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 the. This is the number right here. 361-733-3333. 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 gonna 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 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, that keynote that I gave in that talk, I really wanted to not only just talk about how to make a great offer when you're at, when it comes to advertising so good that customers say stupid saying no to, but also wanted 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 that has 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 revenue of the business. 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 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 case, 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, it 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 that they're not going to pay until their lawn is green, until their lawn is weed free. If you're doing fertilization and weed control, promise customers these things, give them guarantees so that 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 going to 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 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 this, those type of offers in your advertising. Now, today we are doing a live show. So if you would 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 gonna 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 of that's in there. If the second offer is if you sign up for landscape business course or you sign up for longer 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 that we're closer to 100 now and includes business plans and ways for you to get estimates out in 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. Show you a couple of these. These are just the, 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 in your screen so let me just remove that. There's core aeration. This door hanger here, you're in the green industry like lawn caremedia.com these are instant quote door hangers where 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 landscape businesscourse.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 six free months of cope of of P4P software dot com. All right, so if you're thinking been thinking about joining Copilot CRM, if you sign up today, you you're going to get 6 free months of pvp 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 gonna get for free for six months if you sign up for Copilot this weekend. And so we're adding a whole bunch of stuff to P4P 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 a typically almost $1200 in value. Cause 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 gonna get entered into win a one on one call with me. Zoom in out here a little bit. You're gonna enter to win a one on one call with me. I'm gonna 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, if you 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've got a couple of 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 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 start 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, like as it is right now, it's not gonna be worth a whole lot. It's gonna be worth less than the cost of acquiring all those customers, likely. So I would stick with the business whether regardless of whether or not you join Augusta, I would stick with it. Sometimes people wanna sell the business cause 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 and 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, some, you know, person that just really wants to buy a business and willing to overpay and pay three $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 makes sense.

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

Well, the big thing is if you.

Sold right now, the equipment's 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.

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 going to probably just take, you know, let's just call it 50, 60 mowing customers, like, 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 center 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 going to 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 going to be hearing back from the team here pretty soon, so we'll see what we can do.

Okay.

All right, take care. 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, Mowing, shrub trimming, mulch and project.

Yeah, no one like I, I don't even go to the doctor and read all their policies and procedures or their 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 recommend.

So I think go ahead. But I think where this comes up is this time of year in my area with lease 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 leave, which is double the amount of time that I should be spending there if I were to take care of your leaves. 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 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 of this year for mowing. So they're not going to 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, 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 in the first in line, click this button below and we'll get an estimate for mo for leaf cleanup every other week throughout the leaf season. And so it's. It's really, really straightforward. And you could even below that be like, if you're. If there are too many leaves, we are going to blow them into the. 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'd 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. 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 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 habit. Okay. Every single August 30th, we're sending out a message about leaves to 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 could 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 skip services or 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 roundabout but doesn't matter. So I do have a question. Right now we have three people doing about 300k right now. Sports guy is going for the 1st of March. Right now we got 40k in the bank.

Basically the question is now we are haggling a little bit about type of truck. I'm numbers guy and I don't care right now basically we discussed that topic just for you to to note. Basically like lawn care is like your Brighton but for us it is like hatch and bush training. So we are basically gotta go to the dump like once or twice, sometimes even twice a day just of debris. And we need a dump bed like the Abeco Daily and Renaulmass 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 dying. So right now we have IVECO 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 Dan, you have to call that 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 2022 K and they are like you got them like in huge quantities basically. So basically just want to ask you on your 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 it's the question, should we stay to Iveco or should we go for Renomaster?

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, 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 F150. I don't care. It's just like having the same is nice for the sake of maintenance, for 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 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 because 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 and the type of truck you have, the brand of it is not super important. And it's not super important you spend more money to make sure they all match. Next caller is coming in from nine seven, eight. 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 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 it is because we don't have two founders. Right. If I have a founder led company I'm typically 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. And 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 a 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 going to be really profitable on it though, because you raise prices, you're going to systematize things, etc. 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 like the whole, the whole reason you're doing this is it sounds like more of a cultural thing. Let's go ahead and just shoot straight for getting one of the guys the general manager in 2025. But now when they go start their own, their quote unquote own location, they're already going to 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 key leads 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 Gusta 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 one of the teams going to become a general manager at this location. We're going to market into that location this year. We going to try to get a route filled. 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 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 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. But if you wanted to start like a separate webpage and then do a Google my Business, a 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 from an admin perspective and already have 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 806. Welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on.

Hey, Andy, my name is Frank Garcia. I, 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, full time. And I've grown my business this year about 400% in, 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 are you kind of burnt out and you just want to see a little bit more profit and bank from, you know, kind of the fruit of all your labor?

Gotcha. So no, I, I'm not burnout. Love being out in the field. Love the challenges. We just took on 40 accounts for Christmas lights and have quadrupled our profit this just in two months of installing them. And so I'm perfectly fine with being out in the field. So there's no burn out 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. It's 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 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 going to probably hire, probably going to 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 220, 230 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, the ghosting of. Of them has been the kicker. Paying them well. 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, 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 working on the field doing $100,000 in annual revenue, to you having, 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 each. 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 point is like, oh, my word, I just got 23 employees. I'm not making any more money than I was before. And that's actually 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 into 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 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 to, you know, it is 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, put pushed 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 what allows them to be efficient and keeps that drag on profitability as the company begin, continues to grow. And so that's the biggest shocker that I see is most people go from solo, making like 100, $150,000 in annual revenue and, 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, 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 gonna 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, 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 what 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 move away for the wintertime. These are valuable propositions to our customers. And just take the mind shift of like, oh, I am not going to go in this defensive mindset. I'm going to stay aggressive. And I 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 267. Welcome the show and thank you for coming on.

Hey, what's up?

Hey, how's it going?

Okay, so I'm in. 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 thoughts on. So his plan is he wants to do a lot of, like, mergers and acquisitions with other companies this spring and going into the summer. Summer. And he's hoping to get it up to 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, you just buy a business and, like, 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 and 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.

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 a hundred 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 $100,000 in annual revenue before you get out of high school and mowing it like, fantastic. 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 or be a wet black and. But what I am saying is, 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 going to 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 going to hire and then you're going to bail.

I personally don't think that it would work out well. It 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 hire 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 5, 8, 7. 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 by like a few things either like we 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, 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 is 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 are going to 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, put 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. I broke out the P and L. I can just be straight with the numbers. We have half million dollars in the bank right now. Majority of that's probably profit from Calgary. We know if we go to Edmonton, we're going to be losing 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 the level of confidence you have 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 with 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, yeah, 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 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 100, $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 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 modes 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, a free first mo. Free first round when you're going into a new market to get a lot of customers, or do you just go on there with like your 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, like, 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 50 bucks, there's no reason to give $150 worth of things away for free because you could 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 got 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, 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 or two rock stars and I'm willing to pay pretty darn well. Good considering. Yeah, I'd recommend P4P software dot 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.