Preparing for the Spring Rush! [Home Service Millionaire Q&A]

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to another call in show here.

My Candy show.

I apologize for being a little bit late today.

A couple hours almost actually. But I promised myself when I first got into content that I would do two things. Number one, I would create content that I loved so I could do it forever. And secondly, I would not be a misplace my priorities in life. And so today there are other things that had to take place and I put this on the back burner. So I apologize for that. But I'm here and I'm willing to take questions. Today I want to take it a really focus on the spring rush for the vast majority of home service industries, regardless if you're in lawn care, landscaping, cleaning, pressure washing, window cleaning, fences, decks, whatever you are doing in the home services. Almost everyone here is about four to eight weeks away from being in the middle of spring rush when leads are pouring in and we have tons of jobs and work to do. And so if you have a question, I'd love to answer it. 361733-3333 is the call in and I will answer your question here live. We are live. So if you're wondering, is this recorded? This is not recorded. This is live. If you and so I'm looking forward to it. I will also answer questions in the chat. However, I will be giving priority to those that are in the call in queue. All right, so what do we focus on in terms of Spring rush? So first and foremost, knowing that you only have several weeks, the things that you've been putting off need to get done the same way that I talk about earlier in the year, early at the end of last fall. Fall. I say, hey, look, you gotta have a plan for winter. It's the time when your revenues typically go down. There's typically less work and less leads coming in. You gotta have a plan in place to create systems so that when spring rush comes, you can capitalize on it. So whether it be creating new systems or in how you do your sales, how you set up your website, it is honestly too late to be doing things that are going to take you two or three months to figure out. Right now, trying to institute pay for performance, if you haven't already done so, is probably not a great idea right now because you need to be figuring out how to hire and getting ready to train and ultimately getting your team ready for spring rush both in the office, the admin side, the operation side, out in the field. And then from the sales perspective, how are you going to handle the Influx of leads how you capitalize on the spring rush will determine for the vast majority of home service businesses how well they do in that year. And so if you can capitalize on getting more of the leads that are coming, pouring in and actually able to lock them in into recurring service, you'll likely be able to do a much better job the rest of the year. And the people that are able to capitalize on the spring rush have figured out several things. Number one, operationally, how do I have a team that's ready to work and actually able to be efficient during the spring rush? For example, my general manager, one of them I was talking to the other day, he has tiers of team members starting, I think it's four or five team members starting new every, every week for the next five to six weeks. However, he didn't just they're not just gonna be showing up for their first day. They've already come, they've done their orientation, they've got their uniform, they, some of them have been to training already and so they're coming in warmish and then they're going to make sure that over the course of two weeks they are trained up. So what is your training process for your new team members? How are you going to handle when all of a sudden you have 10 estimates in a day versus what it's been in the past few months, which is 10, 10 estimates a month? Is it going to be you out in the field doing work from 8am till 12 and then from 12 to 5 u estimates? These are the type of things to nail down now instead of waiting for the spring rush and then having to be reactive when everything comes pouring in and that's what will happen. Will the spring rush be a little bit less busy than usual because of all the interest rates and the economy? Potentially. But I guarantee you there will be millions of jobs to be had this year and they will go to the people that are most prepared for the spring rush. Both sales, operations and admin. Look at all three of those areas and am I preparing operationally? My team trained up making sure I have system in place to get them efficient within a couple of weeks, ideally. Secondly, from the admin side inside the office, do I have systems in place that are going to make sure that I can take incoming estimates, take incoming emails and voicemails? How are those things being handled? Do I have a way to track and measure exactly how effective I am at answering calls and how quickly I get back to people? Third, that's your sales aspect. How are you Going to handle a doubling of your leads compared to last year. If you're growing your business, you're like, I'm going to double my revenue. There's a very good chance you're going to have to deal with double the amount of leads. So if last spring rush you got four or five estimates a day, expect there to be 10 to 12 now coming in during this time. All right. The hardest part about home services is the seasonality of it. And that is we have massive rush during spring and then we typically have an off season. It's the hardest thing because you have to manage those three elements, sales, operations and admin, during that seasonality. And cash flow is massively impacted because of that seasonality. Here's the key. During spring rush, your customer acquisition cost, the amount of money you will need to spend to buy one more customer, will be at its all time low. Compared to the rest of the time of the year, it is at its lowest point. Why is that? Because demand for our product and service that we sell in home services is extremely high during the spring rush. When you have demand that is very, very high, you can expect that you can get leads much, much for a much lower cost. If you were trying to get mowing, get a mowing quote, get a mowing lead two or three months ago in the middle of the winter, you're going to spend hundreds of dollars likely to close an actual customer during spring rush. They're going to be pouring in. Why? Because the grass is growing. If you're in the mowing industry. But for the vast majority of home services, this is our time when demand spikes. The companies that grow the fastest in home services are the ones that continue to be able to spend money on marketing during the time when the customer acquisition cost is far lower in terms of seasonality. I would venture to believe that between 20 and $40 customer acquisition cost, if that's what you're going to get during the spring rush, that during the off season that could very well be 100 to $200, which means you have a five. You can get five customers for the price of one. Talk about a deal. If you ever went into a cus into a store and like, hey, this, this next couple months only you're getting five for the price of one. We like stock up, baby. And so the the ability to be able to stock up on customers during the spring rush comes down to your ability to plan for the massive spike in leads and the effect that it has on sales, operations and admin. You can't just Think about one of those aspects. Oh, I'm going to do. I'm now going to work out on the business. I'm going to do sales. Great. You fixed one problem. What's going to happen to operations now that you're not able to actually help the guys throughout the day? They're going to need better training. There's going to need to be training for your new team members that are joining. Oh, and the admin, it's going to triple the amount of calls coming in. When you get all these new leads getting accepted, what's that going to do? Do you have redundancy? Do you have video recordings of the work being done in your office so that if someone gets sick for a week during the middle of spring rush, the business doesn't get stopped or you have to go back in the office and answer the phone calls? These are the type of things that allow a business to grow. And when customer acquisition cost is at its lowest and demand for our services is at its highest, the person that can spend the most amount of money on marketing during that time will grow the fastest. I understand that's nice to be able to spend money on marketing during the slow season to drive leads to stay busy. But that cost of that lead is usually 5 to 10x higher than if you can spend that same amount of money during the spring rush. All right, let's go ahead and take our first caller. The area code is 865. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on. Can you hear me okay?

I can.

How are you, Mike?

Good. How are you doing? What's your name?

My name is Parker.

Parker, how's it going? What can I do for you?

So my question is, I started in August. I went full time in August and did about 40k from then until December. And in 2024, my goal is roughly 3 to 350k. So I'm trying to decide, should I buy used equipment to try to get the other crew started or should I do like a third man crew to build up capital until I can get the used truck and everything like that for the second curve?

So is your question getting another crew versus another truck, or is it the question of do I get a used versus new?

So the question is really.

Is.

More or less, should I go ahead and buy used equipment to get a second crew started or should I just add the third person in the same truck with me for like the first two or three weeks through spring rush to try to get them trained up and get them running and then branch off and Add them to the second crew.

Great question. This really comes down to where you're at in terms of a capital and liquidity on hand. So like, do you have enough cash to be able to buy the truck and still be able to sustain the business and market services throughout spring rush?

So I already have a second truck and trailer. The only thing I'm needing is used, either used mowers or new mowers. So that's, it's liquidity is kind of low right now.

Yeah. So like I would say, I would say I would give you the green light on this for one reason. It sounds like you have 80% of the assets required to start a second crew. And by having the second crew, you basically are going to almost double your revenue capacity. So if you're able to do say 15 or $20,000 a month with the one truck and the one crew, you could probably do 35 to 40,000amonth at full capacity running these, the two trucks. It sounds like you have the truck, you have the trailer, you just need the equipment. There's a high likelihood that getting the mower, even if it's at 0% down and you, and you finance it is a good move because honestly, you're probably going to spend two to three hundred dollars per month for that equipment if you had to pay, if you had to finance it. And then that way you keep cash on hand to be able to market throughout the spring rush and fill the truck as fast as possible. And so really my answer comes down to your confidence in your ability to be able to fill the truck with leads. And it sounds to me like the way you got started last year, you probably going to be able to do that pretty quickly. And so what I don't want to happen, and the reason I give you the green light on even financing is I don't want you to max out the first truck. And all of a sudden that truck goes down for just one or two weeks in the middle of spring rush. And now your business basically grind to a halt and you have three employees, which likely means you have like 100 plus customers. And you can't afford to have the truck go down. And so you already have the truck, you already have the trailer, you already actually have all the assets mostly required to get this, the crew started. I just go ahead and either finance the mowers or if you can afford it, pay with, with cash. And then if you. The only reason I say finance because I need to make sure you have enough capital, actually go advertise and fill the truck up. Does that make sense?

It does. How much capital do you think I should set aside for marketing to do? 350 or so.

How many. How many recurring customers do you have now?

So currently I'm doing 40 lawns. That was solo, but now I added a person.

So you'll probably need at least 120 to 150 if you keep the same service mix in order to be able to hit that goal. So in terms of the 300,000 for the year. And so, you know, I just come up with that Math based upon 150 customers, average of $2,000 per, you know, customer per year. And assuming that some do mowing, some do some projects, cleanups, mulch, et cetera. And so in order to get there, you can just run the math of, okay, well, If I have 40 now and I need at least 100 more, and let's just say I'm going to spend, to be conservative, $100 in customer acquisition costs. That would mean you'd need to spend $10,000 in marketing. And so if I was you, I would work that math backwards. So I'd say, okay, I need to have at least $10,000 to quote, unquote, burn. And anything besides that, I'm willing to spend on equipment, trucks, et cetera. But I'd also be making sure you have enough working capital because you're going to be getting all these employees, et cetera. So I like to see at least one month of revenue in the business right now. That's only probably around 10 to 15,000. So I'd be looking at, like, say $15,000 a month as working capital, plus keep liquid, keep, you know, dry capital. $10,000 for marketing. Anything above that, I'd say, hey, you can go ahead and spend it. But if you start dipping into that number, that's why I say potentially use the financing on the equipment if needs be.

Okay, sounds great. So basically just I need to hold about 10 to 15k as capital, and then the rest decide if I want to finance or buy used equipment.

Correct? Exactly. I would. I would personally hold $10,000 set aside for marketing to be able to scale the way that you're thinking and then have at least another $15,000 in working capital. So really, my perfect answer is, like, I'd be looking to try to keep at least $25,000 in the bank. If you have to tap way into that, like, 10 or 15 grand into that for this equipment, then I'd go finance it.

Okay, sounds great. Thank you, Mike.

You got Brother, take care. Have a good one. All right. Next caller is coming in from Texas. Five one, two. Welcome to the show. I think this is Sam, am I correct on that?

Yeah. Hey Mike, how's it going?

Good. How you doing, brother?

Doing good. Hey, really quick question for you. So we're starting our second location, officially starting it here in about three weeks.

Good for you, man.

We already have about 30 budgeted hours for that location to start off with. My question is a two part question. How do you ultimately define success for a general manager within their first year and then what kind of KPIs are you primarily tracking within that first year?

Great question. So the two major ones that you really, from a macro perspective are looking at when you come to a first a new location is growth and profitability. Like in the short term, you want growth to be the focus because they're not going to be able to be profitable in the first year. And so if you're doing sort of comp plans, et cetera, give them, hey, here's your profit percentage or distribution percentage, however you're working that. But that first year especially, I would give them significant incentive based upon revenue goals because they're not going to be profitable because there's just so much that goes into getting all the new leads and going out and getting the customers and spending on advertising, buying more trucks. There's not usually a lot of distributable cash. And so we typically have had it where it's benchmarks like, hey, if you hit above 20,000amonth in revenue, because that's kind of like we want them to get there as fast as possible, hopefully within a month or 2. Anything above 20,000amonth in revenue, we start having tiers of monthly bonuses based upon just straight revenue. And so you could, you could really just have your profit sharing or your distributable cash percentage that you want to share with them as like, hey, this is the North Star where we want to go. You're gonna make a lot more money here. But in that first year we're gonna do benchmarks based upon revenue. I think keeping it that simple is better than trying to do it based on like close ratio and number of leads and a whole bunch of other things. Especially when number of leads is mostly gonna come down to how much you spend on marketing. And so it just becomes a perverse incentive of them wanting to spend more and more on ads.

Gotcha.

Any. Anything that you're kind of like wrestling with that though, in terms of like creating that either compensation plan or just kind of KPIs.

No. So we, we had a plan of going 50000 salary and then 15 distributor or distributions and but I like the idea for the first year.

We kind of already had like think APIs that we wanted to track in terms of like new customers and, and close rate, stuff like that. And what kind of responsibilities, what kind of reporting responsibilities does your GM have for that first year? Like if we do like monthly leadership meetings.

Yeah. In terms of the reporting like getting the actual numbers and the metrics, I put that on my regional manager in order to be able to find those numbers and make sure they're, they're clean and pure because they're, it's their responsibility if I have a regional manager now if you are serving as the regional manager, I would still take reporting as your responsibility because you ultimately need to know what the business is doing and you're going to anyways. So why like have them do it if you're just literally going to do the exact same thing to double check their work? And so I would take reporting on is still your function as you are serving as the quote unquote regional manager. And then the reason that I like using just revenue like growth and profit is because all the other KPIs lead into those two things. So if you're trying to grow really fast, having a high close ratio and more leads is going to lead to higher revenue. Right. As time goes on, efficiency of labor is a huge driving factor of something like profitability. And so instead of trying to take all the leading indicators of success, I'd rather just go after the ones that are easy to track and it's lag and that is my revenue and my profitability. And so I would, I would say what, what's your right now? I know you already have some budget hours of work being done there. What's the revenue per month do you think as of right now like getting started like without any additional.

Oh probably 6,000amonth starting off with that first or second location.

And are you involved in Daily Ops, the second location at all?

No, I won't be.

I, I would, I, I just. This would just be my personal recommendation to you Sam. Cause I know you and I know how you roll and so I'm willing to go a little further with this. I would recommend going more than 15% distributable cash as, as a profit share for them. It's not going to be enough meat on the bone in year two for them to actually get excited about it because let's say in year two, you get this thing up to, let's be conservative, let's say $300,000 in annual revenue for 2024. Okay. Probably not going to be super profitable. You're going to have a hard time convincing them going into year two that 15% of profit is going to be exciting for them because they're going to look at them and be like, okay, let's say we do 500,000 in year two and let's say we're 20% profit. That's 100 grand. Am I really going to push my brain like I have for the past year for $15,000? That's usually unlikely. What I would say is make that so juicy that after year one of the massive growth and, but not being profitable now, they see this path to like 30%, potentially even of distributable cash. Right. And again, that assumes you're completely out of daily operations. But I just, I'm not saying that's what you should do. I'm just saying think about that. Because I see a lot of GMs getting kind of lost after that first year and leaving because there's not enough meat on the bone to actually make the business profitable. Because not easy like that. Second year is when you really start to actually make money and have distributable cash. And if they're not getting a big enough chunk of it, like, ultimately they are the driving factor to whether or not the location will be successful. And so I just make sure that's as, as like, juicy as possible for them from a retention perspective as well as just like motivation throughout year one when it's brutal. It's just so difficult as a GM to be running the location.

Right. Yeah, that's, that's really good. Is that what you do for your GMs is around 30?

Yeah, we do 35 if it's brand new and it goes down. If they're joining a location that already has, I think it's like at 20,000, 40,000, 60,000amonth in revenue, that percentage goes down. But we do that Exactly. Start at 35% and it works its way down, I think all the way down to 10% depending on the amount of revenue that they are stepping into the location with.

Got you. Awesome answer. Thank you for your time, Mike.

Absolutely, brother. Take care. Bye bye.

All right. For some reason, my video kind of got choppy there. Next call is coming in from three three zero. Thank you for coming on the show. Welcome.

What's up? Mike Andes. How are you? Today.

Good. Who am I talking to?

This is Justin from Akron, Ohio.

Awesome, Justin, thanks for calling in, brother. What's, what can I do for you?

Absolutely. Hey, one question. Through the winter time here I have, I, I've had a full crew. We did a360,000 last year. I had a two man crew that I basically hired on April of last year. I did a layoff for one of the guys going into November, was able to sell enough snow contracts to keep a guy on full time. However, did not have the, the workflow to really justify a salary guy through the winter time and was kind of looking for your opinion on what to do next year to kind of keep guys on call to, you know, show up for snow events, but also incentivize them to, you know, actually show up when we need them.

Got it. And so you're, you're thinking right now about next snow season because this snow season I assume was pretty difficult with just having the one person.

It it. We were able to sell seasonal contracts that we were able to take care of our overhead as well as wages for that employee, as well as, you know, keeping me as the owner. Taken care of through the wintertime. I'm just wondering, is there a better strategy moving forward to what would you do in that situation if you had no contracts and needed a plow guy but don't have the, you know, the hours to really put forth? Just put them on salary is basically what I did this winter.

Got it. So I assume the salary kind of eats a hole in your pocket throughout the winter time when you don't have a ton of work.

The difficult thing that I see is yeah, we're selling out the money, but in, in some, in a lot of cases, we, you know, we're basically looking out the window waiting for it to snow.

Right. And so this is, this is when it comes down to if you doubled his hourly rate and you offered that to people to be more on call type scenario and said, hey, instead of paying you, let's just call it. I'm just gonna make up a number. Let's just say you're paying $1,000 per week, right? So it's 200 bucks per day.

Say, hey, you're right on the. Yeah, you're right on the money with that.

Yeah. So, so let's say, let's say it's a thousand bucks a week, you know, and 200 bucks a day if you're someone's on salary five days a week of work. Let's assume though, what if we went out and we said, hey, would you be willing to be. For $400 per day if. If you have to come into work, you get 400 bucks to go through snow, would you be willing to do that? I'm not saying it's necessarily this person that's on salary because they. They've gotten used to this lifestyle and that's fine. But offering next year potentially as an. As a. As another job offering, like, you know, position, be like, hey, you're going to be on call and you're only going to get X amount of time, but when you come in, I'm going to give you 500 bucks per day. Now all of a sudden, it's a matter of they're super motivated to come into work, they're on call, and if it doesn't snow for three weeks, you didn't pay $3,000 for someone to do absolutely nothing. And so I'm assuming a couple things.

Yeah, that's a tough one to. Yep.

And so I think I'm assuming first and foremost that there's people out there that would be willing to make 40 or $50 an hour to be on call, which I think there's a market for that. Secondly, I'm also assuming that there's absolutely nothing for them to do besides the snow, because if there's a whole bunch of other shop work and things you need done during the winter, maybe it makes sense to have someone on salary. But assuming there's nothing for them to do, I would definitely suggest or, like, try that out, at least.

Perfect. One last question for you. In the event I'm looking to grow this year, I'm not trying to get overzealous and say that we're gonna double, but definitely gonna try to get to at least 25 to 30% more than this year. And hiring guys, in your. In your opinion, what would you say is the best way to acquire new guys? Is it. Is it like a hiring agency or Facebook? What would you suggest?

Like, indeed, is definitely the paid service that's still outperforming everything. I would say, though, once you have a good team and getting their referrals, those are usually your best candidates. We're seeing the labor market across all of Augusta Nation. All 150 locations that I'm seeing hiring are having a much easier time right now hiring than they did a year ago, two years ago, and especially three years ago. And so I don't think that's going to be your bottleneck, I think, for the vast majority of people, and we've been so accustomed to labor being our bottleneck for the past three years. It's going to actually be difficult for some people to actually switch into, like, oh, like, leads are going to be squeaky, a little more squeaky this year. And so I would say to calm that fear that you might have put some hiring ads out. And I think you might be surprised how much more come in than usual. And it's just a matter of the economy getting a little softer, a lot more layoffs happening, et cetera. So try that out just to, like, how much longer do you need before you. You actually need employees? How many. How many more weeks?

I mean, right now we're. I'm looking at six weeks till spring. That's the thing that keeps running in my head here. Right.

So, but this. I'm looking.

I would, I would prefer. Go ahead.

This is the time to go and start looking for hires. Right? Because what's going to happen, everyone's going to wait six to eight weeks when they're all of a sudden have all this work, and then you enter the labor market when everyone's hiring right now, everyone's looking outside, seeing snow. I'm like, ah, I don't need to do it. We were hiring like six weeks ago, eight weeks ago, for what? Now they're starting next week. And so when you have a softer labor market, you can do that. When, when we put up an ad and we get 50 people to apply over the weekend, you better believe that we're able to hire 10 of them and then tell them they're starting in three weeks, some of them starting in four weeks and some of them starting in five weeks. You could absolutely do that. And so. And you can even have them come do orientation now, do training now when you're slow so that when they actually start, they're active, efficient, and ready to roll.

You're awesome, man. Thank you. I met you at the summit, and I look forward to talking to you again. Are you still open for calls, paid calls?

Yeah. Mikeanny.com coach is expensive, so, like, if you can hop on one of these occasionally, I'm happy to answer calls.

I appreciate you, brother. Have a good rest of your night, man.

You got it. Bye. All right, next caller. It looks like it's from Australia, so I'm gonna say area code six one, it looks like. Welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on.

Good morning, it's Sophia calling from Darwin, Australia. How are you?

Good. I'm doing fantastic. How are you doing?

Good, good.

I've actually been speaking To Lee, the last couple of weeks, we have a landscaping mowing business up here in Australia in Darwin, which is the top end of Australia. And our biggest issue is staffing. The work is there, Mike. Like, it's to the point where we've got. I'm subcontracting work, I'm giving work away. It is my staff who at the moment let me down. We base our business around your model. We live and breathe Mike Andy's and Augusta Lawn Care. And this is why, one of the reasons I've been speaking to Lee about it, on transitioning over. But it's just these, our workers, we get to two weeks and then I get the, oh, I didn't come to work. I hit a pig. Oh, I.

My footstool and I'm just.

Did you say hit a pig? Did you say hit a pig?

Yeah, yeah, that's a new one.

I hit a pig. I hit a pothole. I couldn't come to work. I'm just getting every excuse under the sun at the moment. And I'm not too sure how to deal with these because our staff, you know, we do our profit share. We do, you know, we do P4P. We do quite a lot of incentives for them. I'm going to put it down to the heat because it's extremely hot up here in the territory. I'm just not too sure which way I can go about it.

Okay. Yeah. So this is, this is, this is a solvable problem. Here's the thing. If you're giving away leads, what it means is that you can raise prices because if you're going to give away the leads, you might as well lose them yourself because your prices are so high. And so this is something that I've recommended to several people that say, like when you, if you say, and I know, you're awesome. So I'm going to get it to you straight. When you say that you're, you're giving away leads and at the same time you're not having employees, it is basically talking on both sides of your mouth. The reason for that is this. If you raise your prices significantly, I'm talking 20 plus percent in order to be able to afford wages that are 20 to 30% higher than everyone else in your market. And now instead of giving away those leads, you will lose more leads. Yes, that will happen, but you're already giving them away. And so before I assume that that's correct, have you already tried raising prices? Was there issues with that? Have you tried raising wages and that didn't work? Have, have you done any of those things?

Yep. So we watched one of your segments and yes, we did raise the prices and we actually raised the prices by about $30 a service. And our customers aren't blinking. And like, they're not even blinking at it. They get approved. No worries. The prices have been increased, our staff wages have increased, and I'm like, you know, we're very honest. If I count for this amount of time, this is what you're going to get. This is what you're going to get paid for. If you do it in this amount of time, you'll receive your P4P. If it's a job that's come in and it's quite a large landscaping job, I'll offer a profit share for my staff members. But it's like, we get to two weeks and they've gotten all this money coming through, and then after two weeks, they literally drop off the radar. Yeah, like, so my latest one was I hit a pig and I never heard of him again.

Yeah, like, and I was born. I, I, I know over in Australia this is an acute problem, in part because of the way you all have to do with your labor market. It's different, the wages, the way that you have to have tiers of wages and benchmarks of, of re. Of. Yeah, like base wage. So this is what I would recommend. If you're still turning away leads, and by the way, you raised prices to the point that you thought was absurd and no one blinked an eye, do it again. And literally think of it as like, we're gonna give every dollar of that increase basically back to our team. And you're gonna do that by raising base pay.

Okay?

Because when you raise the weight, when you raise the price to the customer on P4P, a chunk of that's going to the team member already. But let's raise wages of base pay because that's what's going to attract new talent anyways. Right? They're, they're looking at the base pay. So I want it to be, like, absurd, because in the past it sounds like you raised prices and no one batted an eye. Let's actually get to the point where actually people do get concerned and they leave. And you actually want that because you have so many leads coming and you can't serve them anyways. But now think of it as like, I want to give every dollar back to my team members to the point where you think it's absolutely insane how much you're giving them because the reason they're leaving is because of the heat. And if the heat is so bad, you need to pay them so much they don't want to lose the job.

And that's correct. I mean, I have even gotten to the extent of where my 10 year old daughter is making our staff members lunch. So they don't even have to worry about, you know, lunch break, not lunch breaks, you know, going to buy their own lunch because, you know, we understand it's so hot, so we provide the staff lunch. And I'm thinking, I said today, surely this is, you know, going to help, but.

No, not at all.

But I like your strategy, increase and give back more. Because at the moment we have four setups ready to go for our cruise. But as I spoke today, this morning, we're kind of running on skeleton crew with the amount of work that we have to do because we've got quite a large portfolio of residential customers. But we also have a lot of, we've got a couple of schools here in the territory that we service as well.

Yep. So I, I just think it comes down to the fact that employees come for a paycheck and so if we want to make them make sure they stay, we gotta pay them more. If I would have said you have you raised prices? You said you did and you lost 50% of your customers, we'd be in a really big pickle because we'd have no upward trajectory. And I'd be thinking about things like can you get them lunch, can you do a better culture? All these other things. But the fact is you are, right now your value is so much higher than what you're currently charging your customers. When you raise your prices by what you thought was a lot, no one left, that means you have a huge value discrepancy. So get as much money out of that by raising prices and then giving that to your team members before you start assuming that there's other things in the business you need to fix because those things can be fixed. Things like culture, et cetera. It's a whole lot easier to raise prices with one email and, and then increase base pay and immediately get a different type of talent pool because you guys are up against things like mining industry where they're going to make a lot more money. So if you want to go tap into that market, you're going to have to get your base pay significantly higher.

Correct. And you know, as you would know in Australia, we do have to go by peers and I, we have at times a 19 year old who absolutely no experience that I've recently hired and I. I mean, I believe he's claiming it at. I think he's about $35 an hour, plus he's incentives on top.

Yep.

But then it's getting them motivated to. Okay, let's go. Yes, I know it's hot.

This is.

We're in our hottest part of the year.

We've got 12 weeks to go.

And then when they're beautiful full season and we can scale back and, you know, do all our nice things where this time of the year, we don't do any cleanups as it is too hot.

Right.

So I do like a theory and I'll definitely put it forward.

Circle back. Can't wait to hear back from you. Best of luck to you. Take care.

Thanks, Mark.

You got it.

Thank you.

Bye.

Next caller is coming in from 8, 6, 5. Welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on.

Hello. You're leaving someone else's call. Hello, eight six, five. Hey, how's it going?

Hello. Good, good. So my question was, do you think a SBO SBA loan is a smart idea?

Okay, give me a little bit of context. Are you just getting started? Have you grown the business a bunch? Why you're getting the SBA loan.

So we have a low capital. I'm only solo right now, looking to expand into getting a second truck and also having enough capital to build, do marketing. So I don't know if SBA loan was a good idea for that.

Okay, how much of a SBA loan size are you getting? I'm guessing you're doing a micro, like a 7A loan.

I was thinking around like 10K.

Okay. I would, I would say if you're going for 10k and it's going to go towards, are you going to be using it for the second truck or mostly marketing and other things.

Mostly marketing.

Okay. So I would say having capital on cap. So, okay, so capital and okay, this, this is probably going to be a much faster process to go through your local credit union and get either a line of credit or a small business loan through your credit union. The reason I say this, because just getting all your documents in place, the SBA will likely everyone will walk. You'll walk in, they'll be like, oh, yeah, a few weeks. I have yet to see an SBA loan, an actual A7, a micro loan, even close, less than two months. And so I would, I would prefer that. I would also say, assuming that you think you can, you have the track record to actually collect on money quickly, I. E. Get customers and within a month or two be able to get More money than what you paid into the. The customer acquisition cost. If you think you can do that. A credit card is not a bad idea if you're actually trying to just get a loan. Because if you can get a limit of, say, 15 or 20 grand on a credit card, or, let's just say, $5,000, yes, you might carry a balance for a month or two and pay a couple hundred dollars in interest. But if that's the difference between you being able to double the business this year and not because you capitalize on spring rush, I give you permission. But I would also just say make sure that as you're solo, if you remove the amount that you would spend otherwise on paying an employee from what you're currently making and you're not profitable, then don't take any debt. So how much are you charging right now per hour when you're solo?

We're doing 80 an hour.

Got it. And when you say we, is it mostly you and then you just have a helper or just you by yourself? Mostly.

I just hired a second guy recently to get ready for spring rush.

Got it. And. And when you were solo by yourself, what was your highest revenue per month?

14,000.

Got it. Cool. And are you mostly doing recurring services? Are you doing projects? What's sort of your. Your service mix?

I want to do, like, 90 reoccurring. Just because with the economy and how it's going, I want to stick with mainly reoccurring.

But the 14,000 that month, what percentage of that do you think was recurring? Like, half of it.

Probably like 70% was reoccurring.

Okay, cool. Yeah. So when I. When I do some dirty math on this, you're probably doing 160. That's great. Yeah. So you're efficient because you're. You're getting completed probably about 160, 140 to 160 budget hours per month. In that one month, when you work by yourself did 14,000, so it tells me you're relatively efficient and you're charging enough to be able to afford that second employee. I would have been concerned if you were like, hey, I'm only doing 7 to 8,000amonth in revenue by myself. I'm busy. I'm solo. Because then. Then having the debt makes it a little more scary. I do believe if you're able to be confident that having a second person gets you to 25 to 28,000amonth in revenue, which I think is possible. If you think. If you have the math to back that up, then I'd give The stamp of approval on trying to get a 5 or $10,000 loan from your credit union or even doing a credit card and knowing that you're going to pay a few hundred dollars in interest. Just know that if you just take, if you just slow down by one year, like instead of trying to get to your goals this year, you wait until next year, you probably wouldn't have to go into that debt. So it really just comes down to your risk assessment and your confidence in being able to actually get these customers. And that would come down to like, have you done marketing last year and being able to prove what channels are working in your market.

Do you have any recommendations on credit card companies?

Not really anything specific. I would definitely talk to your local credit union. Whoever you're banking with is usually going to be the best place to get a credit card. I would say though, before you go into debt, I would make sure that you know when you spend money on marketing what your return is going to be. And so even if you say, okay, instead of going and getting $10,000, maybe we spend $1,000 and we spend half of that online and we had spent half of it on door hangers and we just go test and see what we get. Because if we then know that spending that thousand dollars led to an extra 40 customers and a bunch of projects that came in, now I have way more confidence to go spend the $10,000 and even potentially go in a little bit of debt. But if you spend a thousand dollars and you literally don't see any return from it, I'd be more careful going out and getting $10,000 worth of debt that you'll be paying high interest on very high credit card, you're looking at 20 plus interest. If you get a line of credit or any sort of loan from your bank even, you're looking at 8, 10, probably 12% in interest. So that's not cheap. That's gonna be a few hundred dollars per month in just interest on that loan. So I just be very careful. If it sounds like you have checked the box of like efficiency and you, you're high enough pricing, the next part is making sure that you, when you spend the $10,000, your level of confidence that you're actually going to get customers needs to be, I'm okay with you spending like a thousand testing out door hangers, testing out some every door, direct mail, do some yard signs, do some Facebook ads or Google Ads and see what's working. So you can actually, with confidence, go spend the 10,000 instead of just Thinking it's a magic pill just to throw into the. Into the pot. Does that make sense?

So, yeah, door hangers are working the best right now. My only issue is trying to figure out what neighborhoods are the best to put them out in.

This is just a matter of testing, right. The cool thing about door hangers is, you know, for a thousand bucks, you can literally get almost 10,000 door hangers. And so. And in a matter of I'd say 3 to 5,000. $3 to 5,000 door hangers, you can test a pretty good amount of your market. So I would look at, okay, here are all the neighborhoods. I'm going to categorize them by maybe income, maybe by size of the house or the. The. The average. How a home value. You could do that if you really wanted to. But honestly, I think action right now is the main thing because you have more time than money. And so I would go out and do those door hangers and just keep cranking on them and just keep track, like, as you're doing them. Okay, how many. How many did I deliver today? How many leads came in? How many did I deliver today? How many leads came in? And then when the leads come in, you could literally just go old school and put pins on a map of where they're coming in at and start to realize what. Where your hot spots are in your market. Does that make sense?

Yes.

Cool. Awesome, man. Well, best of luck to you. You're gonna crush it. Thank you. Got it. All right, bye. Next caller coming in from Canada, Toronto, 647. Welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on.

Hey, Mike, how's it going?

Good. What's your name?

Michael.

Michael. Fantastic. All right, go for it.

All right, so I wanted to know how you get customers on yearly contracts because it gets slow sometimes, and some of them take advantage and cancel during the slow months. So I wanted to know, do you sign them up for a contract or do you let them cancel at any time? And if you do let them cancel, how do you keep them on the yearly contract?

Yep. So we don't require contracts. I recommend most will not require contracts for mowing services specifically. And it's not to say that they're bad. Just know that if you're doing that, you're adding friction to the sales process. And if you're growing your business so much that you just want to focus on having that constant stream of revenue throughout the whole year, which is fantastic. If you're more concerned about that than you are growth, going with contracts is a great idea. So the question I have for you is, are you trying to maximize growth or are you trying to maximize your profit and your cash flow?

It's only the second year, so I'm not even too sure what I should be focusing on.

Got it. Are you, Are you in a cash crunch right now? Like, is it, Is cash difficult or not?

No, cash is fine.

Got it. So in that case, I would assume you're trying to grow the business.

Yeah.

So in that event, I need to maximize for number of customers converting instead of cash flow throughout the winter. Right. And so. Or them canceling in the middle of spring, in the middle of the season. Now, there are things you can do that won't create friction like a contract that can still incentivize the customer to take the correct behavior. So instead of beating them over the head with a contract, use the carrot analogy to be able to lure them into what you want. So for example, you can have weekly and bi weekly prices. And if they want to cancel during the slow season, like summer, it gets too hot. No worries, Mr. Jones, we'll cancel the service. But next service, just know you're going to be on the bi weekly price because you did skip one service. You could also reward people that stay on throughout the whole year by giving them priority when everyone wants a specific service like fall cleanups or spring cleanups. So there's ways to incentivize people instead of beating them over the head with a contract. And you'll lose a chunk of people because you have a big contract. And the next question is, are you really going to take them over to court because they cancel their $150per month contract in the middle of the season? It's not worth your time. And in most jurisdictions, it would cost more for the lawyer than it would to actually just let them walk out. Well, if you're going to let them just walk out, why are we doing contracts? You're just preventing customers from coming in. It's creating more friction. Right. So I would probably in the short term, say if you're trying to maximize growth, focus on getting people in the door and don't put up a bunch of barriers for them to get in. If you're trying to maximize for profit and you're not trying to grow the business, that's when having things accommodate cash flow like contracts is a great idea. Does that make sense for you?

Yeah. Yeah, I get it.

You sound very disappointed.

Me?

No.

Cool. Well, best of luck to you, man. I know that's not necessarily easy decision, but. And especially up in your market, that can be a tough one because you have such massive swings in the season. But I wish you all the best. Next caller is coming from 202. It says Washington, D.C. don't know if that's true, but welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on.

How are you, Mike? Oh, my name is Edwin Gonzalez. So I run a landscape company in Washington, D.C. i have two years on the business, but I have some struggle with how to do a marketing.

Okay.

I try everything with everything. I'm watching you made like, so I'm big fans of your YouTube. So I mean, like, I tried with Flyer, I tried with. I mean, Rua, I tried with. I mean Gibbs. I tried like many things. I spent a lot of money on that. But what is recommendation? You have a recommendation? Anything to any specific to run my app.

How much in revenue do you currently do? Like last year, what did you do in revenue?

About 600k.

Okay, and in 2022, the year before, what'd you do in revenue then?

A deep left 200k.

Okay, so you tripled in revenue from 2022 to 2023. Is it. Is it the fact that you don't feel you're going to be able to continue that kind of growth, or.

Is it just the fact that you're frustrated by the fact that you can't spend any money to get more leads? It's mostly just been word of mouth. And what basically gives you a call?

Yeah, I mean, like, I feel like sometimes like, so I got like. So I mean, I want to try to grow the company. That's why the point is one gonna be like a good year. It's gonna be like a 7,700k at least. But I feel like I spent last years, I spent like at least on the. Yes, marketing. 75 grand. But I don't see the. I mean, that could decrease. So that's why I made it. I spent a lot of money on marketing.

Whoa, you spent $75,000 on marketing last year?

Yes, Mercy.

Okay, so basically, okay, so you went from 200,000 in 2022 to 600,000 in 2023. That's a difference of $400,000. However, in order to get that $400,000 worth of growth, you spent $75,000 in marketing. So if you take 400,000 divided by 75 that you spent, you're getting around a 5 to 6x multiple on your marketing dollars, assuming they're effective. Right. Which means right now you have to spend, you know, for every dollar you spend on marketing, you're getting about five or six dollars back in revenue now, assuming you keep them forever, there's no churn you'll be okay. But again there's going to be people leave. Some of these are probably one time jobs and projects and so that's not a good ratio. You really need that number to be over 10 10x where you spend a dollar and you get at least $10 back in that first year. I'd recommend that for everyone. Just like trying to use that as the benchmark. So then the next thing is when you did all the marketing, were you able to track where leads are coming from? Like do you ask them hey, where'd you hear about us? Et cetera. And then they're just not mentioning the places that you advertised.

Yes, I do that. And the plus I mean like all the time I ask them, I like so. And then I have a software as well, how to run my leads or how to do the update. I use your, I mean right now, currently. And it helped me a lot. But. And I think, I mean so you ask.

Yeah. So you each, you ask each customer where they heard about you and I'm assuming right now that they're not mentioning your marketing. Is that correct?

Yes.

Got it. And so the market you've been doing right now, what have you been driving, have you been driving that to your website for online at least?

Yes.

And what's, what's your website right now?

Oh, Jared. Next day landscape.

Oh man, I'm sorry, I cannot hear that very well. I apologize. Can you give me, can you spell that for me? I. I'm sorry.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. J A R E D. Next day Landscape and Construction llc.

Okay, see here, one second. All right, there it is. Land. Next day landscaper. Got it. All right, here we go.

Okay. Washington D.C.

Okay. All right, here, let me, let me just share this. Everyone knows what I'm looking at. Okay.

Okay. So for example, the areas that you cover, Washington, Maryland, Potomac, Rockville, McLean, Virginia, etc, I would recommend putting at the very top of your website because not clear where you're serving exactly. Right from the get go if customers are coming to the front page. Also I would try to put your estimate request form above the fold. What I mean by that is when the customer comes to the webpage, they can actually see the web form to fill out for an estimate request right away. And so I know that there's the book now button, but again they don't know what, where they're going when they click on that. They don't know where you've linked that up to. So I'd try to get the. Your estimate request form literally right on the front of the page. Because if customers are coming to the site and you're driving traffic here, you don't want them to have to click again to get to the place they're looking for, which is to get a quote. So any traffic coming here needs to be optimized for getting new leads because that's usually why you're getting. Trying to get them here. And so I would make sure the estimate request form is like, front and center here. I'd also say, like, your pictures, I would try to show your crew, you, door, your. Your truck. Like, do you have trucks that are painted or anything special in terms of the branding?

Yes, I do. We have any uniform as well. For my crew, Alexa, my trucks and my trail lights, everything is wrapped. I mean, it's. Of course, I mean, yes, I want to try to do that, though.

I love it. So the picture, the picture in the back of your website, like, the first picture you see. I'd recommend that being all about your brand, what makes you different? Because right now it's just a picture of a landscape that could be any house in your market from any competition. It could very well not even be your picture. And so put your truck, your employees, like, your crew, like, on the back of the tailgate or like next to the truck, smiling with the estimate request form before the customer has to scroll 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 times the very bottom of the page to send an estimate to you or send a message to you. Right? Just remember, when you're driving traffic from all these marketing sources that you just mentioned, they're coming here first and you're driving them with the intention of getting an estimate. So make that the centerpiece, not anything else like limited time offers or about the company or amenities or happy customers. They are here to get a quote because ideally, your marketing has already done enough sales and enough selling to get them to come get a quote. So make that as the forefront of the site would be my recommendation. Does that make sense?

I got it. Yes.

Cool.

Thank you so much. I appreciate it. I want to try to do that.

Best of luck to you. And by the way, you tripled the business in revenue. So regardless of what anyone says, that's to be something you can be proud of. And assuming your marketing didn't do anything for you, it means you're doing a great job because customers are still coming to you regardless of the marketing. Next call is coming in from 8:1:7. Welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on.

What's going on. My name is Phil over here at Parish Lawn Service in Dallas, Texas. Here buddy.

Hey brother, how you doing? How you doing?

Pretty good. I got two questions here.

Go.

What will you do if you have a customer that owes you money? And the other question is what is the best marketing tool out there? I've done basically I have my own website, I've done door hangers, I have Facebook ads, I done the yard sign. What is the bet? What other things out there could be probably the best thing out there.

Cool. So let me ask the answer the first question. So someone owes you money. I'd say the first thing is let's try to make it where they don't ever owe you money. And that'll be getting credit cards on file, having it where credit cards are required for them to do service with you. And if you use something like Stripe they will pre make sure that the, the card is validated. And so you know, you know Copilot has this other softwares potentially might have the ability to be able to require the card before they even accept the estimate. So that, that'd be the first thing because they prevent them ever having any debt to you first and foremost if it goes past that point. Automations for text and email to remind them of an overdue invoice, that's the next step. Then if you got to escalate it then it's like do you do collections, do you go knock on their door, et cetera. But I think the biggest thing is like focus on the root cause which is the fact that you're allowing them to do services without you collecting right away using a credit card and you're allowing them to get started with your services before requiring a payment method to be on file at least a credit card or ach in terms of the second one in terms of the best marketing like how much did you do in revenue in 2023 Phil?

Man, I done around like 10, 10,000 or so on on that basically last year I did Facebook ads. They it went off the roof had I went to do the door hangers. I got, I looked at the the on that one I didn't get no, no response on door hangers. That was my first year doing door hangers. I got the stuff off of your website and basically did it and I said let's see if it works. I did the, did the yard signs too and didn't really get a whole lot but recently I did, I put out this year A couple yard signs and I've been getting some, not a whole bunch because it's still a little winter here. But that's basically what it is pretty much on a nutshell.

And what'd you do in revenue last year, Phil?

34.

34,000?

Yes, sir.

Got it. Okay. And what's kind of your goal for 2024? What do you think you're gonna do in terms of revenue?

My goal is double. My goal is double that.

Okay, got it. Yeah. So this is what I would challenge everyone on. And I'll just use you an example, Phil.

I really don't think most of us have a leads problem. I think most of us have a follow up problem. And the reason I say that is because I ran math at Augusta Nation a few weeks back on about 50 of the locations. I took their sample data and I ran math and I realized that if we just sent out the estimate, we averaged a 38 close ratio. If we also sent the estimate and followed up three times via phone calls, that close ratio, without any other interactions that were different, same automations for everything else, went to 65%. And so what I would challenge you on, Phil, is instead of trying to think about getting more leads, let's try to focus more on taking the leads we have got and converting more of them to paying customers. And so whether that be having an automated sequence for texting or emailing them to follow up, calling them the day after going and visiting their house with a printed off copy of the estimate, regardless of the method, focus more on following up instead of getting more leads. Because right now if you spend $10,000 on marketing, not $30,000 in, in revenue, that means we have a 3x multiple. That's, that means the marketing's not working. But before we judge that, let's go ahead and take whatever leads are coming in. Because I assume, assuming that the marketing is not working at all and you're not getting any leads from it, there's a very good chance you're getting a lot of your leads through word of mouth, people seeing your truck, customers that are happy, referrals, et cetera. So let's take every single one of those and instead of spending time, money and energy, you on going on advertising, spend that time on, on following up on the leads they're currently coming in. Because a 3x multiple on marketing tells me that one of two things is broken. Either a, the ads are horrible, or two, we're getting a bunch of leads but not actually closing them to become paying customers. The first one's a lot harder for me to fix. Like, you're creative and how you run the ads and all the rest of it. The second one simply takes you following up with customers. And so what I would recommend, Phil, is track religiously when you get an estimate. I don't care if you have to print them off and stick them on the wall and literally mark on them when you've called them and when you text them and whatever is required. Because at 30,000, you can absolutely double your revenue without spending any money on marketing. If you just follow up on the estimates that do come in and religiously make sure that they close the deal. Does that make sense?

Okay. Yeah. Yeah, not a problem.

Cool, man. Well, best of luck to you.

Appreciate Mike.

My pleasure, brother. Bye. Bye. Next caller is coming in from. Okay, we got a lot of callers coming in, so I'm going to be quick. Don't feel offended if I cut you off or I drop the call and then finish your question. We're just going to try to get through these as many as possible. Next caller is coming in from 704. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.

Hey, Mike, this is Phelps. Moment came to the conference. Super good. Thanks for that.

So my question is, you made a video a couple weeks ago regarding.

I can't remember what it was, to be honest. But my question is, how do you find your profit per service? Like for a long service.

I didn't know really how to find that, so I could kind of budget for that.

What's. What's the goal in finding that number for you right now, Philip?

I think just being able. So I'm in growth mode, but I. It will be more profitable because I won't have to buy a truck and trailer and all that this year. So kind of just seeing how much profit I'll have if I have like 60 customers this year is what the minimum times wanting.

Me just kind of ballpark see where I would be at.

Got it. Okay. So the reason I asked you because, like, at first I thought you wanted to know how much you're making per lawn. And I think that's a great number to know down the road. But based upon your secondary question, I can see it's more a matter of what do I need a budget and how much money am I going to make if I get these more customers? If I get 40 more customers, how much more money am I going to make and what do I need to be expecting to spend? Here's what you can think about. If you have all of your fixed expenses. Fixed expenses are things that don't go up or down based upon the revenue you spend. This can be rent, loan payments, insurance. You're not going to pay half the amount of rent next month because your revenue drops in half. Your rent isn't going to double next month because of your revenue doubling next month. These are fixed expenses. Take that number, figure out what that number is going to be. Add on all the trucks, insurance, everything that you know is going to be there. Then what you want to figure out is if you make a dollar of revenue on labor, what percentage of that gets wiped out? And it's going to get wiped out from several different things. It's going to get wiped out from direct labor, I. E. Paying your guys a wage. And on P4P, you can fix that number. It's a 33 or 40%. But then on top of that, you got to have overhead recovery. These are all the other costs of the business. And so if you're lucky, you can be able to say, okay, if I add up all my fixed expenses, that's $6,000 per month, great. I need to make at least $6,000 just to break even and pay my fixed expenses. Oh, but wait, now I have employees. Now if I get large enough, I actually need an office and an admin person. So you can start to figure out where's your actual break even point. And that's what I'd be trying to figure out if I was you. I'd be trying to figure out what dollar amount do I need to make just to break even, get to zero. Then I'd be figuring out what is the the annual value per customer or acv. Annual customer value. ACV is simply how much and how much revenue do I make per customer per year? And then you can extrapolate from that how much rev, how many, how many customers do I need to get to hit break even? And then if I have this goal of hitting 40,000amonth or 50,000amonth in revenue, then I can figure out also how many customers do I need to get to. A lot of times we have the disconnect between how many customers I need to have and how much revenue I'm making, Mostly due to the fact that we don't know our acv. We don't know what our annual customer value is. And therefore we can't make an educated guess that if we get 50 customers, it will lead to $100,000 in annual annual revenue. And the reason I know that number is because I know my average is $2,000 per customer per year. So figuring out your ACV will be important, figuring out your break even will be important. And that will be how you can determine your profitability as you project forward. Next caller is from 814. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.

Welcome.

Thanks for doing this tonight, helping us on know where to focus for the spring rush. What is an impactful way to better the life of the teammates that see a business? Buying more trucks, mowers, building buildings, equipment, etc. Reinvesting the profit back into the business and also a way to keep up morale.

Absolutely. Thanks for the question. It's very good. I think the number one way that you can do this is ultimately why do the employees come to you? They come to for a job and they come for paycheck and they come for stability. And so there's two ways that you can really increase the benefits of for a team member. One, pay them more money. Two, make sure that whatever you are giving them today is going to lead to more money in the future. There's a lot of intangible things that we can talk about, things like culture and one on one meetings and developing their skills and offering other things inside the business like audible programs and podcasts. And these are all positive things and we see the value in them. What we see as value as owners typically is not what our team members see value in. Keep this in mind. And so in my opinion, the same way that you would make an investment in a truck because you want to be able to make more profit in the future, when you spend money on something in the business for your team members, you'll need to make it very clear to them how that is going to lead to them making more money or making their life easier in the future. And so either they're going to make more money or you're going to make their life easier and they make their job easier. So that could be getting them better equipment, etc. However, keep in mind most team members, the reason they are team members and not owners is because they don't want to wait 5 years or 10 years to see any sort of return from their sacrifice today. Ultimately, the reason they're sacrificing today is for a paycheck in two weeks. And so if you constantly are saying, oh, we're going to do this and this and this in five years or 10 years, they're going to lose confidence in you. And so try to get their incentive as close to their performance as possible. And so ideally you have something like P4P, you have profit sharing, you have ways to make sure that when they put hard work in today, they get money back quickly. And if you're going to invest profits in the business back into equipment or shop space or anything that's positive for them, realize you are delaying the gratification that they are getting from that extra amount of effort that they could put in today and that's fine. I'm not saying you shouldn't invest in better equipment for your team. I'm not saying you shouldn't invest in snacks and water and better office space and a shop space and nicer trucks for your team. I'm not saying you shouldn't. Just keep in mind there's delayed gratification there. The fastest way to do this is give them more money. The longer term way to do this is building a culture and building a culture of care for the team members. And so one is quick and relatively easy. Pay them more money whether or not you have the cash. I guess that kind of determines whether or not it's easy. The second one's going to take a longer amount of time and most team members won't see the impact of that right away. And so the best solution in my opinion is move those things up in tandem as you can afford it. Increased benefits like healthcare, 401k, dental, whatever you can do, whatever you can afford that can be immediate and then give them as much money as you possibly can afford. Realistically, like obviously you got to have a profit margin business. In my opinion you gotta have at least 20 profit margin to be sustainable. So if something crazy happens, no one gets laid off. Anything above that. If you really know if you, if unless you're trying to maximize your own personal profit and wealth, I'd just give that back, be the benchmark and you can literally be open with your team. Like hey, anything over this dollar amount I'm, I'm willing to give the team and I want to increase wages, I want to give more benefits or I'm going to invest in something long term like a new shop space or equipment, etc. Hopefully that was somewhat helpful. Next caller is coming in from 559. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.

Hey, how's it going? This is Marco from Baja Creek. So I have, I have a dilemma where I'm constantly booked up for about two weeks but nothing past that. But once those two weeks are, are about done with work then I'm booked up for another two weeks and it just goes on and on like that. I don't really do any ads at all. It's all 100. About 90% of my work is all referrals through Facebook groups here locally. Um, so I've never spent any money on ads, But I hit a plateau where I can't make any more money than what I'm doing now because I'm in the field and not out doing estimates when I'm getting called.

Yep.

So at what point. At what point do I hire somebody that could take my spot or, I don't know, may maybe even hire a sales guy or something to go and do out, do that type of work, the estimates and stuff like that?

So let me. Let me get a couple of things. So in your opinion, if you spent less time on the truck and more time in sales, would you grow the business more?

Oh, for sure. I mean, I already closed. I think I closed, like, seven out of ten jobs.

Okay, and so how much do you pay your team members out in the field working?

Well, I'm embarrassed to say. So I have really good workers. We do concrete work. I pay him a daily rate, and it's 450 a day.

Awesome. Don't be ashamed of that. Let's go, dude. I'm psyched for you. Awesome. All right, so 450 bucks a day. Fantastic. Nothing to be ashamed there. Let's assume that's like, what, 50 bucks an hour on average, you think?

Well, actually, in concrete, when you're just finishing, it's really only four hours and you're done.

So you're paying like 80, 100 bucks an hour for a labor.

Correct.

And is that correct? And just to be clear, that's what you are paying your team members, not what they're. They're making. Correct.

That's what I'm paying them. That's what they make a day.

Got it. Sorry, my bad. I phrased that wrong. My apologies. I meant for the customer. So that's fantastic. Okay, great. So you're paying these guys really good, like, half a day's worth of work. They're making, like, a hundred bucks an hour, essentially. And you're. The thing is this. If you went out instead of doing the. Instead of doing the field work itself and went out and did the work, doing the sales, do you think you could double the business relatively quickly?

I could for sure. Because. Because when I get a phone call. I'm constantly getting phone calls on the at when I'm in the field, and it just kind of ruins. It doesn't ruin my day, but it slows me down it gets me. I'm super focused at work and then I get called and then for the next 10, 15 minutes I'm like lost.

Yep. So in my opinion, those calls that you're doing are probably two to three times more valuable than the doing of the work. And if you're paying people that much per hour to do the work, I don't think you're gonna have a big problem trying to find people to do the job. And so in my opinion, you are more scarce as a salesperson than you are as a laborer. You can find someone to replace you. And if you think it's gonna double the business, I'd do that all day long if I had to pay someone $400 a day. That's like 100 grand a year, 80 grand a year. Whatever it is that you're paying per team member is going to be the unlock for you to probably make. What, like if you doubled the business, how much more revenue would that be?

Well, last year, last, well just last month we were at like 70k revenue.

Got it.

So early this month we're on track for more.

Got it. So you're probably, you're probably at a run rate like 80 to $90,000 per month in revenue right now. And you're growing quickly. All right. You probably get that to 150 to 180,000amonth in revenue in the next 12 to 24 months if and only if you focus on the sales side. And that that role is a higher value task and harder to fill by the way than a labor. Like right now, if I told you go find a someone can go sale sell these jobs and this, these contract jobs versus go find someone that's willing to work for 80 to 100 bucks an hour doing concrete. I would venture to believe it'd be easier for you to find someone to work out in the field.

100%.

So this then it's an easy decision. Like you're trying to replace yourself. You either gotta, you either gotta replace yourself on the sales side or you gotta replace yourself on the field side. It so happens that you are able to pay a gobs amount of money for the field. You're going to be able to find someone no problem. The other side is almost impossible to fill. And that's how, that's why you haven't got anyone to do it. I'd just say go do that 110%. You can afford it by the way, and go find a labor to do your current job for you. You, you're One higher away from doubling the business.

Okay. Okay. Well, thank you for the advice.

You got it, brother. Best of luck to you. Concrete. Making a hundred bucks an hour. I'd do that job. Let's go. Good for you. Nothing to be ashamed of, Marco. Great business you built. And literally, you are one hire away from getting yourself out of the daily operations out in the field. And it will unlock a doubling of your business because there's just massive amounts of synergy that happens when you're able to work on the business instead of in it. Next caller is also from Australia coming in live from six one. Go for it.

Oh, g'. Day. Is that me?

Yeah, that's you. What's up?

Oh, hey, guys. Yeah, good. Yeah, no, I just had a bit of a question to ask you, and there's a little bit of a backstory behind it, if you don't mind me just explaining how I've got myself into the situation I'm in.

Go for it.

All right, cool. Well, I started off as a musician. I went on a TV show called Australia's Got Talent, and that blew up and got a lot of views and I got a lot of shows. I did a lot of work for about 10 years, but I didn't really know anything about business. And so I'd find myself doing gigs for 50. 100 bucks. 150 bucks. Long story short, 10 years later, I found myself in quite a bit of debt. So I decided to learn the skills of business so that I could apply it to my music and then make that work. So anyway, I decided to start my own business. So I did a hundred of hours of research before I started. I stumbled across your channel. I listened to a lot of whiteboard videos and stuff. And just sitting there playing Halo while I listen to your talk. I got the idea. I just tried to want to. I wanted to get it right before I did it. So I tried to do as much research as possible.

Long story short, the long got, like, term plan for me was to be able to create a job so that, you know, my dad could have a good job, then I could just fill his schedule, and then I could understand the skills of business and then go and do new music. So we started out, I think we were about 44 bucks an hour when we started out. And two years later, I've got the price up to like 170 bucks an hour, and we're working like 12 hours a day, seven days a week. And I think your advice worked a bit too well because now I'm trying to Try to figure out what do with this situation. I've pretty much had to cut the business in half or keep raising prices. And now I'm at a point where there's just so much work coming in. I've got my dad's schedule absolutely packed full. I'm now trying to do music and I sort of need to hire someone, but I want to have everything in place properly to be able to put people on. I want to get it right. And I just wanted to ask you about the process of, you know, having all the right things in place to. To hire someone, because I don't just want to mess with someone's livelihood.

No, it's very admirable. Yeah. Like, I think the first question is, is your goal to grow the business or is your goal to make more music?

Well, I'd like to at least have someone there to work with me dad, because it's pretty tough out there just by yourself. So if nothing else, I'd like that to be the case. I would ultimately like to do both, even if I have to hire sort of a CEO to, you know, be in charge of that while I do the music. And I can create the brand awareness for that.

Cool. So I think, I think it comes down to the fact that you have raised the prices sufficiently to be able to hire someone for a very, very good wage. And you could overpay someone by five plus dollars, $10 per hour if needs be, because you raised the prices so high. And if even still you're turning work away and you can't stay up with it, I'd continue to raise prices. Because what I don't want you to do is you get five or six employees and it's. Everything's humming, but it's so operationally heavy for you. You can't do what you love. And it sounds to me like it's making music. And so if you could just have your dad and really well paid employee working, making really high profits, it would sustain the music career and you'd be able to have a really good person working with your dad instead of some Joe Blow that's underpaid. You have. You're making 17 in the hour. Right. So I would just simply determine, okay, how many customers can we serve? And when we hit that number, we are going to raise prices no matter what. And then you just consistently do that. Okay, if it's 150 customers, great. We're at 152, great. We're raising prices. And you keep raising prices every single time you get above that number. And by doing that, you'll be able to make a really good profit margin and be able to afford paying your dad and this other guy a really, really good wage because you're not trying to grow this massive business. And in my opinion, you'll probably make more profit doing that than trying to go to four or five or six guys. But having lower margins and less hourly rate that you're charging the customer.

Right. I, I, yeah, With that, what do you think's a good rate to, to pay someone? Because I, you know, I've got your co pilot thing that I use and I've been considering P2P but you know, I mean out here, I mean, 35 bucks an hour is pretty good. I could do 40 bucks an hour.

Even, you know, and 40 bucks an hour.

And $40 an hour, let's $40 an hour, say $5 more than the average going rate in your market. And for everyone else listening, thinking, that's crazy. This is Australia. This is why he's charging $170 an hour. And so what I would say is even at $40 an hour, you're still at less than 25% of what you're charging the customers.

Right.

Because you're charging 170 at $40 an hour, you're still at less than 25%, which is what I recommend when you do P4P. So you could still work, pay for performance. And I also believe that you be able to determine relatively quickly what your threshold of number of customers is and then raise prices again and make that more like 180 or 190 or potentially down the road even 200. And now all of a sudden you're at 20%. $40 an hour is your base pay of the 200. That starts to make things really interesting. And so you have plenty of meat on the bone to be able to give that higher base pay. And I don't think it would serve you well to keep scaling up, but instead just making it super profitable using your dad and this one great employee. Next caller is coming in from 5:4:0. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.

Yeah, is that me?

Yeah, that's you. What's up?

Oh, hey, how you doing?

Good, man. What's your name?

Yeah, my name's Greg. I'm from Roanoke here in Virginia.

Cool.

I have two, I have a bunch of questions for you, honestly, but I got two or three main ones.

Okay, let's knock out the top two.

The first one is. Yeah, yeah, so the, the first one is How. How do you go of hiring people that actually want to show up and work? And where do you find those folks at? Because here in our location, it just seems like.

Just, you know, hard to do.

Yeah. Right now, are you turning, like, are you crazy busy? Has it been, like, have you been growing a lot? What. What's the business been like?

So. Yep, so I have a gutter business.

Cool.

And, you know, we've grown, you know, pretty. Pretty decent from last year to this year, and we're staying pretty steady, you know, through this time of year. But, I mean, it's about to get, you know, super busy with the spring rush and everything. It hits. So.

You know, it would be nice for me.

Because I'm more, you know, in the cell and running the whole operation as a business. But I do the, you know, I do the. The groundwork as well, and I have another guy that does the work as well, and then I'm looking for another person to kind of replace me so I can set up a crew for them to do it, and then I can, you know, focus on sales, running the business as a whole, and so forth.

Do you have any sort of compensation for the team based upon performance?

No, not based on performance. It's just strictly hourly.

So that would be the. The number one thing I'd be looking at, because I think right now, like, if you're paying someone hourly, the longer it takes for them to hang the gutters, the more money they make. The longer the gutters take. Yeah, it takes. You make less money. So you're going in different directions. You want them to go faster, they want to go slower. And so you got to get everyone going the same direction. And so whether that be, hey, per linear foot, everyone's getting certain amount per hour on the job and split up evenly. Or if it's a matter of, hey, every job, I quote, I'm doing budgeted hours for that job, and then there's an hourly rate attached to that that comes out to labor revenue, and that's getting divided by the team, whatever you need to do to ensure that them working faster makes them more money. That would be the number one way to be able to. Because ultimately, the short answer to your question is pay them more. The question is, so where do you.

Find these people at? So do you have, like, a specific. Like Craigslist or is there anywhere specific that you go to to look for people to hire? Is there any, like, specific programs that you use? Indeed, because that's my main problem is finding them.

Yeah, indeed is a Great is a great place to find them. Facebook. You can make posts on your Facebook page. Trust me, if you make a post that is shareable on Facebook, people will share in groups. You can go into your local market, look at Facebook groups in your area, and there's lots of them for hiring people that are looking for jobs. And I can guarantee that if you have a performance based pay system, they can make 5 or $10 more per hour than the average going rate in your market. People will be wanting to show up and they'll be wanting to work for you. And so making that system is the part that's the key. And whether it be for the per foot or whatever it is, just focus on that.

Okay, so that does make sense. And the second question I have is, can you. Would you mind taking a look at my website?

What's. What is it? Right now.

It'S pro gutters llc.com.

Cool.

All right, let's. Yep, I got it here.

P R O G U T T E R S LLC dot com.

Love it. Cool. All right. I'm looking at it right now. So the first thing I would say is this is a pretty long homepage. Like in my personal opinion, I would move some of these things off into different pages so that the load time on the first page isn't. As long as that's going to hurt your, your, some of your, your rankings.

Was this, was this site like recently created or when it was built?

Are you. Because I'm on the, I'm on YouTube too, and I'm seeing that you're seeing that you're on the correct page for one. Do you see like the, the guy in a green hoodie kind of looking at the house with the gutters?

Exactly. Yep.

Okay. Perfect.

I love it. Yeah. Really?

Yeah. So I mean, it's been creative for the past two, three years. So all this is brand name. Like this is all our, our guys and our trucks and all our photos.

Cool. I love it. I love it.

I've picked that up from listening to your videos, you know.

Yeah.

Watching your videos and stuff. You always talk about using your brand and that's the main thing we want to do. I mean, our guys are branded in our green shirt, you know, with our green trucks and all that. So sort of like your little, your yellow style.

So the only thing I would say if you're trying to optimize for sales and like getting more customers is above the fold. Right. When they get to here on your website, you want them to see a form to fill out their Information. Right. Now, if they get here, they gotta click contact us, which takes them to a different page. They've gotta scroll down. One, two, three. Okay, there's the form. I'm not really sure, like, this is a contact form. It's not necessarily showing the intention of them getting a free estimate. I guess it says at the top of the page here. But like, I would make it if.

You click that right here.

Yeah. I would make it painfully obvious, though, that when they get to this home page, they're getting an estimate. Not contacting us, they're getting an estimate. The whole reason they come to your.

Website is not to, like, make that button. Free estimate.

I wouldn't even make it a button. I would make it a form. I'd make what you see right here, this little form that's nice and small. I would put that right here. I would take out this whole little box here. I just make a form says get a free estimate today. And I put a little form on the right hand side of this screen. Because that's why you're driving them to the website. Regardless of what ads or whatever.

Yeah, exactly.

They're not coming to see the pictures. Although I really like some of your graphics. They're about showing the gutters during the different seasons. Love those. But they're not coming there for that. People are coming to our sites to get an estimate. And so make that the centerpiece right from the get. Instead of making them go to a different page and scroll down to find it.

So, like on the home page, put that little box right there and then make it obvious, like, free estimate.

Exactly. People are coming to our site to get an estimate. That's the only reason they're coming.

Yeah.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah, it does. Yeah. Yeah. And then. And then like I said, the last question would be, we. Our main ad, you know, the place that we get the most leads from and all that stuff is from Google Ads. I mean, I've tried Facebook ads. It doesn't really work that much. I mean, Google is like the number one, you know, lead source.

Yep.

Place for us. Yeah, yeah. And. But I have a company that also does that too. So I have a company that kind of runs all the ads and, and does all that for us. But do you have any other recommendations for, you know, receiving leads locally and are in this type of business, you know, in a smaller area like this? I mean.

Yeah, like the thing about, like Google local services. Awesome. The problem is you can't pour money, more money on it. The thing about Google if you have a small enough market is there's only so many people searching your keywords in any given time. So spending too much money is a very common thing on Google Ads in this industry. It sounds like you kind of know what you're doing in terms of Google Ads etc. So you're looking now, where can I spend my money elsewhere? This is simply a matter of testing. You have to be able to actually validate where you're spending the money and what your return is on them. So I would focus. Okay, the next three weeks we're doing a bunch of door hangers. We're going to test it out. We're going to see how many we, how much we spend, how many, how many doors we put door hangers on. We're going to see how many leads come in. Really simple. The next three weeks we're going to do the exact same thing. But now we're going to go to Facebook ads or we're going to go to some other, you know, every door, direct mail or yard signs, whatever it is. Just tracking it's the most important thing. I would guarantee 90% of people don't have a leads problem though. Like I know that finding more leads is what everyone wants to know about and I know that when I make a video on YouTube it'll get more clicks and it'll get more views. If I say double your revenue using this marketing tactic, I know that for a fact. If I make a video about following up, no one watches it. But I can guarantee you the lowest hanging fruit in your marketing budget is simply calling the customer on every estimate that you send to them. I can guarantee this. I see the numbers across all of Augusta Nation, inside of Copilot. When people do follow up calls, that's the best bang for your buck. If you spend two minutes doing a follow up call, it's literally costing your admin or potentially you like a dollar to be able to do that. That is a whole lot cheaper than spending 20 or 30 or $40 on a brand new customer that you've never done service for. And yet the customer that is warm, that's already literally asked for an estimate, you've given pricing and they've said they wanted to get your job, the job done. You're not following up with them. And so if you can double your, your close ratio from 25% to 50%, you just doubled your business. Like that blows people's mind but yet they'll spend tens of thousands of dollars trying to double their business by getting more leads. When they could do the exact same end result by simply following up. But guess what? It's not sexy, it doesn't sell. And there's not an industry built around doing more follow up calls. So what do we do? We all think we need to get more leads, but I would venture to believe that 70% of the problems with our businesses are not around leads. I would say, I would say it is mostly follow up and then a little bit more around how operationally you're not doing a good enough job to actually make customers want to keep doing business with you and referring you, et cetera. But the vast majority of people watching these in my videos, they're trying to improve, which means they're probably in the highest percentile of people in terms of customer service and caring about the customer. So I don't really talk a whole lot about that because most of you really do want what's best for the customer. And that's why I love you all so much. But it is not getting more leads that is going to solve your problems. It is going to be following up and you'll do the exact same thing, but you won't have to spend tens of thousands of dollars in marketing. We only got a few. Time for a few more callers. I do need to leave. Next caller is coming from 5, 6, 3. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.

Hey, Mike. Yeah, thanks for taking my call.

You got it. What's up?

Yeah, yeah, so my question is kind of over the past year and a half, I've been trying to move from, you know, an external motivation to more of an internal motivation. And it's been kind of an, you know, a battle just, just kind of getting my grounds on, you know, just what motivates me, what my why is, you know, moving forward. And I really struggle with that, you know, just because I've, I've been motivated so externally in the past. Now I realize, you know, in order to make the business grow and kind of, you know, get my employees aligned with the company's vision, I need to, I need to, you know, it needs to come from an internal place. So my questions, you know, when I'm looking at my company, how do I come up with, you know, the why for everything? Because I know for me it's not going to be something I'm probably not going to change the landscaping industry. It's something much more simple, you know, like I want to provide for my family, make a good living, you know, provide a good environment for my employees. But I don't Feel like my why is is really all that, I guess, glamorous. And I, I don't. I have a tough time figuring out what that is, I guess. What's your process to, you know, figure out what your why is?

Great question, great question. First off, respect your humility. Amazingly, for asking this question, I will say, I think unfortunately, the definition of glamorous has been.

Marred massively by social media. It is not any small feat to provide for your family or to create a business that allows your employees to provide for their families. And so I would not understate or underestimate the impact that has on your business, on your employees, on their families, and on your community. You can create jobs in your community for a fraction of what the government does. That sounds like a pretty good ideal thing to be doing. And so, you know, do we want to have these massive goals, ambitions and the whys that drive our team? Potentially, yes. But I would say you're probably underestimating what creating a safe place to work that's paying people really well, that they have a consistent, you know, income and they can provide for their families and do so when they go home, they feel full instead of empty that you pour into them when they leave and they go back to their families and they actually have something to give their families instead of being so drained because everything at work took it out of them. And so if, if you want to build that sort of why it really has to come from you, like what makes you tick is important. Obviously we need to make money. Obviously the employees need to make money. But then what's the next layer behind that? The fact that you even ask the question tells me you care a lot about your team and about the community. And so I would build the why around that and is like, if it is to create X amount of jobs, if it is to be able to provide a certain amount of living standard for your team, like how many people buy houses, how many people are able to get their rental by themselves or own their own car debt free. These are the type of benchmarks you can use to get towards the end result of, like, I want to create a great paying job for my family that can provide for them. And if I get hit by a bus, the business can still run. And I want my team members to be able to be proud of the job that they have, the work that they do. And when they go home, they're not empty, they are full. That sounds like an awesome why.

Okay, great. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, that makes a lot of Sense that kind of brings me back. And you think that would be something if I present that to the team, that would. Because I know there's all these other bigger companies that have these, you know, I guess. And I know, you know, I know that's still, you know, my why could still be good. I just have a tough time seeing how I could get a whole team of motivated people, you know, just by, I guess, my why being something as simple as, you know, providing a good, a good stable income for, for families and things. But you think that's, that's still something that my team would kind of be on board with.

Here's the thing. Your team cares less about the massive goals and missions and all the rest of it than the thing they came to work for. And as a paycheck that's consistent and a place that they can come, that is safe and they like working there. And so, yes, we can have big goals and dreams and that will drive the more entrepreneurial type of person inside your organization. And the fact is, the fact that you think the other missions are great and big is because you're a business owner and you're comparing yourself to what other business owners are doing. But when you're presenting something to the team, they want to know what's in it for them, right? So changing the level of professionals in the landscape industry is our goal. But my team still shows up every single day wanting to know what's in it for them. And so I've got to make that clear and I got to have profit sharing or I've got to give them a benchmark of here. If you hit this revenue, if you hit this profitability, here's what I can do for you. And so if your goals are aligned with these things, keep marching towards the goal of changing the level of professionals in the industry because I'll make sure your goals and dreams happen over here. So if you want healthcare, if you want dentist, if you want a 401k and you can retire here and work here for 20 years, here's the things I need done, right? And then there's an exchange of value and we're all happy. And so I, I would not underestimate just how important it is to focus on your team in the why and not just your own ambitions. Next caller is coming in from. Let's see here. 3, 5, 2. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.

Hello. Hello. 352, check. 1, 2, 3.

Hey, can you hear me?

I can. What's up, brother?

Hello. Hey, Mike. I appreciate you taking my call. So I went part time last year. I worked for a landscaping company and we did not do any maintenance. So I learned a lot of irrigation installs, new construction, and I was full time, probably about half a year, did about 150,000. But I'm thinking about doing maintenance because you talk about recurring revenue and simplifying the business, but I have a hard time jumping into that one thing to like keep my revenue high and my profit margins high with what I know. So would you encourage somebody to jump into reoccurring like Boeing if they have the skill set and the business already growing in the landscaping side?

Yeah, like I don't think there's anything wrong with the project side of the business. I'd say that it is a good idea to have the recurring so you can at least cover your fixed expenses in the event that something crazy happens. And something crazy comes in the form of like what happened in spring of 2020 when all of a sudden every single project canceled and there were massive project companies that were freaking out. Fortunately we got helicopter money coming in a few weeks later and everything was fine. But that sort of stuff will happen every 10 to 20 years. And so I like to be able to at least cover my fixed expenses with recurring revenue. You don't need to change the business overnight, right? If, you know, hey, if I can at least get 20, 30% of my revenue coming from recurring to cover my fixed expenses, I'm happy. You don't need to do that tomorrow. You can absolutely chip away at this and just know that you have. I'm going to market my services for recurring. I'm going to put it on my website. I'm going to send out a one click estimate email to my customers and upsell my project customers into recurring service. I'm going to take my existing projects and upsell them into recurring maintenance on the projects. If you sell a paver patio, if you sell irrigation, you can make a package for fall for recurring service as a maintenance package in perpetuity for that project. I don't care if you're doing gutters, if you're doing window cleaning, you're doing window installation. Like if you do window installation, you sell window cleaning and you sell sealing the windows. If you, if you install the gutters, you also sell the fact that we're going to come twice a year and clear out the gutters. If you install a paver patio, you're going to come back and you're going to clean and seal the pavers every year. Like you can just create the recurring revenue for yourself even based upon the back of your project. You don't have to change or add a different service. So that would be my recommendation. I really apologize to everyone in the call queue. I know it's completely full. I am going to have to end the show. I do apologize for that. I will try to do another one of these occasionally. We've been very busy at Copilot. I have a lot of work to do and so that has to be really my focus and my primary where I'm spending my time right now. But I also wanted to make sure I am available and if you have questions, I can get on these occasionally. And so I appreciate everyone. I know it's been a couple months since we have done a call in show, but I appreciate the community tremendously. And it does not go beyond me that everything I have is because of the community that we have in the home service industries and the support that I get from Lawn Care, web Design, Home service, Web Design, Home Service, CPA, Augusta Nation, CoPilot, CRM, Lawn Care, Media, all of those things is what makes everything I do possible. And that does not go beyond me. And I take it very literally. When I spend my own personal money, everything that I have got is because of the community. And I'm very appreciative of that. And so I tried even the past week, despite having a large workload, just trying to get some more free content out for you. In addition to this, the more.

I guess you'd say.

Glamorous, like the turnaround shows, they're nice, they're fun, they're. They're more stylistic. But the education side, I know a lot of people are liking that. And so I wanted to give back. It's my form of saying thank you when I make these call in shows or the, the free trainings and things like I just really appreciate everyone for their support. I can't say it enough. And even when we are making mistakes like we are currently at Copilot, just the amount of support that I get from the community I am very much indebted to. And it does not go by me just how much I am being supported by community. I looked the other day, almost 20% of people inside of Copilot that are paying aren't even using it right now because they just want to support what we're doing. And I can't say thank you enough. And so I hope that these call in shows and what I do on the YouTube channel and things are helpful and I hope you get a lot about it. Hope you can grow your business, make more money, employ more people, create a better culture for you and your team. And this is the small thing that I can do. I'm not going to change the world, but I do believe that what little I know I want to share with all of you, and I hope.