My Plan to Start a $500K Business in One Month

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes. Today I'm going to be walking through how exactly I am going to take one month and build a $500,000 business. You might be saying, how in the world is that possible? I'm going to walk you through every single week of that month, what exactly I will be doing. You're like, what do you mean you will be doing? My hope is that this summer I am going to go to a place in a different state and I'm going to start from zero, a brand new Augusta Lawn Care location. Now, obviously, there's advantages of being part of Augusta and starting new. There's definitely some advantages. However, I'm gonna start from zero in a place I do not live and I've never been. And I really think it's gonna be a pretty cool experience. I'm gonna hopefully vlog every single day of what's happening. There's two reasons why I'm doing this. Number one is I wanna have literally a documented in video of exactly what I do for an entire month to give to Augusta Lawn Care franchisees to be able to say, like, follow this and you will grow to a business that is doing X in revenue if you follow these steps. We already have that in the systems and procedures, but I've never been able to record it on video. Where every single day I got the highs and the lows and what happened and what I bought and the budget and what I spent on the truck and what I spent on the equipment and every single aspect of the marketing that's being done. It'll all be documented in video. I'm really hoping to be able to do that this summer. I just got to find the time. It'll be great because I still got to run all my other businesses. But my plan is to do it myself and to go do it in a place outside of this state where I'm in Washington state. I know the climate. I know a lot about this climate. I'm going to be dropped in a and it'll be 100% the systems that will run the business. Now, I'm gonna walk you through. Oh, the second reason. The second reason why I'm gonna do this is because people in the comments talking about how I'm an influencer or you must have been given this by your parents, or you've been like, you have no idea what you're talking about. Mowing grass. Cause you wear a polo shirt and wear nice shoes and I wear a watch. Maybe that's true, but now I can hopefully prove to myself and prove to everyone watching that I still have what it takes to grow a lawn care business from zero in one month. Get it to the point of being a half a million dol. Let's go ahead and run the math because I'm not trying to get to half a million in the first year when I start my locations that I am running. I am trying to get to 500,000 in the second year. If a general manager is extraordinary and they really want to go for it, they can go for half a million dollars in that first year. I typically don't expect them to get the 500,000, more like 300,000 in the first year and in the second year they get to $500,000 in annual revenue. But let me go ahead and break down what this month is probably going to look like. I can't share all the secret sauce because I want you to watch the videos when we do this. Hopefully in summer of 2023. So week number one, I'm going to hire two team members, go find them. Whether it be indeed Craigslist, jumping up and down on the side of a road, whatever it is, I've got to find two people to work for me. Then I go buy equipment. This is your trucks. I've got to get them painted and decal because we're in Augusta Nation. I've got to find mowers, weed whackers. I've got to figure out what mowers I need because I've never been this place and I don't know how big the lots are. I gotta like do some market research when I get there and figure out what I'm going to buy. I'm also going to find storage. I've also got to find a place like where to live and where to eat and go to the gym and stuff like that. Because I'm just going to go to this place without any of that planned. So I've also got to find stores though. Alright, so this is why the vlog will be interesting because there'll be definitely parts of just like daily life I've got to figure out. But the business side, I've got to find a place to do some storage. My goal is to be able to get two team members, two trucks and all the equipment ready to go so that I can grow very quickly. Week number two, I've got to get the website up. I've got a massive marketing blitz both online and offline. So online I'll be doing Facebook ads, Google local services and Google Ads, which is the performance max version of that, which optimizes between video display banners and search. I'm going to go ham. And what's really cool in the videos, I'll be able to share exactly what I'm doing, what I'm spending on all of this. It'll be great. And I really look forward to sharing this with everybody. Now offline, I'm gonna be knocking on doors. I'm gonna be doing door hangers. I'm gonna do an instant quote, door hangers that you can get on lawncaremedia.com, that where you can literally write the price down for the customer, put it on the door. They take a picture of that, send it to command center and boom, I got myself a customer. You can get the exact same design@lawncaremedia.com I truly believe it's gonna be a great video. But more importantly, I'm gonna have online working for me. And offline the door hangers, knocking on doors, saying hello to people. Maybe I'll get some. I have like a little camera in front, little spy cam so I can talk to people and you can see exactly what's happening when I knock on the door and when I put the price on the door hanger. It's gonna be an awesome time. Now that week is extremely important. Cause I've gotta start selling jobs and booking out into the future. Cause the whole first week is just like admin, bank accounts, insurance, I got stuff set up. But week two is like knocking on doors. I got ads running in the background on Google and on Facebook and online. My website's now cranking out, I gotta get reviews. That's week two. Week number three is when I've actually. The people that I hired in this first week are gonna be starting in week three because they're likely gonna give their two weeks notice. So team training, I gotta train them up, get them ready to roll as well as actually start doing the work. Because all the people that I sell in week one and two in terms of door knock in and all the rest of it. Cause trust me, even though in week one I'm just buying stuff, I will be selling people jobs without having trucks, I will be selling people jobs without having equipment because you don't need those things to sell them and put them on the schedule. I'll put them on the schedule for week three when I know that in week two I'll get everything else finalized. So week three I'll get my team trained up and I'll actually start doing work. And that's when we start making money finally. All right. Now, before we get to week number four, there's the gentleman's agreement. Now, if you want me to go and do this and actually be able to document this entire journey, I need 5000 views and at least 300 likes to this video. If that does not happen, then the gentleman's agreement is off. Because this is the gentleman's agreement. I make videos for free with simply a verbal handshake and a verbal agreement that you're going to subscribe. And I can't force you to do that. I can't hold you over a barrel and do that. But I do just hope and pray that you subscribe to the channel. If you don't, this might never happen. And that would not be cool. This is going to be a great content. So we need 5000 views and 300 likes on this video. Is that what I said? Yeah, 5000 views, 300 likes. Alright, so let it be written, okay? Make it happen. Gentleman's agreement. Subscribe to the channel. I make these videos for free with the expectation that you subscribe. That's a very fair exchange. Week number four. I'm gonna find a general manager. Because ultimately I want this location to live on beyond just the month that I'm there. I want to actually be profitable, actually grow, actually become a thriving business. Grow past 300,000 in that first year to 500,000 and beyond. And I gotta get a general manager. I've gotta find them, I've gotta hire them, I've gotta get them on a compensation agreement and get rolling, baby. Get them trained up. Because what's really cool about at Augusta, I can send this GM for training in July. So my hope is that I can do this in June, send general manager over for training in July, and I can come back and run the location once I'm gone. Now the other goal in week number four is to increase the amount of recurring work. Because I don't want to sell a bunch of projects. I guarantee you in week number two and three, I can sell enough work on projects to hit my $30,000 per month revenue goal. I know I can do that. But I want to make sure that in July and August and September, the recurring revenue is still there. That the base amount of recurring work, the mowing the bush, trimming, the monthly packages I'm able to sell, that's the part I want to be growing. Typically when you're starting a location, the bigger part of your revenue is going to be projects and one time job at the beginning. But that recurring Revenue is what's going to allow you to have exponential growth and allow you to have much more profitable growth by having simple services. And we're not having to always keep selling because I don't expect my general manager to work as many hours as I do in week one through three. Alright, week number five, what do we got here? Week number five, I gotta train the GM and I've gotta hand off operations, which means I'm gonna to have them run the team meetings. I'm going to have to have them take care of routing and scheduling because I'm not going to be here after week five. I've got to be able to hand this off to a general manager and they take care of everything. So they've got to get used of managing the employees, routing and scheduling, dealing with customer complaints, because that's what my general manager will have to do once I'm gone. So I have to train them up. Now the goal in this one month is to be able to get to 15,000, sorry, $1,500 per day in revenue. If you take 1,500, you multiply it by 20 working days in the month, that is $30,000 in monthly revenue. Now the goal here is to get $30,000 per month in revenue. Like that's not a $500,000 business. You're right. The first year we're trying to hit 300,000 to be conservative. And then in year two, my hope is that this general manager is set up to be able to do $500,000. In that second year, I think it's very conservative. Year two, 500,000. There's a very good chance that if I leave and this gym kicks butt, they could easily get this to 40 or $50,000 per month, which rate to getting to 500,000 or half a million dollars in annual revenue. Because there's no way that from June to the end of the year we're going to do 500,000 in revenue. But your run rate, the amount of revenue you're doing per month, if you can get that to 40, $50,000 a month, times that by 10, 11, 12, you're looking at a half a million dollar business. And that's the goal. So that's what I'm going to be doing. I hope to be able to record every single day of the entire month. And hopefully it's really helpful for augustination but also for you out watching to see how to do door knocking, how to be able to do your marketing campaign, how to actually hire and get my hands dirty. Again. It's going to be great. So, like the video, share it with someone else so we get to 5,000 views. And I look forward to being able to do this later this summer.