*NEW HEADQUARTERS!? Building a Shop for Augusta Lawn Care

Hey, it's Mike Andes. Just wanted to show you a quick thing here. I'm just out at a property, gonna show you something we've been thinking about here recently.

We have not purchased this property yet, but I'm thinking about buying this land and I'll show it to you. Show you what I'm kind of thinking. Let me flip this around so you can see. Got the entrance here we're walking into now. This came into that gate there. This isn't on the market right now. It's a steal of a deal. I don't even know if we're gonna be able to get in before there's multiple offers. And pardon all the smoke and the fog. There's a mix of smoke and fog, mostly smoke from the west coast wildfires. But what I'm thinking about doing is buying this property and turning it into kind of headquarters for Augusta Lawn Care. Let me zoom out for you. There we go. So that's back where we came from. Alright. This recently got logged. Forestry company came through. It's six acres.

And it's literally like two miles. Not even from town, like a mile, honestly. And yet you'd see it feels like you're out in nowheresville.

So what we would do.

The plan. Because like right now, right now we have. We have three places that we kind of rent for Augusta. We have the shop, then we have command center and then we have the studio. And they're all in different space places. They're all like within 15 minutes of drive from each other. But what I'm wanting to do is.

Buy a piece of property. Like they build basically headquarters where everything can be together. Mostly for the fact that we can build on it exactly the way we want it and not worry about just renting the land. So right now we rent our shop space and that's where we run the local Whatcom county location out of. And then command center. We rent a facility there. An office for the command center is where all the calls and estimates are sent out and invoicing and all that stuff done for the franchisees. The office side of things. And then I have the studio where I record videos and do franchisee training and all the rest of it. Another reason we want to get a property like this is because.

When we do franchisee training, we do one day where we take them on tours and tour the Bellingham location. And what I would really love to do is have a building here. Let me turn this around. Have a building here where I could have my studio, we could have the franchisee training and the local shop all be in the same spot. You can see these trees are massive and this hides a lot, but it goes way back, six acres here, most of it's cleared. What would be cool is if while the franchisees are here, they can literally see that for all three days. Trucks coming in, trucks coming out, you know, the whole operation happening while they're getting trained. And so what I'm thinking is doing like a two story building. The bottom story would be for the local shop, for the office, storage, stuff like that. And up above, the second story would just be all glass. Like the whole side here would be glass and it would overlook the operation of the local shop. So you'd see trucks coming in, material going out, you know, stuff always moving and grooving. While we're doing training for the franchisees, this property here, we got this dilapidated cabin, probably built in like the 30s or 40s. It's just on stilts, it needs to be demolished. There's holes in the roof. It's not plumbed or anything, literally that used to be the outhouse. It's a hole and it's pretty, pretty hilarious. But this is obviously not usable. Down at the bottom there's like a river. I don't like the idea of putting capital expenditure this much. By the time we, you know, buy the property, build it, it's like hundreds of thousands of dollars obviously. And all of this land, it's been deforest, like, you know, cleared obviously. This could get burned, but all these stumps still gotta get pulled out. Then this needs to be graded. Then we have to put gravel on this whole thing. We would asphalt the driveway and then what we would do is we'd have kind of an entrance that's gravel. Like this whole thing would be gravel obviously, right? That's where the trucks go in that like are muddy and you know, working. But then here, where we'd have the building kind of thinking like an L shaped building, two stories, top story all being glass.

We would have this whole area being asphalted. That's why the office workers, they're not trudging through mud and things like that, they could just park. Same thing with the franchisees. They could come and park on the asphalt and then they have a separate entrance out back there where the trucks can come at the end of the day and they have debris and all the rest of it. So just want to show you behind the scenes. Don't even know if we're gonna buy this property yet, putting an offer on it, but there's I know there's already competing offers. There's kind of the market we're in right now, and it's. You cannot replicate this land. It's ridiculous. It's literally a mile from, you know, town. It's hidden from the. The. There's no neighbors, so you can't see any neighbors here. It's hidden from the road, so we can kind of have privacy and do what we want to do. Dump debris back here. We could probably burn. We don't. We didn't need to. We just decompose everything. But, yeah, this is kind of what I want to do eventually in the next couple years. So on all of our leases, we have two more years remaining, but I would need a solid year to build this out anyways, just in time in terms of getting the permits, getting the. Well, getting septic. There are these electricity, so that's cool.

So, yeah, that's the. That's the dream. I would love, love, love to be able to have the franchisees getting trained here for three days, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, while they see everything actually happening. Like, hey, here on the projector. This is how we do it. This is the system. Look out that window. See it happening. So that's kind of the goal. They could literally just be there with the crew, see them coming in. I don't even. Like, they could be there for a team meeting, you know, during those three days. So. Looking forward to it. This is something we definitely want to do, and, yeah, I just want to show you kind of what we're doing.