My Business Doubled Revenue in One Month! - Live Q&A (Call-In Show)

Hey, everyone.

It'S Mike. Andy's here. Welcome to another live show. Haven't done one of these in a few weeks.

So happy Black Friday. Happy Thanksgiving. Awesome day. And I wanted to hop on. A couple of my meetings canceled today, so I made it, took advantage. And we're gonna do a live stream and I'm happy to answer any questions you might have. If you want to call in, this is the number right here. 3617336, 3332. Before we get into taking some callers today, I am actually going to talk a little bit about something that happened to my business the last three weeks and that is doubling in revenue. I'm going to talk about how that happened and why it happened and hopefully how you can replicate it in your small business. So if you didn't have the chance, cutting edge conference a couple weeks ago, we had an event online Thursday, Friday, Friday and Saturday. And the third day, I spoke about how to create your marketing campaigns and your ads, specifically Facebook ads, that would allow you to.

Basically make an offer so good that customers could not refuse, saying no by using scarcity, by using guarantees, by using urgencies and bonuses. And so on. That keynote that I gave in that talk, I really wanted to not only just talk about how to make a great offer when it comes to advertising so good that customers say stupid saying no to, but also want to give one. And so at that, at the very end of that keynote, if you watched it, you would have seen me do the exact same thing for Copilot CRM and as essentially said, hey, look, I am literally going to guarantee your business grows by 10%. If it doesn't in the next year, we'll give you all your money back and make a guarantee that strong that no one else is doing in the industry. And so on that event, we literally, in the past few weeks, since the time of that event, have doubled the. The revenue of the business. And I say that not to gloat, but simply to state that if you haven't watched that already, I highly recommend you do so by using urgency. Scarcity guarantees bonuses in your offers. When it comes to advertising, you will absolutely convert dramatically better than if you simply say, like, here's the services I offer. Call now for a quote. Everyone else in your industry, everyone, every other one of your competitors is doing the exact same thing. And, and that's leading to mediocre results. And so if you want results that are greater than that, if you want to actually do a campaign that you don't Feel like you're putting money into the shredder of Facebook ads and Google Ads, you're going to need to be able to create an offer that customers literally feel stupid saying no to. And in that keynote, we talk about very specific examples of pest control, lawn care, landscaping, cleaning, et cetera, where you can create offers that people literally feel stupid saying no to. Because there's bonuses, you guarantee results, they don't pay until the solution has been granted. These are the type of things you can do in your small business. And so the results we've seen at Copilot CRM over the past few weeks is the result of a great offer. And when I say doubling, to be more Precise, has been 89.8% month over month growth. And I don't expect it to slow down. When you make a guarantee and you guarantee people results in your small business, like for example, if you're doing pest control, just guarantee people they will not pay until you take care of the roaches or the pest or the bug or whatever it is. Promise people they're not going to pay until their lawn is green, until their lawn is weed free. If you're doing, you know, fertilization and weed control, promise customers these things, give them guarantees so it takes away the angst or the anxiety that you potentially might be a scammer that's going to take their money and run and never give them the service that they desire or take care of the problem that they need help with. And so if you can guarantee these things and then off also stack on top of that, bonuses, stack on top of that urgency and the fact that you have a scarce resource of your time that you're trying to sell and that there's only certain number of spots available. If you stack all of these things, you can absolutely create an offer that customers feel stupid saying no to because you've essentially solved their problem and you're guaranteeing it that they're going, you're going to solve their problem. And if you don't, you're not, they're not gonna pay a single penny. And so I was, I was really happy because, like, when I made that, that, that keynote, I was like, okay, how well I do at presenting an offer for Copilot is really going to be the determining factor as to whether or not what I taught in the keynote is actually relevant and useful. And so seeing that the business has doubled in the past few weeks because of that one singular offer tells me that it works well and that it would be wise for all of us and all of our businesses to start thinking about how can we make an offer so insane that none of our competition will do it and that our customers feel stupid saying no to it and they actually don't even believe you because it sounds too good to be true. And so I would highly recommend watching that if you haven't already and start creating those type of offers in your advertising. Now. Today we are doing a live show. So if you'd like to call in, the lines are open. You can go 361-733-3333. Any business question, I'm happy to answer you. As the callers are getting into the queue again, call that number at the top. I will get you on and you can ask your question. I did want to go over something real quick, and that is the Black Friday specials. So if you go to mikeannies.com/black Friday, you're going to see this page right here. All right, now, we've done something kind of cool this year and we, we have three offers and we have a giveaway. So a whole bunch of free stuff being given away if it's right now, if you're watching this, it's Black Friday. This is Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday up until Cyber Monday, this is valid. All right, so it's this weekend only. First off, if you sign up for home service Web design, you're going to get six free months of MBA for entrepreneurs. So that's all the lectures, all of the material in terms of the monthly stuff that I put out, some of that is going to be from Landscape Summit recently that I talked. All that's in there. If the second offer is if you sign up for landscape business course or you sign up for long care web design, either one, you're going to get 70 plus designs for postcards, door hangers, flyers, every door, direct mail, canva templates for all of your marketing needs. There's over 70. I actually think we're closer to 100 now and includes business plans and ways for you to get estimates out on the road. Like there's a ton of stuff in there now and it's going to give you completely free. So you can literally sign up for landscape business course and literally get $499 worth of value in all these templates. Like here are some of them.

These are just some of the postcards and door hangers. So for example, you got.

This one is for irrigation services, this one's for bush trimming. Okay. We got Christmas lights. So if you're doing Christmas lights, there's literally door hangers for that. I just realized that I'm probably super small on your screen, so let me just remove that. There's core aeration. This door hanger here, if you're in the green industry like lawn caremedia.com these are instant quote door hangers. We're on the back. You immediately can give a price for things like mowing, property cleanups. Then you got every door direct mail core aeration. Like there's just a ton of stuff in here that is super helpful. Over 70 of those you get for free if you sign up for landscapebusinesscourse.com or lawn careweb design.com so check those out and then let's keep moving along here. There's one more offer. If you sign up for Copilot CRM, you're going to get six free months of cope of P4P software dot com. All right, so if you're thinking been thinking about joining Copilot CRM, if you sign up today, you're going to get six free months of P4P software dot com. Now for all of these, if you simply just check out literally Tuesday morning after the events this, this weekend is over, we are going to send you access to all of these things. So for example, you will get a access to P4P software for six months. Usually it's $199 per month. You're for free for six months if you sign up for Copilot this weekend. And so we're adding a whole bunch of stuff to PVP software that's going to make it a really amazing time clock and be able to tie incentives around certain actions like showing up on time, not having any call outs, perfect attendance, et cetera. And you'll be able to tie in rewards like gift cards, more paid time off, all these other things. So over the next six months you'll be actually see all that happening for completely free. So that's typically almost $1200 in value because it's $199 a month. You get all for free if you join Copilot this month or this weekend. Also, everyone that buys anything any of these offers, if you take any of take me up on any of those three offers, you're going to get entered into win a one on one call with me. Zoom in out here a little bit. You're going to enter into one win a one on one call with me. I'm going to be doing two of these and I'm going to be drawing one of them tomorrow. And Then one of them on Monday evening. So if you take me up on any of these offers, whether it be joining copilot, joining landscape business course along here web design, or signing up for home service web design, we are going to put you in the drawing for a live call with myself. So that's 45 minutes. We do a zoom call. I send you the recording and I can help you as much as I possibly can in that 45 minutes. And I'm looking forward to it. So without any further delay, I think we got a couple callers on the line. First caller, I think is coming in from area code 530. Thank you for coming on the show. How's it going?

Can you hear me?

This is Carter from Yuba City again.

Carter, what's up, dude?

Hey, how have you been?

Good, man. What's up?

So I kind of put myself in a pretty bad spot financially over this past year. Did a few jobs wrong. I'm trying to figure out how to get myself out of it. And I guess my question is, do you think it's smart or even feasible to sell the business as it is now and then just starts progress fresh in the spring with an Augusta location, or is it better just to try and ride out the winter? And how would I even go about evaluating the business as it is right now?

Yeah, as it is right now, it's not going to be worth a whole lot. It's going to be worth less than the cost of acquiring all those customers, likely. So I would stick with the business regardless of whether or not you join Augusta. I would stick with it. Sometimes people want to sell the business because they feel like they kind of get a blank slate, which there's validity to that. However, I think that if you keep your database, you keep all of your customers warm, whether, regardless, if you join Augusta next year, the year after, or never, I would make sure that you keep those customers warm and keep selling to them. Even if that means you're selling them different services. Even if that means because, like, ultimately the cost to acquire all of those customers is far greater than what you would be able to sell it for right now. And so unless you get some, you know, person that just really wants to buy a business and willing to overpay and pay 3, $400 per recurring customer, you know, it's likely that you're going to be better off just keeping them and not going and having to acquire them all again next spring. That make sense?

Yeah. Okay. Because right now, I mean, we don't have many customers, but we have 11,000amonth in growth coming in from the maintenance side. So I didn't know what, you know.

Well, the big thing is if you.

Sold right now worth about 40,000.

Yeah. If you sold all that right now, the thing is, what you're really going to be selling, any good buyer is going to want is your contact database. And so you probably have a couple thousand people inside your database from all the projects you've done that if you were able to use them, you'd be able to convert a lot more into mowing or recurring or sell them into other projects down the road. And so that is something that is. Usually takes a couple years at least to build up. And if you were to sell it, you probably won't get the real value of that by selling it because people wouldn't put any sort of valuation on that. They're gonna probably just take, you know, let's just call it 50, 60 mowing customers. Okay. I'll give you a couple hundred bucks a pop. And all of a sudden you make 15 grand. You sell all your equipment. Great. Maybe you get out at a son of the debt. But you're still going to be going into next year then with like no database, no one to upsell, no recurring revenue, and you're probably gonna set yourself back a year. Right. So it'd be different if you were super profitable, all these routes were making money, and then you could sell the business as a whole. That might make more sense. But when it's not doing well and you don't have the financials to back up a really healthy valuation, it's likely that it's better to try to turn it around.

Okay. Okay, sounds good.

So I know, I know you applied to be on the turnaround show. I think you're gonna be hearing back from the team here pretty soon, so we'll see what we.

Okay.

All right, take care.

Appreciate it.

You got it.

I appreciate all your hard work.

All right, the next caller is coming in from 704. Welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on.

Hey, Mike, this is Ellis. How are you?

Good. How you doing, brother?

Good, good. Hey, quick question. I got two questions, actually. So mine's about onboarding.

When you bring a new customer on, do you like to send them your policies and procedures with an estimate or is that after an estimate? What does that process look like?

Yeah, like, I. I'm a big believer that in our home. In home. Like, what services are you selling?

Lawn mowing. Same thing. Okay, so mowing, shrub, trimming mulch and.

Yeah, yeah, no one. Like I, I don't even go to the doctor and read all their policies and procedures. They're two pages. Like, I'm just not going to do that for lawn care. And the person that is going to read all those things, you probably don't want them as a customer. You want the person that is like, hey, just take this off my plate. I'm willing to pay whatever as long as you stick to the schedule we predetermined and I put my card on file, I never have to talk to you again. Let's go. That's usually the person you want. That person is not going to read two pages of policies and procedures for their lawn care business. It's just not going to happen. And so I would recognize, I think, where the. Go ahead.

I think where this comes up is this time of year in my area with leaf removal where I show up, I mow through.

Pretty much through December 1st, and leaves are just too much to mow over top of. And people think that the service that I provided throughout the spring and summer is the same, is going to be taking care of leaves, which is double the amount of time that I should be spending there. If I were to take care of your leads. And they're just like, yeah, I want you to mulch them, but I can't mulch them, you know?

Yeah. So I would not. First off, let's just assume that you did a whole bunch of policies and procedures. And one of those line items is talking about leaves and it says three or four sentences about how leaves are handled. People are not going to read that. And remember that when they signed up for you in March and April this year for mowing, so they're not gonna be like, oh yeah, now it's November back in March when we signed this contract with them, or we signed an estimate or we saw their estimate, we remember now there's about the leaves. They're not going to the same expectations are going to be there. And so, you know, the question is like if you, you know, six months ago when you read one policy and procedure on your credit card bill or whatever, did you remember? No, we just don't. And so what I would recommend is reduce the friction to getting them in the door and then just over communicate going forward. So, for example, going into the leaf season, send every single customer on recurring mowing an estimate or, sorry, an email. And on it it says, hey, look, here's what's included for your mowing service. Throughout the fall season, we will mow over everything if it's too much, we're simply going to send you an estimate. In fact, if you'd like to get ahead of everyone else and get the first in line, click this button below and we'll get an estimate for, for leaf cleanup every other week three throughout the leaf season. And so it's really, really straightforward. And you could even below that be like, if there are too many leaves, we are going to blow them into your beds or whatever. Like, we are there to mow the grass, we are not there to remove the leaves. That is a separate service. And if you like leaf cleanup, here it is. You will lose like a one or two customers that might freak out over that, but you will save yourself a lot of things. Number one, that the lost customers from having to explain that to them in the springtime or creating a contract, policies, procedures, whatever, you're going to scare people away. It's adding another level, another step to the sales process. Just communicate them right before the fall and communicate like, here's what it is, here's what we're going to do. If you'd like the full service for leaves, click on this button. That's what I would recommend doing. Because you just don't want to add another step to the, the sales process or more friction there. You want to get them in the door and then when there's things like that coming up, just communicate prior and just get in the heaven. Okay. Every single August 30th, we're sending out a message about leaves to up upcoming customers and 20, 30, 40 people are going to click on that button and you're going to actually upsell them into leaf service instead of trying to do mulching of all their leaves.

Oh, that's great. Yeah, we've been trying to do some newsletters as well, which, you know, kind of plays along with the email. So I think, you know, you're right. Don't, don't make the process any harder than it should be. It's just. Yeah, it's trying to get everybody to understand.

Exactly. Yeah. Like the bottom line is we don't want to add too much friction to the sales process. We want to make it super easy for people to give us money. And at the end of the day, in terms of policies and procedures, I like to do three, maybe four things on the estimate. So for example, for us, we require weekly service. We require, we let them know, hey, this is a year round because we do winter services and your first service is $1.50 per minute per man because we don't know what it's going to look like because we do these estimates over the phone or from our website. And so those are the major points I want them to know. Outside of that, I will go over all the other details with them down the road if they're starting to like lock gates on me or they start trying to scare skip services or this, all this other stuff because guess what, they're not going to read A list of 400 terms and conditions prior to signing up. Next caller says it's from Germany, is that right?

Yes it is. Right. Hello Mike, it is me, Patrick.

Hey Patrick, how's it going?

Quite fine so far. So first of all I'm sorry to call you from Germany and second, I mean like we got now like 10pm right about. But it doesn't matter. So I do have a question. Right now we have three people doing about 300k right now. Foursky is going for the 1st of March. Right now we've got 40k in the bank. Basically the question is now we are haggling a little bit about type of truck. I'm a numbers guy and I don't care right now basically we discussed that topic just for you to note. Basically like lawn care is like your bread and buses for us it is like hatch and bush trimming. So we are basically gonna go to the dump like once or twice, sometimes even twice a day just of debris and we need a dump bed like the Aveco deity and Renom and all of that. So basically right now we are deciding to buy a used truck with like about 50,000 miles on it. What we expect expected was like 20, 25k in buying. So right now we have Ibacco daily. We are not really sure whether we should stick to that because of the standardization and having one.

Like one guy who's going to fix it and not having to call like oh no, then you have to call last dealer. Now they have to call that dealer. The problem is with the Iveco daily it is like 5k more expensive. It goes for the 25k sector and right now there's only one.

Sector and with the Random Master it goes for like 20, 22k and they are like you got them like in huge quantities basically. So basically just want to ask you in your opinion opinion probably I mean like from the if you know the ADAC and the German tooth they basically both say yeah, those trucks are just reliable.

So basically the question is like do you stick with the same brand and are you willing to pay a few thousand dollars More for that.

Yeah, exactly. So basically we say, okay, we are going to decide to switch only to one brand. Now the question should we stay to Iveco or should we go for an announcer?

Yeah, like in my opinion, like when it comes to trucks, I'm pretty brand independent. I don't really care what type of brand it is. However, if it's only a few thousand dollars difference and you know you're gonna scale up how many trucks you have, it is really nice to have the same model of truck. So like when I first started Augusta, my the first location, we have dodges, Fords, GMCs, Chevrolets. We like every truck you could possibly think of. Now when we're going back through and we've had trucks for 10 years and we're going out and getting new ones now we are going to stick to like one, maybe two brands. And so we're going to stick to Chevy Silverados and GMC Sierras. And so far it's actually just been Silverados. So whether or not people like that, I don't really care. I don't even care if it was a different brand like Ford F150s, I don't care. It's just like having the same is nice. From the sake of maintenance, from the sake of the guys understanding how to drive the trucks, it leads to a smaller training learning curve, just the same way that standardization of all your equipment leads them. If they know one mower, they know all your mowers. If they know one truck, they know all their trucks. That's a really nice thing. And so that's why like back in the day, we even had like manual, A couple manual trucks. And like, even when you start throwing like dump beds and all these other sort of setups, the more you can standardize it, the better. And, and so even like when it comes to our trucks, we're trying to buy a truck that can do a ramp rack, but then also pull a dump trailer. So that way it's like the same truck all of the time. And so am I willing to spend a little bit more for that? Not at the very beginning on my second truck, I wouldn't really care about what kind of, you know, I would not pay five grand more just for the sake of having the same brand. The reason is cause that $5,000, if that's your last 5,000, if that was spent on marketing and advertising, getting more customers, it'd probably do a whole lot more for your business than making sure the brand was the same as your other truck. At my size and we're the company that now it is worth it because it would prevent us having to get a shop mechanic or if we do have a shop mechanic down the road, it'll prevent a lot of wasted time getting a whole bunch of different types of parts from different manufacturers. But I truly believe unless you have more than three or four trucks, the type of truck you have, the brand of it is not super important and it's not super important that you spend more money to make sure they all match. Next caller is coming in from 9, 7, 8. Welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on.

Hey Mike, it's Brandon from Simply Lawn Care. How are you?

Good. How you doing Brandon?

Good, man. Yeah. So Scott and I have been chatting a lot and you know what we're leaning towards doing this year? I want you to just kind of poke some holes in it for me is we're going to end up finishing at 700, so a little bit short of our initial goal of 8. So we're thinking about going into profit mode this year for the main location. And we're actually planning on having Scott start a new location with one of the current trucks next year. That's 15 minutes away. Our thought on it was obviously we talked about you can't really have three people in management when you're only at 800,000. So the thought was I can become the GM and we'll just have an office person with me. I'll learn how to become an actual GM and get better at that role. And Scott can go run the new location since there isn't much cost since he's one of the founders. What are some of your thoughts on that?

So I think there's a. Okay, so my first inclination is why would you not if it's only 15 minutes away, why would you not just drive a little bit further every day for the sake of the cruise in order to accommodate that new route, that new area.

That's a great question. We never really thought about it. Why don't. Well I guess I would ask why don't you guys do that? Like when you, if you start something nearby or do you always go farther?

Great point. So the reason we do is because we don't have two founders. Right. If I have a founder led company, I'm typically going to grow a larger location. Whereas if I'm just doing GM by gm, it's. They have. Their capacity is typically lower in terms of how big the business can become without one. Not just their capacity but also I don't really want to grow Past a million because it's going to be harder to replace them down the road if something they want to move on, if they want to become move up inside the company, start their own location, whatever it is. I'm now at a in a weirder, harder position to find a replacement. And so that's the reason why I don't we keep our locations smaller. If both of you are separating, there needs to be great. There needs to be reason and good logic as to why you guys being apart is going to grow the business faster. And so if you think that by both of you moving into a GM role and you taking, let's say 700,000 revenue location, turning into profit mode, and then you believe that by him going out and starting, quote unquote, his own location, he's now going to go do three or four hundred thousand just by himself. That makes sense. But if next year all you're going to do is 800,000, there's very high likelihood that you're going to lose more money by having a second shop space because of increased overhead, especially because you don't have the scale for the office person to really operate very well. Like there's still going to be one office person, so it's still a massive handicap for the business because you don't have scale in that. So if that office person leaves now, all of a sudden you have two locations, two general managers, and no admin support.

Yeah, a second reason other than the profit was we do have a, you know, we have two or three people who really do want to move up and one person we're still planning on trying to have be a gm. So I thought for us as well was just trying to make room for them. But do you think that's just we should focus more on profit first before making room for other people?

I would say, you know, based on me knowing so much about your business, I would probably wait one year at your current location, expand into the area that you plan on having a second location and try to create one full route. So next year, let's say you do 750, you're gonna be really profitable on it though, because you'll raise prices, you, you're going to systematize things, et cetera, you're going to really nail down the admin side of the business, systematize that more. So that way in 2025, when you take one of your guys, not one of you, but one of your guys, become the general manager, which will help with like the whole pro. The whole reason you're doing this is kind of sounds like more of a cultural thing. Let's go ahead and just shoot straight for getting one of the guys as a general manager in 2025. But now when they go start their own, their quote unquote own location, they they're already gonna have 10, 15,000amonth in recurring revenue because you started marketing in that area and expanding this coming year. And so that location will be much more profitable faster because they already have that recurring revenue set that route. They'll probably likely already be needing an employee from day one and you'll be able to take that next year. Profitability and cementing the admin role because the admin is going to be your Achilles if you split. Because if you both split, you're both going to become general managers. And if you lose the admin for whatever reason, it literally would probably likely you'd probably cancel the second location. This is what happened to yard dogs. Cancel the second location. Just move back to one. And so that would be your Achilles heel. And that's why like the command center role for Augusta is so important is because like you don't have to always like hope and pray that your admin person stays.

Okay. So do you think it'll be more advisable then just a situation for me to just focus on admin then next year make it really simple. Let Scott stay in GM but spend all of next year training someone else to move up in the GM who can then run that location the following year?

Yeah, I would be open with the guys like, hey, next year we're gonna have one of the teams gonna become a general manager at this location. We're gonna market into that location this year we're gonna try to get a route. We're not guaranteeing a position. We're not even going to pick for that position until next October, November. But it kind of gives a good incentive for your team, especially your guys who are motivated and want to get ahead. They're like, okay, they actually see a, a some place to, to strive towards and then you're going to be in a much better financial position if you wait one year, make it really profitable instead of trying to do this grow, grow, grow thing, you'll have the money to go expand that location and if anything bad happens and have the cash cushion so that nothing bad happens to the original location, which is my biggest concern.

Gotcha. And do you think it's good to set up like a Google my business and things still as if we're running a second location just to get momentum on the marketing. So still run out of location one, online, make it and legally make it two.

You could, you could. I just don't want to add any complexity. Right. So I'd keep the same phone number, I would keep the same email. But if you wanted to start like a separate webpage and then do a Google my business Google listing, that might be helpful, just so it has a little more traction. But even if you wait until after spring rush, that might be a good idea. I just want to have no complexity. This coming spring rush. You can just focus on making it super profitable and making sure the admin is just nailed down and then next season have the ability to grow and expand but have a much better base financially. But from an admin perspective and already have us established route in the new market.

Awesome. I appreciate it, man. Thanks so much.

You got brother. Have a great day. All right, the next caller is coming in from 8:06. Welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on.

Hey, Andy, my name is Frank Garcia. I called you back or called you back in in April about moving full time. And then the month later in May, I went full time. And I've grown my business this year about 400% in revenue and customers and just overall growth has been really good. And so I want to first and foremost just thank you for the guidance and that conversation we had. I'm kind of don't know like if, like what mode I'm in now and kind of not sure like where to go. Like I could hire an employee, you know, just one person and be done, you know, by two, three o' clock every day or, you know, focus more on the spraying and fertilizer side. So I was kind of just kind of pick your brain and see what questions you had on what mode I'm in or what to do going forward.

What do you want to do? Do you want to keep growing the business overall, like in the long term or. Or are you kind of burnt out and you just want to see a little bit more profit in the bank from, you know, kind of the fruit of all your labor.

Gotcha. So no, I'm not burnt out. Love being out in the field. Love the challenges. We just took on 40 accounts for Christmas lights and have quadrupled our profit just in two months of installing them. And so I'm perfectly fine with being out in the field. So there's no burnout there. I just am like, would I be considered to be in like a profit mode, a growth mode, or like, you know, kind of just kind of confusing there on when me and my wife talk about it.

Yeah, like, if you. If next year you plan on, like, say, doubling revenue, you're definitely not in profit mode. Because profit mode is I'm not going to grow usually more than 10%, and I'm going to be raising prices to basically, you know, smash down demand, but by raising the price and increasing margins dramatically. That's profit mode. So it sounds like you're probably not going that route. You're gonna probably hire, probably gonna double the business likely next year. Like, what'd you do in revenue this year?

This year we'll do about 110.

Right. And so if you hire someone, you're probably gonna do 222, 30 next year, easily.

Yeah, yeah. And that was mostly out of the, you know, a majority of the season, eight months so far, just as a solo operator and so. But yeah, looking to grow, hire some, you know, some good, reputable guys. That's been a little bit of a challenge. The ghosting of them has been the kicker, paying them well. I'm kind of did the whole hourly thing just to start out with, but also tacked on some bonuses with, you know, projects we did or, you know, we just really kicked butt that week. But, yeah, I'm looking to grow, so I kind of. Kind of see where you're going with that. But I also just wanted to call in, give you a big thank you. I wouldn't be where I am without you. And now I've got kind of a good direction to go from there.

Awesome. Thanks for calling in, brother. I appreciate it. Yeah, like, I think that if I was you, I'd be looking at this as if you want to grow long term. That's. That's the direction we're going. You're not burnout. It's like, I give you the green light to grow the business. Keep in mind, when you go from you. You working on the field, doing $100,000 in annual revenue, to you having. Wait. I think it's going to end up happening next year. You're going to have two employees by the end of the summer. But let's just call it one or two employees. Either way, your profit margins are going from like 50 and 60% net profit margins to probably 20 to 30%, and that's going to be very freaky. And so a lot of times what happens in that transition port is like, oh, my word, I just got two, three employees. I'm not making any more money than I was before. And that's actually true, true. The reason is because now you're paying wages, you have overhead, people are not as efficient as you. And so a lot of times in that third year, that's why people need to raise their prices somewhat, because they were making all this money in year one, usually by themselves, with, like a helper, and they're super profitable. And then all of a sudden year two, they get these employees, and the employees drive down profitability. They make mistakes, and all of a sudden your profit margin go from 60, 70% down to 20 or 30%, and people lose their minds because they're making less money than they were just two years ago when they were working out in the field by themselves. And so typically in year three, that's why I see people stabilize, because they've grown now to the size of, you know, 3, 500,000 annual revenue, whatever that is. And then they decide, I'm going to raise prices, I'm going to actually quote, unquote, go into profit mode. And they might only go to profit mode for one spring rush, but they raise prices enough to accommodate a higher profit margin and be able to pay those guys. And the biggest thing that you can do to attract better talent is pay them more. You tap into a different talent pool. If you can go from 15 bucks an hour to 20 bucks an hour, how do you go from 15 to $20 an hour? Two things. One, you increase your prices, and two, you put them on pay for performance so that the harder they work, the more money they make. It just makes a lot of sense. And if you only have one employee and you can have eyes on them all day long, you don't need P4P pay for performance. You don't need to, because you are the system. Your eyes are managing them. If you have guys that leave outside your truck, outside with a truck, with, without your supervision every single day, pay for performance is basically, in my opinion, my personal opinion, a requirement to operate in home services. It gives the guys so much more ability to make more money. For example, this past week, you know, it is a Black Friday, and we had Thanksgiving yesterday. And at the local shop, they. They told me that they said, hey, if everyone works really hard, we can have Thursday and Friday off. But if we don't get all the jobs done, guess what? Everyone's coming in, working on Friday. Guess what happened? Everyone just kicked butt for three days. They got paid just as much because we use P4P. But they all wanted to get the work done, so they were willing to work longer hours, push through whatever it was. So they didn't have to work on Thursday and Friday. And guess what? They got paid just as much as if they would have come back in on Thursday. On Friday, if you're paying them hourly, it's not that way because if they would have come back in on Friday, they would have made more money. And so incentivizing your guys that way is, is what allows them to be efficient and it keeps that drag on profitability as the company begin, continues to grow. And so that, that's the biggest shocker that I see is most people go from solo making like 100, $150,000 in annual revenue and making 80, $90,000 take home, which is fantastic. And then they go get an employee because they're kind of burnt out. It's a lot of work. They have tons of work coming in. They get a second employee and all of a sudden it goes from 110 home, 120, 130,000 in revenue to 300,000 in revenue. But they're only making 20% profit margin. So now they're only taking 50 or 60 grand home. And so that's a very tough, difficult part. And that's typically when people need to raise prices and adjust there and take a little bit of time off from growth in order to accommodate those lower profit margins. Now, I am going to answer some questions in the chat. So let me just hop in here and I'm going to go back just a little bit, answer some questions. Is this happening? This is happening. Anthony. I'm struggling with leads and winter services. Yeah. One thing we've been talking about at Augusta a ton is let's just say you're in the green industry. Let's say you're in any industry where there's a slow season. Okay. I want you to think about the service that you only do during your slow season. So for example.

In our market season, spring rush, summer, fall, lots of mowing. During the winter, not much mowing. So what do we do? We in our market do what we call winter services. We trim bushes, we pull weeds, and the weeds aren't very much unless people like if people, once they pull the weed, once they don't keep growing, the leaves that have fallen from fall, they didn't pick up during a windstorm. There's branches that fall down, the beds need to be edged, the walkways need to be blown off, the gutters need to be checked and the downspouts cleared out. These are things that we do call winter services. Now, everyone always has a reason as to why they decrease revenue during the winter. And it's usually well founded. It's like, well, I don't. This is my slow season. Okay, what if instead of Augusta Lawn Care Services, it was Augusta Winter Services? This would be your go time. This would be like time to sell. This would be what you live for. This would be the equivalent of your spring rush right now. So regardless of industry. And ask yourself during a period when you would typically be slowing down, ask yourself, what service can you sell? And then pretend as if that's the only service you sold. And think about it like, this is my go time. This is my time to actually make. This is making money while the hate making. What is it? Making money while the sun shines. What is it? Make hay while the sun shines. Whatever it is, this is your time to go. And so at Augusta, we've been selling winter services to people who have never done service with us before and actually selling it as like a value proposition to people that have a second house, that have that move away for the wintertime. These are valuable propositions to our customers. And just a mind shift of like, oh, I am not going to go in this defensive mind. I'm going to stay aggressive and actually think about all the services that are considered typically like filling in the gaps. And I'm just gonna go all, all in on them as if they're my main business. That will change that mindset. Change could potentially turn your slow season into busy season. Next caller is coming in from 2-67-Welcome the show and thank you for coming on.

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes. I hope you've been enjoying the episode so far. I have a really important announcement I wanted to share. If you're listening to this in December of 2023, please just take this moment here because this is a special announcement I wanted to give specifically for the podcast and that is that at the end of this month, we are raising prices at Copilot CRM. So if you've thought about joining Copilot CRM, I highly recommend doing it now. The reason for that is because not only are we going to raise prices in January, if you sign up before January 1, 2024, you're going to get the price lock guarantee for life. And what that means is that monthly rate will never go up, assuming that you join the enterprise level before the end of 2023. So if you're listening to this in December 2023, please join now. If you've been thinking about it or you're kind of going to join the next couple months I just want to give that heads up so that way no one's unexpectedly getting the price increase. But furthermore you, if you join in December of 2023, you're going to be able to have that monthly price locked in forever. So as long as you stay with Copilot, that monthly price will stay the same. Now if you leave and then try to come back, obviously that's not going to be in effect anymore. But if you want to get the price lock guarantee for life, you'll have to join before January 1, 2024. We've done a lot of work at Copilot and really moved at breakneck speed. We have done so so many new features this year. It's been incredible and because of that there's obviously been bumps and bruises in terms of bugs. There's been times when the system's gone down for a few minutes and it's not ideal. However, as we move into 2024, we are now switching over to AWS as our cloud service provider, making it much more stable, much more fast. We have a system now for better code review testing as well as a beta group so that when features are released it goes to the beta group before all the other users. These things will slow us down a little bit in development, but honestly it's going to allow us so much more stability and these extra costs is why we're raising the price at Copilot. We are very confident the value that has been added over the past years far in excess of what we're going to be raising prices. But I wanted to give a heads up so there is no unexpected changes without you knowing. So if you've been thinking about joining Copilot and you need help with your scheduling, your invoicing, your routing.

Automating things inside your business to be able to make more money, make it more profitable, get more customers using things like upsells and all the features we've built highly recommend. This is the time to move. Go to copilotsrum.com youm can actually book a one on one call with the team and actually walk through your account. Look through your business and if you're like not sure if Copilot's the right fit for you, just go to copilotcrm.com quiz and you can answer a bunch of questions about your business and it'll tell you if you joining Copilot is a good option for you now or if you should wait a little bit longer. But I did want to give this update just because this is the last month before we are raising prices and this is the last month to join with the price lock guarantee. So little PSA public service announcement for everyone. Let's jump back into the episode. I appreciate you all very much.

Hey, what's up?

Hey. How's it going?

Okay, so I'm in high school. I'm a senior this year. Next year I'm going to college.

Cool.

And I'm thinking of partnering with another kid who was a high school company. We Both did about 100,000 this year in revenue.

And I just want to get your. Your thoughts on. So his. His plan is he wants to do a lot of, like, mergers and acquisitions with other companies this spring and going into the summer. And he's hoping to get it up to like, like 750,000 by the time we go back to school and then hire somebody who's really experienced to run it while we're in school.

I was wondering if you think that's like, a realistic or feasible thing that we could do if we partnered.

Totally. I'm going to drop you just because there's a bunch of people in the queue, but I will answer this question. So I would say first and foremost, what you want to be careful of here is the whole game of merger and acquisitions. When people start saying that word, I ask myself, do they have the skills required to actually do mergers and acquisitions? Well, because if they're going to take a failing or mediocre business and turn it into great, you better make sure that you have some serious skills. I think sometimes we just take for granted the fact that people use buy a business and make it better. That takes, like, how are you going to run it any better than the company that's ran it for the last five years, knows every single customer and knows all of their properties, et cetera? It's unlikely you're going to unless you have a tremendous amount of skill. The fact that you Both have done $100,000 in annual revenue before end of high school, Fantastic. You're ahead of the game. However, I don't think you're ready to do five or six mergers and acquisitions because let's say all of those mergers go well and you build a business over the next six months that's doing 750,000, $800,000 in annual revenue, and then you're going to hire a general manager to run it while you're absentee owners and a partnership, by the way, I don't think that's going to end well. You're both at a period of time where life is going 100 different directions. You're going to have girlfriends, you're going to have school, you're going to have moving different places, you have different careers, pulling in different directions. I don't think this is the right time to get in a partnership. I don't think it's the right time to get into partnership with other people that have equal levels of skill as you going into things like mergers and acquisitions, let alone absentee ownership. Now, I am not trying to be a wet blanket on what you're trying to do. You're doing. You're going to crush life if you're doing a hundred thousand dollars in annual revenue before you get out of high school and mowing like Fanta. You're. You're going to do fantastic in life at college. Career, business, lawn care, it doesn't matter. So I'm not trying to beg on you to be a wet black and. But what I am saying is I. What I don't want to happen is you ruin the relationship with the friend. Because that partnership I don't think will do well just based upon statistics, without knowing anything about you guys, I just don't think it'll do well. The fact that you're gonna put all these multiple businesses together, it's like putting a whole bunch of family together that never knew each other, like, just smashing them all together, expecting that to somehow be a cohesive family unit and then throwing some other random person and be like, oh, yeah, you're the stepmom, you're the stepdad, and that's the new general manager you're gonna hire and then you're gonna bail.

I personally don't think that it would work out well, especially given your skill level, not to say that like really low or poor. You just don't have the experience that is going to require for me, like, yes, 100% that's going to succeed. So I feel like a wet blanket. But I also feel like I think you'll do better in school. Your relationship with this other person from high school will do better and you potentially might make more money and profit just doing it on your own. So, like, grow the business to say 200,000 on your own this next year, then go hire someone full time, give them half the revenue. And now you're going to go to school, make $50,000 in straight profit for doing absolutely nothing, and have someone super money motivated back home doing the jobs for you. And guess What? You own 100% of it. And so if life changes, you have to drag a partner through that deal because a $750,000 deal that you just did, a whole bunch of mergers and acquisitions to bring together and then you hired a general manager. That's going to be very messy to try to figure out when life takes you guys in different directions, as it inevitably will. Next caller is coming in from five, eight, seven. Welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on.

Yo, Mike. Hey, it's Liam here with Yard dogs.

How you doing? Good, brother. How you doing?

Hey, doing good, man. Doing good. Yeah. Quick question for you, man. So Obviously, like in 2022, we had that disaster season where we expanded, had to shut them down. We are debating here since we had a really good season, just focusing and niching in on Calgary to potentially opening up a new branch there in Edmonton and just want to run, to run by like a few things either like you start from scratch or acquire and just kind of like just trying to get like some advice, like what would be your recommendation for moving into a new market? Like discounts or like how do you kind of break in and just. I just want to hear kind of like your experience, your advice with that.

Yeah. The challenging part with your market is that there is nothing else outside Calgary until you hit Edmonton. Like, because typically what I would say if someone's trying to expand is like, hey, go market in that area for the next year and then if there seems to be a really good uptake, then you go split off into a second location.

This would mostly come down to the question of how much money you have because you have to realize that there can be a huge amount of capital inefficiency by starting a second location, especially given the fact that you've had one good year. Right. So in the perfect world, I'd probably tell you, like, hey, take one more year, stack more cash and make sure you train up the general manager that you're going to send over there. I'm going to go out on a limb and say you already have the general manager ready to go.

We do, we do. And I broken up the piano. I can just be straight with the numbers. We have half a million dollars in the bank right now, majority of that profit from Calgary. We know if we go to Edmonton, we're going to be losing consumers conservatively, $100,000.

Yeah.

But I don't want to stretch our focus too thin, if that makes sense too, you know.

Yeah. If you have $500,000, that makes things like if you actually have $500,000 in cash burning a hole in your pocket and this year's like Tax situation is going to be 30, 40% of that going bye bye. That becomes a little bit more of an interesting conversation. And so in that event, it really comes down to what the level of confidence you have in that general manager and what are you going to do differently than you did before when it didn't work out. And so I think you've identified a lot better like systems and the admin side, the marketing side. And now it's a matter like, is there enough demand there? So I would personally say, okay, next year we're going to send this GM in there. We're going to give them incentive to the moon in terms of growth of revenue. And it's going to be, hey, your first year is based on revenue. After that we're going to be switching over a profitability, profit sharing model. And so that first year I'm going to be giving them a bonus based upon the revenue per month. So they're going to, every year, every single month, they get over a certain amount of revenue, they get more pay. And so I would then decide, hey, this is how much we're going to spend on marketing. Here's the budget. We're going to go spend $150,000 on breaking this new market. And if it goes over that dollar amount and we aren't profitable, we're out. Or we're like, what is that line? Right? Like, do you spend another $50,000 and you know, expend to $200,000 of burn before you call, you know, pull the plug on it. But really it's going to come down to general manager. When they're that far away, it simply comes down to whether or not a general manager is going to push the envelope. Even if you have great marketing, even if you have good product market fit, even if it does well in terms if that GM doesn't do well, that location will fail. And so your level of confidence has to be like through the roof of that GM.

Yeah, no, 100%. Now I know you like, you follow her mod and all that. Do you recommend when you break it into like a new market, like really offer something where it's like too good of an offer for customers to turn down, like, I don't know, like a free first mo. Free first round when you're going into like a new market to get a lot of customers, or do you just go on there with like your scale standard pricing of like, you know, 70, $80 an hour, like, what's your kind of strategy for that?

Well, the thing is, when you start Giving things away, you got to ask yourself, okay, if I didn't give this away and I just charged full price and I converted that into customer acquisition cost and spend, would I actually be better off? So sometimes when people start go into a new market, I'm gonna like give all this stuff away for free. It's like, okay, you're giving $150 worth of stuff away for free. If you can acquire a customer for free for 50 bucks, there's no reason to give $150 worth of things away for free because you can go get three customers if you spent that $150 on marketing. And so what you nailed that I think in the past year is probably your customer acquisition cost. And that's why I need you to test in in Edmonton because if you identify what those numbers are you okay, if we know we can acquire a new customer for $60, we are willing to give away one free service, but we're not going to give away two or three because then all of a sudden it's just, it's just cheaper and more cost effective to actually go buy more customers via marketing and advertising or a salesperson or whatever you're doing.

Yeah, 100%, dude. Yeah. And yeah, no, that's basically all I really had. No. Thanks so much, Mike. Really appreciate it.

You are brother. Take care. All right, we are going to spend the rest of the show in the chat, so I'm going to. Sorry for everyone in the in the call queue. Thank you and goodbye. Bye bye. Yep. Ding, ding, ding. Okay, next here we got Christmas lights are great winter services. I've created a lot of opportunities and bids through cold calling and targeting my perfect clientele. Happy Thanksgiving. Cold calling general contractors and offering my services along with a follow up email including my legal info and insurance. If you do good work, you don't need ads. I agree with that. But if you want to grow and expand faster than the rate of the people referring you, typically advertising will help in that endeavor. Yeah, I don't run ads and more work than I can get to. I think it depends what type of service you offer. But generally speaking I agree. And it depends how big you want to get. Right? Like if you only want to grow to the size where you stay busy, then yeah, you probably don't need advertising, you don't need a great website, you don't need pay for performance, you don't need a lot of things. It just comes down to if you're trying to get 10, 15, 20 employees or multiple locations or general Managers, et cetera. Etc, there's going to be more scale involved. Finding good help is the biggest problem. Any recommendations for a general purpose truck setup? Kind of talked about that already. That's my current situation nailed on the head. I need to hire one to two rock stars and I'm willing to pay pretty darn well. Good considering. Yeah, I'd recommend P4P software.com just check out the free training on there. Even if you don't use the software, you can use the general thesis to pay your guys significantly more than the market wage. Is P4P a paid software now? I thought it was free. No, it's been paid for a few years. We're adding a whole bunch of stuff to it in the coming year. It's going to be fantastic.

I have 10 policies that I tell every customer to read when something happens. First thing I say is did you read the policies? Because short read, not 3 pages or 1000 word page essay. LOL. Is there a training program for Copilot? Yes, it's called Copilot University. I actually think someone told me the other day said I don't need a CRM. But I watched all the CRM training videos and it was super helpful to like create systems in my business because they were pretty small and so yeah, it's free. It's 100 free. Just go to mikeannies.com copilot and you'll get like two days worth of free training on creating systems in your business.

Wonder if he's ever talked with a subcontractor construction service type of business. Yeah, I talked a lot like roofing. The other day I was talking with a fireproofing company that was doing like $20 million in annual revenue. Yeah we got one coming up here in a couple weeks for the turnaround show that is Christmas lights, window cleaning and pressure washing. So we got some cool stuff coming up with the rates to Pay employees in P4P for snow be different than lawn care. It really depends on the frequency. If you do. If you do snow like 20 times in the winter then I recommend using P4P and then just giving them a, you know, the same, you know, budget hours, etc. If you only do snow plowing two, three, four times a year, I don't think you can do. You're doing it consistently enough to be safe when you're on PvP. And I would tell them to. I would recommend you simply give a really good base pay and then a big bonus if they get no damage cases Worked really well for us back in the day when we did snow. We are normally able to charge more per hour for snow but the hours aren't consistent. Yeah, exactly. Great job on the 2x revenue. Let's go.

Let's see what else we got here. It'd be very, I'd be very interested in seeing this. Can you DM it to me please? Aaron Hope should your first reliable guy in a location be a non exempt salary manager vs. PvP with trainer bonuses, etc. Typically if your first person is the manager, there's too many non revenue producing teams task for them to make P4P because they've got to do the hiring, they got to do the maintenance, they got to keep the shop looking good, they got to do estimates, they've got to do sales calls, you got to do a lot of things and so it's typically too difficult to pay them on P4P. Now that being said, a lot of times during the season, certain parts of the year guys out in the field are making more than my general managers on P4P and that's a little demoralizing. However, they don't have salary so during the winter months their hours might get cut significantly. P4P gets cut significantly compared to the general managers where it's a salary. So there's pros and cons. The thing that you're getting as a GM though is like a piece of the profits and a piece of that in perpetuity. And if you stay with the company for three or four years that gets really, really interesting versus P4P. Yes, you get more experience but you're probably not going to double or triple your pay. You might only get 10, 15, 20, 30% more over the next couple years versus a GM that sticks with the location, gets profit sharing and they can literally double or triple their income over the next several years.

What do Mike Andy's do for marketing? For advertising we do everything from Google, local services, Google Ads, Facebook ads, Angie's List. Like the whole list goes down the list. Every single market is different but number one right now is door hangers in most of my locations that I own. Thank you for your videos. Single person mowing this year and hopefully doubling my client list next season. Jason Kovacs Pay for performance is an absolute must. It is. What are some examples or offers or bonus that you could use for mowing services? Oh, there's so many. Just watch the video from a couple weeks ago about offers. You'll get a lot of ideas. The biggest one for mowing is going to be scarcity and Urgency during the spring around certain timing. So like certain like March 1st, that's the date like the last time to be able to get in the mowing service. It's also like we have four more spots remaining on your route. So those type of offers, the scarcity and urgency ones are typically the ones you're going to use the most for mowing because routes have a, have a play in it for your command center. How does your office team change the franchisees when there's 140 locations and attribute the cost to them? Yeah, so inside Copilot we have what we call Command center and they all get a profile of their own and they're able to, to switch accounts without having to log in and out. And it tracks where they're at and they literally track every single second. And we have it in a worksheet and over the course of the last four years we just have to refine that more and more and more and literally down the second we charge. Mergers scare me. The Dirt Life says like before they answer an email from a customer from a franchise, how do you scalably attribute that cost to that individual for franchise? So they're going to, for example, check this in batches. So for example, they're at Command Center. If they're managing the email for a franchisee, they're going to go in there twice a day. It might be three times a day, but I know it's at least twice a day. They're going to go in there and they're going to go through all the email. So it could. They could spend like three or four minutes if it's mostly spam or like they don't really nothing needs to happen. They could spend 15 or 20 minutes if there's estimate requests that they have to go through or work order changes or someone refuting a bill and they need to go and do some digging in the CRM. So it just depends. But we're not going to like spend 10 seconds doing an email and hop out of their account. We're going to do it in batches so that it is most efficient for them. Otherwise we bop in another account 50 times in a day. And super inefficient. So that's why typically we will block things in like two or three times a day. We get all your email cleared out, et cetera. So like I had to go like find an admin person to do that for me. But for the franchisees, they can tap into Command center and that basically have all that stuff being done for them by the second. What's the number to call in? Sorry, you missed it.

What else we got? Do you think that $10,000 in cash per employee is a good amount as a reserve in the bank or higher? $10,000 per employee is pretty good. That's probably about, you know, a month and a half or two months worth of, of.

What'S it called, Wages, salary, whatever. Um, so that's okay. My big thing is I want at least one month worth of revenue at the very least. Even if I'm in growth mode, I typically want at least one month worth of revenue. Any recommendations on where I can build an e commerce website? Squarespace is good. Shopify is good. Have you ever helped insulation companies get back on track? I would love your help in Michigan. Yeah, Greg. Hey, if you would love, I would love to have you on the turnaround show if you're, if you're willing to. Mikeandys.com turnaround just the other day I was talking with a company that did, like I said, almost $20 million in annual revenue doing fireproofing and some of that was insulation. And they would, they did a lot of like high rise buildings and commercial stuff. But hey, I am happy and I would love if you're willing for us to come out and film. We do it for free. It's on a my dime. I will come out to your location, we'll video it all and I'll hopefully help help you turn the business around. So I'd love to help. Mikeandy.com turnaround anyone can apply and we really like doing all sorts of industries. We got a couple of roofing companies coming up. We got a fencing company that just applied. We got window cleaning, Christmas lights and a pressure washing company coming up. So it's good stuff.

Approaching the wilderness, do I grind through it or stay small and stock up cash to blast through it down the road? I still don't have an answer on which is the better option. So for those of you not familiar, the wilderness is what we call 200,000 to $500,000 in annual revenue. Typically it's where you don't see any more increased profits compared to being below that number. And sometimes you get around to 50 and still be okay just depending on how you're structuring the business. So it really comes down to your stress level and your level of angst. Like if financially is really causing a lot of pressure, I would wait one year at least, stack some cash and then grow. Later on you'll, your family life will be better. You're probably better psychologically and emotionally. But if you're like gearing up, you really love this thing. It's growing, the family is going and supporting you. I just, you know, bomb through as fast as possible. It like going from 200 to 500,000 is you getting one truck and two more employees in the spring rush and being able to really capitalize on the leads coming in and just bombing right through it. How's the Salis park location doing? A pretty good. The general manager decided that he wanted to go back into being in the field. So we basically are getting a gen. No, a new general manager this coming spring. He wants to get some more experience and then he will likely go back and be in the gm. So there was no bad blood or anything bad that happened. He's gonna be a fantastic gm. Honestly, it's just a matter of he wanted to get more experience in the field before leading and training other people, which I thought was really admirable. And he's been great in the field, which is very rare for someone to be able to go from general management back to the field worker and like still do well. And he has been so I really respect him for that and he'll come back being a great GM down the road. Corey Bigelow, when do you. When you do P4P and say 25 to 30% of labor, does that include my side of the taxes, retirement, other Benefits? It is 25% to 30. Whatever percentage you're giving the team members, you're giving them percentage of the labor revenue. So if you charge $80 an hour and you have five $5 hours worth of labor, that's $400 worth of labor revenue. You're giving them a percentage of that. Don't worry about taxes and all this other stuff. You're giving a percentage of labor revenue. That's. That's really what you want to focus on.

Taylor says, I found my cap. Whoops. I found my cap by myself. As a small welding business is around 250,000 to 300,000. I'm ready to hire now ASAP. Let's go, Taylor. Good job, man. A welding company. My brother in law is a welder. It's a good, very good industry and good trade. I can't wait to start. P4P Amity, let's go. I think you guys just joined copilot too. Let's go. I saw you guys talking with Christian the other day. Can anyone give me advice for how I should create a business name? Literally just flip a coin. It does not matter. You can change it down the road.

First year doing PvP a lot of guys doing their first season struggle to get bonuses. More experienced guys are doing great. Is this normal or our expectation for the average employee too high? Two things I would say. Number one, if someone has more experience, you should expect them to be more efficient. They should make more money on PvP. That makes a lot of sense. And if it wasn't that way, they're probably lazy. Like if you get more experience, you should be making more money. If you're brand new, yes, it is harder to make more money on P4P because you aren't as efficient. That being said, if it's your first year in business, it's likely that your route density is not great, you're inefficient at routing scheduling, you're not accurate on your estimates. So it does prevent sometimes people getting from P4P in your first year of business just because due to inexperience as an estimator, as a manager, as a dispatcher, etc. But it is very common that people with more experience make more money on PvP. But that's how it should be because if they make more money for the business, they should make more money themselves. What you're also doing though is if someone new does come into the business and kicks butt because they work so hard and they figure things out quickly, there's not like oh you have to wait a year year or two years or three years to make good money. You can simply start making good money right away using P4P. Will P4P software work for ornamental structural welding business? As long as you have labor revenue? Taylor as long as you have some piece of the estimate that is considered labor revenue. Whether you use budget hours and multiply that by an hourly rate like I just did there, or even if you said that's a $2000 job and 500, that's going to be supplies and 1500, that's 1500 is labor. As long as you have a dollar amount for labor for every job you can use pay for performance. There's some companies in there that would blow people's mind that that's like all different industries that have used P4P because they know they can attribute some function of labor to dollar amount. So per brick, per sandwich, per whatever, if I can attribute how much labor revenue was created, I can use pay for performance.

Colin got a late start on Christmas lights which is a bit depressing. However, raised my prices and cut my clientele clientele down. So I'm Making the same amount with less work. Any quick tips for systematizing Christmas lights? Oh, that's a lot. You know what, that's really cool. Coming up in a couple weeks, we're doing, we have a turnaround with a company called Mr. Sudsy. They do cleaning, window cleaning, and they also do Christmas lights. That episode has a ton of stuff about Christmas lights.

So stay tuned. Limo's lawn care. What a good question to ask when buying out a company. Possibly have a opportunity with a guy wanting to retire. All right, so I would recommend type in. Let me just make sure. Because we changed the name on this thing. This is video that's like an hour and a half long that I made about buying companies and how to value them and everything. So I'm going to do merger Mike Andes and see if it comes up.

No, merger doesn't work. Let me see if acquisition does. It used. Acquisition used. So your acquisition. I talk about all about valuations and how to like value if you're buying. How to increase your value of your business. Oh man, I can't find it now. Brutal.

Okay, there is a YouTube video like two years ago that I made an hour and a half and it talks all about valuations and what they're worth and how to value companies for trying to buy them out. So just look for that. Can anyone give me advice on how I should create a business name? Freddie Profit says, Do you implement the profit first method in your business? What do you think about it if you do? I think it's fantastic. If you have problems with spending money, if you see money and you think it needs to be spent because it's sitting there, then you should have. Profit first is a measure of discipline, kind of like a budget. Personally, I know that I'm going to spend everything in the businesses on growth and expansion and I don't sprint fluvishly. And me seeing more money in the bank does not make me want to go spend more money. It doesn't. So it would be a constraint on the business and just add honestly a lot of bookkeeping, which is already pretty expansive for me because I have all these different businesses going on. I like the idea though, and that is like pay yourself a piece of the profits first and then go figure out the rest of the money being spent on operations and actually making the business work. Because most people don't spend end up getting any profit because they take that out as last. I like the idea, but for me personally it creates a lot more bookkeeping when I have all the different businesses and When I'm trying to grow and scale and I don't have a problem with spending money. Walter Rocha Should I get a small loan to make it through the winter or ask for a prepants for next month, the growing season. I have 4 guys less than 10k in the bank. I plan on raising prices in the spring.

I wouldn't ask for prepayments because you're robbing Peter to pay Paul at that point. Like if you're gonna give someone 20, 30 off, you're basically giving away all your profits for next year to get prepayments. So that could end up costing you more than a short term loan if you have short term. I would really be looking at your. Your what people owe you in terms of money. Like how much your accounts receivable is. We were at this location doing a turnaround recently and literally 25 of their annual revenue was locked up in receivables and they were like why? We were always hurting for money. I'm like 25% of your revenue, like three months of revenue is locked up into just how much people owe you. Like I'd be looking there. I'd be looking for jobs that you need to get deposits on. I'd be looking for jobs that are halfway finished that you can collect on. Things like that. Relatively high manager salary plus low percentage profit sharing plus 40% profit sharing gets higher of the two at the end of the month. Oh, I think it was giving an some ideas for someone to do their general manager compensation. What are the free P4P books coming? Great question. Hopefully next week we literally sold out within 24 hours so I ordered 200 more. They should be here next week and I'll sign those out and send them out to you.

How is Copilot going for you? I'm probably going to switch from jobber to copilot soon. Copilot is going good. We have a Tomorrow we are switching to aws. It's gonna be fantastic. It'll be a huge transition but it'll definitely put us on the best cloud computing options out there and give us options for redundant servers in different localities. We'll probably put some over in Europe so that we're closer to those. Put some in Australia so we're closer to. It just helps with speed, load speed. A whole bunch of stuff we're doing with aws. Tomorrow we're switching over and it's a big deal and so that's been really good. Where job costing and price matrices comes out next week to the beta group and then the week after that to the public users. That's really cool. So there's a lot coming out. We have more bumps and bruises along the way though, because we are adding features so quickly and so comparatively to other softwares, I would say we have more bugs than we would like and more than other people comparatively. However, we probably produce about three times as many more features as any other software. I'm pretty confident saying three times than any other software I know. In terms of the home service industry, we are so grateful. Looking forward to joining Copa this month, looking forward to expanding new branches in 2024. Let's go. Amity hi, I'm new. What is P4? P4P stands for pay for performance. If you go to P4psoftware.com there's a new website, completely new. Same thing with Copilot Serum. By the way, if you haven't checked out the two websites, they're awesome. Go check them out. They're brand new, we just made them and at both of them there's a video at the top that I think you'd really enjoy watching regardless if you join the software. And I made it more presentation style and like kind of sharing my story. So go to p4psoftware.com There's a video at the very, the very top. It says like how I went from broke to making $280,000 in profit a year. Go check it out. I think it'll be really, really not only entertaining, but Super Educational. Craig McMullen if you are doing full service on each yard, trimming bushes, spraying flower flower beds and mowing, you don't do all of it each week. So how do you use P4P if one week they take longer versus other weeks. Great question, Craig. So this is basically if someone is like doing level billing like 300amonth and they pay for all these services, when you set up the service, you're going to attribute a certain amount of budget hours for each of those services. Let's say half a budget hour for mowing, one hour for bush trimming, whatever it is. And then you're going to set up all those services in Copilot underneath what's called a level billing contract. That level billing contracts have charged the customer 300 every single month. But when the crew shows up, they're going to see mowing half an hour, bush trimming, one hour. They're not going to see the other five services that are part of that level billing contract. And you're only going to pay them for the budget hours completed on those services, it's all about setting up the set, the services with individual budget hours. Why did I just, why did I just lose my. My camera just turned off? Whoa. One second, one second.

Let's see what happened here, folks. Why did my camera just turn off? And we're back. See, we have a new camera. Big fancy, shiny camera got in because all the other cameras got stolen on the last turnaround. We were flying from Chicago and they got stolen from the, the bag. You know, we had a Pelican case, two cameras, a GoPro, a whole bunch of microphones. Absolute insanity. So this camera is brand new. So I hope it, I hope you'll like it because it is expensive. These things are not cheap. Jardine. Brian.

How do you charge customers for percentage of overhead when you're your first year of excavation and only close 15 jobs or 30 days of work? I would not worry about your percentage of overhead because your first year going, as you grow, your percentage of overhead from month to month to month is changing so fast that charging a percentage overhead is actually pretty inaccurate. So this is sometimes where you got to be careful about like job costing when it comes to percentage based. Because if you're always growing your business, how much you're always charging every single month or being having pay for certain overhead expenses goes up dramatically and it also changes like based upon your service, etc. So just be careful of that. I would not worry about this in your first year of excavation. I would focus on getting more customers and then I would focus on systematizing it so that you can go hire someone to do the work for you. Because ultimately our goal is to be able to sell service to a customer for 80 or 100 or whatever dollars per hour and then go be able to go give someone else a third, a quarter of that to go do the work that is an employee. And so that would be no the delta there is created by systemization. Like if you actually look at your service business as I simply, my whole goal is to take $25 labor and turn that one hour of their labor into $100. Well, why? Well, because you got the equipment, you have systems, you have procedures, you have employees, you have staff. All of the value creation and the profits in your business are dependent on you taking that $25 hour per hour labor and turning their hour into $100 worth of value to the customer. And, and that comes in the form of equipment and procedures and marketing and websites. And if you think about like that, it starts to really change the way you look. At your business.

If you are a solo franchisee for Augusta, is there a requirement to have a yellow truck? Yes, it is a requirement to have a yellow truck. We have new decals coming out. They're fantastic. I'll be showing some pictures here pretty soon. We're getting four new trucks. I'm going to have them all decal them wrapped up, and I'll share some pictures. They look really cool. Mike P4P took my guys from 17 an hour to averaging around 22 to 25 dollars per hour. Let's go. We are beginning to develop a reputation as the company who pays nearly 25 an hour to cut grass. What a blessing. Freed up hours.

Trinity lawn care, let's go. Good work, man.

Great job.

Makes me very happy. Freddie Profit says, do you think spring is the best time to raise prices? I think raising prices, the best is when you're at capacity. So when you either have to hire more employees to get more work done or you have to get more trucks in order to get more work done, that is the best time to raise prices, irregardless of what time of year it is.

How's the copilot Quickbooks integration? I'm not a huge fan of it. I'm not a huge fan of integrating quickbooks with any CRM unless you have a lot of years of experience doing it. If you know how quickbooks works and you know how sinks work, great, do it. I see 95% of people are like, oh, I see this button that said I can integrate with QuickBooks 95% of the time. They end up spending so much time on mistakes between the two sinks. I would not recommend it. I have a warning on copilot that literally when you're signing up to do the integration, I warn you of this. If you do it. If you. If you've done it before, you'll be just fine. What is some advice you can give me? I'm 15. My father and have been has been trying his best to build up a business, but we are at this point where we are not professional in the perfect world. You convince him to educate himself a little bit as to why doing that is a good thing for the business. It's gonna be difficult, I would say, for most fathers to learn from their sons about how to run their business. So you might need to do this in a very indirect way. And even if there's certain videos of mine that you like, you know you want him to hear you, don't go tell him to go watch these because you think he needs to learn them, you would need to be a little more creative. How you like come up with this. For example, you know, whether it be getting access to a course or a book or something like the very first, the first book I wrote that's like more of a story. Might be a good one called Zero Turn. That one might be good. Get them for a Christmas present. Why is my camera keep turning off? It must be getting too hot. Alright folks, camera. Seriously.

You pay $4,000 for these cameras and they seriously just can't turn on. Seriously, I think it got too hot. It's been an hour and 15 minutes and it has a massive lens on this thing. Okay folks, we're going to call it a day because the camera is puking out here on Black Friday. But if you've stuck with me this far, make sure, make sure that you go to mikeannies.com blackfriday okay, there's three deals and then there's a giveaway. First deal is if you sign up for home service web design. You get six months of MBA for entrepreneurs for free.

Okay?

Inside there we have hundreds of lectures about profit and loss statements, balance sheets, law, like a whole bunch of really, really cool stuff that you will need to know regardless of what industry you're in. All right, what else do we got? Offer number two. If you sign up for landscape business course or you sign up for lawn care web design, you're going to get all seven designs. There's more than 70, like 90 now of postcards, door hangers, flyers, just a ton of really great material as well as other contracts and a whole bunch of stuff, business plans, etc all from Lawn Care Media.com all right, so landscape businesscourse.com check it out. Lawn Career Design.com check it out. Lawn CareMedia.com check that out. You can literally get $500 worth of value for free. Now this is the really cool one I think you should really take advantage of because it's actually kind of insane the fact that you can sign up for $129 a month for Copilot and get $1,100 worth of free software from CO from P4P Software. So if you sign up for Copilot CRM, this is Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, four days this weekend you get six months of P4P software for free. That's usually $199 in per month. So that's why six months of that's like $1,200 now. And for everyone that takes any of those three offers, this weekend, you're going to be put into a drawing because we're going to give you two of these away. And typically they're 45 minutes, their Zoom call, it's recorded and you pay $1,299. If you don't believe me, go to mikeannies.com coach. That price is going to be going up yet again in a couple of weeks because I can only do one or two of these a week. So we're going to have two of these a week, two of these away. And we're going to do a drawing tomorrow and we're going to another one on Monday. So get in now for any of these three offers and you'll be put in the drawing to get a one hour consultation with myself on zoom. And I'll help you as much as I possibly can. But.

If you want something for absolute free, here it is. All right. We have filled the December turnaround series, so we got several people we're gonna be flying out and doing turnarounds for in December that's been filled up. But if you want me to come to your place in January, I fly out. I pay for the hotel, I pay for the rental car, I pay for the flights, I pay for all my, my media team to come there. And we spend weeks editing your video.

Okay.

It doesn't cost you a single penny. And I literally come out there for a few hours and talk to you about your business for free. Go to mikeannies.com turnaround and if you're watching this, there's been a couple hundred people listening to this already and there's like 97 people live right now. It's completely free. There's no strings attached. I'm not asking anything that you have to pay for. Okay. Mikeandy.com turnaround I don't care if you're in welding. We had a welder on here today. Construction. We had construction person on here. Insulation. We had an installation person on here today. Or any home service industry. I can help you, I think, really improve your business. And I don't need money to do it. I wanted to simply be like, capture it for the community so they can learn. And so everything I do is sort of community driven in that it's like we, all the money we make from the media side of things goes right into these turnaround shows right now. We spend gobs of money on it, by the way. It's not, it's not cheap to like fly, fly around the country to three different states for a week with Team members that are all getting paid overtime. And then, like last week, we lost $10,000 worth of gear got stolen in our luggage. It's expensive. So all of the stuff that we do, like, whether it be the Black Friday deals, all this stuff, it goes right into making these shows. And we're just going to make them better and better and better. We have a lot of plans. We're trying to hire two more video editors so we can. We can increase the amount of videos we put out. The turnaround series, it's going to be expensive, but it's really funded by all of you, and I really do appreciate it. So take advantage of some of those offers. They're fantastic. Really, really good stuff. And by the way, all right, little secret. I wasn't going to tell anyone this until camera went out again. One second. All right, that was a pause for dramatic effect. This camera is nuts. Literally. That camera with the lens cost $4,000, and it is literally going black because I think it's getting too hot. Okay, so let me tell you a secret, then we'll call it a day. All right? The secret is this. I'm going to tell everyone a couple weeks, but I'll share with everyone here that's made this far in the video. Okay? If you sign up for copilot, your price will never go up in the future. If you sign up before January 1st. Okay? So if you sign up for Copilot by January 1st, 2024, we're locking everyone's price in forever. Like, not for a little bit. Like, your monthly price at the enterprise level will never go up. And now if you're changing subscriptions around, if you leave for a month and then you come back, we can't honor it because it's too hard for us to track. But if you're in enterprise, like at the top tiered subscription, which like 95% of people in copilot are in, in enterprise, if you're in that level of subscription, your price will never go up. It is going up in January. We are raising the price of copilot, okay? And we will raise it every year, just incrementally, just so we never have to shock people. But if you want to get a lifetime price lot guarantee, which means your price for monthly will never go up, you'll have to join before the end of December. Okay? So before January 1, 2024, I'll announce it live later on in December. But I just want to let everyone know here that's on the live because you guys are killing it. So let's. Because the camera is dying on us. Make sure you go to mikeannies.com brack Friday. Take advantage of the deals. Make sure you by doing so you're able to get in a drawing to do it. Join a one on one call with myself and those can be personal and you don't have to share them with the world or I can record them and share them if you want. It's really, really up to you. So have a fantastic day. And if you want something for absolute free, if you have a business, go to mikeandys.com turnaround and I would love to come out and help you in your business. I get a lot of satisfaction out of it. I get a lot of joy. I hate traveling, by the way, but it's extremely fun to go into a business blind and get some just very few numbers. Hop in and be able to see the issues and be able to hopefully help you grow your business and make it more profitable because that's what we're here to do. I have no shame in saying I try to make small business owners rich and I think we can do that. Thank you all very much. Have a fantastic weekend. Happy Thanksgiving. Happy Black Friday. Happy Cyber Monday. Just make sure you go to mike gaines.com black Friday and take advantage of some of those sweet, sweet Black Friday deals.

Oh, I'm still live.