Prepare for 2024! Strategic Planning Session w/ Mike Andes

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, it's time to start. Very happy. We're a couple minutes early, so welcome everyone for joining. It's gonna be a great next hour, so I really believe it's gonna be a lot of fun and I do believe you'll walk away with some really good in input for your business. And so thank you all for joining. There's just a ton of people in here, so I'm gonna go ahead and get started in a few minutes. But first off, maybe just tell me where you're from, what the name of your business is. Joshua Gavin, Will John Chuka is in the house. If you guys don't already get some water. Get some, you know, stay hydrated for the next hour or so. You know, put your phone on mute. I don't even know my phone's at. Oh, it's in my pocket. Okay, we're going to charge that bad boy. Leave that alone right there. Okay? Yeah, if also, if you have a printer, be close to that because I'm going to give you a template that ideally you print off. Or because it's going to be a PDF, you could also use like, if you have like a remarkable or you have an iPad to write on, you're going to want to use that. So we're going to do it in the presentation today. You will need to download a PDF and draw on it. So either you can print it off, you can use an iPad, you can use whatever you need, but you will want to have that be able to be printed off and drawn on as a PDF. So we got Harold in the house saying roll tide. Supposedly. I heard, I hear last night didn't go well. So. Well. Three. Three points or something like that. Marco, Dakota. Welcome. Jose, Isaac, Marlon, Michael, Marcus, Parker, Patrick, Yeager. Okay, we just have a lot of people now. Okay. There's too many for me to say everyone's name now. Okay. So welcome everyone. Tucson, Arizona, Minnesota's in the house. Midland, Texas. Travis. Welcome. North Dallas. Green Empire. Lawn care. American Dream Landscaping. Patrick, Written in Ohio. Adam Jones. Let's go. Just a ton of people welcome. Thank you for joining. Dennis in Texas, Kansas, Ontario. I'm gonna be in Ontario next week for a turnaround show. It's gonna be fantastic. Coastal pools is in the house. Yard works. GoPro, Parker's Lawn and landscape. Oh, wow, there's a ton of. Thank you everyone for joining. This is fantastic. Let's see here. Fantastic. We've got people from Mexico in the house. Tlc, man. We got tree services, junk removal, Toronto Wow, this is a. This is fantastic. Okay, well, welcome, everybody. I really appreciate you all being on here. The SOD squad, Boise, Idaho. I'm gonna be in Idaho next week as well for a turnaround. I'm going to Ontario and then I'm going over to Idaho. So looking forward to it. We'll probably get our first turnaround where there's snow plowing involved. We got South Australia, we got Maine. Birmingham, Alabama. Welcome, everybody. Thank you for joining. I really do believe over the next hour it'll be super beneficial and actual tangible things you'll be able to take away for you and for your business going into 2024. We got people in Washington state. Let's go. Not too far away from me, we got. Oh, my God, this is a ton of people. Alberta, Josh, Jeremy, Alberta Sons. Let's go. This is a ton of people. Fantastic. Well, I appreciate you all being on here. Just a couple more days to the end of the year and so I did want to do something. Well, okay. I'm not gonna be able to read everyone's name. Sorry, they're just, they're just kind of pouring in. So thank you everyone for being on today. And I will do some Q A. I am going to go ahead and turn the. Okay, we got prose washing like there's a bunch of people in here. Thank you so much. I'm going to turn the comments off just so I can't see them. But you can still comment all you want, but otherwise it's distracting for me. I will come back to comments and I'll do some Q and A at the end of all of this. So please feel free to comment. I'm just not going to be responding to them because I get distracted when I'm trying to focus on my presentation. So let's go ahead and get started. We're just a minute in. If you just are joining, make sure you do a few things. Get some water. Introduce yourself in the chat. That's part of the entry fee for, for coming on live here. Is that you. You introduce yourself. So if in case you're watching this on some other platform randomly, go to mikeannings.com2024 get the full experience with everyone else in the chat and you can introduce yourself. That is again, the cost of admission. Get some water. And then you will need to be by a printer for a PDF to be able to print this off or you can, you'll be able to download this and you'll be able to put on your iPad and draw on it. So you'll want to get close to something like that because in about 15 to 20 minutes after I do a presentation, you, we are going to go through this vision map together.

Get some water. Let's go ahead and jump into things. I am going to need a volunteer at some point, so hold your horses for that. I don't know who that's going to be, but I will eventually come back to the comments because I'll need a volunteer, but I will need to know your email address also. So we'll figure that out. I want to do that live. So first off, though, let's talk about planning in general. So today we're talking about strategic planning and I really do believe that you'll walk away for the next hour or so having some real tangible things to implement inside your business. Let's go ahead and get started. How this presentation is going to make you some money, because that's why we're here, is I really believe you spend 1% more time on this thing that we're going to talk about today. You'll grow your business by 100%. You can literally double your business by spending 1%. This lever. Time is a lever in your business. And if deployed correctly into the right places of your business in terms of attention, you can have outsized returns, which means I don't spend 1% more of time and get 1% better business. I get 1% input of time and 100% better business. I can double the revenue of my company If I spend 1% of an input. That's what you call a lever when you get an outsized return from the inputs given. Right. So I believe if you spend 1% of your time on this that we talk about today, you can have a massive, massive return in the business. So I want to ask the question, and in the comments, hit me up, tell me what's going on. What percentage of your month is spent on strategy? All right, so you might have to do some math on this. So you say, okay, well if I spend, let's just say you do an hour a month. So one hour out of. Let's just say you're working 50 hours a week. So that would be one divided by 200 per month. So you'd be looking at around what is it like 0.005, which would be 0.5% of your. Of your month would be spent on strategy. Okay, so what percentage of your month? Someone asked me this a while back. I was joining a mastermind and they asked what percentage of your day is spent on strategy? Like your day. And I was like, well, I don't really, can't really quantify it in day because I don't really spend much time on strategy even in a given week, let alone a month, let alone a given day. It's very common that we get so caught up in operations, sales, administration, hiring, all these other things, we don't actually take time to sit down what we're doing today and actually focus on strategy.

Here's the thing. If you spent 1% of your time on strategy, that would mean you would spend three full days per year just thinking about the strategy of your business. Now, this is a lot of times when people think about strategy, they think about this as working, quote, unquote on their business. And so a lot of times, because we are working on our business, we, we somehow attribute that with bigger businesses and more successful businesses, which, which, this is the crazy thing, the people that work on their business usually become bigger. So if your goal is to grow a business, it is going to require you to work on it. And the reason I'm making this delineation is because strategy is part of working on your business. And if you're only working on your business, even as a successful entrepreneur, 1%, only 1% of your day is spent on something that's so important fundamentally to the growth of that organ, the growth of your business, the growth profitably. And from a revenue perspective, it's actually laughable that we only spend 1% of our time working on the business. It is phenomenal. Like, even if you say, okay, well, I'm, I'm, you know, I'm out of daily operations, well, what are you doing all the time? Well, you know, I run to the post office, I run to the bank. You're still working on in the business. Just because you're not actively doing the work out in the field does not mean you are working on the business. You're doing sales, you know, your stuff in envelopes, you might be doing some door hangers, you're still working in the business. Really working on the business means you take the thing, the business here a better example, we take the business and we work on it, which means we are outside of it. And without us, it doesn't really improve or change. But then we work on it. And so that's what strategy to me is working on the business equals strategy. And so I challenge you. Even if you're at a size of 5, $10 million in revenue, I'd still challenge you and ask you what percentage of your day, what percentage of your week, what percentage, your month, what percent of your year is actually spent on strategy? Because that's really the best bang for your buck as you begin to grow the business. And if you were to spend 1%, you'd be spending full, a full three days. We're gonna spend like an hour talking about strategy right now. Okay? If you spent 1% of your your year working on strategy, you'd actually spend three full days. Alright? So keep this in mind. I think this is something to really think about when you start looking at where you spend your time. Now, before we get started, I need everyone to download this workbook. Now the most efficient way of me doing this was to make this a free product on our site. So just go to mikeandy's.com freeplan all right? And just, you know, check out. I don't even. It does not require card. I'm 99.99% sure it does not require a card. Just go download this right now. So open up a different tab, your browser, go to mikeandys.com freeplan and if you're watching this later, or if you want to do it later, I'm going to go through this example right here. But if you want to work through it with me live, go to this link over on the screen. Download@mikeandys.com FreePlan it's literally just a PDF for you to download and I'm going to work through it with you. And trust me, you'll get so much more out of this next 30 to 60 minutes if you can work through this with me and actually fill this document out. So I'm going to be talking, so feel free to get, open up another tab, whatever you need to do to get this workbook downloaded. All right, so while you're doing that, because you need to be taking action right now, all right, this is not a time to like sit back. Mikeannies.com freeplan Download the PDF, print it off if you need to put it on your iPad if needs be. While you're doing that, I'm going to leave this on the screen so you can make sure you get that URL. Let me see here. Let's see. So like Chuka says, five minutes during the winter. I think a lot about during mowing season, 0% that's very common in seasonal businesses, by the way, is to spend most of your strategy time and you're working on the business during the winter. Can't get audio. Click the mute button. That's. That is a good idea. 12%. That's pretty amazing. 10%. Not enough. 5%. 12%. All right, so this is the amount of people spending time on strategy. 0%. 10%. 10%. My dude. 4%. I don't know how I got. That's very accurate. Big old. 005 to 10 hours per month. Okay, this is good. All right. This is fantastic. It's amazing to me if we actually stack this up against, like, how many times you spend in meetings, how much time do you spend, you know, doing things like shop maintenance or a lot of other things in our business, but we don't spend time on strategy. So I have given. I've been stalling for you for the past couple seconds. I'm going to hide my comments. Go to mikeanny.com freeplan let's go ahead and jump into it. Oh, I need to take that comment off. How do I do that? Hide current comment. There it is. Okay, so this is what it's going to look like once you have downloaded this. This is what we're going to be working about. On in about 10 minutes. I want to go through a presentation about strategy first so it's really clear once we jump in, exactly where, what you can expect, and really the focus of this vision map. So before we get into the vision map, let's talk about a few things. All right. What happens if you don't have a strategy? If you don't have a strategy, you're extremely reactive. Okay. Imagine going on a road trip. You don't have a map, and you are simply going to be reacting to every single sign, signal, and visual cue because you don't have a map, you don't have a gps, you don't really know how close or far away you are from something until a sign tells you. So every once in a while, you're going to get a data point and you're like, oh, sick, we're closer than we thought. Or, oh, my goodness, I should be getting off right now. Like, I should be getting on this different highway because that sign told me. Whereas if you would have had a strategy, had a plan, had a map in place, you would have known for the past however long you've been driving that you need to be getting off in five miles, four miles, three miles, two miles. And you know exactly there would be be way less reactive to, oh, my word, there's a sign that says, I need to get off here. I'm super low on fuel. Why? Because I didn't plan how many miles I was driving on this road. And what my current fuel gauge was just, just FYI. Fuel gauge, think cash. If you're. When you're doing planning, it's extremely important to know how much fuel you have in the tank. It's extremely important when you're doing planning to know exactly how much cash you have in the bank, because it's going to be the determining factor of how fast and how far you can go on this journey. Another thing I find when people don't have a strategy is they get reactive to everything that happens in the business. Employee leaves a key hire, leaves a big contract they lose out on, and we go into a turnaround. Next week, they lost two massive commercial contracts, and now their revenue is half of what's going. It was last year. That's a huge problem. But again, where was the strategy to be able to sit down and start thinking about why is 50% of our revenue being generated by just one or two contracts that leave us very vulnerable? And what it does is when those contracts are lost, you become reactive to the fact that you have not had a strategy or a plan in place to take into account that these things can happen. So, like dynamite, we blow up. You know, an employee leaves, it's been with you for five or six years, and all of a sudden you literally think you're going to melt, the whole business is going to fall apart, and you become reactive because you don't have a strategy, you to don't have in place. And things. This is the thing. Reactive doesn't necessarily mean things go bad, things go really, really good for your business. But because you don't have a strategy, you do become reactive. You go into spring rush and your business is literally tripling. And that sounds like a fantastic thing, but you don't have a plan, a strategy in place. And therefore you're reacting to the fact that now you have a backlog of six weeks, you're way overbooked in the schedule, and everyone's working crazy overtime hours. And therefore the. They start to bail, they start to leave, they start to walk off the job simply because they're getting overworked. Whose fault is that? That is the owner's fault for not having a plan and a strategy in place. And because of that, they become reactive. So what happens in the middle, middle of spring rush? Oh, we got to stop the leads, turn off the estimates. No more estimates. Oh, my goodness. You know, we got to cut out the side of the. Our. Our service area. No more jobs over there. Oh, my goodness. We're still overbooked. Okay. Let's go ahead and I'm going to buy another truck, I'll buy another truck. I'll just go ahead and get some debt. And all of a sudden they get into short term debt. Employees start to leave because they're overworked. And all these downstream effects when in reality the business is tripling. The business is doing fantastic from a numbers perspective, but because there's no strategy and there's no plan in place, we become reactive as owners. And I say we because I do the same thing. And if you don't have a strategy in place, you will become reactive. When I go into a turnaround, one of the biggest things I'm looking for is was this a strategic plan as part of growth? Because, like we're going to grow next year. Fantastic. You need to know how. But how much, like how much are you going to grow? What is that going to require in the form of assets, new team members, training systems, procedures? These are the type of things you have to think about. Otherwise you will become reactive even if the business is doing well.

Here's the thing. The question is, should I set little goals? Should I set these massive goals? Now, in my opinion, I hate missing goals. Okay? Now, I don't like to set goals that are easily achievable, but I do not want to set the culture of my company to be that we miss targets. Targets. It is, it is, it is inexcusable to not hit your target. And when we set a target, it is not a target unless we are trying to achieve it. And if it's just this nebulous, like I hope it happens, that ad does absolutely nothing for the business. Having a target and then working backwards from the target to where you are today and then being able to determine how far off you are from the trajectory of hitting that target is an actual measurable goal that you can hit. And so if you don't have the strategy and the plan in place to actually hit the target, then usually it's a wild ankle guess, as Jim Collins calls it in his book Good to Great. You're just like throwing a number out there. You have no idea whatsoever. And I see people do this all the time when it comes to goals, when it comes to planning, when it comes to strategic growth, it's like, how much are you going to grow next year? Well, let me see. Last year we went from 200,000 to 500,000. So this year, because last year we'd more than doubled, this year we're from 500,000 to a million. Fantastic. How Is that going to happen? Where are those customers coming from? Who are you going to hire to double the output of your labor? Are you going to need management? Are you going to have to move your shop? Will you need a new insurance provider? Will you need to change your service mix? Will you need to change your promotions? Will your website need to be changed? What will your day look like as the owner of a business that is a million dollars versus where it is today? These things are not thought about. We think about one thing and one thing only, unfortunately. And I say we because, like, I do this too, okay? In the home service industries, we think about one number when it comes to goals. And it's like, how big are we going to become next year? We don't think about all the other downstream effects. It's the equivalent of saying, that's the target. And I have absolutely no idea how I'm going to get from here to there, but that's. Somehow I'm going to end up over there. It's like saying, well, I'm going to Mexico. I'm just going to head south. Okay, fantastic. But there's a lot of other things we need to know about because if I don't have a map, if I don't have a gps, I will get lost along the way. You say, oh, no, I just hit I5 and I go straight down there. What happens if there's a detour, I. E. An employee leaves? What happens if a big contract's lost? What if all of a sudden i5 gets closed down and you've got to take 10, 15, 20 miles off course? That's where we all trip up. And the vast majority of us have the goal of heading south, I. E. Growing our business. And we somehow think we're going to reach Mexico when reality, we need to have a plan, a strategy and a map in place, be able to follow and constantly track our progress. Because if you're 11 degree off from your target right now as we start 2024, you will end off dozens of feet away from the target. If you're shooting a gun and you're some one degree off, you shoot and we're just one degree off. It's a tiny, tiny little bit. You go 300 yards down the range and all of a sudden you're way off target. And so what you want to do is constantly monitoring how close am I to the strategy and the plan I have in place to get from January 1st of 2024 to where I look, wake up in December of 30, December 30th, 2024 that have actually hit the target. Because I need to be able to monitor all along the way and have a plan in place and the map to actually get and hit the goal. So I'm not a fan personally of missing goals. I don't want that to be the culture of the business. I would rather have slightly smaller goals that I know I can hit, work my way backwards and then if I know I'm going to just demolish the goal, like double it, I can course correct. Middle of the year, middle of the month, middle of the week, if I have certain goals that I'm just completely demolishing. But I don't want to miss goals. I hate missing goals. I like goals are meant to be accomplished. They are not meant to just encourage and inspire you. Because guess what? If that's the only way you have, you're the only one being inspired. Your team isn't. They don't have a way to be able to determine whether every single day they are performing well because they don't have a measurable target that they are trying to go toward. They don't have a gps, a map that they can compare themselves to and tells them how far they are away from where they should be going. So that brings up the question, what about big hairy audacious goals? Because also in Jim Collins book he talks about these. And unfortunately the big hairy audacious goals is has taken the place of strategic planning in my opinion. When I ask most owners what they want the business to do, they have a big hairy audacious goal. They do not have a strategic plan on how they're going to get there. I really believe that anything beyond three years in terms of planning is basically a wild ankle guess. Because in three years you don't know what's going to happen. Guess what? Three years ago we were in the middle of a pandemic. Three years ago everything was 15 to 20% cheaper because of inflation and probably 40% or so less in terms of labor cost. These are the type of things you are not going to be able to project on a 5, 10, 15 year plan. I want to be clear when they talk about bhags big hairy audacious goals in these books that we have so we so love. They're Talking about a 15 to 20 year goal for the business. So your big hairy audacious goal can be big, but you gotta have a plan on how you're gonna get there. And if you want to work from 20 years backwards, fantastic. I just believe that you're really anything beyond three years, you're really like, it's just not super useful. All right, have a plan of where the the big hairy audacious goal is going to be. But then focus on what. Where do I turn left and right today if I just know I'm going to Mexico and that's my big hairy audacious goal. That's fantastic. But I need to know how to turn left and right and get to the highway. And then when there's a detour, I need to know how to turn. Just knowing the big hairy audacious goal is not enough to accomplish it. You need the tactile day to day, week to week, month to month, quarter to quarter, year to year strategic plan that in my opinion, is different than a big hairy audacious goal. And we have substituted planning and strategy for bhags big hairy audacious goals. All right, so let's talk about a few things. All right, if you have been with me so far, there's 265 people here. Welcome. Thank you for being here. Grab some water. Make sure if you haven't already. Mikeandys.com free plan we're going to be using in just a few minutes, but I want to go over some very important things first.

Grab some water. Let's go. First off, you got to map the metrics. Okay? So if we're creating a goal, we're creating a strategic plan to get somewhere. These are some of the metrics you might want to track. The equivalent to making sure before you go on a road trip that you check the psi air pressure of your tires, you make sure that you have windshield fluid, you make sure that you have enough gas in the tank, that you have an oil change. Those are all the metrics required to get from point A to point B on a road trip. When it comes to getting from point A where you are at today to where you want to go in your business, you also need to map the metrics. All right. Along this journey, we're going to be traveling x thousand miles. Fantastic. When will I need to to recharge or fuel up my vehicle? Let's go ahead and map that. This is the type of thing you'll need to do for your goal and for your strategic planning is what? How much cash on. Let me try to point to this. I know it's this way. Sorry. Cash on hand, marketing budget. The number of hires you're going to need to accomplish these revenue goals. The number.

The number of hires, number of trucks, what profit you're going to be making on the business and your capex, that's your capital expenditures. What are you going to buy in the form of trucks, equipment, potentially land or shop space? These are things that need to be measured along the journey to your goal. These are just a few of them. You get very, very granular in terms of what other metrics you should be tracking. Okay, just think about all the metrics that go into a road trip, a trip on an airplane, a trip across, you know, an ocean. There are so many things that are planned for. How much food are we going to have? How much cash do I have? Do I need to have a different type of currency? Do my sim card work? All these different things that we are going to track and measure and check on throughout our journey. But yet when it comes to our business and we have a destination, a goal in mind, we somehow just blindly start moving towards it. I say we because I do this too. I'm not throwing anyone under the bus. It's just a broad generalization for what I see in the home service industries and I think we can really improve in this area. These are just a few of the metrics you'll want to track as you are moving through towards your goals. Now, in my opinion, there's no reason to work forwards, to move in a linear path towards your goal. You should work backwards from where you want to be back to where you are today. So the question is more a matter of is this a reasonable goal? Well, let's work backwards from where we want to head, where we're going. Okay, I want to head to Mexico. I'm thousand miles away. I'm going to have to work backwards from how many miles am I going to have to fuel up? How many miles is it from the border of Mexico to where my final destination is? I'm working backwards to determine how much fuel I'm going to need. How long is it going to take me? Work backwards from your goal. And then this is what's really cool. You can determine if your goal isn't realistic based upon working backwards. Is it realistic that you go from 200,000 to, to $1 million in revenue? Absolutely. I am going to crush it. I'm going to 10x baby. 10x this bad boy. Okay, fantastic. Have we thought about how much capital is going to be required for capital expenditures if I go back here? Have we thought about what our profit margin is going to be? How many new trucks are we going to need? How many people are we going to have to hire? The fact is, at 200,000, you probably have one person working for you. At a million, you probably have 10 to 15 people working for you. Plus you have admin and office staff that are going to increase your overhead expense. These are things that are not thought about. And so let's work our way backwards from our goal and start to strategically plan back to the present day to actually figure out whether or not this goal is achievable. All right, here's another thing I want you to think about. Because we all get wrapped up at the end of the year, especially most home service industries. We have a decent amount of capital right now. So this is what happens.

If you haven't already spent your money because you're trying to do section 179 and get out of all your taxes, this is what starts to become a lot on a lot of people's goals. And that is adding new services, adding more trucks and equipment, adding more employees. And I'm not opposed to any of those. But I would encourage you to think about amplifying what you currently have in terms of assets, what you currently have in terms of team members and employees, what you currently have in terms of your service mix, what you currently have in terms of your service area. I would look at those things first. So instead of digging a bunch of little holes, just focus on one hole and go get yourself an excavator. So a lot of times when people think about planning, I hear this all the time, oh, I'm going to add this specific service to my business. I am going to expand into this other market. By the way, the two least profitable ways to grow your home service business, in my opinion, is add more services and increase your geographical service area. Okay, so what we constantly are doing so many of the times is we're digging all these little holes. We go from one service to the other service and like, oh, this is gonna be a good one. I'm hire this employee and then this employee. No, let's take our current team, let's make them more efficient. Let's institute a system like P4P paper performance, the excavator and get more out of this one hole. What we currently have. Instead of going around bouncing around getting, oh, I got only more employees, I should find I could find a general manager. I need an office manager. I need like you just constantly are going around setups like first thinking about how do I amplify what I currently have, how do I take the assets that I currently have, the trucks that I currently have, and utilize them far more often throughout the week. So many of the times I see these businesses and they have five, 10 employees, they have five, 10 trucks and I show up and there's four trucks sitting in the shop all the time. That's poor asset utilization. And I look at their goals and their plans like well, I'm going to get more trucks, I need some more equipment. It's like whoa, whoa, whoa, let's amplify instead of thinking about new things. So often the times when it comes to goals and planning, we think about new new services, new trucks, new employees, new shop space, new service area, new shop. I'm double, I'm gonna get another shop, I'm gonna get another. When we just need to take what we currently have and amplify it, we take the current services. Instead of thinking about all these other services we could sell our customers. That's what you call a cross sell. Why don't we focus on upselling them what services we currently have and be able to increase their lifetime value or annual value that customer without having to go buy all those capex, without having to buy more trucks, buy more equipment, hire more employees, train them on new services, get more registration, get, get new licensing, increase our insurance. Why? Because we added new services. Instead of taking the services we currently have and amplifying them, how do we take our. Let's just use a service of.

Mowing. Okay, how do I get more mowing customers? I would ideally in your plan want you to highlight that versus well, I'm going to take my 100 mowing customers. I'm going to try to sell them window washing, I sell them pressure washing. I'm going to try to get janitorial service in the winter. Like I would rather you focus on amplifying your hundred customers into 300 customers and tripling your business instead of trying to think about all the new things you're going to do. And I just use services as an example. I'm not opposed to adding more services. There's definitely a place for them when you, when it comes to season, seasonality especially, there's certain lulls that you will want to use other services to be able to keep the business profitable year round. However, I constantly see people thinking that a new service, a new employee, a new service area, a new something in their business is going to change everything and they put that in their planning when in reality, if they just focus on what they currently have and amplify it and get the big bad excavator, they wake make way more progress. All right, here is a quote. A Quotable quote here on Saturday, December 30th. All right, great. Grab some water. Let's read this together. The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do. Michael Porter. He has a fantastic first name and a great quote. The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do. And so often the times back to our slide, the little shovel versus the excavator. We are constantly thinking about the new instead of what we should not be doing. I get very excited when people start cutting things out of their business. Simplify, standardize. Remove areas of the business that are redundant and are causing operational drag. Those things are many times where the greatest profits are formed. And realize is when you cut things out. When you focus on what you're currently doing instead of some new initiative. All right, Example for Mike. Because Mike has to eat some humble pie. I'm cutting out multiple little side hustles and side things I've done for a long time. Like last year I sold off half like 2022. Last year I sold off half of my real estate portfolio. In part because a lot of those ones had appreciated a lot and need money for the headquarters, but also to focus on the businesses. This year we closed down lawn care business for sale. Why? Because people were starting to get litigious with me based upon what other people were posting. Even though it was free, I never made a single penny. Cost me a lot of money. So I close the thing down. Gotta focus on the business. Why? Focusing on amplifying Augusta and Copilot instead of getting distracted with new things that are good and fine and help people but doesn't actually drive the business results that if I just focus on what is currently there and amplify those results. Okay, we cut out. It's very sad. Built for business. That was a thing I created a year ago with my trainer to be able to sell to business owners how to do health, nutrition and their workouts. Fantastic. I use it fan. I have good results. I started a year ago. Guess what? It was new and exciting and flashy. And guess what? It has to get chopped. Because I need to focus on amplification instead of new. So I'm eating humble pie. I expect you to be able to do the same thing in your own business. And that is what are the things that are distracting you? And they're new and they're exciting. But if you just focus on what you currently have and amplify your those employees, like pour more into your your existing employees instead of focusing on hiring new ones. If you poured more into your existing customers Instead of going out and getting new ones, that is doing upsells and one click estimate emails. Instead of spending money on advertising. These are the type of things that you can do to amplify your results instead of always focusing on new. All right, Sequencing matters, baby. When it comes to your plan sequence manners, this would be the equivalent of having all the directions driving to Mexico in your on a list and then being like, oh, yeah, I have all the directions. Oh, actually I have them on index cards. And then you just shuffle up the index cards. Yes, you're right. You do have all the ingredients to be able to get to Mexico and all the turn by turn directions. But if they're not in the right order, they mean absolutely nothing. And if you get 1, 1 turn by turn direction out of order, it could put you in a completely different continent. Well, not continent, country. You could end up in Canada if you turn left instead of right at the incorrect time. So not only is your goal and your plan important, is the sequence of that plan. That is very important. It's called right time, right action. Okay. There's a lot of times I, when I'm making any decision, I run this through my head. It's like, right time, right action. Rt, rt, Right time, right action. Is this the right time for the right action and the right action? Because you could have the right time and the wrong action. Right. Good timing, bad action. Or you get to do what's right, the right action at the wrong time. Like, yes, you're supposed to turn left two hours ago. Okay. So you've got to have the sequence of events in order to make your plan effective. Okay. And I like the roadmap analogy because it makes a lot of sense. I'm trying to get somewhere. If my sequence of my steps to get to my goal is not in the correct sequence, I, I can end up a very wrong place. So right time, right action, very important as you're moving towards your goals. This is how I think about it. All right. All good things start with the pyramid. So here we go.

On the bottom, we have goals and objectives. In the middle, we have strategy. And on the top, we have mission and vision. Now, in my opinion, a lot of us have goals and objectives. A lot of them have a mission and a vision for our business. And very, very few of us have the strategy to link the two together. In my opinion, the strategy if missing the mission will not be accomplished. We will focus most of our time on goals and objectives. And we will wonder why we never reach the goal and vision Is because we lack the strategy to link the two together. And some people are saying, well, I thought goals and strategy are the same thing. They're not. Okay, so all the objectives, all the stuff that we're doing every single day, we get busy in this. We set goals. You need to have a strategy in place to link up to the vision and mission of the business. Let me explain this a little bit easier using the analogies we've used so far. So the goals and so let's start from the top. Where are we going? Okay, we're going to Mexico. Sorry, I keep pointing at my screen as if you guys can see over on the right hand of your screen you're gonna see Mexico. Okay, that's where we're going. That's the mission. That's the vision of the business. The mission of this trip. The strategy is how are we going to get there? Well, we're going to use a plane, use a car. Like this is the strategy for how are we going to get there? Now the goals and objectives are what are we going to get. Sorry, what are we going to do to get there? These are the tactics. Okay? For example, I've got to have some luggage. I've got to buy myself the ticket before I get on the plane. I've got to drive to the airport. I've got to pack no pesos currency. I've got to make sure my phone has a SIM card. These are all the goals and objectives that have to be achieved in order to be able to get on. Whoops. How are we going to get the plane? Okay, and so a lot of times I see people have goals and objectives. They have all the tactics of how they think they're going to be able to reach the vision and mission, their big hairy, audacious goal. But they lack this one key thing. That's a strategy. How are we going to get there? They have the ticket, they have the currency, they have the cell phone. They even. They have everything, right? They got their luggage in hand. But they lack the strategy, I. E. In this case, the airplane, to get to their mission and vision. And that is why. And when I say the vast majority, over 90% of small businesses fail within their first 10 years, therefore, I can confidently say the vast majority of small business owners never reached the mission and vision of their business. And in my opinion, opinion it's because they don't have this key middle part and a strategy. Okay, so let's go ahead and get started on strategy and that. And as I was thinking about it just Right now someone's like, well, strategy was execution. Each strategy for breakfast. I agree. But you won't know what to execute on if you don't have a strategy. All right? And you will be spinning your wheels not knowing where you're going. And so you. Strategy is important. Although, yes, I agree, execution is extremely important as well. Okay, now we need a volunteer. So one second here, let me get myself a volunteer. I need someone that needs. Let's see here. Is someone willing to hop on if you're leaving right now? There's a wrong time to leave. We're just about to get in the good stuff. If there's. Is there someone willing to hop on via video with me and I will fill this out for you because I could do a hypothetical, but if I have someone that's willing to actually use their business and walk through the vision map with me, this will be much, much more helpful. Okay, so if you're willing to hop on here and do this with me, please make it in the comments known and then I will need to send you a link. Okay, so just say like, hey, I'm willing to volunteer something along those lines and we can connect here. Okay, so let me see here. Who here would want me to fill? We're gonna do a three year vision and we're gonna do the one year plan. And so if you are willing to do that, please, in the comments, hit me up and say exactly where. If you are willing to volunteer. Okay, let me see here.

Okay. All right, Dylan. Dylan. Okay, there's a whole bunch of people. Mercy. Oh, wow. I just saw. Okay, Mercy. Goodness. Let's see here.

Okay, we're gonna do Dylan because I have Dylan's email. All right, Dylan.

All right, Dylan, I'm sending you an email link. I need you to open up and we're gonna go through this.

Email sent. Boom. All right, Dylan's gonna hop in here live and we're gonna start filling this out now. If you haven't. If you haven't already, please go download this. This is mikeandys.com freeplan. Print it off. Use an iPad. We're gonna fill this out and you're gonna use your examples, okay. And your numbers and your stuff, but I want to go over this with someone with a real business. Some of you know Dylan, he was on recently on the Turnaround show. So it's actually kind of perfect. You all kind of know a little bit about him. So let's go ahead. And I'm just waiting for him to hop in here. Okay, Dylan, I'm waiting on you. Don't disappoint me. Okay. While. While we're waiting for him to come in, I will say this. If you. If you're wanting to join Copilot, this is the last chance. You get the price lock guarantee for the end of 2023. So if you join in 2023, you get a price lock guarantee at the enterprise level, which means your price will never go up. The prices for Copilot are going up in January. So if you would like to avoid that and you're thinking about joining, just join today or tomorrow. So you can lock that in. It is lifetime. As long as you stay inside the enterprise level, you will forever only be charged 249. It is going up next week. Okay. And it is going to go up consistently as we add more value. Just the same way that I would encourage you to raise your prices as you increase value your customers. Okay, we are having a problem. Dylan, I am not seeing you and I'm stalling. So let's see here. One second.

Dylan. Oh, there he is. Oh, he's hopping in. Okay, I stalled well enough. He is hopping in. He's getting situated, looks like. Okay, so again, if you are thinking about joining Copilot CRM, please do that today or tomorrow. So that way you can get the price lock guarantee. This is my way of saying thank you to everyone has joined early when we. Especially earlier this year, we're not ready. We had just a lot more bugs, etc. So I really do appreciate it and I highly recommend checking out the main. If you haven't watched this main video on copilotcm.com. all right, Dylan is in the house. I'm going to switch it over to Dylan here. Dylan, can you hear me? Yeah, I can hear you. How's it going, Mike? Pretty fantastic. One second here. Do you have your. A computer or something that you can see that PDF.

I.

Let me see. I think so. If not, it's fine because I'll share. I'll share it on the screen here. Okay. Yeah, if you want to share it on the screen there, that might help.

Okay, here we go.

Add this one. Here we go. Oh yeah, look at this. We are rolling. All right, cool. Okay everyone in the comments make sure that you have downloaded this and.

Are able to. Let's see here. Very good. Cool. That is over there. Okay, so business name. Let's start at the top here. This is the three year vision. This is page one. What's your business name? Mr. Dylan Moye.

Say that again. Mike. Sorry, what was your business name? Urban Roots Landscaping. All right, here we go.

Cool. Today is 12:30. Okay, so what we are going to do on your three year vision map is first and foremost, let's fill out where we're at today. Okay, so annual revenue for 2020. Let's just call it 2023. Dylan, what do you think you're gonna be at roughly 750 between 7 and 750. Okay, let's see here.

Let's do 750, 000. And what do you think is profit gonna be for 2023?

I think we. We talked about this before. I haven't seen the. Do you recall from our zoom call what the profits were at the time? It was like 34, 35,000. Yeah.

Oh, Dylan's. Dylan, you're chopping up. I think you're leaving your wi fi. Okay, well, we're going to put 35k. You're good. I can see you. And I also just got word. My wife is. She just walked in. I hate to do this. I may have to abort mission. She's got a fever. So I'm gonna take over with the kiddos. Okay, you go ahead. I'll get someone else in the comments. You're totally fine. Yes. Sorry, Mike. Yeah. I gotta take care of those kiddos. Okay, you're good. All right. All right. Dylan has aborted the mission. All right, so let's see here. Let's see here. One second. Okay, I think someone else left their email in here.

Okay, I'm trying to scroll back here. Let's see here. Phil Whitman. Let's do a pool service. That would be fun. Okay, Phil, I'm gonna send you a link. All right, everyone, pause, pause. All right, Phil at Pro.

Act. Oh, it's proactive.

Typing on two different screens. This is weird. Cool solutions. All right, Phil, you're coming up. I sure hope you're ready. Sending you the link.

Video.

Boom.

Proactive pool solutions. All right, Phil, I just sent you an email.

We had Dylan. He bailed on us. We gotta take care of the kiddos. So we're gonna erase this off of this here. Phil, I'm gonna stall for you for about five seconds, all right? So don't disappoint me. Show up in the room so we can get this started. Let's see here. What else can I talk about? Okay, look at this copilot. I'm stalling. Phil, I need you in the room as fast as possible. Okay, I did want to go over, like the whole reason copilot. Exists is to put pressure on a lot of the software industry that I don't think is building really great solutions for home service businesses in comparison, like HubSpot, Salesforce, et cetera. And so this, for example, is the stuff that we've done in copilot in 2023. So support stuff. We have daily live streams. We have Zoom support now phone support, Copilot University. We now have air traffic control, which is like our support chat. It says 60 plus hours on here. We've now increased that, so we have Saturday and Sundays and weekend hours. So I think we're open like 84 hours or 85 hours a week now for support chat. Also, we have private live streams. So I had one this morning with all the members going over what we did this week and then what's gonna be coming up next week and do Q and A as well as we added the flight log where you can actually see every single ticket. So when you submit a bug, you actually can see where it's at in the process of development before it gets deployed. So that we added that as well. Okay. Infrastructure. We switched over to AWS immediately led to about a 30% increase in our page load time. And it will allow us to scale up without slowing down the system. Hill, I sure hope you're hopping on a computer because. Because I'm waiting on your brother. And then we are working right now in the offline mode of the app. So that way employees can still clock time, add notes, add pictures to a visit, and it won't even if they're offline. So, like a bad cell service spot, Stuff like that. Features that we added. Okay, look at this. Phil is in the house. Thank you. Thank you for this little sponsored spot. Phil, are you ready? Are we gonna have fever on the kids or anything like that?

Here we go.

Hear me?

There we go. Yeah, there we go.

We're alive. Okay, so first thing is, do we have any kids? They're gonna have fever.

I do have kids, but they're all good.

Okay, fantastic. All right, let's go ahead and open this up. This will be fun. So what's the name of the business? Is it Proactive Pool Service?

Proactive Pool Solutions.

Yeah. All right, and so your revenue for 2023, approximately, what do you think that was?

612, 073.

All right, so we're going to 612. And what do you think roughly your profit was for 2023?

After my salary, we're going to be like negative 10. But including my salary, it's about 90.

Okay. So let's just. Let's just put zero for now because I like to include the owner salary in that, that equation. All right, now let's. Let's look out three years from now, what do you kind of want the business to look like? Kind of like your big herodacious goal may be. Like, what's sort of the trajectory in terms of revenue and profit, are you thinking?

Yeah, Bhag. We're looking to grow up above a million a year. Basically, our goal is to have multiple locations in the Raleigh area.

So growing to multiple locations, probably right now we're serving about 130 clients, probably up to about 500.

Okay, so we want to go from 300. 500 clients?

No, 130 to 500.

Oh, got it. You're at 130 now. Okay, and so in terms of revenue, Is that like 1.5? You said over a million. What's that look like in three years?

In three years, I mean, at 500, if we hit our 500 goal.

That'S about.

Hang on.

That'S like 2.25 per year.

Okay, so let's do 2.25 million. And what do you want to profit off of that 2.25 million? Take home after your salary?

Let's say 360, about 15%.

Okay, perfect. Cool. So now let's think about revenues of for 2024. 2025.

Cool. So we know we're now, we're at 6, 612. We've got to get to 2.25 in the next three years. Very ambitious. Let's work our way backwards for 2025. What are we thinking in terms of revenue and profit? Just hit me with numbers.

2025.

Probably like 1.5.

Okay. And then what were we thinking in terms of profit?

At that rate of growth, you're probably going to be investing quite a bit, just FYI.

Yeah, so we'll probably be closer to like 100,000.

Okay. All right, let's move back to 2024. What's our annual revenue going to look.

Like probably this coming year? 900,000.

Okay.

Great. And then what's your profit going to be looking like for next year?

Call it 60.

Perfect. All right, I'm going to change colors of my pen here.

Bam. Okay, so now what we're going to do is we're going to create a strategy for getting there. So for this coming year.

Today. Okay, great. So in 2023, what was kind of like the main contributions of your growth this year, do you think?

We spent a ton on advertising this year. So Google Ads, that was the. That was our biggest kind of growth expense.

And what was that advertising budget, you think? For 2023?

We spent about 18,000.

Okay. Mostly on Google.

Yeah, most. Well, 18,000 on Google and then probably another 2,000 in paper and print and stuff like that. So probably 20,000 total.

All right, and then what else? This year was kind of the main contributors. And again, when you think about the strategies that we're putting here, this is like systems marketing, sales services. You might have added your close ratio, any key hires you had, anything like that.

Yeah. So we basically promoted from within. Got a. Got one of my guys into a more general manager position, got me out of the field more.

And got us to kind of give me more time to focus on growth and sales and getting out.

Very cool. All right. Anything else specifically this year that kind of helped you get to that spot?

Nothing that comes straight up. Like, nothing off the top of my head.

Okay, fantastic. All right, so I wrote down here, just for everyone, trying to follow along kind of stuff. That was prior to today. Well, I'm going to focus on now, though, is going from today to year number one. So what is going to change in terms of advertising, hiring, etc. Because you are literally planning to grow about 50%, about 300,000 in 2024.

Yeah. So the big, big change that we're making is we're incentivizing our guys to bring on new leads in the areas they're already in.

Okay, so can we say route density?

What's that?

Can we say route density for that?

Yeah, route density is our biggest goal. Yep.

Okay, cool. And what are you doing to do that? You said that you're getting the guys to try to get more jobs in those areas. Are you doing door hangers?

Are you door hangers? Five rounds. Um, our. Our goal, our plan is to actually create a more of, like, official sales team where we have younger guys going around hitting doors just as that's their only job.

Okay, so sales team. Fantastic. Okay, cool. What else are we going to do to get an extra 300 grand this coming year?

Probably reinvesting with advertising and stuff, still putting money in.

Okay, so growing. Growing 50%. Do you think there's going to be any changes to your role, the general manager's role? Or was that something that more recently you got the GM hired, so you think that's going to allow the expansion?

Exactly. Yep. That was our plan, was to kind of open up space for me to focus on strategy and expansion, getting him taken over 99 of the day to day is what our goal was there.

Okay, so we can say that he's going to take over ops.

Yep.

Fantastic. Okay, good. All right, so that's going to get us to 900,000. Now we're talking 20 going from, you know, next. The year following, which is 2025. So what are we going to do going from year one to year two to go from 900,000 to 1.5 million? Because now we're going to be. We're going to be increasing by $600,000. So what's that going to look like?

So big thing that we're trying to do this year is stack cash. We can. We can handle the growth with just without investing anything in equipment or anything like that. No extra trucks, anything like that. So we're trying to stack that cash that we were normally putting into getting trucks and stuff. We're going to stack that to kind of hit the ground running in 2025 to invest a ton of money into equipment and stuff.

Okay, so how many more trucks do you think you'd have to purchase going into 2025?

So going into 2025, we'll need another four trucks.

Okay.

And then how much more equipment.

In terms of cost do you think it's about. It's about 5,000 per truck. So 20 grand.

Any other equipment, though, or when you say the 20 grand.

Oh, I see. 20 grand additional. Got it.

Yeah. On top of the truck.

Yep.

So four trucks plus 20 grand for equipment.

Gotcha. All right. What else are we changing going into that year?

That's gonna be. So we'll probably have to have.

We'll probably have to have another layer of management. I would say we're gonna bring on another four techs, so probably have like two. Two guys under my gm, so bringing people up, paying them a bit more. But that's. That's basically the plan. Bring people in.

So we can grow there.

Going to 1.5. You're basically going to be more than double, almost triple your current size. Will you have to change shop spaces? Any other, like adding more services, anything to get there, or basically staying the same?

No, basically staying the same. So we're distributed network right now. We don't have a shop. We could definitely benefit. It starts to make more sense once we have more and more trucks to have a shop space. But right now we're distributed. Guys take the trucks home. We hit distributors in the morning when we need to, but yeah, we're distributed.

So that's about it in terms of marketing. For that second year. What are you thinking?

Probably twice as much as we did the year before. So probably 40 grand, something like that.

Okay, so we got a 40k marketing budget.

Great. Okay, I forgot on the last. Going in 2024, what is cash on hand currently looking like?

Like 30 grand.

Okay.

So very good. Yeah, so definitely obviously a bit of a cash crunch. That much growth is going to be tough. Are you taking on any loans to get the four trucks?

Haven't planned it. This again is loose plans, but probably. We'll probably have to. Yeah.

Okay, go ahead.

The only.

What, Sorry, I was just gonna say. Yeah, the only. The only thing we'd probably need the debt for is the trucks. And we, we always buy used five, six year old trucks. So we've paid cash in the past, but that's probably what we'll do.

What do those trucks usually run you like 30 grand?

No, we usually find them under 15.

Okay. Yeah.

The most we've ever paid is 16 five. So.

Okay.

They're usually about 12 is what we run.

Okay. So end of 2024. So as we're kind of getting towards the end of next year, what's our cash position going to be kind of looking like.

At the end of 2024, we're gonna need probably 100 grand.

Okay.

Okay. So that's gonna be your cash on hand and that's gonna fuel us going into 2025. Sorry, going all of 25 to going to 2026, our third year. Now what's our cash on hand gonna be looking like at that perspective, you.

Think at the end of 2025 in order to. I mean in order to grow another 700 000, we're gonna have to get probably another four or five trucks again. So same same investment basically.

O.

So probably still 50k there. Yeah.

And this is assuming as we scale density gets better, so our number numbers get better. Couple assumptions.

And so at a 2.2, $2.25 million business, what's the goal for cash on hand? Like money in the bank?

I mean, I think we'd have to have 2, 250 in the bank.

Okay, cool. Awesome. Anything else going from 1.5 that 2.25 is that when you're going to do the multiple location that I assume we kind of have some metrics in terms of clients. Anything else for that, that third year?

I mean I think the plan for us is going to be split before we get to that. So kind of break up our current.

Current office basically and split it into two locations. So that we can kind of continue scaling and continue making density better as we go.

Okay, and are you going to, when you split, are you going to have your GM become, you know, take the one location. Okay, got it. Okay.

So either, either bring GM to regional or have him take one and bring up another one. We haven't. I'm not 100 sure on that yet.

Got it. All right, so now for everyone watching, we're going to go to your one year plan. Right now we know we have $30,000 cash on hand. We're trying to get to 100,000. We also know that when we look back at the last year, we are going from. What's your, what's your monthly revenue looking like right now? Like just kind of as an average, I guess. I guess you. 50,000.

We did this last month.

This season we got up to 87 was our highest.

And I'm going to average it out just so we can actually put a number here. Yeah, yeah, 50 at 900,000. That means we're going to need to do basically 75k a month. Perfect. And if we're trying to get 60,000 profit, we can assume then that we're going to be trying to get 5k in profit per month. Right. Cool. All right, so let's work our way backwards on this one as well. So this is now Q4 of 2024.

What do. Because we know we're going to be growing by basically 50. You said though that we didn't really need to buy anything, is that correct?

Yeah, for this next year we have five trucks and we're very underutilized right now. So we don't need to buy anything next year.

Fantastic. That means we can basically run this through. For anyone watching though, you need to make sure that your capital expenditures lines up with what your revenue is going up. Like if you're trying to double or triple, don't think you're not going to have to buy some trucks, equipment, et cetera. And furthermore, that needs to line up with this part on the bottom, which is your cash on hand. And this is also going to be affected by seasonality. So, for example, Phil, going to spring, we've got to go from 30,000 to 100,000. What do you think that's going to look like in Q2 and Q3?

Q2 is our most profitable.

We always were. I mean, this past year we did 10 or 12k in profit a month for March, April, May.

So in terms of cash in the bank at the end of Q2, you think in like 75, 80,000, hopefully.

Yeah. End of Q2, we want to be more than halfway to that, so.

Perfect. Okay. And then I'm just going to put 90,000 for Q3. Seems pretty doable. So really, Q2 is where you make a lot of your money, then that's just kind of your spring rush, I assume.

Okay. Yep.

All right, fantastic. All right, so monthly revenues, you said that you get as high as like 80 something thousand. I'm assuming monthly revenue for Q2 is going to be probably 110, 120 this year.

Yeah, Yep. Should be around there.

We're averaging this out. Ah, that's the problem with doing this the way I did when I averaged everything out. But let's do this instead of using the 50,000 down here. Like this month, you did say it was around 50, 000 though, right?

Yeah, this month was 49.

Got it. Okay, so monthly revenue Q2 is 120. What do you think it happened like Q3, what did that kind of look like usually?

Yeah, it'll probably drop down to like 100. And then.

The.

Our third quarter, we have another pop. So it's probably right back up to 120, 130.

And then probably back down. Yeah, Q4 is probably back down to 75.

Perfect. Okay, so in terms of profit, we got 12,000 the spring. I'm going to guess that Q3 isn't super profitable. So we're probably looking at like a few thousand dollars in profit per month there.

Historically it, it hasn't been cute. Like Q2 is our most profitable, Q3 is not as profitable. And then Q4 is in between those two, so. Got it.

Okay, so we could go. Because I'm just looking at how much cash we have on hand. That's really what I'm targeting.

Yeah.

So even this one, like if you're actually trying to put $50,000 in the bank, you really got to put more like 16, 17k in profit there per month going into Q2. And then let's see, we got here, we got.

Just do 2k 2k because that, that will actually even out like 3k. I guess so. Perfect. Okay, so the story basically for everyone, everyone listening is like, you're gonna work backwards from now the goals. Right. So we got three year plan kind of where we're trying to head. We're trying to have multiple locations, a general manager runs a location. But now we got to think about, okay, what's the revenues that's going to drive a lot of what you got to do in terms of hiring what you got to do in terms of capital expenditures, how much money in the bank's really important because if Phil would have told me that he needs to buy three trucks this quarter, we'd have a problem because now all of a sudden we'd have 40k as capital expenditures and we'd run out of money. And so this is why it's important to not just have a plan in terms of revenue, all the other indicators that we've been talking about. So fortunately for Phil, the reason I think that you will become significantly more profitable in the next year or two is because you don't have any capital expenditure. You're going to use your existing trucks to so much more efficiently, I. E. Grow the business by 50% without buying another truck. Fantastic. All right. We're basically not profitable there. So I'll put zero there. Cool. All right, this Q1, what are we. What are we thinking in terms of systems marketing? What's changing? And some of that will be kind of reflective of what we've already talked about, which is right here.

Yeah. So Q1 is we're gonna. Going to be putting in that sales team. That's our goal. Switching over to copilot is also in Q1, the getting everything over. So tapping.

What does that sales team look like? Is that someone going full time, door hanging, door knocking? Like what's.

Yeah, that's the plan. Is going full time, maybe, maybe part time to start. But me and my business partner are fiddling around. Going to be a 1099 or a W2. Um, but this. That's where we're. Where we're at right now, trying to figure out what that looks like. But yeah, the goal is to have somebody dedicated to just do door hangers. Getting out, talking to people and getting out and actually bringing new clients in full time.

How many new hires are we thinking for to could we got a ramp up for Q2. So like I'm assuming you hire them in Q1.

Yep.

Yeah.

So Q1, we're going to hire two new techs and a. Hopefully a sales guy.

That's what we're.

That's the plan.

Okay, so that's one hire. She got one hire for sales team, two new techs. What else? I know the GM is he's starting to take over operations or is he already kind of rolling in that regard?

No, he's rolling. Yeah. So we had. I had our. We had our third baby. So I got. That was the whole plan. Just get him taken over. Most of the thing. What I'm doing Now is payroll, all the back end stuff. Not answering phones and stuff, but doing the back end business stuff.

Anything else like close ratio targets, you know, you need to hit.

Yeah.

Close ratio density you're trying to do.

Yep. Close ratio has been a big, a big focus. Last year it was, we were like 30, 40%. So we're trying to focus on improving that system to kind of have more touches, more personal touches in the beginning once the estimates go out.

Our two big focuses are close ratio and route density because we're. Our route density is terrible right now as it stands.

You mentioned personal touch to increase the close ratio. What specifically are you doing to increase the personal touch?

Like personal phone calls. Like right now we have a. We use 20 days to close follow up estimate emails, but we don't do the phone calls. So getting, getting actually on the phone with people trying to close a few more of those deals that are people just looking for numbers that we can actually get in and, and close those.

Okay, perfect. All right, so Q2 is your crazy time. What are some of the main things you need to focus on during that time? Is that when you spend most of your marketing dollars?

Yeah. Yep. 90% of our marketing's March to April, March to June.

Sorry, so 90% of what are we thinking, like 20 grand?

20 grand? Yep.

Okay. And that's going to Google again?

Yeah, historically that's what we've done.

Okay. All right. What else needs to happen during that kind of spring rush for you?

I mean, the big things are just closing. It's getting our follow ups, getting people onboarded. That's the big kind of hiccup that we run into is getting people onboarded.

Customers or is that employees?

When you say onboarding clients is what I'm thinking of. We have, we have a pretty good training for, for actual employees. We've got a whole system baked in for that already. But onboarding clients, when, when we're bringing on 5, 6, 7, 8 a week, that's what our kind of constraint is there.

Okay. And just out of curiosity, this past year, what, what like what was 22, 2022 revenue versus 2023. I know 2023 was 612. What was 2022?

Last year was 562.

Okay, so this is like, this is the big thing is like so last year was five something. This is six. We grew maybe 15 to 20%. And so I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the salesperson is really the main thing that you're going to lean on to drive this kind of growth as well as increasing close ratio leads.

Leads, incoming and closure ratios are the biggest constraints. Yeah.

Okay. All right. And in terms of pricing, do we need to raise prices or is that going to be on the back burner until we have more volume?

We're trying to avoid cutting prices because like I said, our close ratio is up 30% so we're really low. We're trying to avoid cutting prices. We have the room in the margins, but we basically want to increase everything before we do that. We want to go trying to increase close ratio to other ways rather than just cutting price.

We're like, go ahead. We're kind of middle, middle to top end of the market price wise. So great prices 2022. So we're trying to avoid raising or changing price really. We're going to try and pull other levers first.

Okay. Anything in the middle of spring rush we got to work on. In terms of other key hires, it sounds like you got the gm, but between you and him, he sounds like you're going to do pretty good. Are you going to need that sales team through just Q2 or do you think that's going to be something, someone you lay off?

We haven't, I haven't really thought that through yet. The, the goal obviously would be to have them full term, full time, long term. Okay. Q2. Honestly, Q2, we get so many leads that it's like we don't, we probably don't need them Q2 but it's like the off peaks times when we kind of need that salesperson bringing in interest.

Yeah, that's the plan is long, long term, Bring them into the family, bring them into the fold and kind of get them into the, get them into our ecosystem so that hey, they can go from door to door sales to maybe a tech can P4P and then grow from there.

Okay, cool. All right. Q3 things slow down a little bit. What are we thinking in terms of changes? Are we just basically still rolling? Are you going to be trying to more out of the business in terms of, you know, your either wages or even just like hours out of the business. What's kind of the plan for Q3?

Yeah, Q3 is generally just autopilot, like running, making sure things are running smoothly. We do repairs. A lot of repairs happen then.

But yeah, retaining employees, keeping people excited and on board with the vision. This year was our first full year doing P4P so that's helped a ton.

Very good. And then in terms of Q3 is that sometimes when you lose customers?

No, Q3 into Q4 is kind of when we lose clients. Mostly. Yeah.

Okay.

In here?

Yeah, I'll be out in a minute.

All right. Yeah. Anything else as you kind of slow down then in Q4, like, things to make sure that we are actually getting the hundred thousand dollars cash on hand.

Yes. Winter services. You try to upsell anything like that?

No. So, I mean, we. About 60, 70 of our clients stay open, so we have a little bit of a slowdown over the winter. It's not crazy, but. Yeah, just getting. That's our big thing, trying to find those clients who are open year round. Because it. Like I said, there's a majority of the market down here, but.

Yeah. And so what percentage would you like to target for that to kind of like you said, 60 to 70%. Like if we had target for 80, would that be a reasonable target?

Yeah, that'd be a reasonable goal. Yeah.

Okay, so 80, retention of recurring.

And I would assume most of your. Almost all your revenue is recurring work, right, Phil?

Yeah, 90. 90%.

Yep. Got it. And is there any upsell opportunities during that time in terms of like one off stuff? Okay.