OVER Rated UNDER Rated with Mike Andes!

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes for the first ever episode of Overrated. Underrated, where I give my first take reactions to things in life and in business. Big shout out to Gary Vee for inspiring this. If you want me to react to something comment below, hit the like button and we look forward to many more episodes of Overrated. Underrated.

All right, Overrated or underrated brand new?

Dramatically overrated when you're first starting out. Dramatically underrated. As the business grows though, especially when small businesses are just getting started, people start thinking about branding too soon, in my opinion, when they need thinking about direct marketing and getting the sale. All right, new equipment, New equipment when you're first starting out is, again, I'd rather you use that money on marketing and on hiring. The two things that grow your business the best and the fastest is great marketing and hiring great people. Spending money on fancy new trucks that are way too much money is not the right thing to do. I'm not against new equipment in general, but when it comes to landscaping, lawn care, and getting new trucks and mowers and all the rest of it, I'd much rather that money be spent on marketing in the early days of your business.

Team culture.

Team culture is dramatically underrated, especially as the business begins to hit scale and grow fast. It's the thing that will keep the business together in an otherwise very chaotic time of the business. When things are growing really quickly, you gotta be hiring a lot of people. If you don't have a strong culture, the business will eventually fall apart, whether it be at the top, in other words, your management and the people you are directly reporting to you, or frontline employees that will begin to basically hold a mutiny as the business begins to grow and thrive and all this great things are happening, but literally, your frontline employees could literally throw you under the bus if you're not creating a great culture. Debt, debt. I think debt can be used. I think it is correctly rated because you can definitely go way too far in the extreme and spend way too much money and go too far into it over leverage yourself. And this is what gets exposed in times like we're going through right now in 2020. So many companies are taking on debt to get through this time and it's going to show in the next few years and it's great time to look forward like, oh, we got through this time great, but you took on a lot of debt and that can really slow down the growth of the business and the profitability down the road. On the flip side, I'm not Like Dave Ramsey, that's gonna tell you, don't ever take debt, ever. That's because debt can absolutely be a great leverage for your business. And if you're growing really fast, you probably need debt to be able to sustain that growth. And more importantly, if you can get debt for a low percentage in this environment where money is so cheap, if you can get money for 4 or 5% on an SBA loan or some other sort of line of credit, it's really cheap money. I think that if you can produce 20, 30% returns on your money in your business, why wouldn't I take a 4 or 5% loan? So, so cheap money, good money, lots of debt, that's way over. Leveraging your business, bad idea. Especially when you come to an economic crisis. 2008 showed this big time open book management, Open book management, dramatically underrated because so many people think that by doing so they are going to somehow ruin the culture or they are going to make employees mad at them for making so much money. When in reality, open book management is the thing that brings the culture together and as the business succeeds, allows the team to participate in your success. And that marginal amount of money that you give to them in the form of profit sharing and open book management and showing the numbers is going to be dramatically brought back to the business in the form of a workforce that is much more bought into what you're doing and is going to be much more efficient and looking for areas of waste to eliminate.

New Year's resolutions.

Ooh.

I actually, you know, I'm gonna say underrated on this one because I don't like the terminology New Year's resolutions, but if you can change, okay, so New Year's resolutions, dramatically overrated. Because I own a gym and I see the results of the first three weeks of January it being packed and then no one showing up for February. But when it comes to goal setting, dramatically underrated. And I think that this time of year is a great time to do goals and really look forward to the next year and get very specific in terms of what your business looks like. But in terms of resolutions, losing, we, you know, whatever, whatever, whatever. Those things just do not work out very well. And I profit from that very same thing because of the gym.

Google reviews.

Google reviews for small businesses, especially in the service business, is very, very underrated. It's probably the first place you should really look. When we talk about marketing, we're talking about spending money usually on advertising, things like that. Like this is a free form marketing, and that is getting Better Google reviews. Same thing goes with Angie's List or other different types of review services like HomeAdvisor. But Google reviews dramatically underrated because they're free. You don't have to pay money, you don't have to do anything. Go get your family, your friends, your customers to leave a review. Don't make fake ones, make them real. Make sure they're legit. But they're dramatically underrated and can serve as a great marketing catalyst for your business.

Team meetings.

Team meetings honestly are overrated because a lot of people think that having a longer team meeting or that you've got to do it for, you just have to have team meetings for the sake of having a team meeting. I think most people would say that I am a big fan of team meetings and I am, but I feel like most people don't do team meetings correctly. They're too long, they're not pertinent to what's going on in the business and the employees. If it's early in the morning, especially in a labor type of environment like landscaping, they're not interested in sitting around and talking for 30 minutes, especially if they're on P4P where you're paying them to work. So I think they're overrated because people do them to kind of check the box. If there's nothing we need to go over, if there's nothing important, we're gonna have a very, very short, like two or three minute meeting or no meeting at all.

The stock market.

Ooh, the stock market. I feel like this one moves up and down right now. Oh, this is tough.

I would say overall, the stock market is underrated because people feel like it's just gambling and therefore they just stray away from it. In reality, if they educate themselves, really look at the fundamentals of valuating companies and seeing which ones are undervalued. Looking at the political and economic tides and seeing which companies are gonna be the winners in the future, I feel like there's huge opportunity and therefore very underrated. However, when you're talking about day trading, massively overrated. To think that you're gonna be able to move money around better than these massive ETFs and hedge funds that spend hundred thousands of millions of dollars on some of the smartest people in the world, I think that you're gonna somehow do better than them on a day trading basis I think is ludicrous. In the past year, people in the day trading, they're the winners, right? But eventually hogs get slaughtered and then what's gonna happen when it comes to day trading.

Gie Expo.

Ooh. Gie Expo.

Man. Okay, I'm gonna say it's correctly rated because it's overrated when it comes to equipment and going there and looking at the booths. But it's dramatically underrated for the value of the relationships that you build and the content that you can absorb in the form of education. But in terms of the booths and the massive expo center and the outdoor driving new equipment, I feel like it's overrated. However, if you are looking for new. If you're looking to buy equipment, great place to get started with, like, demoing things out. So I'm actually. I'm gonna settle on underrated for that one.

Peer reviews.

Peer reviews. Dramatically. Ooh, underrated. I'll go with underrated on this one because I really feel like if you can do peer reviews and where co workers are actually reviewing each other on an annual basis, it takes away from the work of you. Having to do an annual review with your. Every single employee saves you time. And more importantly, the coworkers know each other the best. They know who slacks off. They know who puts in 110% effort all the time. And literally, just reading their reviews of each other gives you a massive insight to actually their performance. WhatsApp. WhatsApp is dramatically underrated simply due to the fact that some guy named Mark Zuckerberg thought It was worth 19 billion. Everyone else thought he massively overpaid for it. But I think in the next 12 to 24 months, we're gonna see the impact that WhatsApp is actually having on Facebook's business model. And in terms of communication, it's a great avenue for your business to use a free tool to be able to do voice notes, pictures, video in a very seamless manner. I feel like it's a little more simple than slack. Like, slack is great if you're having a bunch of office people behind a desk at a desktop, but in terms of mobile, I feel like WhatsApp has really dominated that market.

Christmas shopping.

Christmas shopping is dramatically overrated. I hate shopping with a passion, especially when it comes to going in person. I went to the mall for one time this year. It lasted about 20 minutes. I hated every single minute of it. And with the complications of COVID and all the restrictions, I hate it even more. I hate Christmas shopping on top of that, because I hate having the pressure of buying people things, and I don't like the obligation. I would rather buy things and get things purchased for me because I either care for someone or they care for me or they're showing appreciation and not because there's this random day of the year where, you know, the commercial society has told us that we need to buy things. I feel like that's watered down the meaning of Christmas, and I feel like buying things around Christmas for me has dramatically been overrated in the past few years.

Building a shop building.

So like an office building building a structure, that's definitely overrated. You do not need one of these, especially with the way that technology evolving to be able to have a virtual assistant. At Augusta Lawn Care, we have Command center, which eliminates the need for an office space. By not needing to build a big shop or have a big fancy place to park your trucks and things like that. In the lawn care landscaping industry, you're able to use that money that would otherwise be spent on overhead. You can funnel that towards hiring, profit sharing, all the things that actually move the business forward. Instead of a big shop. That is a sunk expense. Yes, it is an ass. Yes, it is absolutely an investment if it appreciates and goes up in value. But you got to remember, that is a different business. Real estate is a different business. If you're investing in a big shop and building out real estate, yes, it's probably going to go up in value. Yes, you can pay it off over time. It can look good on a balance sheet. But at the end of the day, when it comes to your lawn care business and taking the real estate part of it off the table, that massive monthly payment, that massive down payment on that loan for that real estate is probably better served when it comes to the lawn care business. Better spent on marketing, hiring, and really improving the business. So that's the first episode of Underrated. Overrated. Let me know if you disagree with some of my comments on these different topics and comment below what topic you would like. My reaction on next when we come to episode two of Overrated, Underrated.