Partner Walks Out— No Profit in Landscaping Business!

Our business IQ is so bad, people.

That aren't even paying us. I mean, we mowed a lot that people didn't even pay us. We were putting in the hours trying to make sure everyone was satisfied. But at the end of the day, we weren't collecting all of our money spiral down.

So today we're in central Illinois visiting Nathan and Brady from luxury lawn care.

Right now, our biggest struggles are running the business. We're the ones who missed the paychecks.

We never really caught up last year.

One payroll, one truck going down, and one job going wrong. That's 40 grand. They're going to throw some landmine. Like, that doesn't allow someone like me to help you. It also doesn't allow your accountant to help you. Doesn't allow anyone to help you as well as your flying blind. Like, you have no idea where you're at in the business. Like, I can't help this business. Like, hey, let's figure out how this is going to end.

If you can't show up and do the same effort that we're doing, then I don't think you should be part of it anymore.

Don't get into business with someone that in a relationship, you know, will end and therefore inevitably affect the relationship that you want to keep going on forever.

I think we run a Pretty successful business.

$390,000 in revenue last year. $279 in profit.

We want to go big. Yeah.

When you have two owners in the field, you should be super efficient and super profitable. Even if you don't know your numbers. Have them on a spreadsheet so someone else can look at them and then help you.

This is the business Turnaround Show. My name is Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care, where we have over 170 locations around the world. And I travel around the country fixing struggling businesses. Our goal is to give Nathan and Brady a strategy to turn around the business in the next six weeks and get the company back on track. Brady, right? Yep. Brady.

Nice to meet you.

Good to meet you, man. And this is Nathan. Yeah. Good to meet you, Mike. Absolutely. This is great shop space you got here.

Yeah, it's not bad.

It's cool. You guys own this or rent it or.

My dad bought it.

Okay.

And we rent it from him.

Very cool. Just like the front of the property.

All of this.

Really?

Yeah. Good thing is we can dump here.

So we just like two or three. Yeah.

I think because we have some of the wood line. Yeah. It's like 2.3 that's nice.

Very cool. Do you just pull one of the trucks in here?

Usually the zuzu stays in here. We were renting before. We're basically still renting, but it's. We're getting something out of it. We can store all of our materials here.

This is probably zone four too, right?

Yeah.

This is super cool.

It was an old trash company.

This place was.

Yeah. And he retired and he was getting out of it, so we got it for a really, really good deal.

So when did you move in this. This shop space?

Three years ago.

Oh, so we've been here a while. Yeah. Okay, cool.

We try to keep most things hooked up just so it's efficient. In the morning, typically this will be back here, the trailer. As far as that. That'll get unhooked, then they can pull around and then hook up to it and then go out and. And then the dump trailer will be in here. And then usually the trucks will stay outside. But if we can, we try to. Try to pack everything in here as tight as we can so that everything can. But the nice thing is the lean to. Just got built last fall. Yeah. So now we can kind of have a little bit more space like the wheelbarrows and everything like that out there.

That's awesome, man.

And we have an office too, which was a huge plus cuz we didn't have that in the last spot.

Got it.

So we were at a shop renting, but there's another guy's in there and we didn't really care for that.

There's something hairy, I think with the partnership because the old owner is still on the website. Let me get clear on this. And we can cut this out if you want us to.

No, you're good.

So there was another gentleman. I think it's Landon. His picture still on the website. Bless his heart.

Yeah, yeah.

So he was. It was you two?

Yes. Landon was a great worker. Honestly, he's probably our best guy we had. That's all he would do, you know, like so like before Brady, I was kind of doing the sales, talking to clients, the admin, running the day to day operations. And it was like too much. It was like, hey, if you're gonna be a partner, I need your help on some of those other things. So that's why we brought Brady onto it.

It was them two. Originally I had my own thing and I was going through like this whole process with. I was still playing baseball and then I was supposed to get surgery.

Let's go.

So it was like my labrum. It's completely tor like that. So it was tough because I was, you know, working in the field, and, like, I couldn't do anything. We both joked around with the idea of, you know, hey, like, we should join. Like, we're in the same service area. Might as well. So then it was all three of us, and then, oh, so you.

For a while, it was all three of you. And was that just last year?

That just last year up until, like, May.

In a relationship, assuming you're married, getting married, like, you basically say, till death do us park. And, like, essentially out of, like, an existential crisis. That doesn't change when business. Everyone's going to eventually split, but yet we treat it like a marriage, which is like, oh, we're never gonna talk about divorce. Unfortunately, unlike relationships, people don't take a lot of their time on partnerships. Like, it'll be like, a matter of a few weeks. And I'm like, we should do business together. You're basically like getting in a marriage with somebody, but in terms of business, it's going to end at some point. You're not going to be with each other forever. And so if the likelihood of divorce in a relationship is 50%, I would say the likelihood of quote, unquote, divorce, I. E. Just separation in business is probably 99%. Like, very, very few people for the rest of their life will be in business together. And so it seemed like a good idea to figure out how that's going to work when it does end inevitably.

A lot of people's like, partners are scary. But I look at it like, hey, we got three people that have the same goal. I mean, we're not going to have an employee that can top that. Spring of last year came. We bought out another two companies, small company. And one had 30 yards, one had 85 yards.

And you were also kind of joining at the same time.

Yeah.

So I worked.

Let's all do everything at the exact same time. From a revenue perspective. Like in 2023, what was the revenue?

We hit 189. That was me and Landon.

Okay, cool. And then the acquisitions happened early last year. And both the acquisitions are paid for. Right. If they're behind us or not. And you guys are scaling up a lot. I'm spring. The three of you are all on board. And then does he just, like, lose interest in the business? He.

He had drama going on.

Yeah.

Okay.

But another. His girl. We had like 60 something yards. Me and Landon did that. We were mowing, and that's fine. He had roughly 30 or 40 yards so with us three, with us combining, we could be. We could be fine. But then we. The spring rush last year hit. We bought all those accounts. We had like 220.

I don't want to talk bad about him, but it got to a point where, honestly, he was missing. Missing work. Missing work. Missing work. And I was like, hey, I got tired of it. And I said, hey, if you can't show up and do the same effort that we're doing, then I don't think you should be part of it anymore.

Then he left. April.

April.

April. That was like a month ago.

It was quick. It was quick.

Mercy. Did you relinquish all equity?

So, yeah, it was just a tough situation. And I don't blame him necessarily for leaving and taking care of what he had to do. It was just kind of affecting us, and it was not fair to us.

After he left, did you all have to kind of put brakes on growing those? Because he immediately was like, your leader in the field.

Yeah.

Got it. So last spring was probably a lot of chaos.

It was rough.

Yeah. It was stress on top of stress on top of stress. I mean, probably 80 hour, 80 hours a week minimum.

And landscape side of things. He was landscaper, too. So we kind of basically had to cut those out until we found guys. We scored, like, $70,000 in landscapes in one day. It was a joke finding guys.

Did those come in, like, right before he left? And so you were on the hook.

It was like, as he was leaving, so we were, like, bidding it out for a shorter amount of time because he knows how to do all that stuff.

So two jobs. We should have profited. We didn't really profit just because trying to find the guys to do it. So. So that. That messed us up. There's a lot of weeks that we couldn't even get everything mowed.

Yeah.

So we never really caught up last year. We got behind, hit us hard early April, and we never really got caught up. I was supposed to run the mowing. He was landscaping, and he was supposed to just admins because that's what me and Landon struggled on the year before. Is this the upselling is there the more money's there? It's just like the backbone of the business is what we struggled on. We just learning curve to get there.

Like my thing with Patrick last year, I got him talking about publicly, but it's like, yeah, I ended up buying him out, but, like, at least we had it defined as to what was supposed to happen. So when I was, you know, not thrilled with his partnership, I could get out of it and we're still friends. Like, he still text. I invite him to my wedding.

Right. Now, as far as where the contract with the new LLC is, the that it's just pretty much a 50. 50. So equity split. Yeah.

Okay. And then who is 50, 50 split of power too?

Yeah, pretty much.

Do you have a pen by chance? Yeah. You guys know what the 4L framework is? Have you guys seen the idea? I've heard of it.

Okay. Yeah.

There's only four real reasons why your business stops growing, and I call it the 4L framework. It's either because of liquidity, leads, labor, or leadership. And when you first get your business started, you need liquidity, you need cash, and. And you turn that liquidity into leads. How? By advertising. And then once you get a bunch of leads, you get a bunch of customers. You already need labor. Because we're in the home service industry, we actually go do the work. And once you get a bunch of labors, you need leadership to be able to run the business and be able to run it when you're not even there. What I like to do is over the next six weeks before we touch base with you, kind of give you assignments for, hey, these are the things we're doing, each of these areas. So, okay, leadership side, I think we want to do an amendment and figure out, like, what is the partnership agreement. What we don't want to happen is anything with the relationship and their partnership. Then do a repeat of 2024 so you can even determine in the partnership agreement, like, what, how do we value the business. Right. So you can just already set an arbitrary valuation so that if someone wants to out, it's like, we already know what it is to buy them out. And then there's always the agreement of like, okay, we know what the value of the business is. And if I ever want to buy them out or I need to leave, I know what I'm going to be getting out of this. And if it does happen, it's very clear. It's like, okay, so we don't agree on stuff. Great, let's go. What's supposed to happen now? Okay, you're getting divorced. Like, we never want that. We don't want to think about it. But like, you're doing that now. 25% of the business is in jeopardy. What's supposed to happen? Oh, we're supposed to liquidate. I have to be bought out. And here's the valuation. Okay, we're going to get three independent valuators and. And Then that the average of those what we use, some people use profit. And like, we add the assets, like in 10 years, one of you wanted to grow, one of you want, like, cash out. Yeah. Right. And having the conversation now when things are good and it's not a bunch of money on the line is really healthy. You can just keep adding to it in your LLC as the business changes. It's going to take one evening for you guys to go over, like, what is the prenup of this business? How does that work? So we both can like, pour 100% into it, knowing that if and when things happen, like, I'm not going to get screwed again because that's in the back of both of your heads. I would just like, put it all in writing. It's like, super healthy.

Yeah.

Smart. Now while we're good.

Well, it requires having a good balance sheet. Right. So I think even from a leadership perspective, like having numbers of the business that is an account like the bookkeeper would be super positive.

Yeah.

Well, the challenging part with a turnaround like this is when you have really like a P and L that doesn't hardly exist. A balance sheet that's typed up on Google Docs in two paragraphs. You are flying blinds, like, literally being dropped into a car in the middle of the prairies and be like, where do you think you are? You have no idea. For me coming in, I can't really do much because I don't know, like, what is your labor efficiency? You know, how much are you spending on admin versus out in the field labor? Like, there's no numbers and so you don't even know where to attack. Yeah, have them on a spreadsheet so someone else can look at them and then help you. Because, like, I can't help this business. And so I would definitely try to get some numbers on it. Like right now. How much is in the bank?

14.

14,000.

Okay, so it's not like crazy bad, but squeaky going into like, probably a 50, $60,000 a month.

Yeah, April. April will be.

Yeah.

This month I think we're going to do like 30.

Just going to ramp it up. Yeah. Okay. All right. So still a little bit squeaky on the cash, but, like, you can cover payroll.

Yeah.

Okay, cool.

There's a couple of weeks where it's like payrolls come in. It's like, who has a credit card file? Hit them.

Yeah.

So we can at least get paid to pay for our guys.

Our guys have never missed a paycheck ever. We're the ones who missed the paychecks. That's why we want the profit, because, like, we have bills too. He has a house, I have a. I have a truck payment. I'm getting ready to get married in December.

So it's like, yeah, we never miss a check, but we had to. Hey, I know this is your route that you're supposed to do. Hit these. Yeah, don't go mow these 20 customers today. We don't have credit cards for them, so we're not going to get paid from them until whenever.

So we'd have to switch the routes up by, like, if they're on a Thursday and we were already behind a little bit, would like, oh, let's move them back to a Tuesday. That way, you know, hey, come Thursday, everything's in the account so we can give them their checks on Friday. So that's the rough part that we're like, we don't want to do that right now.

Like, the challenging part is like, I don't even have numbers to look at. Like, I don't know what percentage is going to labor. I don't know what percentage is going to fuel. I don't know what percentage you go into your shop space. Like, you're flying blind because you don't have no metrics. Like, even the fact that you did the acquisitions last year and that came out of cash, if that was marked as an expense like, that probably messes up your taxes. It also is going to mess up the P and L. It looks like you guys didn't make money. Right. It was like 390,000 revenue, $279 in profit, according to what I saw, but I didn't see any breakdown.

We. So we run Jobber. That is where we. Our biggest headache, as opposed, like, our business IQ is so bad.

Yeah, yeah. Like, the. The thing with bank statements is like, it's like every time you got in your car, if you have to like, check the oil, check the air pressure, like, you don't do that. You just hop in the car and you hope that the dashboard at a glance, you know what's going on. And that's why the P L is important. It's just a matter of, like, do we want to scale fast or do we want to make this thing more profitable? I think, like, getting clarity on that's important before we go into it, because, for example, if you had $100,000 in the bank, oh, great. You're going to be full time admin, you're going to be full time sales. You're going to get an operations person, we're going to scale to a million in a year and a half. That's one out. Very risky when you only have $15,000 in the bank. Like not don't recommend. And so then it's just a function of. Okay, what, what's the alternative look like? The alternative looks like let's juice every single lead. So as the leads get in, we filled all the current trucks up. Like right now, if you have 180, 150 customers mowing, how many do you think you could get before you like, hey, we have to buy another truck for moe?

Probably about 200, so probably well more. About 50 or 60. Yeah.

Okay, so but if you basically 50, 60 more customers, you're at 150. If we hit 200, we're basically like, we're using the extra trailer, extra mowers. Okay, great. So like my, my then philosophy is we can grow and kind of pro be profit at the same time. That is one, we grow as fast as possible to 200 and then we raise prices like across the board by at least 20%. So from a liquidity perspective, we really got to get above two weeks worth of revenue in the bank and that's like 25, $30,000. So I'm gonna put like a target on it, a 30k, 30k cash in the bank. The other thing is from a liquidity perspective, we gotta do a price increase. So if we can get a price increase in six weeks on 200 customers, that's the goal, then we will literally solve our liquidity crunch problem. And like the difference between being like 1 or 2% profitable versus 10 or 15% profitable this year, actually like that you guys get distributions is whether or not you raise prices during spring rush. And so if we do that, that will give you the cash flow required and then you kind of get to scratch the itch of growing and scratch ditch and making more money. And so like it's very rare that I actually tell someone, hey, go sprint to this. And you're going to run it pretty hot. But I think you can do it in six to eight weeks, right? Get 50 new customers if you juice the leads correctly. And I have a couple of ideas around that. Like, juice it, hit that marker. And then as soon as you raise, if you raise 200 customers by 20%, you're, you're going to literally bring six to eight grand of profit to the bottom line. And so it just becomes a matter of like, oh, then how do we get the leads?

So is this what you're doing for marketing?

Yeah, that's our plan. We have obviously a website and we used to have a marketing guy who was supposed to make, you know, tick tocks. Facebook posts. He's supposed to edit our website. But like you said already, Landon's still on the website.

So that was kind of the breaking point. That's kind of why. Yeah, he had like two months to fix that. We had them in here to have a meeting with them.

The website was broken?

No, we. Two months. We had them in here to like, hey, we want these changed. Lane is not here, you know, he knows Lana's not here. Can we have this about us changed a little bit?

Yeah.

Even the right address?

I was going to say. Dude. Okay. Okay. So have you guys locked out of your site?

He has pretty much all access, as far as I know.

Landon or the SEO? No. Website guy. The guy. And so why isn't he giving it to you?

I. He literally wouldn't. I asked him because I was trying to, you know, obviously springs coming in. I. I text him. I was like, hey, you want to like, come in and like, take a look, see, make a plan for what we want? How many Facebook posts, you know, change a little bit of stuff on the website? And he was like, yeah, I'll come in. And then I text him like, hey, are you coming in this weekend?

And he's like, no. He's like.

He didn't even answer.

Are you just paying him? No, no. But he basically controls the site.

Yes. Yeah.

And you have no access to that?

I.

Not right now, no. Like if we wanted to get in and change a photo. No, no, no.

We pay.

Do you own the domain?

Yes. Yes.

Okay. Okay. Pull it up real quick. There's a few things. Like the challenging part is I'm going to give you these ideas and then like, you can't really execute them right now. Yeah. Do you actually have access to the domain though? Like if you. If you built another site, you could rip it out from underneath him?

I think so, yeah.

Okay, good.

He's the one that got it for.

Oh snap. He has access.

But if I called him right now.

He like, is it GoDaddy? Do you know what? He bought it through Hostgator here. Okay.

Cuz it turned out to be a pretty decent website.

Yeah. Yeah. So there's a few things like on here, I think we could really improve the conversion.

So I know you're big about getting rid of stock images.

Yeah.

Getting a video of our guys in the background.

Yeah. Or even. Even like your trucks like, the suit is really nice. If it was you and like your crew just standing up against that in front of the shop space, I think it'd be great. Like, that picture here would do a lot better than just random, you know, stuff in the background. Also with this, like, the text is hard to read because there's so much busyness happening. So a couple things you could do almost like you almost immediately double the conversion on this site. So how I think about, like, these would drive traffic to the website. Running Facebook ads will drive traffic to website, getting better SEO, drive traffic website. But if the website doesn't convert them into leads, I could care less. And so like, it's like, what's the lever of the businesses? If I can figure out how to take this website and instead of 1 out of 50 people that get to the site, ask for an estimate and we get a 1 out of 25, we double the business. So actually look at here first, because if we, how do we get 50 new customers is the problem to solve in the next six weeks? How do we get 50 more mowing customers? Because I know if we do that and then we raise prices, we are going to draw five to $8,000 straight to the bottom line. That will solve a lot of the pressure financially. So when I look at this, there's a few things I would do. And this is challenging because like right now we can't make these changes. But like the financing tab. How many people actually use Wisetac on your project?

We've had, yeah, one person and it was like a 38,000.

So we're wasting our highest converting CTA call to action spot for financing that one customer used and basically for another service, Wisetap. I don't care about Wisetack. I want you guys to make money. So like this, this is where I would say request an estimate. So this button goes up here. Like we want it to be wherever they are on this page. It doesn't say financing, it says get, like, get an estimate. Like, he has the CTA throughout here. That's fine. But this floats up top. I would, I would change it to get it. Get it. The whole point of getting the website is that they ask for an estimate, right? And then the Next thing is 90% of people that will see this page right here will not go to a different page or scroll down. They're just going to stay here. And so I want them to be able to submit their information without scrolling down, without clicking here, like the Contact Us page now. So in order to give you guys, information. I have to leave the homepage and then I have to scroll down. I want to be where as soon as I get here. If I'm, if I'm going down the road and I see luxury longer and I type in luxury laundry, Google and I click on your site right from here, I want to have a fillable form. Okay? And so even if you move this over, you had one third of this just being. I want your name, your contact information and what service you want. Just get their information so then you can capture the lead because that will take you from a 1 out of 50 conversion. Right now we have no math on this because he's. But like, you will be able to see eventually. Like, okay, here's how many people come to our site. And I can guarantee right now you're probably getting 3, 400 people to this site every month. And a small fraction of them are actually converting because they have to click on the other things. And you'll be able to see down the road, like page views and you'll see like less than 10% of people are going to other pages. They're just staying right here. And if they can't get their information to you, you don't get a lead. And so we can pay for this. We can pay for Facebook ads, we can do Google Ads, we can do SEO and we will get to the site. But if they're not converting to a lead, it's useless. So I would really encourage, like, for my. This is tough because we can't do anything but like, change the CTA to get it. Get. Request an estimate. Change the photo to mean your guys in your uniforms out here with the truck. This usually looks great. Make that the main image. And then up here in the top, like above the fold so you don't have to scroll. There's your request form. And I don't care if it's tied in a job or not. I just want the higher conversion of people getting here and immediately sending the information.

Because that alone will increase, I would say at least double your conversion. From an SEO perspective, they're doing pretty good. Their website's ranking well. But again, I'm always looking for like, what's the 1% that actually makes it double? So for example, if their conversion on their website is 2%, which means 1 out of 50 people that come to the site convert to a lead, if I can just change the conversion from 2% to 4%, I just doubled the business. And so, yes, I could go after the inefficiencies. Here and 5%, 10%. But I'm looking for the biggest domino and to double that business, I need to increase the conversion on the website from 2% to 4%. So many times we get so stuck in operations because you fail a step back and like, okay, how do I double this? How do I triple this business? And it's usually not going after the thing that you're going to make small tweaks to. That makes a 5, 10% increase. It's the massive domino, which is leads coming in right now. Half of them get confused and don't click through always all the way to submitting an estimate request for fix that bottleneck, that constraint. And so if you fix any bottleneck below, that is where all the impact of the business happens. But you've got to fix that one little stick small thing. Like really from a leads perspective, we just need control of the site.

Yeah.

Like whether you pay him or you ask him, hey, can we get the domain? Or if he has an access to like a website builder, it looks like he's using WordPress and then you go get someone else to do it. Like we just need control of it because it is literally the reason that you're getting leads. Like if you're not advertising, the reason you're getting those leads is because you're ranking well on Google listing and you're ranking well on Google. So like not having control of that lead source is like very like it is a tomorrow. He could pull that card and you guys don't have a business. Like, if that happens, your leads stop. And that's like an existential crisis for the business. That's a huge threat in my opinion. This is why, like, eventually I always try to move something like third party. I have the keys to it, I have the keys to the domain. Even the people that build my sites, like employees, they do not have access to the domain because someone can pull that domain out from in your toast. Like you are ransom at Ransom. And so if we can just increase the conversion and have control of that, I'd feel better. Especially after what happened last year. Like, you're just always looking for like, okay, what could potentially put me out of business tomorrow.

Yeah.

You know, and like he is one click away on on the on Hostgator or GoDaddy from like, okay, their site's off. I need five grand from you. And you would pay it because leads would grind to a hole. Right.

Learning like, obviously we know how to work and we know how to our product is good, but learning the business Side is way harder than doing the actual work in the field.

From a labor perspective.

You obviously have a couple good guys from last year still. Yeah, you got a couple new guys getting trained. Finding them seems to be easier this year.

Way easier way.

Yeah.

And so from a training perspective like as we get the new customers has like it sounds like I haven't even heard of like a lot of complaints, callbacks, nothing like that.

The biggest complaints we had was not answering the phone. Communication was terrible last year. If I'm working, I just want to get the work done and I'll kind of leave my phones in the truck. But I had the business phone and like I'd get calls and calls and calls and I'd be like, okay, I got 10 missed calls because I was on landscapes last year. So I'd be there for like six hours and I'd take a break and it'd be like I got 10 missed calls. I'm like oh my God, now I gotta take you know, an hour to make these phone calls back. Or I can just wait till the end of the day and do that. So it was kind of a back and forth on that. Maintenance is our focus. I mean obviously being a lawn care business, our main focus is, you know, taking care of people's weekly needs and project based work. Because it's only 10 or 15% of our revenue, it's like okay, that 10 or 15% takes up, you know, probably 150 hours worth of my time per.

Project doing the smaller services like the mulching and the lawn care. I mean it's easier to train guys. So if we can do that, bring guys in, have him focus on what he needs to do, we're good. Like if he's on the phone, he's doing the emails and he's talking to the clients, people are doing what they need to do behind him. That's where we're our best.

So then what can our team do to, to keep you from having to be on job sites? Do we need to have a better trained like project manager?

I'm extremely picky.

Okay.

On the project based.

So can we take the 20 jobs that we currently do on project side and cut out the top five or six that you know, you only can be there?

Probably yeah, I, yeah I, my.

I micromanage big time on the, on the like quality side of things. So that's a like a personal issue that I like projects.

That's why we do so well together. Cuz project based work, we don't work together.

Yeah, he's so fast at mowing and his quality is good on mowing. But like I have to make sure grade is like perfect. I have to make sure that everything is like code, which obviously you should. But like there's so many people around here that don't do it that way. But that's also why we're higher priced because I do it like step by step. No steps get missed. And I've never had a complaint on any project based work in my life.

Work wise, we really don't get complaints.

No.

So what I would say then is like if the constraint of the business is you being able to communicate better with customers, we need to free you up. So then this question is like, why are you not freeing up? Well, I have to be on the job site. They have to be perfect. Okay, great. What are the things that if you're not there, fall through the cracks and then eliminate those services. There's also a reason why having a good P and L and even you could use jobber for this. Figure out what which services you're making revenue from. Because I happen to believe you could cut out 20% of your project revenue, but cut out 60, 70, 80% of the amount of time you must be on the job site. By doing that, increase our communication and double the other parts of the business. Because we just have better close ratio, better communication.

I don't want to have to be out there. I don't. I want this to be my like I want the communication, I want everything like that, the maintenance side so that that's healthy.

I just keep doing that. Because if the constraint of a business exists, all resources are put into it. And if the constraint is we don't communicate fast enough, we have a whole bunch of missed calls, a bunch of leads we don't get back to, that should be the thing we solve for. And if that means cutting out 10 to 15% of revenue so we can attach attack the other 80% of revenue idea. Like as you're super busy with mowing, don't take on big projects. Schedule those off into the off season. Whether that be July, August, when it slows down a little bit because of the sun or just even like as you go into fall, fall cleanups like focus all of the time and energy on getting the recurring customers and push the project off in December and January.

We made an agreement to cut out the hardscapes last year. Yeah, more difficult services because it was hard for us to find guys last year. Our goal is to basically just build up the Maintenance, Maintenance side.

Right.

Instead of selling these bigger projects, I mean just focus on upselling what we have and we'll make the same amount of money, if not more. And I think that's like the route we're going to focus on.

And you can always just have it where it's okay. We're okay with a 50% close ratio on our maintenance, but we only want a close ratio of like 25 to 30% on projects because we're going to price it so high and so that if we do get a project and you have to be there, you know, you're making such a killing, you could care less.

Yeah.

Right. So that's what I would probably do. Right. Right away is just raise your prices dramatically on land on projects.

The stress versus the money. I'd rather maintenance.

Well, it's also managers like leverage of your time. Like your time out doing projects are making 100 bucks an hour for the business.

Yeah.

But if you're able to get five new jobs and communicate with customers and have a better retention of your maintenance and then one time you raise a price increase and make eight grand a month. That's what you can't do with landscape. Yeah. You can't go back in time like, all right, all these customers I now make money on you with, with the maintenance we can get 200. Use all these trucks and equipment. I happen to believe that you could also down the road, if you really wanted to go for it, that other truck, start to do some projects, but then also more maintenance. During the spring rush you might get 250 customers and all of a sudden like raising prices. We just left our location like he's going to raise price and $10,000 extra profit. There's like pushing a button and that's, that's, that's like where the money is good.

Right.

And more importantly, you don't, you're. It's not dependent on you being there.

Yeah.

Right.

I know. We kind of did the full circle there. There's a lot of little changes.

Yeah.

And, and what's funny is like most time people think I'm gonna come in here like ah, change the software and like. But we don't have any numbers to do with right now. Right. And so I go up to the low hanging fruit which is like we need more, more money in the bank. And to do that when you hit capacity and raise prices and I think we can grow into that. And then a lot of this other stuff falls into place. Like if you get, if you're conversion on Your leads, all of a sudden you're getting six, eight leads a day. It'll force you even more. So you need the bottom left becomes you can't communicate. So it'll force you to simplify services. It'll force you to say no to complex ones and then matter. Like, you'll need to know your numbers because, like, eventually you get to the point where like, okay, this is so fresh and money comes in, money somehow disappears. We have no idea where it's going. And you just like, you got to have a P and L. Right. So I think even from a leadership perspective, like having numbers of the business, I. E. An account like the bookkeeper would be super positive.

Yeah.

Because like, if I come back here in a year and we have a solid P And l from 2025, we have a really good discussion. Okay, do you pay for performance? Do we open up the books? Do we do profit sharing? What does the truth of cash look like? What are the roles and responsibilities? And what percentage of revenue is going to the landscaping versus the mowing? But we don't have that now. So I think numbers like having the bookkeeper, they'll be happy to take your money. So that should be an easy one. I'd say within a week or two, they clean things up for you. Right. And then you have a really good P and L. You actually, as you make a price increase, you see the effect of it. You start to see what the close ratio is for landscape versus mowing. And then you really start to govern the business. Business as the owner. Right.

The biggest thing is if we get access to the site like this week and then immediately increase our conversion as spring rush comes on. I think that's the thing that unlocks us getting 50 new customers and raising the price. If we can do the like, the difference between this year being profitable and not is going to be if we get that price increase in six to eight weeks versus, like in August, we kind of hit capacity. Yeah, right. And then you're like, I don't really want to raise prices because we're kind of on the downswing anyways. Like, the next two months of sprinting to that is the difference of profitability.