the road. And people just get away with stuff because they don't know their numbers. So knowing your numbers is really important because if you don't know your numbers, you're not going to know when to hire someone. You're not going to know when you can afford to hire somebody. You're not going to know when to fire someone because you're not reporting their performance. You don't have any numbers on their performance. And then you really need to know your numbers. So that way, when you're selling, you have confidence that the jobs you're actually selling are going to make profit and that you're going to have a consistent profit margin that your business can rely on to hire more people. So this is a cyclical process here. If you hire good people and fire the bad ones, it gives you confidence on the selling, which therefore leads to growth and allows you to hire more people. And it's this continuous growth cycle where you're getting new customers in, you're getting. You're getting new employees in, and you're kicking out bad employees. It's a continuous cycle. Customers coming in, new hires coming in, and then you're kicking out the bad employees. It should be a continuous cycle. It's just like a cell, just like an organism. It's a living. It's got to continually be moving. And these are the three things you have to be focused on as your business scales up is it's hiring, spending time on attracting great talent, firing the people. And part of hiring is like training them, onboarding them, putting them in the right position, getting them having an operations manual, making sure they know what they're doing, training them correctly. Safety, all that stuff. Firing, though, just as important, selling. There are so many landscapers that are good at what they do, but they don't know how to sell. They don't have a sales process. They don't have steps to the sale. They don't know when they're gonna sell. They don't know their percentages. So, for example, I know that in August, I don't even have. I don't. Do not have the numbers in front of me. I wish I could show you my. I'm not looking at anything. At Augusta in August, our close ratio was 42%. I didn't. I didn't go to a single estimate, but I know that 42% of our estimates, we closed 40, 42% of our calls in as leads were closed in the final sales I know that if between 40 and 60% we're okay. If we're going over 60%, that means we're going to raise prices. If we're going below 40%, it means I need to train my estimators, I need to give them better or I need to work on the system of follow up to make it better. So 42%. The reason I know that's on the lower end or like no, not 50 or 55 or is because I know that we're so far booked out right now that they are artificially increasing the price and giving more budgeted hours on these jobs because they know we're so far booked out. My estimators are so.

But you've got to have a sales process. You've got to have a process and I talked a lot about this even on the last webinar is you, you got to have a process for collecting the lead, getting the estimate, the process of educating the customer, getting the information, sending the estimate, how is it formatted, what's the pricing system, all that's part of the sales process. The communication back and forth to the office, that's part of the sales process. You're selling the customer on how efficient you are with communication, how tech savvy you are, are you going to waste their time, all of those things that's a part of the sales process. And then the follow up process, do you have steps in place to email them, text them, call them after that estimate has been done? This all part of the sales process. And if you're not fanatically thinking about hiring, firing and selling and the systems around those three things, you will not be able to get your business much past a million. If you're good at one of these things, you can get to a million. If you're. I've seen people that are great at sales, landscapers that are great at sales, great with people, great with customers, just absolutely kill it at sales and they'll make it to a million. But if I talk to them, the thing they're always talking about is their employees. It's always on their nerves. They're not very good at firing people. They love people too much or they can't find enough good people and they can't hire people like. So if you, if you, if you can do anything right, if these three things that I could bestow upon any landscaper is hiring people, the ability to find and hire great people and get them on behind the vision of your business, the mission of what you're trying to do Number two is to be able to fire the people that are not good fits for your business. So that way you retain the A players and you kick out the low performers. And third thing is sales.

All right, we got a couple more slides here, then we'll jump into Q and A. If you have any questions, make sure you put them in the chat box. Because now we're talking about something that is easier said than done and that is delegating the minutiae. And you notice in brackets I put necessary minutia. It's not to say that these things are not needed. These are very important things. They're just not part of the big three. Alright? So you can see here I put delegate the minutia, which is like example, answering phone calls, getting the mail, picking up supplies, sharpening the blades, truck maintenance, everything. If I had a list, it could go on and on and on, but everything should be delegated. Besides hiring, firing and sales, that's really all you should be thinking about. If you're like approaching a million and you're like, I'm kind of stalling out, I don't know if I can grow anymore. If you're trying to get to a million, it's just not working. This is something you got to start thinking about, delegation. A lot of times you are the enemy of your own success and you're the one that's keeping your business small because you're holding on to everything and you're micromanaging everything. And this is easier said than done. It's easier to start. It's easier to say to delegate than to actually do it. It's very difficult to do this. And the reason for that is because answering the phone is like one of the most important things in the world in your business. So I'm not saying minutia, sorry, I'm not saying minutia like, oh, it's not important, it's little. It's like.

It'S insignificant. That's not what I'm saying. It's minutiae to you as the business owner who needs to be focusing on other things and those other things just happen to be, oh, the big three. Hiring, firing and selling. If you're not doing one of those three things and you're approaching three quarters of a million and you're wanting to get past a million, you've got to start delegating these other things because these are the three things that'll get you to a million and beyond doing. And you know, answering the phone calls might make your customers happier, but it's not going to be scalable enough to where you can make a million dollar business. Getting the mail, opening up the mail, picking up supplies for your crew, you know, moving things around in the field, sharpening the blades on the weekend, doing the truck maintenance, doing the, changing the oil, filling up the fuel tanks. Like that's not going to get you to a million dollars in revenue. It's not in the big three. You've got to start delegating. I could talk a lot more about why it's so hard and it is easier said than done, but I kind of explain a little bit more about that in the next slide and that's where we talk about from going from cmo. CEO. What does CMO stand for? We all know what CEO stands for. Chief Executive Officer. Everyone wants to be CEO. What does cmo? No, it's not Chief Marketing Officer for all of you that are so smart, it's Chief Mowing Officer. You need to go from the Chief mowing officer, the guy out in the field that's so worried about mowing and actually becoming an executive. If you're going to go to a million dollar business and beyond, you've got to start thinking more of like an executive than a guy that who mows lawns. You got to start thinking about these four things below leadership, humility, thinking about micromanagement and this coach versus player mentality. Alright, so leadership, what does that mean? This is like you got to lead by example. If you're not showing up early, leaving late, you can't expect other people to do that. You know, the culture at Augusta when I'm gone is a direct result of the first year and two when I was starting to build Augusta, where the culture was me working 12, 16, 18 hours a day, if needs be, outside and inside six days a week, like all the time, doing everything, like not being like, oh, I'm above that, like first couple years of business, that's all I did, just drive hard. Work, work, work, work, work. You know, if you can't do that, you can't expect your people to do that. You've got to lead by example. You've got to lead in a way of being a servant. You've got to be the one that even as you're growing the business and you start getting employees, you're there to support them. You're there, you're not too busy. You know, it's not like you don't care. You don't just brush people off. You actually are a leader. You, you're part of them. They want you to win because you want them to win. And you. You put your full trust in them, and that's the only way you can expect the full trust back to you. Humility. It takes a lot of humility to go from. From the guy out in the field to the CEO. Why? Because now you've got to be humble, to delegate people, delegate things to other people. And it goes right into micromanagement. Like, it was so hard for even me when I was having to delegate so many things and go from CMO to CEO and start delegating things to the office, delegating things to estimators. Like, I so wanted to hold on to sales. I love selling. It's something I'm good at. It's something I enjoy. It's like, it's the one thing I'm pretty good at. And so I held onto it for so long. And because that, I started micromanaging, and you start getting the way of people. And basically what led me this spring to getting out of the business locally at our shop and going full time into the franchise thing is because I started getting the way of other people that I had delegated things to. I would, like halfway give it away. I would like, say, oh, I want you to take care of this. But when things would go bad, I would, like, jump in and try to fix it. And so I just needed to delegate and let it go and just realize that I had great people that were gonna run with the system. And. And the system was in place. It was. It was balanced, you know, bal. Scarred, tested, ready to go. And just. I just needed to let it go and stop micromanaging and stop getting into everyone's business and tripping them up. And so when you become the CEO, you no longer are a player on the field. You become a coach. And this is a big turn for us as business owners who started in the landscaping industry. We started mowing the lawns. We started mowing. We did the landscaping. We did the work. And it's very hard to switch out of, like, mowing lawns and trimming trees to giving other people the opportunity and putting them in the best seat to mow the lawns and to trim the trees. Let's not be. Let's not get, you know, beyond ourselves. And we got to realize we're still in the landscaping industry. We still about mowing lawns and trimming trees, but no longer are you the person doing it. You're no longer the player. The coach on the sideline should never get on the field. In fact, in the NFL, if the, if the coach steps on the field, they're going to get penalized. If the coach was like, you know what, back 40 years ago, I could have thrown that pass and I would have been a better quarterback. And if they came running onto the field like I'm going to take over as qb, I guarantee they'd get pummeled, the team would lose, people would get injured, the entire chemistry and culture of the team would fall apart. If the cult, if the coach got on to the field. Alright, so one of the biggest parts for us as owners as we scale our business and we start to become more of a CEO type position and being more of a leader, more of training, focusing on the hiring, focusing on the selling, focusing on the systems, tweaking things within the business. The biggest problem I see and I am guilty of is being the coach and trying to step on the field and be a player occasionally and then hopping off him. Trying to be a coach doesn't work. And it's not right for an employee. It's not right for a player to backstab or say the coach is wrong about everything. We had to fire someone because that's what their mentality was. The coach is always wrong. The coach is always telling us to do these plays and you know, do the jobs in certain ways and they're always promoting certain people in the business. We fire the guy like you're a player, get on the field and do the work. You're not a coach, but the coach, because that's who I'm talking to now. You as the owner should not be on the field. And it's very hard to switch your mentality from being a player in the field to being a coach on the sidelines that is there to support, is there to encourage that there to cheer on, is there to reprimand, is there to pull up when someone's down, is there to inspire, is there to really get the troops all together and create camaraderie. That's what the coach should be focusing on.

So that's kind of the essence behind a million dollars in revenue, getting your business to that level. And that's really my vision for Augusta lawn care and the franchisees is like I want them to make a million dollar business because you actually have a sellable asset if you have a business that has systems in place and is not personality dependent. And so my goal is for the franchisees to get to that million dollar marker. And the advantage of having an Augusta lawn care franchise is we have Systems to actually manage the big three. We have systems in place that say, hey, this is how you should hire people. This is when you should fire them. This is the sales process. When people come here for three days as a franchisee and they're in this facility here and we do three days of training, literally half of that is about the sales process. Walking from like when someone first calls you like a lead, that fresh prospect, all the way to the point of like selling the job, the estimate process, the follow up process, project management work, change orders, all of those things, all the way to the point of like now, now it comes into like email news, later, email newsletters, strategy for getting reviews. All of that is part of the sales process. And so the big three is, you know that that is the part of being a franchisee that's super valuable. And the financial statement reporting like, yes, we're looking at the top line revenue, but like I said, every day, every single week, every single month on the coaching calls, every single year, we have the max metrics and we're always ranking all the different stats of all the franchisees. So for example, if you're really, really low on, you know, really low on the totem pole in terms of when the rankings come out, if you're low on your labor ratio to revenue, you can go to the guys who are on the top in the system at Augusta and be like, hey, what are you doing? Like can I come see your, the way that you guys do your morning routine, Can I figure out a way to make my system better, make my operation better? And then you can track and see like, okay, what do I need to be working on in my business? What system should I be working on? You can look at the numbers and have the reports to do that. And then we've created standard operating procedures to delegate this minutiae, that minutia for you. Alright, so standard, standard operating procedures for answering the phone, a standard operating procedure for sending voice notes, for sending videos to and from the customer, for project management. Creating standard operating procedures for all of that minutia is what allows you to go and focus on the systems that are actually going to drive revenue and are actually going to get your business to grow to that million dollar level. So again, there is an offer sign sheet there on the side that you can sign up for a trial or sorry, a phone call with me. Just go ahead and click that and we can set up a time, probably next week we can set up a time to call and we'll spend 30 minutes on that call. And really just see if Gusta Lawn Care is the right fit for you if it is going to be the thing that gets you to a million. If you're stuck at 4 or 5, 600,000 revenue and you need the systems to get to that million dollar marker, I'd love for you to be part of Augusta Lawn Care and especially the first group of 10 that were going to be here in November to get trained up. So there's still a few spots available. I'd love to see you here for that. So that's my invitation to you. If you'd like to sign up for a phone call and learn more about Augusta for the lawn care franchise and what it can do for your business, just click on that button or just go to augustalawncareservices.com franchise and on there you'll get a whole bunch of FAQ videos. You'll get a chance also on there to schedule a call with me directly and see if it's right for your business. And again, you can convert your existing brand over into an Augusta Lawn Care franchise. It's not that difficult, but I want to open it up for any questions.