Owner Left His $1M Lawn Business for 2 Years...

Today we're in Idaho visiting Eagle Pros.

When we first joined, it was kind of rocky.

It was messy. They do lawn care and cleaning services, and we had to mass fire like the pros that we had, kind of do a redo. We let go some people in the office too, and that started improving things.

The business owner is not in town and won't be back for another year and a half.

I would not say it's hurting the business, but I am on a 2-year mission, and although I will not be there, I will have my team there.

Nathan wasn't making money. We sold We sold everything except one truck.

Business is making over $80,000 per month in revenue.

We just find the deals and then we assign it to contractors.

What's the value you offer to the pro to be able to take that 50% in perpetuity?

No solicitation contracts that will ensure that if the pros take our clients, we're gonna sue them.

Now they want to expand nationally. Have you gone into a new market already?

Yeah, we opened Rexburg, Idaho.

But they only have $23,000 in the bank. I need, in my in my opinion, $100,000+ in cash before you go into the market. This is the Business Turnaround Show. My name is Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care, where we have over 190 locations around the world. I travel the country fixing struggling businesses. Our goal is to give Eagle Pros a strategy to turn around the company in the next 6 weeks. I'll be very prescriptive on this one part. Do not expand into new markets yet. You're going to frustrate your field manager. Okay. Yeah.

I ran Eagle Lawn Care Services, and now I have a team who runs Eagle Pros. So Eagle Lawn Care Services converted to Eagle Pros when we started offering home cleaning services. Last year we did $475,000 in revenue. This year we're doing about $80,000 a month. I will not say it's hurting the business, but I am on a 2-year mission in Copenhagen, Denmark for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And so therefore our sales have obviously probably been affected by me being gone because, you know, I was the main sales guy. Mike Andes and the team, you guys need to come to Boise, Idaho, because just like we implemented everything before, we're going to implement everything again and it's going to be awesome. And although I will not be there, I will have my team there. We're really looking forward to seeing how we can expand appropriately and go into different states and ultimately keep growing the business from there. Based off of your feedback on how we should do that.

Dude, what a goat. Nathan's the goat. So we came to Eagle Lawn Care a couple years ago, and Nathan was doing, I think it was, if I remember correctly, like $400,000 or $500,000 in revenue.

And we were doing like 80, 90 lawns per week, just a 2-man crew. Okay, so it was getting crazy with batteries, right? We had like 15 at one point.

But really, his strength was not operations or hiring people. He's young at the time. I think it was 17, 18 years old.

He's like, hey man, could I just use your trailer over the weekend to move some stuff? I'm like, yeah, sure. And then like the next day he asked to quit. I'm like, okay. Then like a week later I'm like, where's my trailer? Because I forgot about it. So I drive to his house and like I unlock his gate somehow and then just grab my trailer back.

Oh my word.

And then he takes the customer's check and then he won't give it to me. So I'm like, you can keep it, just like, just leave.

But he did a great job of website stuff. That was actually his strength, was building websites, doing the marketing. That was really his forte. To be able to do $800,000 as a subcontractor, you need to be selling $4 million worth of revenue.

Yeah.

Because you're getting 20% of it.

Yeah.

So your $800,000 business is going to have $4 million worth of admin. So I remember the title. I felt like this 16-year-old runs a $4 million business without employees. And I was like, it's clickbait, but I think he's actually done it. Basically no actual doing of the work, has the admin team like we talked about. Sells over the phone and instant quotes. He's on the other side of the world right now, letting his business be managed, making $30,000 a month in profit. Not a bad gig. Eagle Pros is different than just about every other home service business in that they don't have employees, they don't have any equipment, and all they do is go find the individual operators that are going to go do the work and the operations out on the customer's property. But then on the back end, Eagle Pros is doing the admin and the sales. All them haters in the comments section, but people, when they listen on the Turnaround Show, they don't care I don't care about what you say in the comments because they go make that moolah, that cheddar, that bacon. You know what I'm saying? So his CEO of the business is going to be meeting us today. We're going to be checking in and seeing how things have gone over the past year. I can see in their P&L, it's really been in the past 3 months things have taken off. Hey, how's it going?

I think I want him to speak more than we do, if possible.

Hey, Jess, good to meet you. Absolutely.

And then we're also working on the cleaning side. We have to change quite a bit there because we are not making money with the cleaning.

Thanks for coming back. Oh, our advisor. Oh, good. No, he's a great guy. He executed so well on everything we talked about.

But cleaning, we, we had a high number of cancellations, and so we need to change. And I want to move from contractors and do employees for cleaning.

Whoa. Hey, how's it going?

Hello.

What's your name? Ezra. Ezra? Yeah, very cool.

He's your fan, by the way.

Okay. Hi, Mike. What's your name?

Alberto.

Alberto. Okay, Ralph. Ralph, got it.

My name is Alberto Tovaller. I am the CEO and partner here at Eagle Pros.

Hi, my name is Rafael Macarena, and I am the field manager of Eagle Pros.

Well, thank you so much, Mike, for making time.

Oh, my pleasure. Thank you for flying all the way out here. How did you meet, uh, Nathan?

So I actually went to BYU-Idaho, which is like a local university. Oh, okay, perfect.

Yeah.

And I met his sister there.

Okay.

We became really close friends. And then like 2 years later, I started the business in New York, an accounting business.

Okay.

And then Nathan was looking for a bookkeeper and fractional CFO. And so she said, I know somebody who could be great.

That's funny. From the equity perspective, is Nathan still 100% or did you guys already figure out a partnership? What's that look like?

Yeah, we, we are partners, 51-49%. Perfect.

Okay. And then that way it's kind of understandable that once he gets back, it's staying the same way.

Yeah. Yeah.

Give me a little bit of a breakdown of both your roles. You're local and kind of manage a lot of the contractors, correct?

Yes.

Got it. And then you make sure all the mistakes get fixed.

Yes.

Got it. Okay, cool.

Exactly.

And then from a CEO perspective, you're kind of right now managing the whole thing because Nathan is out of town.

Yeah, exactly. You know, the team in the office kind of helps with the putting together the estimates, but then I provide support. There is one contractor here and then one employee here, and then three are in the Philippines. One is going to do quality management. The other will communicate with, with customers, but also ensuring quality, like following up and making sure that the customers are happy with the service that we provided.

What's your process on a daily basis? Are you getting like 5 complaints and you go check them out? Are you going in doing quality control? What's sort of like your role right now?

A little bit of both quality control and management. We don't get a lot of complaints, but when we do, I'll go to the job site and film, and then I'll send him the video, and then I'll tell him, you know, this needs to happen, you missed this, and this was incorrect, and then this needs to be corrected. If they can't get to it, I will go and do it myself.

A lot of customers were canceling services, lawn care services in particular, at a rate that we were not experiencing before. Like, what is going on? Our quality of service Is it the quality of service? What, what are we doing, not doing that causes all of this? We close the client and once we close client, then we assign a specific pro to go and do the work and then we pay them 50% of the, of the job.

And then for recurring services like cleaning, mowing, etc., what's the value you offer to the pro to be able to take that 50% in perpetuity?

We designed contracts that no solicitation contracts that will ensure that If the pros take our clients, we're going to sue them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And they lose out on leads too.

They lose out on leads. But if they, you know, they undercut us, it would be just on one client, but then they would lose out in all of these clients that we could potentially assign them to do and make much more money.

Really, your ideal pro is someone who kind of like has a weakness on the sales side, but they're decent enough at operations and getting the work done. And so correct me if I'm wrong, most of your pros are probably smaller businesses. Like 1, 2 employees maybe.

Yeah. Yeah.

I just want to make it really clear that like this business model is extremely risky. If it was so successful, there'd be people have done this over and over and over again. And so just be very careful because you are basically hinging this whole business model, finding very incompetent people that will not start a business, give them all the training they need to be a very high level of service. That's difficult. And what does that onboarding process look like for the, for the pros? Are you reaching out to the pros or do you get a job and then basically solicit the lead to them? Like, hey, we got this job sold, do you want it? Like, how do you attract the contractor?

We do job posting on Indeed, and then they submit applications, and then we do screening, do interviews, 1 or 2 interviews, and then when we find that they're a good fit, we put them in our database, and then we find out what the equipment they have and all of that stuff, and then we have a database that lists their skill set, their equipment, we assign them jobs accordingly. We improved our screening process to ensure that we are bringing the best guys that we could get, the best pros who do quality service. They care about the clients and they also, you know, at least care about our values, even if they're contractors, they're not employees.

Cool. And so I assume if you're posting on Indeed, a lot, almost, I would guess a lot of your pros are sole proprietors.

Yeah. Yeah. There are some that own their businesses and they still— Okay. Accept services from us.

And have you had any problems with like, hey, we have this level of professionalism that's super high, and then all of a sudden a pro shows up and is like, whoa, this isn't Eagle Pros. Has that happened occasionally?

We ask the pros to not use their personal branding.

So they just like throw on like a vest or something like that. And to the customer's perspective, it's still Eagle Pros.

Yeah, exactly. Okay.

Okay. So they're, they're getting the experience of the brand.

Exactly.

Interesting. Okay. And then they're $10.99, I'm assuming?

$10.99.

Yeah. Awesome. One thing that would allow Eagle Pros to really streamline their operations is to not have to be calling, texting, and communicating with the pros outside of their CRM, their software system. I want all communication in one place, whether they're calling the office, they're talking to the manager or the pro. Everyone's communicating in the same language. And I think they can do that using video. Let me show you this tool inside of HomeWorks. You can check out the website home.works. But inside of HomeWorks, we have what's called the Field Force mobile app. And it works offline. So even if you're in bad service areas, make a video, create a visit form, and attach that to the visit for the pro to return back to the job site. So if you have callbacks, customer service requests, and you're tired of your crew getting the job site, calling you, not knowing what to do, use video inside the Field Force mobile app and inside of HomeWorks. What's the challenging part on your side?

Well, to get them to do supreme work, the main struggle is to maintain the quality. Maintain the quality. It's just like the way I see it is The lawn is your canvas and your mower and your weed eater is the paintbrush and you make it beautiful and then people will see, you know, their lawn like, oh my gosh, it's beautifully striped, just a contrast, dark and light, different angles. And if you have a different angle every week, you'll eventually get like a diamond cut.

I assume that the first one or two services is the time when you really have to buckle down the pros, like do quality control.

Yeah, and if they don't have a learning spirit, then they're just going to stay down there. And I'm trying to get them up high.

So when I first came, we were losing a lot of clients. We had a funnel we were putting on top and it was going to the bottom and we're like, okay, what's going on? And the quality was the issue. But the quality then is dependent on the people we bring on as pros. You know, it's like, okay, what we need to do. And we had to mass fire like, you know, the pros that we had and then kind of do a redo. And that started improving things. We started closing that funnel. Slowly. And, and, and, and so Ralph then came on as well. And, and, and yeah, things just started slowly changing.

And yeah, when we first joined, it was kind of rocky.

Yeah, but then like, it was messy, kind of rocky.

It's nice. We had to tighten a lot of screws, but I think where we're headed is, is to greatness.

What's the churn rate right now for the mowing side? What have you got that down to? Do you know what that is like on a monthly or annual basis?

That came down to about Okay.

On a monthly basis?

No, not on a monthly basis. Every 3 months or so.

Okay. So every quarter you're losing 10%?

Yeah, about 10%.

Okay. That's the challenging part of this whole model is like ultimately the customer is paying for operations to go smoothly and we can do sales and admin all we want, but the only thing they actually see is the person on their property doing the work. And if operations isn't nailed, that's where this, this company, like these sort of lead gen companies fall apart.

Okay.

And then what a lot of times companies that are doing your space will end up doing is moving the model I kind of told Nathan originally is like, just provide the leads up front and then get out. Then it's like, I don't have to worry about quality control. I don't have to worry about all this other stuff. And so I'm not saying that's what you should do. I'm just saying I see this happen all the time when people try to scale. Operations doesn't scale the same way that an ad does. The part that you all have cracked is getting a customer and you figure out admin. Like, so getting the work and then like getting paid for the work. The part that will be the constant difficult part here is operations. How do I get the work done efficiently and profitably? And the customers stick around. 'Cause even 10% quarterly is 40% annualized churn. And that means you're keeping customers for 2 years, which now if you're taking half of that, like we have to get customer acquisition cost down to under $40 probably to be able to start making money at a decent rate. I think at the current size it works. Like what you guys are doing now is great. I get a little concerned scaling it because operations is so hard to scale. When you start doing that, like multiple cities, things like that, given the fact that their model is built on 1099s and getting subcontractors, the fact that their immediate thought is like, oh, we need to go to W-2s, shows the flaw in the model, which is you've got to control operations. And if the only way to do that is, oh, I've got to go hire employees, you are now a home service. You are no longer a lead gen, backend admin, directive subcontracting company. And so you've got to fix that model of training people that do not have the skill of high service before you think you can scale this model. I'm not saying it's impossible. What's your current strategy? And don't think that because of what I just said, I'm gonna say not to do it, because I think there is a way to do it. Just tell me what you're currently thinking in terms of like, okay, when we go into a different market, here's our strategy.

What we're thinking about different cities is to kind of duplicate what we have been doing here. We find like a top-notch, like Rafael guy, and then we hire that person and becomes our vanguard, which is basically field manager in that location. And then we set up, and then we do the marketing again, and we hire the pros in that location, and then we, we do the service. Our goal is to continue to have the same business centralized, but at the same time being able to open new locations and open it in a way that it's, it's sustainable. We are the pros. I apologize, I think I slipped a little bit.

Okay, so you get the pros first?

Pros first. Okay. But those pros that we hire, we want them to be— we have the vision of one of them at least becoming becoming a manager, field manager. Yeah, but so the focus is hiring the top notch that we can find in that area.

If you're in a new market, you got a pro, would you tell them, hey, like within a few weeks or like—

Yeah, usually we say about, you know, 2 to 3 weeks.

Have you gone into a new market already?

Yeah, we opened Rexburg, Idaho.

Okay. How far is that from here?

It's 5 hours.

Do you have another field manager there?

We don't have a field manager yet because it hasn't grown.

You just got there. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So right now, do you have pros in Rexburg? Yeah. We do have customers in Rexburg. Yes.

Yes, we do.

Okay. So how is that working now? Because they don't have a field manager. Is that more difficult to manage quality then?

Him alone right now, he's doing a good job. But then once you had more, like you said, operations, it starts to decline. The quality starts to decline the more people you add to do. And that's when we activate the field manager. The field manager. Yeah.

All right. We will come back to operations and like that field manager position. Let's talk about sales, how you're bringing new customers, a little bit CAC, stuff like that. And nerd out on it, I'll follow you. And then let's talk about admin, how when those leads are coming in, how you're getting that to a pro.

Right now, the things that we're doing are Google Profile, Google My Business, Google LSA.

And we're also registering in that market, getting an address verified, putting up a web page.

And another thing we do is the website. So our Eagle Pros website, we, as you see, we're rebranding. We invest in quite a bit of money in that to, to do SEO optimization so that it can rank as high as possible.

And when you say you spend a bunch of money on SEO, Is that really changing the site, building it out, optimizing for that local market then from a tag perspective, etc.?

They're going to change the website and then optimize it for different locations, but mostly to, to rank high for the services that we provide.

And right now, how many customers do you currently have in Rexburg?

In Rexburg, we have about 15 clients. Rexburg, Idaho Falls. Yeah, about 30 minutes.

Like Rexburg, do you advertise or simply SEO website?

Yeah, that's all we've done so far.

No ads.

No ads.

All right, so you don't really have a CAC. You don't have customer acquisition cost.

The only thing we pay for right now is Google LSA. And so we do have from—

Oh, you do that? I was like, okay, cool. And what's the CAC on that right now?

It's about $23, $25.

Okay. But you're constrained on cap, like you can't spend a gobs of money in that market. 'Cause like LSA caps you.

LSA caps, but also I think how do you spend it? That would be a question. Like how do you spend specifically for that market? Do I need to set up like a new Google LSA account for that area?

Are you currently changing your LSA to add service areas? Like when you went to Rexburg, you just be like, hey, we're now servicing Rexburg.

Yeah, we just add the location and then yeah, the services.

Okay, cool. The only real way this multi-location strategy will work and then moving in new markets is going to be if they have a really solid website that when they move into a new market, they can get a bunch of leads very quickly. And that's why at Home Service Web Design, you can actually book a free call with our team for 15 minutes and we'll give you instruction on how to make your website better. You can go to homeservicewebdesign.com/call and book a consultation with the team, and we'll see if working with you makes sense to take your business to the next level. I think your constraint you're eventually going to hit is SEO and web traffic is going to be very lumpy.

Yeah, that's our biggest problem.

I would really recommend focusing on Eagle more. I think that there's a lot more revenue in this market and you have the infrastructure. Like, Why not just do $2 or $3 million here and then take that cash and be able to go do something really cool in, say, Rexburg or Twin Falls? Like, there's so much money here and in Boise and in Meridian. Yeah, there's tons of money.

Okay. And you have to just take more marketing over here.

I just take more market. Okay. Especially because you haven't even gotten to paid ads. Like, if you started running paid ads and you could actually figure out what is a customer acquisition cost we can get, you can turn this into a money machine. Right now we're like, LSA, spend as much money as we can. And then they'll cap you. Like, if you put $1,000 a week into it, they won't spend $1,000.

Yeah, yeah.

Maybe you're getting 5 or 10 leads, 15 leads a week, maybe.

40 to 60 leads a week from total. From total.

Total. Got it. Yeah. Which would then impute if we have 120 coming from LSA that you're probably getting 120 or so from just organic traffic.

Yeah, yeah.

And that's the part that goes away if you go into a new market.

Yes, exactly.

And that's where the model breaks.

Yeah.

Because when you go to a new market, you can keep paying LSA or even go after cold traffic.. But right now, the reason this one's becoming profitable is because you have half of your leads just showing up on your front door. And a lot of that is because of the years that Nathan put in under Eagle Lawn Care. Yeah. Getting all the Google reviews, reputation, the SEO is firing on all cylinders. So I would just double down on this area for now. The fact of the matter is that right now they're getting around 240 leads per month. Half of those are from local services ads, LSA, from Google. The other half are just showing up on their front door because of SEO, and that their website has been around for a long time in this local market. But if they're trying to go into a new market, half of their leads, that 120 is completely gone. We've got to figure out a much more dependable strategy. I think you probably become profitable at around 80 to 100 customers. And the challenging part is you kind of have a chicken-egg problem, and that is, well, to get the 80 or 100, I need good quality. To get quality, I need a good field manager. To get a good field manager, I need to get them set up before I go get a bunch of pros and then damage my reputation in this market. And so the credibility that you lack in new markets will be your Achilles heel. And so that's where, again, like, you will eventually have a burn rate when you go into a new market because you'll need, in my opinion, from operations perspective, need high quality, get the field manager, get the pros, then get the customers. Okay. Right now you're going in the opposite direction, which is fine as long as he can drive there. And that's why it's working okay in these markets that are relatively close. And I would, I would recommend that be your strategy of growth is stay like, go from here to the next closest city, to the next closest city. To next closest city. So that way you can kind of bridge the field manager role before you go into a new market. Like if you start in New York tomorrow, you would need a field manager. If you start 30 minutes from here, he can kind of bridge over until, okay, now there's 50, 100 customers. Let's get a field manager in that market. Okay. That'll help your burn rate going into new markets.

Yeah, we do pros, customers, field manager.

So we got to do— Oh, you— Oh, I see what you're saying. I see what you're saying. You're getting pros, then you're getting the customers. If you went to a brand new market way away, you would need that field manager first. Yeah, which I think your current strategy of like, as long as it's close enough for one field manager to kind of dip over there— yeah, I'm a fan of that. I think it's kind of like when it comes to a gym, uh, you don't just come every single week increase the weight. A lot of times you'll kind of increase the weight, you'll do— be there for a little bit, you'll plateau, and then you gain and you step up again. I think that's important because otherwise it causes injury. Like if tomorrow I'm like, I'm weightlifting 250, the next 255, then 260, then eventually I'll hit 290 and I'll break versus take a few months, stabilize, maybe come down, focus on higher rep. Like, the reps are important. If you're just maxing the weight all the time— I grow the business like max growth all the time— and you're not just focused on the number of reps and gaining the muscle, it causes injury. So the same thing is true in business. If you're trying to grow and expand and just make it bigger and more and new, that's like you're ratcheting up the weight versus let's say keep it the same size, same number of employees, and just like make sure we nail our systems. If you were actually going to scale this, what I would do is I would go into your next market over. I would incentivize your field manager to find, train, and get someone set up as the field manager in the new market once it's at a certain number of customers. Okay. Once you get, say, above 50 customers in that market, we need a field manager there, or 100, however the math works out. And then incentivize this field manager to train the next one up and get them rolling. Like, hey, when this person has this level of quality and this amount of revenue and you're able to train them up, you get like either a bonus or even in perpetuity, a percentage of like their earnings, something to incentivize the handoff to that next field manager. Because especially with you being out of town, like you don't want to be flying in town every time you're trying to get a field manager set up. You want the field manager to be in the next market, get them started, get them rolling, get them trained, and then hand it off to them and incentivize that. I think it's important to incentivize a field manager to train another field manager. If you're basically expecting them to like set them up for success. If I just say, hey, it's your job to teach so-and-so, it's like, okay, cool. I don't want to do that. That's like 3 hours away. I don't want to go spend time with them. And so like that person is going to fail, flounder, lose money. I want to incentivize this person to give them information. By doing that, the customer's experiences improve with the business.

Like Mike said, you know, you can have a great restaurant and all this, but if you don't have a chef that cooks the good food, The people are not gonna come.

I'll be very prescriptive on this one part. Do not expand into new markets yet. Okay. You're going to frustrate your field manager.

Okay.

Yeah. What you've solved in the past 3 months, just double down on it. Like, I think you've, in the past 3 months, you've actually proven the model. Yeah. If I would've come 4 months ago, I'd have been like, this is shaky. Yeah. You've proven it works. And you know it works in this market. I would just double and triple and quadruple down on it. For 6 to 12 months. If I went to any other business, I'd say, "Hey, quadruple your business in the next year." I couldn't say that because it'll go from $1 million to $4 million because they have to go buy $200,000 worth of trucks and equipment. You don't need to. Yeah. So, I would just focus much more in terms of like, it's like when Uber would take, go from city to city, they went very strategically, but they plowed money in and like really scaled one market before going in another one. Okay. And went one by one. They would send like teams of people to there and like they had an opening strategy, like a grand opening strategy. Okay. Right now we do not have the money to do that correctly. The reason I fear that is because we also don't have a proven customer acquisition cost model outside of LSA, and LSA is not enough to launch in a new market.

Okay. Nathan mentioned in one of our conversation, planning conversation, like, you know what, we need to take more market share in Eagle. You know, we need to do that. And he actually, Nathan actually mentioned Uber, and then we quickly dismissed that, you know.

You've only done it for 3 months. If you do another 6 to 12 months of what you've been doing the past 3, you'll actually crack the code on operations Okay, do we have better surveying? Do we have better training? Like, you actually create your own training manuals for— and like, you go through this education process before you become a pro and you pitch this as like, hey, you become, you know, Eagle Pro certified. You can use this in your own business and say you are Eagle Pro certified. Like, you can create a certification method that is for operations because you are going to make your field manager take on so much horribleness from customers when you go in a new market if you have not solidified operations. And I think you have done like a huge step up in the past 3 months. Yeah. But 40% churn is still scary. That's still a scary number. Okay. And if you can get that down by improving operations, I would look at your onboarding of pros as the current weakness. Because right now they're calling in, it's like admin, like, yep, you set up, okay, great, insurance, like, or whatever, however your process is. I would nail that down like crazy. I would make that so hard to get into. There'd be multiple touchpoints, interviews, like video interviews. Indeed automatically sends them a text message once they apply. Apply, ask for a video with certain questions that will weed a lot of people out. Yeah. The more you can refine the pro—

I actually need to do that in my other business, but thank you.

Yeah. Yeah. Like the video interview process, the training process. I would look at every single mistake that comes in as a yellow, you know, yellows for a callback. How do we fix this? Comes back to training your pros. The positive thing is if you can crack that nut, you can quadruple in one year in this market. I need, in my opinion, $100,000+ in cash before you go into a new market. 'Cause you will burn more cash than you think when you go into a new market and all of a sudden half your leads disappear and your quality's slipping 'cause you don't have a field manager. So what you're gonna do, you're gonna go hire a field manager and now you're burning cash. I think that will be the unlock when you actually go move into a market. You need to be able to say, okay, we know we can get customers for $30 or $40 or whatever it is because we have proven that these 10 ads work great. We then run them and we spend X amount of dollars in order to be able to get 100 customers. Once we get 100 customers, break even on a field manager. Once you get a field manager, then we're actually good to go.

Okay, but there's burn in there. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, even at Augusta, we've raised the amount of cash we require new owners to have because we are more confident that a solid launch, a successful outcome, happens when you have a certain amount of money to start. And I know that's a minimum of $50,000, so I was saying $100,000 to be more conservative for them because they have half the margin when they do work. Growth creates chaos and it sucks cash. Have no cash, it makes even more more chaos. And that's usually when people quit. From a leads perspective, if you're moving into a new market, the way you're currently setting up the website will get diluted if you keep increasing your service areas. Essentially, if you add a new location on, say, Google, Google listings, you do want to verify an address in that market. Okay. You will perform double or triple in terms of Google listing ranking if you have a verified address. Okay. Now, do you need to actually go to an office? No. But if you can get a commercial, a commercial client to allow you to verify their address, you got to have Verify it, though, it's like you have to get a truck or like a sign or something to be able to get these verified. Because a verified address inside Google listing will double or triple your leads. Okay. From a ranking perspective. So, in my personal opinion, I would take 6 to 12 months and make Eagle a cash cow. Okay. I would at least double revenue. By doing that, you'll get $100,000 in the bank. And then when you have the $100,000, when you go into a new market, immediately you'll have money to spend. You will have— over the next 6 to 12 months, I would run ads locally. Locally, have an actual customer acquisition cost because LSA is not a customer acquisition cost. Because you get capped. You can't spend enough. Like, if you want a new market, you want to get to profitability as fast as possible and get 100 customers. I need to be able to say, okay, I will spend $10,000. I will spend $20,000. Yeah. And then have those numbers. Well, when LSA wants to give us leads, then we will. You go to a new market, they're not going to give you leads. Yeah. Because you don't have reputation.

You don't have reputation, yeah.

Right? And so, you're going to be capped when you go into a new market if you don't know how to spend and drive traffic. So, 6 to 12 months, we are figuring out the customer acquisition cost via paid strategy. So that is Facebook and Google. You could do other stuff too, like door hangers or something like that. So, for example, I would play with this a lot. I would be like, okay, if I find a pro in a market, can I just pay them to do door hangers? And then whatever they get, like eat to kill kind of thing. Like, hey, if you get customers for us, you then get the 50% and like, we set you up. Yeah, yeah. Very, very possible to do that too and figure out what's the customer acquisition cost. By the time I pay them to deliver and I print off the door hangers with instant pricing, what's that cost look like? Yeah, because you're going to have like 3 different customer acquisition costs. You're going to have Facebook, you're going to have Google, you're going to have for door hangers. And then you're going to segment those also by service. So if I do a door hanger for lawn care, if I do a door hanger for cleaning, because you're going to a new market, all of a sudden you get cleaning customers for $10 because there's not a good market. It's not a good market for janitorial. Yeah, like no one's good there. Again, they don't do good operations. Yeah, everything in this business will come down to operations. Everyone get customers, everyone get paid to set it all up automatically. The hardest part in home service is operations. And so that's why I'm like, let's just take what you've done the past 3 months and just keep doing the exact same thing. Because if you do that, you'll refine operations. Every single time there's a churn customer, every single time someone leaves. Like right now, are they— are you keeping track of that on a churn sheet?

Yeah, we are.

Yeah. I would sit down every week and like, who left? Why did they leave? And how do we fix it? How do you fix it? That is the name of this game. And I believe that will come in the form of like an LMS, learning management system. Yeah. That you have your pros log into, they get out of complete ongoing training. You have weekly meetings, you have PIPs, performance improvement plans. Like you'd really nail down operations while you're also stacking cash.

Yeah.

Okay. For all the pros they bring on, there needs to be an onboarding process, a corrective measure, as well as incentives for them to do high-quality work. By nailing operations, that's the only way they'll be able to grow this business. I would also encourage a tier or stage incentive program for high-quality work. If we know that operations and high-quality work is going to be the thing that prevents us from going to market and is going to damage our reputation, let's figure out a way to make sure that doesn't happen. It would also incentivize tenure. If someone is able to join at 40%, And you're like, we give you a pretty good path over the next 12 months to get to 60%. Now they don't, they're not trying to get the job. They're not, the contract is less of like a, we will sue you. And we're like, you will make more money if you just stick doing what you're doing.

Yeah. And it also decreased the turnover rate for contractors too.

For pros. Exactly. Because they can make 50% more by just doing a good job. You have leverage. Now when you come, they come complain, they're not saying down on you. They're like, well, what do I need to do to keep my 60%? Yeah. You want him to have all the leverage 'Cause now he has something besides like, you do a bad job and like, you should do it better. And they're like, like, you need them to be like, no, how do you want that done, sir? Yes, sir.

Absolutely, sir.

Right. And you just tie it to incentive. We got to make sure that we incentivize the pros to do high quality work for the customers, get 5-star reviews, and make sure that it's actually part of the compensation plan that they can make more money if they do high quality work and stay as a pro inside of the system. From what I have heard, That's probably enough for you to chew on. Yeah. I know it's pretty short, but like, I would say in general, like, I know I have 6-week plan here, but it's really a matter of like, some of this is just planning. Like, don't go in a new market yet. Yeah. You're gonna damage your reputation. You do not have a Google that has all the reviews. It's gonna be a slow trickle and that will work as long as he can get there. But like, you're gonna have higher churn, lower customer reviews, and you can't stack bad reviews in a new market. Yeah. Like, it's— then you're gonna be doubling your customer acquisition cost once you actually start trying to scale it. Okay. So I would just take this current market instead of trying to go into 2, 3 new markets next year and do $2 million, just do $2 million here. In doing $2 million, stack a bunch of cash and refine the operations required so that when you go into a new market, it's like bulletproof. I would stack the cash. I'd spend 6 to 12 months really figuring out what your actual customer acquisition cost is when you spend money. Yeah. Not outside of LSA, 'cause we can't depend on LSA when we move to new markets. It's just like this— the lead flow is too small for us to get up to enough of a break-even point. So Facebook, Google, and door hangers across the different services. Okay. Third one is a learning management system and training operations for the pros, tiered or staged incentives for high quality for the pros.

Okay. Yeah, I think, I think we can execute on that.

I know this will do well because you've already proven the last few months you just focusing. Yeah. Yeah. Already like a really good result.

No, this is good, Mike. Thank you so much.

Yeah, thanks for flying all the way out.

You are the man.

Thank you.

It's nice to actually experience that in real time.

I'm a real person, I promise. So I know, I know it's a lot, like structurally, like— can I have these? Yeah, it's all yours. Okay, perfect. I know structurally, like slowing things down a lot, and it can be a little bit of a disappointment, but I genuinely believe if you slow down a little bit, really sink your roots in lawn care in this area, But when you come out of it in 6 to 12 months, you'll have a model. Yeah. Like, we need a model to copy and paste. We don't need like, hey, this has been working for a couple months.

Yeah.

'Cause you have, we haven't even gone through an off season with this model.

I can't.

Yeah. Like, the value of the business is when I have a model that can be copied and pasted, but we haven't proven that it actually works a whole year. Okay. We haven't proven that it becomes super cash heavy and you actually need to go spend the money. Yeah. And you know exactly what your customer action cost is, what your lifetime gross profit is to go into a new market, spend $50 grand and scale it. But we don't have the model. When you can come to me like, hey, if we spend X amount on a customer, we get this much. And then if I go and spend $50 grand on marketing in a new market, I will get X amount of customers and immediately we will be profitable. 'Cause I've also got all the learning systems for my field manager and my pros. And they have levels of operational excellence that they then unlock more money. Like, once you have that, that's investable. That's something that you can really scale.