POV: Behind the Scenes with a $75M CEO

All right, it has been a couple weeks since we have been at the headquarters building. Augusta Nation HQ is in operation. I'm gonna walk you through kind of what the layout of the land is going to be. So this building is 2 stories once it's completed. I'm gonna walk you through what the layout is going to look like. So this bottom side of the building is going to be for homeworks, So the software side is also going to be for Home Service CPA, and it's going to be for the media team as well as elements of Command Center once they move over here. On this side, on the bottom floor, we're going to have the Bellingham shop. So this is my location that I own locally, and those very first Augusta Lawn Care location— there'll be a big roll-up door, so they'll have plenty of space inside of here, and it's going to definitely be the nicest shop. They've ever had. They'll have a nice little office space in here as well with a bathroom, etc. There'll be a break room over there for the entire team. And then upstairs, up here, is where we're going to train all the owners of Augusta Lawn Care when they come here for new owner training. And we're gonna have studios up above the Bellingham shop. So this is where we'll make videos in the studio that I have for the Mia team to be able to make these YouTube videos. Now, if we go over here, the whole reason, the objective of the headquarters building is that I believe there is a lot of unforeseen benefits, and it's hard to measure or quantify, but bringing everyone together in the same place. The engineers that are building the software, HomeWorks, the team members that are answering the phone calls for Command Center, the team members that are actually doing the work out in the field, and being able to see each other I feel like is really helpful to be able to build culture as well as for them to appreciate the role that everyone else is playing on the team. So if they never see the technicians going out on a rainy day, they might not have the same feeling when someone calls in and is freaking out and mad at a technician. It's like, look, it is pouring down rain. I just saw them leave and it's, it's brutal out there. And vice versa, when someone's been having a hard day on the phone, customer's been mad at them for whatever reason and the technician comes back, they're able to actually meet those people and they have faces to those names. And so I'm really looking forward to be able to have everyone in the same place. But the big news is this is just going to be building number 1. So what we've been working on, the reason there's been a bit of a delay is that building number 2 is going to be going back here and this building will probably be about twice the size Of building number 1. This is going to allow us to be able to grow and expand. I would love to be able to have events here. I would love to be able to continue expanding Command Center. At peak season this year, we had 87 agents and it was not comfortable inside the office. And this office is not big enough for 85 people. It's not. This might house 30 to 40 comfortably if you could really squeeze it in, maybe a little bit more. In the actual office space because there's a lot of studio space, then the shop space and the training facility. But the second facility will be very much more of a call center layout as well as a larger meeting area. So that is the plan for the headquarters building. I look forward to being able to share the good news that we have permits and are breaking ground on building number 2. But the objective for this year is to get into this building so I can move the Bellingham shop, 'Cause they're renting over here, move Homeworks over here, move the media team over here, and then fulfill our lease over at the other command center by the time building number 2 is ready. All right, this might look familiar because this is where we do training for Augusta owners, but this is Anytime Fitness. This gym, I have owned this now for like 9 or 10 years. I learned a lot about franchising because when I worked here as a trainer, they were the number one franchise ranked by the Franchise 500 Entrepreneur Magazine. And I was able to kind of learn a lot of systems, processes, how they did training. A lot of stuff we do at Augusta is actually from Anytime Fitness, like even the verbiage around academy dashboard, how we do our training, flat fees. We The conference, lots of stuff. So all that being said, because it's now been quite some time, we have to do a remodel. So part of being the franchise system is making sure that we do a remodel and refresh the brand. So right now this big dumpster is here because they're doing demolition. So I'm gonna show you some of the early stages of the remodel. We're painting the entire place, but we're taking out walls, we're installing tile in all the bathrooms. There's a lot of work that's going on. All in, it's about $120,000 to remodel the whole thing, which is a bit of a pain in the butt. And about 400 locations of Anytime Fitness have actually closed down because of the remodel costs. However, as a franchisee, I'm actually really happy that they're enforcing this to make sure that the standards are upheld because there's a lot of gyms that honestly look really, really bad. As I've traveled the country seeing a lot of them, there's about 5 or 10% of them that are not up to snuff and they're not clean, the bad equipment, it just looks super dated. So as much as I don't like spending $120,000 and being forced to do so to sign my next franchise agreement, I'm happy that the brand consistency is being upheld and the new colors and the new scheme looks very cool. This is the entrance. It's all going to look completely different. This is going to get wiped out, that wall. But this is the construction that's currently going on, taking out the whole front face that used to be like a nice rock wall, but it's going to be completely changed, open up this All with a bunch of glass. And then we're opening up the member lobby area and taking out one of the training rooms. This training room wasn't really needed or used a lot, so we're just going to extend the cubbies, making a really nice station for people to be able to take their shoes off, pack all their stuff. All in the cubby area. Put tile in there. But then the biggest changes are really happening in the bathrooms. Everything's going to get painted. Completely different colors of the brand. You see everything's kind of a mess now for demo. See in here, everything's being completely stripped out. This is the bathroom, bathroom 1, and it goes over another bathroom. So all the showers are gonna get retiled, and all of this will get retiled, so it'll be much nicer. Everything all plasticked off. So the demo will continue, but everything's gonna get wiped out here. So I have to cover all the equipment just because the dust is pretty crazy. But progress is being made. This is day 2, and this will be about a week and a half of construction. It's 3-3, and we're not doing very good. All right, Panzer, what do you think of the Mariners? I just hope everyone wins, and I hope everyone has a good time. I'm just here for a good time. Here for the Coke Zero. All right, the Mariners won. We're having a celebration, and we went to this random Mexican place. So we got a molcajete bowl and guacamole. Let's go, steak! Tender? Juicy? All of the above. We drove down to Seattle. Tomorrow morning we are heading out for a turnaround show. Today we went to the Seattle Mariners game. They beat the Minnesota Twins. We saw a home run for the one clip that I actually took of the, of the game. And in the bottom of the 9th inning, we scored a run and we won. Fantastic. So we celebrated. We're going to a Mexican restaurant, and tomorrow starts the turnaround show. Landed in Boston, had a massive barbecue dinner, and then went to Anytime Fitness. So starting off the turnaround strong. My head is killing me for some reason. It was a long flight, like 5 hours from Seattle to Boston. So hopefully I can sleep this off, but we gotta head back to the hotel. We'll meet Terrell, the videographer, and do the pre-coaching interview. All right, folks, we are currently on a rain delay because pouring down rain and the crew was not able to show up at the business that we're supposed to be doing turnaround today for. So Terrell went to go talk to the owner We are on rain delay. We're gonna go to a cafe real quick. I'm gonna talk to Mr. Stefano Narducci. So, gonna hop on the call with him now. What's up, brother? Not much. You already at the office, or are you guys, uh, getting ready for the day? Right. It's very easy to dilute the first location by you leaving. You pull your core team out, and all of a sudden that location starts to struggle. And trying to test that, it's one of those things. It's very hard to determine location. Just you don't want that being hurt like that. That is the moneymaker. All right. So we are headed to the turnaround. We have been rained out for the crew. They're off today. But Terrell, our videographer, he shot at their shop. space this morning, and now we're meeting them at the house of the owner. Now, so far we've got that they've been having some struggles in the marriage because of the business. She's a physical therapist and has basically been the breadwinner for the home, but he's been working like 7 days a week, seems really distant in the relationship. There's been some struggle, but they're starting to try to figure it out. The challenging part is usually I would tell someone, because he's doing like $600,000 in annual revenue, doing a bunch of different services. I usually tell them like, cut back to your most profitable services, go all in on those and be profitable. Like raise your prices, go into profit mode. The problem is he has $100,000 of equipment debt, like $130,000. And then he has another $30,000 of credit card debt. So it's really hard to scale back and go into profit mode when your monthly interest is like $3,000, $4,000, $5,000 plus Monthly payments. So I gotta figure out what the math is to see if that's even an option or if we actually have to continue scaling. The other trouble is he doesn't really know what he wants. He doesn't know why he would keep growing. So we'll dig into it. Trel wants me to go the relationship route, but we'll see. She's gonna be there. It'll be fun. Hey, Mike. Alex, good to see you, man. Nice to meet you. Absolutely. And you're Maggie? Hi, it's nice to meet you. Great to meet you. Awesome. This is a good little spot you got here. This is a fantastic little spot. So this is kind of like your hangout, shop space, office? This is our office, yeah. I genuinely believe what she's doing in 4 hours, you will do in an hour and a half because now it's compressed. Like, I just do all of it one, one at a time. Yep. Makes sense, right? I think I tried to move myself out too fast. Yeah. And a lot of times you do it in the name of trying to get some time back. Yep. Right. But when the business makes no money, all of a sudden, like, every single— there's so many problems. You feel like you're sinking all the time. All right. So we're headed over to a spot 2 blocks away from the hotel. It's kind of raining. So we got this special spot where it's kind of covered. We're going to do the 4L framework and the introduction to the turnaround show that we shot this morning. So currently I got today we're Massachusetts. I don't know if I'm going to be able to say Massachusetts correctly. Massachusetts. Massachusetts. Massachusetts. Mass. Yeah. Massachusetts. Mass. Massachusetts. Massachusetts. Today we're in Boston visiting. To Boston. Huh? Well, I was gonna say Massachusetts, but I can't say it very well. Now I'm thinking more here because there's wind blockage up there. It's very windy. This guy, he put that wind mic on. Let's go. Strategy call, say weekly, where maybe we do dinner together or something like that. And this is like available if we need it, but we need more into— All right, so we landed in Michigan yesterday. We were in Boston, and now we're in this very vibey little Airbnb situation. Got 4 bedrooms. Terrell's hiding out over here with all the camera gear. Did we each get 2 rooms? But I am gonna be hopping on a call now with all the members of Home Service Boardroom and doing some Q&A. I would, I would just focus on your first location getting between $1 and $2 million, but knocking that $250,000 net cash, do another one of those. And then you will likely be in a good spot from a financial position to float yourself as well as to prove the model enough to your first 5 or 10 franchisees. But again, if you're kicking off that kind of cash, and you're only doing 50 locations, you are literally going to get to 50 and make less money in revenue than the 2 locations that you started off with. Just keep that in mind. This is a great Place you have out here. Thank you. I feel pretty blessed. It's a little further away from the the city, but not like too far away. Yes. That's awesome. After a brain injury, you don't have like reserve anymore. You're gonna need some break after this today. Yeah, I'm gonna need a little mental nap. All right, we finished the turnaround. We went to Anytime Fitness, and I just got changed out of my. Work clothes into my gym clothes. But I'm in the bathroom because we are currently at Augusta launching what we call the Augusta Nation Console, and it uses the MCP and API access from HomeWorks to pull a ton of data for all the owners— their cost of goods sold, their net margins, their churn percentages for 90-day and 1-year. Tells them which customers are the lowest price, and it's all using the AI agent and app connector that we now have, which is called MCP or API access. It's legit. But we're super excited. We've been working on this for months. Shout out Nick. He's the owner success manager. He's been working like crazy on this using Claude. And later this week, we'll be launching it for the public, for anyone that uses HomeWorks to be able to connect any Vibe-coded app or just their AI agent to really ask it and have it do things inside their account and pull reports like churn and lead attribution, just a ton of cool stuff. So I am currently in the bathroom because at Anytime Fitness here, this is a tiny little town, it's a tiny little gym, and they might be a little weirded out if I pull out my laptop out there. So we just announced it on Facebook, and now I'm about to push send on the email to all the owners giving them access to the new Augusta Nation console. So that's the first step. We're at a little cafe here in Michigan, and Mike is doing his Mike Minute. The podcast we're talking about first to come out for this week, I highly recommend watching it. We talk all about cost of goods sold, unit return cost. This is the new look. New banners, new paint on everything, and then the— sup, Lenny? And then we got the cubbies. This is all new too, and this looks great. This looks amazing. Busy day. But this does not look amazing. And check this out, that's all crooked. Look at this. It's all done on, completely messed up. So this is all gonna come out. Oh, Catawampus Lake. All the fancy schnazzy new stuff. Everything's repainted. It used to be like light greens and purples, but now it's a little bit more standardized. Very good. But in the back here, we also have problems. Like, oh, everything looks great, fantastic, right? No, this is the highest point of the entire bathroom, so if water comes out, it literally goes back behind the toilet. So we have to tear all of this out. And then they built this out a few inches, so no longer is this ADA compliant, so they gotta tear that out. And then when you turn the shower on, it literally hardly goes inside that drain. It all just It pours out here, and because this is the highest point, it goes to behind the toilet. So all this has got to get torn out. The contractor can't get here for a few more weeks, and it ain't great. This one's closed completely. Oh no, it's open. And this is in the other shower area. You can see, check this out. You can really see here, it's buckling. Like, it's not a great job on the tile. So they're gonna tear all this out too, 'cause it's like, you can't really tell, but it's like a solid quarter inch off and it's all buckled. So yeah, we're gonna have to— So new contractor will be here in a few weeks, fix all this up. But unfortunately, in the meantime, Showers are closed and we're amid construction zone. All right, so I'm headed into the office, but one thing that I'm doing today that's a little interesting is I'm talking to the previous CEO of Gym Launch. So several years back, Alex and Leila Hormozi, they sold Gym Launch to a private equity firm, and then Kale was the CEO that took over, and he had already worked with them for quite a while. And so he's been there for several years but recently left. And it's not easy being a CEO of a company that's owned by private equity, especially when you're more of an entrepreneurial type. So he currently is sort of in between things. He doesn't know 100% what he's doing next. He's partnered in some kind of a gym franchise. And so I actually have a call with him today. I'm really looking forward to it. I talked to him and his wife Maggie A few years ago because they were inside of a mastermind that I was in for software founders. And at the time, they thought they were going to start gymowners.com and start a CRM for gym businesses. And so that's why they were in the mastermind. We ended up talking and chatting because at the same time I was starting the CRM for home service businesses, which is HomeWorks. And so today we're going to connect and see if it might make sense for me to do some coaching with him. I'm a big proponent of still getting coaching, even if you're at the top of your game. If you look at the best athletes, they still have coaches. And no matter who you look at, they have athletic trainers, they have people that help work on their nutrition, people that actually work on their game, review game tape with them, look at their numbers, look at their stats. And so I look at this very much the same way. Even though I have the franchise, I have— The team. the school community, Home Service Boardroom, I still need my own coach. And so I've had— I've been very privileged to have Dr. Kashi in my corner. However, since the Money Models launch of Alex, he has— we haven't been on our weekly cadence. It's been very much like, if I need him, I'll ask kind of thing. I don't like asking. And so I want to get on more of a consistent cadence with a coach. And I think that Cale might be an excellent option. But today's call is really to see, is that even something that he thinks he could help me with? And so he's been really honest about like, hey, if I think I can help you, we can do it. If not, I'll just let you know. And so today's call is to see if it'd be a beneficial relationship and if coaching with him would be a benefit. And so for anyone out there, you're not going to be able to get someone potentially of Cale's caliber. It's expensive. And we're talking about 5 figures a month in terms of cost. But start at whatever level you're at trying to get inside of a community. It doesn't always have to be paid, but usually the paid ones are— it's the gateway to make sure that the people inside the room are of high quality and all on the same page. That's the only reason why I've joined masterminds. I've done coaching, all of that. It's not so much about what I learned, but the people that I meet. It's about the quality of the people in that room. And many times the higher the price, I have seen not necessarily the information get better. I have seen the quality of the people inside the room get better when I do group coaching or masterminds, etc. And then when you go one-on-one, just expect to pay a very, very premium price, especially if someone has exactly what you want. However, again, the best of the best in their field, whether it be athletics, business, even politics, like you look at singers, et cetera, all of them have coaches. And so the moment that someone believes that they're uncoachable or that no one can teach them anything is their first step towards decline. And so I wanna prevent that. I wanna be a good example in front of the owners of Augusta as well as everyone that watches my content. They're like, there is no victory lap. There is no, I've learned everything, I know everything. Crazy talk. So much pride. And so I want to set aside any ego that I have and ensure that I'm constantly learning, improving, and growing myself and the businesses. So when I do get into the office, I always bring my lunch. Brianna always packs me an incredible lunch. This morning we got a cottage cheese bowl. That is what you call incredible. Catalina Crunch, fresh fruit, some dark chocolate in there. Keto cookies she made me. Oh my word, she always writes me a nice little note. What else we got here today? Oh, burgers. She made these incredible burgers, bacon and cheese. It's gonna be a good day. And then new addition to the office is my drink fridge. Now this is a luxury, but man oh man, is it amazing. Having it just ice cold. I want to give a final update where we're at on the building project. Windows are going in here at the headquarters building, and walls are going in. So the roof is complete inside, it's all been insulated, but we're actually putting on siding. Let's go! All the windows are in, the facade backing is ready, and we expect the next couple weeks for this to be fully All the walls up, insulated, and then starting to frame out the interior. So progress is being made. All this insulation's going up, looks like in these walls here, and then it's getting all wrapped. So that is the final update of the vlog. Thank you all for watching. Next time you see this, it'll probably be framed out and a lot more progress have been made. Bye.