My Lawn Care Business Lost $125K in One Month!

Negative $125,039 for the month of December, just for the franchise. And so, again, obviously, that's like, oh, my word, he's lost $125,000 in one month, literally. That means that expenses were, like, 165 grand. Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes, and you're listening to the Business Bootcamp podcast. Today we're going to be sharing the numbers from all my businesses from December 2020. I hope it's inspirational. I hope it's educational. Before we get into today's show, a big thank you. Today's sponsor, which is Gusto. Gusto has supported the show for literally years before any other sponsor came to me. And to this day, there's sponsors that want to sponsor, and I don't. I say no. Because Gusto's been there for so long, they've supported this show so much. They're big, big support of a lot of small business owners and. And creators for business. So I know I've said it before, the benefits of their software for your payroll and all the rest of it, and especially this time of year when you're trying to get your W2s together, very, very helpful to keep it all organized. But I can't overemphasize enough my appreciation to them as we kind of go into 2021, for continuing to support the show and allowing me to do what I do. You know, when they first became sponsors, it was not so much. It was a bigger deal than it is now even. Cause now, like, it's a smaller percentage of, like, revenues and things. Right. But when they first gave me my first, you know, sponsorship, I was just overwhelmed and thrilled. And that was a big piece of why this whole studio actually came about, because of them giving us a good commitment on sponsorship. So big things to them. Check out Gusto.com Bootcamp for a free 90 day trial of their software. All right, so as per usual, each month I share the profit and loss statement from my businesses, and I go through them. I show my revenues and I show my profits. And so if you haven't watched previous months, please do that. A lot of people are new to the channel in the past month, and they're going to. This is going to be your first one. Please watch the other ones. You'll get some more context. I'll share more about, you know, what's happening. And the reasoning behind me doing this is because I want you to be getting the full picture. I want you to get the full picture of what we're doing. And I want to look back in five years and have every single month of revenues, every single month of profits, being public, being able to be shared. And you could literally make. It'd be really cool to watch a movie, a two hour movie of a condensed version of every single month's revenues and profits. That's gonna be a really cool story. So I'm looking forward to that. But more importantly, I'm doing this because I want to have full transparency because so many of you are the reason why the businesses do well in terms of the franchise. You know, people buying the course, the, you know, the podcast sponsors. There's just so many people out there, the franchisees, part of Augusta Lawn Care, that have supported me. And so I feel like, in my opinion, I want to be as open and transparent about the numbers, where the money's going and try and allow you all to hold me accountable, to be a good steward of the money that is being given. And I believe we do a good job of that, in my opinion. And I will continue to strive to do so and try to do so. And then the last reason I do this is because I want to inspire people. If you're just getting started, if you are in the grind right now, like, this is hopefully inspiring you to keep going, don't give up. Realize that there is going to be a day when you break through. If the business is growing, maybe it seems like you're not really making any money. It's your first year in business. Like, that's horrible. Like, I remember, like the crate. Like, this is why I wish I would have been doing this, you know, six, seven years ago when, you know you can't make payroll and you're borrowing money from family and like you're trying to like juggle money between accounts and credit cards and all that. I remember those days. First couple years in business is tough. So if you're there, I hope this is inspiration to you. And I do not do this to gloat or brag and things like that. I try my best just to show the numbers to accomplish those things I just mentioned. Okay, let's delay, let's jump into it because I'm very excited because this is our first month where we, we had a lot of loss and in part in most of the reason why there was losses is because end of year, it's December and we have a big tax bill coming up and I wanted to get minimized as much as possible. So the businesses that have a big loss, I'm going to explain them and go through them. But I'm very excited because in the past, I don't think, like, four or five months, I don't think any of the businesses have lost money. I'm just looking through here. 1, 2, 3, 4. The past four months, none of the companies have lost money at any given time or any month. It's been very consistently profitable. But December was a great month because we lost money. I'm very excited about this. Wait six months. Wow. That's pretty good. Anyways.

So I'm going to share my numbers and December, obviously, end of the year, cut taxes. We did a lot of. Bought a lot of things that we're going to need in 2021 and investments so that we can minimize tax bills. All right, I'm going to go through these in quick, quickly. If you're a landscaper, a lawn care professional, business owner. I'm going to be posting a separate one. Just more in detail on the lawn care and landscaping side of things. But for now, we're going to go through these quickly. All right, so for Augusta lawn care of Bellingham's, the Bellingham location revenues were $90,863. We lost so negative net profit, $27,199. Why? So they bought a bunch of stuff for end of year. They bought equipment. They bought a truck. They bought seven or eight ramp racks, which are, like, three grand a pop.

They bought a whole bunch, like, hand tools and equipment. A whole bunch of stuff and everything, like all the gadgets we needed for next spring. And the tools and equipment. We are good to go. There's nothing really we should have to buy unless we see some crazy amount of growth. And we need more trucks, but we got an extra truck. We got maintenance on all the vehicles. Tires are changed out on all the vehicles. Like, we're ready to roll. And so I was actually very happy that we only lost 27,000 because they probably spent a good, I don't know, 40 on equipment. So, anyways, very happy with that. Okay, next one up is Blaine anytime fitness. So in Washington state, they still want the gyms to be closed. I'm hoping in a week that changes. However, we stayed open. All right. We did that for a lot of reasons. I think I talked about in the last episode as to why we stayed open. And it definitely wasn't about money. It was mostly around the fact that three out of the four staff members wouldn't have gotten any much, if any unemployment, as well as the fact that in Washington state, people can't go outside and exercise it's horribly cold and rainy. And so we felt almost obligated to keep our gym open for our members sake. And that's reflected in the numbers because we only made $33,975 in revenue and we lost 748. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that there was. I did end of year bonuses for the staff members and I don't do Christmas bonuses, but I did end of year, this time only at the gym, because they were just so cooperative with keeping the gym open. And they could have made a really big pain for me if they were against that or if they wanted to report me or whatever, but they were all super cooperative. I felt obligated that any profits made in that month were given to the employees because they just, they did an amazing job of caring for the members, keeping the place open, keeping it clean, adjusting and like quickly adapting and pivoting when the governor all of a sudden just told gyms they had to close. Anyways, next one, Next one is landscape business course, business, bootcamp, podcast, everything that is, you know, this is the book back there, which is not very much. Landscapebusinesscourse.com this is the conference. This is like Landscape Summit that's coming up next week. This is lawn careweb design.com all kind of online digital stuff that I do. Total revenues for December were 27,842. Profits 24,783. Let's go. All right, so really profitable again, that has a lot to do with the fact that we are pre selling conference tickets and a bunch of the expenses we actually put on the franchise. And we are doing that because of the. We're chalking up to basically a marketing expense and we're funneling that through the franchise. So did a little bit of work with the CPA to figure out what we can do there, and that was the best thing to do, essentially. All right, so.

The online space, though, the stuff that I do is obviously high margin. There's not a whole lot of expenses to it. And the expenses that do come out, I take quite a few of those from the franchise, for example, like Josh, he creates these videos. But I look at that as marketing really for the franchise. We don't spend money on ads for the franchise. We don't spend money really to advertise becoming a franchisee. It's the videos. It is me sharing content. And so we run a lot of those expenses through the franchise. Okay, next one up is the franchise. So again, this is. This is the V. This is the good one. This is the good one. I'm looking forward to this because I'm reason I'm looking forward to this is because for the past, you know, three months it's been super profitable every month. There's that one month it was like $50,000 profit, etc. Well, hold on. Your Britches franchise, Augusta Franchise LLC which we're chained to an S Corp this year or coming year 2021 $40,172 in revenue and a whopping negative $125,039 for the month of December just for the franchise. And so again obviously that's like oh my word, he's lost $125,000 in one month. Literally that means that expenses were like 165 grand. Okay, so this is the part that I enjoy and why I'm looking, I was looking forward to sharing these numbers is because there's months where you do ch heavily in the business and what's different between the Augusta local shop that is investing and needing that equipment for next spring. The difference with the franchise is that the money that I spent here, the 125,000 in negative profitability here is probably not even going to be seen by the franchisees for six to 12 months and definitely not being seen by the public even noticeable what I'm investing in for another two years in terms of this like we heavily developed software and this massive investment in December from the franchise was absolutely an investment in the future of the franchise. I basically took every single dollar of profit from the franchise the entire year and more. Another $60,000 on top of that. I moved in December because I know it's a long term move. Literally no one's even gonna know what it's really about. It's software. Most a lot of this is big time software development beyond P4P stuff that we have in the works and we're planning on and I'm very much looking forward to it. The franchisees are hear about it a little bit next week when we have our meeting. But it's not even going to be seen in a really useful and there's going to be like in two years people are gonna be like okay, that's incredible. But right now you got to put the 125 grand in right? So you reap what you sow. This is a long term game and we truly believe that we can and are going to create an unfair advantage for our franchisees in the long term. And we're going to use software to do it. And that requires some significant investments. And we've been doing it all year long for the past, you know, all of 2020. But in December, I took the opportunity to prepay some big expenses when it comes to software development. And I'm very much looking forward to what that's going to bring in 2021. Yes, some P4P version three is what we're building and gonna be launching here in the next month or so. However, the stuff that we're doing beyond that is what I'm very excited about and looking forward to that immensely. But yeah, negative $125,000 on a P and L is nothing to cheer about. It's just that I really look at as a massive investment. I know in two years I'll start seeing the yield on that. And the yield will be that we have an unfair advantage against any independent lco. And I know we can do it. Looking forward to it dramatically. Okay, last one is Augusta Lawn Care Mount Vernon. That's a second corporately owned location.

And they did a gross revenue of $16,337 and they profited 2,993. Again, this is Mount Vernon is a location that's much smaller. We just got it started this year and it is currently being ran by just one general manager. During the winter it's just him working. There's not even another employee. Next spring we're gonna be. Our goal is the more than double, almost triple the Mount Vernon location next year. So really looking forward to that. And they did also buy a vehicle and so there's some expenses in there as well, but still profitable overall after all of that, after paying the salary for the. For the general manager after purchasing a vehicle, all the rest of it still profitable. And that's the goal with the Mount Vernon location is just profit every single month. And everything's paid, there's no debt. And that's with a general manager. And I never am involved in terms of, you know, managing things. Maybe once a month we get together, go over stuff like I would with a regular franchisee. So that's that again. If you want more landscaping, lawn care related, P and L dive deep dive. Dive deeper into that stuff. I'll make a separate video here pretty soon. All right. For real estate in December, we finally have started to collect more on these rentals. We have have a total of 10 rental units. We collected about $20,000 in revenues, about 5,000 profit. We filled one of the units and that was empty. And we still have One really bad tenant that we are trying to get rid of. They're. They're criminals. They're doing a lot of bad things in there. But the eviction moratorium is preventing us from evicting them. And that's just, just got extended in Washington state for another three months. So honestly, at this point, it's not about the money is like get them out of there for the safety of all our other, other tenants. And so we're trying to work on that. But the real estate was profitable and it will not be profitable throughout most of 2021, because as units become available, I'm going to renovate them. And so that will obviously eat into the quote, unquote profits. But from a tax standpoint, real estate has been great for us. And it's really kind of my personal hedge in diversification and learning real estate for the franchisees as they, in two, three, four years start thinking more about diversifying their portfolio. And they're outside of just Augusta Lawn Care. All right, last one is stocks. The stocks that I choose, if you haven't already. A couple weeks ago, I made a full video of all the companies that I have in my store stock portfolio for the month of December, we're up about 4% and we were as high as about 11%. But then the third week of December it started, the market started coming down quite a bit. Had a bit of a correction, which has been great because I've been able to buy more. I don't think this is a long term slide or anything. I think it's an opportunity to buy. And going into 2020, very strongly, the first half is going to be, I feel my opinion, pretty strong in the stock market. So overall pretty good there as well. So that was kind of all of my businesses that I currently operate. A couple things that are not in the P and L I want to share, and that is the fact that we are going to be opening up two, possibly three corporately owned locations in the next couple months across the country. And so very much looking forward to that. Felix, Chuck. And as general managers, they're in other states, other side of the country. Very much looking forward to using the systems that we have used for the franchisees as well as the Mount Vernon location as corporately owned stores to be able to be there, have general managers in place with profit sharing in place, and very much looking forward to be able to share those numbers with you next year because it's gonna be so much great data to see these, these companies start out and see their trajectories and see why they grow faster, et cetera and where they're spending the money. It's gonna be great. So similar to like the Mount Vernon location, but unfortunately I didn't really start sharing my numbers a whole lot until four, five, four months into the Mount Vernon location. You're gonna be able to see these other locations start off brand new. I'm gonna share every single number I possibly can. So that's kind of something that was not talked about in today's, you know, thing is that we are starting three. Those are gonna be probably not in this P and L, but the next P and L February you'll probably start seeing these other corporately owned stores will start popping up on here. And the other last thing is that I have a project. Not gonna talk about it now, but it is something that I am trying to kind of keep some money aside. I feel like the business are a point now where I want to do something.

Not I want to do something that I'm pretty passionate about around mental health. I don't know if it's going to happen 100% yet, so I'm not going to share about it. But I'm looking forward to hopefully next month I can share more about that project. It's going to be a money making. I believe like when I do things like this and projects that I want to be sustainable, I feel it has to make money and do good. If it can do both of those things, it's sustainable, right? Unless it's not making money in a sustainable business. It's a charity and it requires donations all the time. Whereas if you can create a business model that also does really good, that's in my opinion the best form of giving back and contribution back to society and your community and all the rest of it. So I'm working on something. I'm pretty passionate about it, very passionate about it. And just a matter of like making sure that it makes financial sense, making sure I can pull this off. And I very much look forward to being able to share that with you as we roll that project out. So I'm hoping Hopefully after the first quarter of 2021 I'll be able to start sharing more information on that. I believe it'll help a lot of people and the businesses now are at that point where they're profitable, they're making good money. And I said it time and time again, like I'm not going to ever change much of my, my living standards. I live in a little closet. You guys have seen that. I Watch. I drive a company vehicle. I don't live super frivolously. I don't do crazy stuff. Like, I really enjoy building businesses, like, I really do. And I want to use that knowledge that I gained to help other people, whether it be through the franchise and making as many millionaires as possible or whether it be something like this project that we're working on, where I really believe it's gonna help a lot of people with their mental health, business owners and things like that. So I'm really looking forward to that. It's a big investment on my part, but I feel like the companies are at a point where I can do this sort of thing. Now, obviously, Augusta is still my number one focus, but this is gonna be a project that's sort of fulfilling to me, and if, you know, hobby, if you would. This is my hobby, and it's something I very much am passionate about and I enjoy a lot. So I look forward to sharing that with you as well. So hopefully, that was inspiring. Hopefully, that was educational. If you have months where you do lose money because you're investing back in the business, maybe this gives you the confidence when it's like, oh, my word, we lost money, Absolutely. But as long as you have the fundamentals of the business, the profit margins are still there. You know, the profit margin at the Bellingham location, like 20, almost 20% this year. Now 30% of the profits are going back to the company and the employees. I'm very, very happy about that. I'm thrilled. It's still kicking off enough profit for the franchise to keep growing. And I'm just very lucky, very privileged, very blessed, and we had head into 2021. All I can say is I'm very thankful for everyone that supported me along the journey. The. The staff and the team here locally, a command center, the Augusta Nation, the franchisees, those that have invested with me, as well as listeners, people that have supported. I was talking to someone today that, like, you know, gets the course and, you know, lawn care, web design, all that, and literally, they do it just to support what I'm doing. And I'm blown away, very thankful, and that's why I feel obligated to share these numbers. So hopefully that was helpful. Thank you so much. You've been listening to the Business Boot Camp podcast. I'm Mike Andes. We'll see you next time.