My $1M Strategy For Building A New Business In 1 Year

In a few weeks, I'm moving 1,000+ miles away to Texas and starting a lawn care business that I'm going to grow to $1 million of annual recurring revenue within the next 12 months. My name is Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care. We have over 200 locations around the world. We'll do over $75 million in system-wide revenue here in 2026. And I want to share with you 4 of the things that I think is really instrumental in what we're about to build, which is a fast-growing lawn care service in a place that I don't know about. So I just wrote them down on my phone. I want to share them with all of you. So whether you are just getting started and you want to grow really fast, or if you are trying to improve your business, make it more profitable, and build a business that's scalable, I think these are useful tips. So the very first thing is it's all about your general manager. I've said this before, and that is like the success of a location is hinging on the operator, whether it be the owner-operator Or the manager, like a general manager. And you're going to meet John. He's my general manager. But I interviewed so many people. I would, I would fairly say that I interviewed 40 to 50, but I went back and forth with over 100. So what I mean by that is I had an Indeed application. I got thousands of applicants. They had to go then through a video process where they had to submit a video to me. And over 100 people I responded back to and corresponded with. And then about 40 or 50 I actually interviewed. And through all of that, I come down to about 8 or 10 that I really liked, and then about 2 or 3 that I went multiple iterations with and finally landed on John. And the reason I say this is because I think a lot of us know that who you hire is super important, especially when it comes to leaders or managers inside your company. But the amount of attention and time that you spend on something actually shows The value and importance that you place on it. And this is the same thing when it comes to like technicians out in the field. People are like, I can't find any good workers. And you look at their calendar and all they're thinking about all day long is their equipment or advertising or getting new customers. They're not actually spending time on finding new technicians, whether that be improving their job ads, their hiring process, their interview process, creating an employee referral program. They're not spending any time on any of that stuff. And so when I've always said getting a great general manager is the most important thing, the person that's running that location, like a bad general manager in a really good location can sour it very quickly. A not so great location with a great general manager step in and in 90 days that thing can get turned around, no problem. So if it's that important, if it's the one thing that is so valuable to the business, why would we not spend more time on it? And I had this notion, this thought going into this process. I'm like, if this is the most important thing, which it is, specifically because I'm going to move back here 6 months after we get started and he's got to keep running the thing. And so even more important that when I'm thousands of miles away, there's someone I can trust to actually run the location. The amount of interviews, the work that I put in is huge, going to have huge returns down the road. And people will look at John and be like, he's phenomenal. And he's there. You're 100% right. He's an incredible general manager. But the amount of effort and, and work that you put into finding your general manager many times will correspond with the type of general manager that you attract to the organization and that actually wants to work for you. And so if you're not willing to put in hundreds of hours, thousands of reps in finding great people, you'll usually just get mediocre people because you're not willing to put the effort in to make sure they're great. I probably went back and forth with John 5 or 6 times. And then my wife and I, Brianna, we flew out to Dallas, Texas, just to meet John. We drove around the market where we were wanting to start the location.

But we all—

the main reason we were there was to take him and his wife out for dinner. We were just there for a few days. But one of the main reasons was to go spend a few hours with John and his wife, Emily, and be able to spend time with them, just get to know them on a personal level. And there's a lot of things I was looking for, the intangibles. And some of those intangibles, when it comes to finding a great general manager, I wanted to think about those for you so that if you're finding— looking for a manager or a leader inside your organization, these are things that you might think about. And this came to me because I realized that a lot of times there's a whole bunch of things that people would just chalk up as having good instincts. Like, I have good instincts for hiring. Well, can I actually break that down into the measurable things that I'm looking for? Because if you take someone who's never hired someone before, And they go hire a bunch of people and they're like striking out constantly. People are leaving. They're not great fits for the culture. And you take someone else who's done hundreds or thousands of hires and suddenly they have a way better hit rate. And it's like, well, they're interviewing like the same people. They have the same questions on the interview. What's different? He's like, well, this person has instincts. Well, they probably have the skill of interviewing and they're probably, without even thinking about it, subconsciously being able to weed certain people out or look for certain traits that happen during the interview process that they can red flag people that they know aren't going to work out. For example, they might say, okay, if someone's not going to have good eye contact with me, I know like, A, I might not be able to trust them. B, they might just be nervous. If they're nervous, I've got to try to get break through that and spend a little more time with them. Whereas the novice might just also be nervous and also not have good eye contact and might not be able to understand the fact that this person just walked in and they're not someone you want to trust taking your truck out every single day. And so the only difference between the two is one has a ton of reps. And they have developed this instinct for what is good and bad. And so I wanted to break down some of the things that after I hired John, I went back to think, what were some of those instinctual things I was looking for in the interview process? And when we had dinner with him and his wife, a few things that came to mind was I wanted longevity around his, his tenure at his place of work. He'd worked there for many years and had an impeccable reputation. And whether he left a reference, People from the city that had talked well of him. Those are all good things, but just tenure in one place for a long time, great sign if you're trying to look for a leader that you want to build the organization with and set as the foundation. Another thing I was looking for was support from his spouse. That's why we absolutely wanted to meet with her and have dinner. I know that a great leader cannot lead well when there's turmoil in their household, when there's turmoil with their family, their spouse, their loved ones. And so to be able to see that there was stability there was a huge green flag. And again, these are things that I, in hindsight, I was looking back on and trying to put my finger on exactly some of the things that were like green flags and what were the red flags that were avoided. Another thing was the fact that he had been in that local area for a very long time. I had interviewed quite a few really good candidates that were willing to move to that market. However, I'm new to the market. I don't want to deal with someone that is also brand new to what areas of town are good, what neighborhoods are up and coming, the type of grasses that are there. I'm new to the market. I need someone who has been there for a very long time, has established roots, isn't going anywhere. Like, if someone's going to move into town, yeah, that's great. I appreciate the sacrifice. I'm willing to compensate you for that. The thing is, if they've been there for 15, 20, 30 years, they have their family there. They want to grow inside that local community. They've been a member of that community and contributing to it for many years. There's a really good chance good chance they're not going anywhere. And when you're looking for longevity at the leadership level, I am looking for how long have you been around town? Do you care about this community? Do you have roots in this community? Is your family part of this community? Do you care about this community? Because your reputation is now on the line for good quality service that when you're going to the local Costco, that people see you and their customers and you can be proud of the work you've done in your local community. And so that was another thing that I was looking for is like longevity in the area. And this was really relevant later on when we started figuring out like our service area and what parts of town we were gonna avoid. Like John, my general manager, knew these like the back of his hand. And he's like, okay, that area's up and coming, so let's expand service area a little bit there. Okay, that area's not good in town, like even though it's in our territory, let's just not avoid— let's avoid it. We don't really want customers over there. It's not where our ideal customer profile is. Like he just knew every single thing. He knew the best dealers, he knew the types of grasses, he knew what type of chemicals, he knew the vendors that we should be using for chemicals. Like, Everything, because he'd just been there for 15 or 20 years, was highly certified and extremely experienced in lawn care and landscaping. Another green flag when it came to my general manager was that the questions that he asked throughout the entire interview process was all about operations. And when you're hiring for a role, if you're interviewing someone and they're asking questions about everything but their role, I see it as a red flag. Whereas with John, his main job is going to be operations, doing the work. You all have heard me talk about sales, getting the work, operations, doing the work, admin, getting paid for the work. And in this case, John's main role is operations, the team hiring, training, getting the right team in place, making sure quality is in place. Like everything that's doing the work, he is responsible for the vans, the equipment, everything. But he's not really responsible for a lot on the sales side or on the admin side because admin's a lot being handled by Command Center. A lot of our sales because recurring services, Will this be handled on the website with instant quote forms? And so all of his questions revolved around the team. How much are we gonna pay? What's benefits gonna look like for the team? How are we gonna handle the vans? What type, like, what type of treatments we're using? What time of year they're going to be? What's our pricing gonna be for the client? It was all having to do with operations. It really was nothing to do with sales or admin, and that's great 'cause I just need him to focus 100% of his time on operations. And if you were hiring someone that you wanted to focus them on sales, like they're gonna go knock on doors or do door hangers, or they've gotta do a bunch of follow-up phone calls, you would be wanting to make sure that they're talking about things to do with sales. They wanna know like, what is the pricing and what's the close rate going to be and what kind of advertising are we doing and what is our conversion rate on our website and are we using landing pages and do we use Facebook ads, do we use Google ads? These would be the things that they should be asking. And so John was asking a ton of operational questions, which was a green flag to me 'cause that's where I wanted him to focus. Now, I've spent most of my time of this video on the general manager because it is the most important thing. But I wanted to break down hopefully some of the things that some of my instincts just kind of kicked in as to whether or not John was the right fit. But afterwards, I went through a whole list and these were just some of them that I thought was really green flags that in hindsight, I just saw them as like instinctual. But it was because I've just seen what works and what doesn't over the course of a long time.

So this entire video that you're watching was actually inspired by a question from one of the members at Home Service Boardroom. Home Service Boardroom is a private group for home service businesses that are doing over $1 million in annual revenue. And we were talking about this because the operations manager for one of the owners had like 5 bad hires in a row, just hiring people and they were not working out. And the owner's like, why in the world is this not happening correctly? Like, I delegated this and it's not working out.

And it was because they—

that new operations manager didn't have instincts around what good looks like. They hadn't seen 100 different applicants. They hadn't seen 100 different employees come in and be able to identify things like body language, eye contact, whether they showed up on time, all these other little intangibles that the owner had developed over the course of years and was able to hire very accurately and with precision, making sure that they were a good fit.

So this sort of talk about instincts is what led to this video, and hopefully it's helpful for you.

If you would like to join Home Service Boardroom and you do over $1 million in annual revenue, click the link in the description and we'll see you inside.

The second thing that I've learned over the past few weeks and months as I've been preparing for the challenge is you've got to do the math. And so when we talk about building a $1 million annual recurring revenue business in the next 12 months, that means we've got to get to, on average, about $82,000, $83,000 of monthly recurring revenue. The challenge is there's going to be a little higher months and a little lower months. Obviously, we're doing our very best to make sure we protect our offseason and can do as much service as possible during those months. But they're still going to have a dip in revenue for about 3 months they don't mow as much and as often in Dallas, Texas. And so the very first thing is if you have a goal, work backwards in terms of, okay, if let's just say I'm shooting for $100,000 in monthly recurring revenue as my top so that during the offseason if it goes down to $70,000 or $65,000, I'm okay. So I want to get to $1 million monthly. That's going to be $100,000 in monthly recurring revenue.

Okay.

Well, what's the average mow going to be? Oh, okay, it's $50. Okay, well, if there's 4 on average mows per month, that means I'm having $200 per month from a mowing customer. How many clients do I need? Oh, I need 500 of those in order to be able to make $100,000 a month. Well, what if I'm able to sell a second service like treatments, for example, and make an extra $50 per month? What can I do for my annual customer value? to be able to backtrack how many customers do I need to build the $100,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Once I know, okay, here's my revenue target, here's how many customers I need to hit that revenue target, then I can start really playing the math all the way backwards to how much do I need to spend on marketing to get to the goal. So at the end of the day, I put money into the marketing machine, I get leads. Well, what percentage of them are going to close? That's my close rate. If I can determine that or estimate what that's going to be, I have my customer acquisition cost. So then I know how much do I need to spend to get one paying customer. Well, I can't just multiply that by 500 because there's churn. So what percentage of customers will I lose, or they'll churn out in the first 30, 60, 90 days as I'm ramping up the location? Because if you only plan to get the 500 customers you need so you can get to the goal, you'll be very sadly mistaken when all of a sudden you run out of money because you now only have 380 customers because 120 churned out in the first year. That can happen. That's about a 25% churn, 24% churn, and that's very normal. And so a lot of times just working the math backwards will help you go from goal and like revenue goal, 'cause that's what most of us as entrepreneurs think about, to how many customers do I need? How much do I need to spend on marketing in order to be able to achieve a certain customer acquisition cost that gets me those customers? And then that's really ultimately one of the major reasons why we added in a second service. Is treatments because I started looking at the math of like, oh man, maybe we can make $1,200 to $1,400 per year in mowing per customer on average. But if I can get that above $2,000 because I add treatments in, now all of a sudden I need less customers to hit the goal. And so that would lead to my third aspect of the challenge I've learned so far, and that is keep it simple. We've kept everything simple. We do 2 services. We do mowing and we do treatments. When it comes to mowing, we have one price per visit. We don't have a weekly and biweekly price. We don't have anything besides one price for mowing based on small, medium, and large. So our square foot ranges are small, medium, and large. 0 to 4,000 square feet, 4,000 to 8,000 square feet, 8,000 square feet to 12,000 square feet. Got small, medium, and large with 3 prices. And the cost per cut doesn't change if we're weekly or biweekly because we are requiring them to be on weekly during months, certain months, and biweekly on other months. And if they don't like that and they leave, they're not a customer of ours. Do I know that by requiring weekly for certain months I'm going to lose customers?

Yes.

Do I think that by requiring biweekly during the off-season when the grass isn't growing as much, is going to also reduce our close rate. In other words, increase our customer acquisition cost. Yes, that will happen. However, I'm willing to take that loss in order to make sure that I have consistency with my routes for my crews and I have revenue during the off-season. And we believe our bet is that there's enough customers that want people to come even during the off-season because they want their property looking great. And we're not just going to say, Hey, we mow your grass. We're gonna do other things on the property to make sure that we're offering value and make it more of a yard maintenance program or lawn maintenance program, because we're not trimming bushes, we're not pulling weeds, we're keeping it really simple. So that's all we're doing when it comes to mowing. And then for treatments, we have one package. So very similar, we have small, medium, and large, same square foot ranges, 0 to 4,000, 4,000 to 8,000, 8,000 to 12,000. We have 3 different prices, but 1 package. We don't have a premium and a basic package. We don't have other random packages. We don't do one-off treatments. It's like you're either on the package and it's 1 package or you're not. And there's 9 treatments and we're able to move those treatments as much as possible towards the months where mowing is not as busy to be able to create some stability of revenue throughout the year. This also allows our general manager that has the chemical applicator's license to be able to have that in his van while he's out with the crew training, etc., but then be able to move and have some flexibility with his treatment route when times are really busy. When he's hiring a whole bunch of people, he's not going to put all his spraying jobs on that for that week. And so his van that he's going to be using is going to have the chemicals and the backup equipment for anyone else out in the field that might go down because they're all going to have their own individual vans. driving them home and then driving to their first job just to be as efficient as possible. And it'll be also kind of like a benefit or a perk of working is that you do get your own company vehicle, but it saves them a lot of time. And on pay for performance, where they get a percentage of the labor revenue, they make more money because they spend less time driving to and from work all the time or stuck in traffic. And rather, it's just a function of you get these jobs done. And if you want to start at 7 or 6 or 6:30, like, that's on you. You just got to get these jobs done and you get a percentage of the revenue. And we're gonna make sure we have We're tracking the vehicles, obviously. We have front-facing video on the road, GPS, and making sure that there is a geofence. We're gonna do all those things. That being said, the general manager being out in the field as much as possible, doing treatments, having some flexibility around treatments, but really just offering 2 services. So we're not mulching, we're not gonna weed, we're not gonna trim bushes. I believe that each of those in and of themselves is like a completely different business. Why? 'Cause as soon as I add Let's just call it bush trimming because everyone, like every customer, wants everything to be done by one person. That's the dream. Ultimately, a lot of those businesses don't make money because they offer so many services and they don't simplify things. They never get really good at it. It's really hard to train your technicians on 20 different services. It's hard to be profitable. But more importantly, I can't have the simple model of vans if I'm also expecting us to have a whole bunch of debris that I am now requiring my crew to like, okay, when you have a Cleanup, I need to move all the equipment out of the vans. And then, so what are they— now they're gonna need a garage. And then you're gonna need a spot to dump all that debris. So now I gotta think about where are all the dump sites and what the cost of dumping is. Okay, well, I wanna add mulch. Okay, great. I love mulch. Mulch is a fantastic service. But now I've gotta think about the same thing. I've gotta get the bags of mulch, where they gotta pick that up. I've got to think about the fact that most people who want mulch also want their beds weeded. So now I've gotta think about that. And then most time when you want, you're doing your beds, you also want to trim the bushes and you also want to take that hedge down a little bit. And all of a sudden you get all these services. And this is why so many home service businesses are a compilation of 10 or 20 services. And when you're starting, this is like the unique thing about the Augusta trip that I'm doing out in Dallas is I'm starting from scratch and being able to consciously know I will have to say no to people and it will hurt my close rate. It'll hurt my customer acquisition cost. But I'm trying to build a business that is scalable from the get-go instead of building a business that I grow to hate because I have made it so complex and there's so many moving parts and I'm constantly chasing my tail and having callbacks and yellow slips from my crew, customers complaining because there's 20 things I'm expecting my crew to do. It's harder to find people that can do the work. I have to train them longer so they're not as profitable to the business for 2, 3, 5, 6 weeks before they actually are profitable. There are so many different parts of a business that change when you add complexity, you add more services. And so we're just doing 2 services and they're keeping it really simple. All right. The 4th thing that I've learned as we've been preparing for the trip is focus and delegation. I can only focus on so many things. And part of the challenge is that I'm only allowed to spend 10 hours a week working on the business. I will never touch the tools. That's like part of the challenge too. Like I cannot in a pinch go out and mow lawns. I cannot go out and spray chemicals. That's part of the challenge. I can't actually do the work. But even working on the business when it comes to onboarding, helping the general manager, getting them up and running, I can't be spending 40, 50 hours a week doing that. And so in order for that to occur, I have to delegate and I have to be okay with other people's 90%. For example, Augusta Leads is part of Augusta Nation and the franchise, and they are running all of my ads, all the Facebook ads, all the Google ads. They've created all of the content, like the videos, the pictures, the headlines, all of that. They already know what they're going to be running and they've tested across all the locations. And you might be— before you stop, like, I know this is going to happen on the challenge. It's not fair. You have all these other, you know, pros and people able to help you. It's not fair being part of a franchise. Here's the thing. Every part of the franchise that I am using You could absolutely go buy from a service or an agency. For example, Augusta Leads, you can go buy Facebook ads agencies, you can buy Google ads agencies and go get someone to do those things. And part of the franchise, yes, we have— we build the websites and we spend a lot of time on SEO. You could go hire an SEO specialist. At Command Center, they're going to answer all our phones, do all our bookkeeping, do the texts and emails and all the admin stuff. They're going to answer the phones and sell over the phone, etc. You can go hire someone to do that. You're like, well, I don't wanna have to like train people and get an office space. And I agree, that's why I'm not doing it. But I also have to be okay with 90%. For example, we wanted to do a subscription-based thing out in Dallas, but I knew if we added that, that'd be something that would confuse Command Center 'cause most Augusta Lawn Care locations don't do a subscription-based year-round thing. And it gets a little funky with like people canceling. What happens if they cancel after a really expensive treatment and now I've actually lost money on them? What happens if they cancel right at the end of the busy season before the Am I really gonna take someone to court over our contract? Like, but more importantly, it was like, I know if they call Command Center, they will get confused 'cause they don't see this very often and it's gonna cause errors. So we didn't do the subscriptions as much as I think it's a good idea and I wanted to give it a try. And so same thing with Augusta Leads. There's less flexibility because these are the systems, this is what we know works, and use it or you can kind of go pound sand. And so I'm following the systems, but more importantly, if you're going to delegate and you're going to focus on the things that are most important inside your business, everything that you delegate, you have to be okay with 90%. You have to be okay with some things will fall through the cracks. Someone's going to message on Facebook and I'm not going to see it and it's going to look bad. Someone's going to leave a bad review because they don't like my ads. Someone is going to say that someone so didn't answer the phone correctly. or they didn't like them on the phone. And usually it's 'cause of like the customer has their own issue. But nonetheless, that's going to happen. There's going to be times I wish I could pivot or change or something, but I can't 'cause Command Center's behind me and I've gotta make sure everything's documented for them to answer the phone and accurately answer 90% of the time that it's exactly what I'm wanting. And so whether it be Augusta Leads delegating all the advertising, whether it be the franchise as a whole doing all the website stuff and SEO, whether it be Command Center answering my phones and doing a lot of the admin work, Doing my bookkeeping, my payroll, running P4P for me. They'll do a lot of those things. You can go find other people to do a lot of these tasks in your business. And the reason you need to is so that you can focus on the few things that are actually moving the ball forward. I know that me spending time with my general manager and making sure he's solid is the most important use of my time. Finding a great team and coaching up the culture of the business is the best use of my time. Anything outside of that is lower leverage than those things. And so I'm going to try to delegate as much as possible. And so many times, myself included, we come from a place when we had very limited resources, a place of scarcity when we grew up. And it causes us to penny pinch all the time, constantly looking for dollars and pennies to pick up or areas that, you know, nitpicking our vendors and trying to pinch them, like, versus just stepping back and like, it's okay. I'm just gonna go on the offensive and focus on the couple things that are actually highest leverage. And by me focusing on them, I double and triple the business. Whereas if I just focus on all these little perfection, perfecting every little thing in the business, I get 1% and 1% and 2% and 1% versus 2%. And don't get me wrong, perfection and like optimization of a process, very important. But when you're trying to grow a business, You gotta focus on the highest leverage things, 'cause there's going to be 50, 60, 100 things that you could work on in your business, but you only have 24 hours in a day. In this case, I only have 10 hours a week to work on the business. I've gotta figure out what are the highest leverage things. And most of the time, it's gonna come down to where do you spend money, where do you spend time, and the people inside the organization. And so the only thing that I can really do to help this business is find great people, Make sure they have a great culture. Figure out where we're going to spend money in terms of advertising, equipment, vans, expansion, and making sure that the time of my leadership, my team is spent well. That's like literally all I can do. Time, money, and making sure that the right people are on the bus. And anything else inside of a business is usually a distraction. And many times the reason we go to it as entrepreneurs is because it's actually the thing that we're good at. You're really good at sales, so you spend so much time on it instead of focusing on people. You're really, really good at ads and systems and using AI, and so you get really honed in that, when in reality, your technicians are not trained up correctly, they're not onboarded correctly. And so many times we focus on actually the thing that makes us very comfortable because it makes us feel good. Like, we feel accomplished when we get the next sale. We feel accomplished when we get the ads set up correctly. We feel accomplished when we set up the next AI system. So we keep doing those things because it's positively reinforcing us for success versus spending time on the much harder, higher leverage tasks in the business. And I see so many times people cap out the size of their business because of this. And I want to demonstrate the fact that when I am forced to only spend a certain amount of time in the business, there are just a few things I'm going to focus on. And so those are some of the things that I have learned so far in the past few months as we get ready for the Texas trip. I think I will learn a whole lot more there. We'll be testing out features for Homeworks around chemical applications, making that easier to set up, and several other, like the dispatch board and several other things while we're on the trip. But over the past few months, getting my general manager, setting up all the vans, we purchased the vans, we've ordered a lot of the things to get there as fast as possible because I'm going to only have like 6 weeks at the end of the season and I've got to get moving very quickly. And so we've been preparing, Buying the vans, getting the wraps ordered, getting ramps ordered, getting the equipment ordered so that when I get there day one, we can just like hit the ground running, immediately be trying to find technicians and putting up ads for that. And I'm looking forward to it. So make sure you follow on the Mike Andes YouTube channel. That's where we'll be posting all the vlogs. 4 of them will come out every single week, and I hope you learn a lot. But this is kind of behind the scenes of what I have learned in the first few months just leading up to the trip. And before we even start, some of the planning that's gone into it. So I hope it's helpful.