Reactive Work Is DESTROYING Your Focus | Confession Booth

Everything we have tried to do to please this guy, it's just not working. I gave him a $2,000 discount. He was like, I got a Google review drafted, a Yelp review drafted, a BBB review drafted. I mean, it's like—

The bottom line is a negative review from this customer will not impact your business in a negative way. The reason is, is that the customer's only complaining about price and you are transparent about your prices. No other future customer will care. I'm not going to take the path of most resistance, which is complex services. They're custom. Every single project, they're gonna be different. Guess who's gonna be the one that has to be on every job?

You.

Guess who's gonna have to manage the project? You. Guess who's gonna have to order the materials? You. Guess who's gonna have to teach the crew on every single job how to do the new design of the pavers?

You.

And so you become the bottleneck. It's very hard to scale any business where you're the bottleneck.

I see it as an investment in myself. It's something I do enjoy doing. I do enjoy doing the growing of the business. And it is something I think I can do. Really, it feels like a good way for me to build the life I want.

It's not fun and it hurts and I'm sore, but I do it for a reason. Having a lot of clarity as to why you're doing this many times will be the thing that allows you to be able to endure the pain that is inevitably going to come.

Hey, so I guess I'm in a little bit of a dilemma here. So hired an office lady on. So we do about probably on base for about 1.2 million-ish this year, somewhere around there. Did about $580,000 last year. Year before that, we did like $100,000. So we were picking up pretty quick. Um, and I'm kind of in a dilemma because essentially I hired a lady in who had worked at, you know, like a $5 million water landscape company previously. Said she had a lot of experience and I hired her in to take over the admin roles for myself.

Didn't work out.

I got rid of her. Partially my fault because I didn't have any SOPs or anything set up from her. However, on the other side, um, I hired her specifically because she was supposed to come in and bring her experience to make those SOPs and everything. So that just didn't work out. But I'm kind of back in the spot where I'm trying to figure out if before I hire another office person, if, um, I wait until there's really enough workload for them to take it on, or if I just delegate it now. Quite frankly, it adds about an hour and a half to my day because we have so many automations set up in HomeWorks and like 90% of our services are recurring. So it's not necessarily a ton of work and upkeep, you know, dealing with the clients. And it is work that I genuinely do enjoy doing, but I do realize like in the long term of things, especially as, you know, we continue to grow, that I need to delegate that at some point. Like, am I punishing myself by staying in that role and continuing to do it? Because to me, I'm like $50,000 a year on Google Ads rather than $50,000 a year on an admin person when it adds an hour to my day. It's just kind of hard to justify until, you know, I can delegate it correctly with all the SOPs and workflows and like Loom videos and all that good stuff.

Yeah. So first off, if hiring someone full time is only going to save you an hour a day at your size, I understand the apprehension. I would also say there's a few things you could do. One, you could just not hire someone full-time and they could just do a couple hours worth of work a day. The second thing is, I believe there's probably other things they could delegate. You could delegate to them to say more like 4 or 5 hours a day, but it requires them being a very good player. And so this is where it's very much of a catch-22. It's like you could go get a VA or someone part-time, probably work 3 hours a day and do everything you need and get it off of your plate. I will also say hiring an all-star rockstar admin will probably unlock twice as much of your time because they will actively be looking for things to be taken off of your plate and they'll do more than save you an hour, an hour and a half a day. And so, um, I agree with the sentiment that you might have like not set up for success. I will also say if you hire an all-star, one thing that I would really recommend, you might have done this, and that is in their job description, make it clear that they are supposed to be setting up the SOPs.

Because that was, yeah, that was made clear.

Okay.

Yeah.

So then it's a function of, I think, what are the lowest hanging, lowest hanging fruit of tasks that can be taken off your plate? And if those are a matter of an hour, an hour or two a day, like I would probably just give a vet VA or a part-time office person and then keep your eyes open for a rockstar that you're gonna pay 3 times as much, but they're gonna give you most of your day back. And that's what gets you from $1.2 to $3 million.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, I, 100% agree that my only issue with trying to get somebody part-time is really there's so much that's automated now. And it's like, I got an operations manager, um, the guy's been with me for 4 years and he's running everything in the field awesome. So I'm at the point where I'm just dealing with essentially phone calls coming in and, and, uh, like he's taking over scheduling and all of that. So I feel like it's like those phone calls, it's kind of hard to delineate whether they're for sales or they're for support. And hiring somebody part-time that's only there a couple hours a day, you know, there's no way to know when the calls are necessarily coming in. So that's only been the reason I was kind of apprehensive to get somebody part-time and hold off until I could justify a full-time more so.

Great question. So this is why I'm a huge fan, especially when it's things like phone calls that you mention, to hire someone to— by the minute.

Yeah.

And, and this is a function of either, A, hiring someone, a call center, or even someone that you literally say, I will I will pay you by the minute and it's gonna be like $200 an hour, but you're only gonna get a few calls a day. The thing is this, right now you are underestimating how much distraction these reactive tasks are taking from your day. And it's gonna keep you from growing the business because that phone ringing 4 or 5 times a day is keeping you from growing the business. It's keeping you from staying focused on the higher leverage tasks. And even though the phone call might be 3 to 5 minutes, it's taking 15 minutes of your time 'cause you got back on your phone, you noticed 4 other things, you got on Facebook, you saw an email come in. It's the 30 interruptions throughout the day that are killing you. And you're putting them all together and like, oh, it's an hour and a half, when I believe if those were all actually off of your plate and you then time-blocked when you'd react to them, 'cause you're like, well, I still have to respond, it's just the sales function still. Okay, I'll go along with you on that, but now you're gonna block, okay, I'm gonna spend 30 minutes from 9:00 AM till 9:30, and I'm gonna spend from 2:00 PM till 3:00 PM doing these tasks. And what you will get done in an hour and a half, is technically taking you 5 hours right now. It just, it's spread throughout the entire day. And so the ability to be able to time block comes after you've taken reactive tasks and put some sort of barrier between you and the customer so that you get to react on your own time. And now you go into your day being like, I will work on sales during these hours. I will then, I will respond to the tasks that my admin, all the tickets they put together for me, I'll respond during these hours. And you're like, oh, it's gonna slow down how Fast by communication. Yes, it will. It'll also allow you to triple the size of the business because like right now there are 5 to 10 things you're reacting to in a day that if you could just time block them, you could get 'em done in 30 minutes, but they're kind of spread throughout your whole day right now. And so this is definitely where I think a call service or some sort of permanent situation is probably helpful. And then down the road you can get a, a part-time person for some things like payroll, all this other stuff, but you've probably already farmed a lot of that out. And so I would really be thinking about anything reactive, anything that buzzes on this phone is something I'm trying to get rid of.

Okay, fair enough. So I guess obviously I don't want to make the— I need to learn from my mistake, have SOPs and workflows and all that set up. Should I build the plane while I'm going or, you know, maybe hold off for a couple of weeks to a month, really get that position built out and all the training material for that position built out and then go ahead and hire for it? Because I also think realistically in the next month now that we got an ad agency and we're just, you know, funneling money into, into ads that will be able to also pick up enough work to justify the added overhead within even just the next month or so.

100%. And if you add in your automation just one extra step for this admin person, which is like calling them within 60 seconds, that alone could pay for this person. And so these are the type of things that right now you don't do because it's your time. I get it. And so I think there's two ways to do this. One is very violent, which is in 24 hours you talk through each of your processes when it comes to answering the phone, what to say, how to upsell. You could talk through with AI and it will create the quote unquote SOPs. The other way to do this, over the next 30 days, whenever you're doing an admin task that you know you eventually wanna hand off, you just record it, do a Loom video, take the Loom video, take the transcript, drop it into ChatGPT, and it'll give you the SOP with the checklist. And so I would, I'm more in that direction if you wanna do it passively. If you're like, I need to get this off my plate today 'cause we're just growing so fast, then you could very well probably talk to AI for 4 to 5 hours and create SOPs for every single thing. Keep in mind, people don't follow checklists. Like no matter who you hire, if you show them what to do though via the recording, that is usually more effective. And so I would be in the camp of over the next week.

Yeah.

Anytime you're answering email, answering a phone call, you're simply recording everything. And even if you get like, for example, on voice memos, it gets transcripts right away on iOS. On Loom, you can drop any video or audio, it'll immediately get you the transcript. Drop that stuff into ChatGPT and allow it to give you the script for upselling. Allow it to give you the script for when you're selling over the phone. These are all things that you can create SOPs for quickly, but then have the video in Loom or some sort of, you know, screen recording for that person to follow along with.

Yep.

No, that sounds, that sounds great. So yeah, I'm, uh, I appreciate it. I'm just in kind of weird spot where I genuinely love working 60 hours a week.

Mm-hmm.

And, uh, I have no intention to stop doing that. So it kind of makes it hard to want to give those things away, even though obviously making the effort, you know, I tried and, you know, it burned down, but, you know, I'll shoot for it again. But, uh, no, that's definitely a good plan. I just want to make sure that I was kind of on the right track of not pushing it off for too long, but making sure that next time I go about it, there's more structure to it. So it, uh, you know, has a different result than it did the first time around.

Awesome, man. Keep crushing it. You're doing great. All right. Yeah. So this is a great point about reactivity. It's so easy to say, oh, I get this done in an hour or 2 hours a day. But when you take those tasks and it's 2 minutes here, 4 minutes here, 8 minutes here, 6 minutes here, 3 minutes here, 1 minute there, that distraction is a tax on the business that keeps you from growing. And he's running up against it like most companies do once you hit around 7 figures. And I'm okay with it. I love doing admin. Totally fine. I just don't want you to be reactively doing admin. I.e., the phone rings and I jump on it. I'm in a sales meeting with a customer and the phone rings and I have to go to answer it. Either A, I'm gonna jeopardize the sale if I answer the phone, or B, I'm gonna jeopardize the lead that's coming in because I stay with the customer that I'm talking to. And so being reactive through your day is costing you and it doesn't show up on the P&L. But I can promise you it's a whole lot cheaper than paying some phone company to answer the thing at 2 or 3 bucks a minute. It doesn't matter what the cost is per minute, 'cause it's costing you way more in distraction when it's reactive. I would rather him keep doing the admin tasks, but don't be reactive. Have them create a ticket and you get a plan and schedule when you're going to take those admin tasks on instead of being reactive to whatever customer wants to blow up your phone that day. Okay, don't get me wrong, admin, the phone, the office, super important part of running your business, but it is a defensive measure. And so many people get so wrapped up in the defensive measures, they never grow a big enough business for it to even matter. If you're running $100,000, $200,000 business, you scrimping every single penny and trying to do everything yourself when it comes to answering the phone or doing email or running payroll, it's going to save you a few thousand dollars at the expense of growing a million-dollar business. And so at the beginning, especially from $0 to $500,000 in annual revenue, I don't need you to go hire a full-time office person and figure out every system. I don't need you to be doing it. I want you spending as much of your time possible doing sales and training your team. That is getting more work and doing more work so you can grow the business. And then down the road, once you hit $800,000, $1 million, then you go hire an office person. Then you figure out how to actually now build these systems myself. But until then, use a service. Get someone else to answer the phone, get someone part-time, get someone virtual, but spend as little of your time on the defensive measures until you have a big enough business for it to actually matter. That's why at Augusta Lawn Care we built Command Center, is because I want owners from $0,000 to $500,000 specifically to focus all their time and attention on getting more customers and getting more technicians out in the field trained up. All right, back to the video.

My question is around capacity, like personal capacity. Okay, so I've been doing a solo thing for about 5 years. I had to do it under the table due to some like citizenship-related stuff, and I'm— this is my first year doing it professional with like LSA setup and everything like that. So I'm really feeling a lot of the personal capacity stress coming from just the loneliness on the truck, kind of. So I'm just wondering how you would like— when did you decide on this? On that, like, because I feel my personal capacity kind of lessening honestly throughout the days and like just maybe having somebody on the truck feels like it would be the solution. I'm just wondering what you have experience with that.

Yeah. So the tough part about personal capacity is also the best part, and that is personal capacity will limit the size of your business every single time. It's actually the reason why all of us, including myself, don't grow a bigger business is because of our personal capacity. The good news is that you can change it. And so identifying why your personal capacity is the limit to your growth is the hardest part. And so when we talk about personal capacity, I have to ask, is it a skill that you're lacking? Is it the stamina that you're lacking? Is it just keeping your head in the game? What's the actual thing that is keeping you from being like, I want to keep growing this business, I want to keep putting more work. What is it? And have you identified that already?

Yeah, I'd say it's definitely keeping the head in the game. Like, I'll go and like Monday I'm motivated, but then my Friday after, it feels like, you know, rat-racy kind of. And I've had part-time guys on like for one job and one or two, and that gives me a lot. Just having— going through with somebody, I feel like, is a lot of what I need to do. I feel like I'm going through a lot of it by myself.

And when you say by yourself, when you have that employee, does that make it feel better for you?

Yeah, I feel like— oh yeah, no, definitely. I feel like my personal capacity raises quite a bit. So what I was wondering though, because right now I make around $8,000 a month from the business with about $4,000 of that coming from maintenance. So my risk is like, I think it would— hiring someone on the truck would help my personal capacity, but I worry then it'll affect my— like, I'm not there yet in the business is what I worry about.

Right now, do you have enough leads? Like, do you have tons of leads to where you could hire someone else or not?

I think I— yeah, I've been getting pretty consistent leads, about 3 a week. So I think right now in this business, like, to hire someone on— and it would start part-time probably, but I don't know if I can hire someone on full time right now with the amount of leads.

Totally. So what I would love for you to be able to do is an intermediary step before hiring someone, from just a business perspective for a minute. I would love if we can get that to $10K at least per month, which would probably mean raising your prices. Um, and most of the time, the reason people, when they hire someone first, like, it is lonely being out solo all the time, but then you get that employee and all of a sudden you're making $12,000 a month, you pay their wages and you're making less than before. And now you create financial stress that actually makes— now loneliness sounds pretty good, you know? It's like, I'd rather have that than not be able to pay the bills. And so I don't want to exchange one stress, which is the current stress you're facing now, uh, with another stress, which is financial stress. And now having to get— figure out how you're going to let this person go because you don't have enough work. And so I would love for your prices to get more in the range of $80+ per hour and making at least $10,000 per month. I would love that to be the case first. I will also say, um, the— there are certain times in the business that you just have to push through. And you've already increased your personal capacity by going from under table to being pro. And I believe that you're probably only 6 to 12 months away from being able to afford what we just talked about, which is hiring an employee and building a team. This might just be part of the time where it is lonely and You do not want to buy yourself companionship on the truck that is going to put the business in jeopardy. And it might just be that for 6 or 12 months it's going to be lonely so that you can build the cash reserves to be able to afford the team member. And the only way to get through that point is to have a reason why you're doing this business in the first place. And so I would go back to that as the anchoring point as to you're running out of steam throughout the week. I understand that. Start off Monday, high energy, let's go. And then Friday you're like, I just got to get out of here. I understand that. And the only way to keep your head in the game at that point is to have a why. And so like, if you don't mind, like, why, why even have the business? Like, what are you trying to provide for? What are you trying to accomplish?

So originally the business started from the thing that everybody says, freedom, that freedom view of it. But really the business now, I see it as an investment in myself. It's something I do enjoy doing. I do enjoy doing the growing of the business. And it is something I think I can do. So I don't know if that's why. And then I do it for my family too. But really, it feels like a good way for me to build the life I want. And it's like something, even if I don't end up succeeding in the amount of skills I've learned throughout the process.

So that's—

I don't know if that really answered your why reason, but that's kind of where I come from.

What does that version of you that you're trying to get to, how does that differ than the current version of you?

Yeah, that's the thing. Yeah, that's what I do. I think that's the question I need to ask right there, because I don't have an answer to that.

That's fine. I think the reason I push so hard on this is having clarity is what keeps your head in the game when times are tough. And so there are— and this doesn't go away, by the way. As the business grows, the problems get bigger. There'll be times you will doubt yourself more and you'll have more evidence as to why you should quit because the problem is harder to conquer. The problems are bigger, they're more expensive, there's more people involved. Now, when you get 3 or 4 employees and they're all turning against you and they're doing a revolt against you, they all don't show up, now we have bigger problems. And so having a reason why you show up is what keeps your head in the game. And there's been plenty of times I want to quit, and it is the easiest, the path of least resistance is just to give up. And so what you're feeling that way on Thursdays and Fridays right now, but that doesn't change as the business grows. It just means I have to know why I'm enduring this pain. Like I go to the gym, it's not fun. I don't love lifting things at 4:00 AM, up like hundreds of pounds and it hurts and I'm sore, but I do it for a reason. And so having a lot of clarity as to why you're doing this many times will be the thing that allows you to be able to endure the pain that is inevitably going to come. And so instead of trying to put a Band-Aid on it and say like, oh, this will fix it, and like, let's go hire someone, and then just prevent causing that, that hemorrhage to show up in a different place, which is going to be financial stress down the road, I would just get really clear on why you started this business. And like, you're like, I want to become a different version of myself. What does that person look like? Because when you're really low, I've got to keep— I got to remind myself that it is worth the pain I'm going through to become the person I want to be. And having clarity around what that person looks like will help. That could be financial, that could be financial relief, it could be paying off a debt, it could be being able to provide not just for you, not just for your family, but for the people that you love. Like, you got to have a reason why. And then I like get it really clear what that's going to look like. Does that make sense?

That makes 100% sense. Thank you so much, Mike.

My pleasure, brother. Take care. Next caller.

I had a bit of a situation this past weekend and it's kind of thrown me in, uh, like just kind of grow up and want to get some advice. Um, so I got a reckless driving, uh, ticket and my court date's coming up in about a month, but I had to fire one of my guys this morning just because he wasn't hitting any of the benchmarks for doing the service. And I really want to grow this thing, especially now seeing that it can't really run without me if I don't have a guy, and I might not be here, uh, depending on how the court goes. Um, so I have a couple questions. How can I grow to $500K as fast as possible? I, I want to do the copy and paste method. I read your whole book and That's what I want to do. Um, but actually getting there, um, I'm not sure with where I'm at now. Um, I'm going to be hiring another person here within the next couple weeks, and my plan is to have a full mowing crew, uh, two guys be in our mowing truck, and then that will allow me to go out and do more sales and more landscaping type things. Um, I will say up front, I'm not great at sales, do not have a background in it. So I am getting better, but definitely the reps are not there.

How are you going to do the landscaping jobs and focus on sales if you can't drive?

Right. So when I was in the policeman's car, he said that I could get like a working, uh, like suspension So I can drive to work and then drive out work, but I can't do anything but that. So if I can't like, you know, go to the gym or church or whatnot, but he said that there's a little bit of leeway he can give on that. So it kind of is up in the air depending on how everything goes.

Yeah, so I would cross that bridge when we get there in terms of like, we have a month to make the business better.

Right.

Right. And so I wouldn't worry about copy and paste. I wouldn't worry about projects. I wouldn't worry about sales. I would worry about one thing and is getting a great employee ready to go. And I wouldn't be hiring them a couple of weeks. I'd be hiring them as soon as possible so that in the next month you can really make sure that they understand the systems, the procedures. I would also have a second employee that's in my back pocket that might, might be willing to work part-time or fill in the gaps because if things go bad and you're not able to get that work, the extra permit or whatever, We want to make sure that the whole business doesn't come collapsing down, right?

And right now I have— I, I had the full-timer that would help me Monday through Thursday. He's not here anymore, but I've got another guy that works, uh, Thursday through Saturday, um, and he clocks his 40 hours in that time. Um, so I do have still him. I'm mainly just looking for the other guy. Um, my I guess my question is, do I hire that one guy now for full-time and then get another full-timer to join him in the truck?

I think right now it's a function of if you had enough demand, yes. But I think by getting a full-time person, you have a month to basically put on your sales boots and focus only on recurring revenue because any building of projects could be in jeopardy. You could put the business in a really bad spot if you sell 8 months or 8 weeks worth of projects in the next month. By having a second employee in the truck and all of a sudden you come up to this court date and you can't drive. And so I want to mitigate risk by simplifying services and making sure that if that were to happen, the business continues. And if we get past the month and like you got a solid employee, you got another one that's ready to go, great, put them in the truck, you're able to drive, do the landscape thing, do sales, et cetera. I just don't want this to be a cataclysmic failure if what we think is going to happen doesn't happen.

Right, right. Yes, sir. And, and my projects are more like property cleanup and mulch install, not like hardscaping. Yeah. Um, but my, I guess my follow-up question of that, um, with doing door hangers, as of now I don't really have the time to do that. Do you think I should hire someone specifically to pass those out, or, um, like how, how should I go about that?

Right now, how far are you booked out in terms of work?

Uh, we have mowing Monday through Wednesday or Monday through Thursday, and then we do, uh, we have about a week or two for projects.

Okay. Yeah, like I would say if you were to get a full-time employee right now, you would still need to be in the field somewhat, kind of like you are now. Is that right? Like if you had— if you were able to replace this one that left, you'd be still in the field a little bit. Is that correct?

That's correct. We would— I would be in the truck with him doing the mowing route. And then technically we have 3 guys on Thursday.

Yep.

And then Friday, Saturday, I have the other guy that helps.

Yeah. So the way to scale is eventually going to be having another employee that replaces you in the truck and you focus on sales. Big fan of that. After this month, we need it. We need to pass the month thing, make sure that we can actually drive before we sell projects. And I don't want to even put a bad spot where you get one employee, you train them up in 3, 4 weeks, and then he leaves you right before this. Now we're in a really bad spot. So I want to, I want to build more conservatively for the next month, and that is get this employee as fast as possible trained up. And then if this month comes by and like, hey, we're in the clear, great. Then you get another employee, you have a solid 2-man crew doing all the lawns, you go focus on projects and getting sales. I'm fine with that. But we got it. We got to build the business to Avoid catastrophe. And so whenever I hear about something like this at this size of business, I don't want to build the business in a way that could potentially put you completely out of business. And so for now, for the next month, I would lock down the first— replacing this employee as fast as possible, training that person up one-on-one, even having a backup to them. It sounds like you got the Thursday to Saturday guys. That's great. And then once you're past this month suspension thing or like you have, you're in the clear on that, then I give you permission to like Okay, replace yourself in the truck and go focus on sales. And does that mean doing door hangers? Yes. Does it mean maybe spending some money on ads? Yes. Does that mean focusing more on automations and follow-up phone calls? Yes. That's what sales is.

Okay, perfect. Thanks for that question. Thank you, Mike.

Thank you. You have a good one. All right, so there is a national travesty. The media team just let me know, and that is that over 60% of you watching the video have not subscribed. You're missing out on all sorts of good stuff. Usually the videos with the least amount of views have the most amount of value for you and for your business. And if you're not subscribed, you don't get notified because it's not going to show up on your feed. So I highly recommend click the little bell, get notified, and subscribe today. Thanks. Next caller is coming in hot to the confession booth. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.

Hey, how you doing, Mike?

Fantastic.

What can I do to help?

So, uh, I have a company now, uh, We've been in business for about 5 years and I do about, about $500,000 in revenue, uh, which projected this year. Um, and I have no problem getting leads and work, uh, and selling the work. Uh, my problem now is almost like, I guess, just like, I wonder if I should simplify my services. Um, on the landscaping side, I have one mowing crew and one landscaping crew, and the mowing crew is really profitable. Uh, but my landscaping seems to really only be profitable sometimes. Um, every job feels different and it's hard to kind of price profitably for me because I don't— I like set pricing for some line items but not all of them. And, uh, it seems hard to train guys to do them properly. Um, so I feel like I've almost taken on too much work. Um, you know, we're booked out for a good 2 2-ish months right now. Um, and I've started to raise pricing on landscaping to— and we've dropped our close rate to probably like 40%. Um, and that's helped a little bit kind of weed out some of the, um, jobs that I may have priced incorrectly. Um, but I'm, I'm starting to think like, okay, I don't really need to say yes to every single service, every lead that comes in, you know. I can start choosing what I want to take on. And reduce the headache of, you know, callbacks or, um, not as good profit from pricing incorrectly on my end, uh, by scaling back the services. Or, um, you know, maybe hiring somebody with a little bit more experience on the landscaping side, which I'm a bit weary because I feel like that's, um, kind of hit or miss. Right now I have two landscaping guys with me, uh, and I'm on the landscaping side. And I just feel like I can't leave for more than like a few hours because they're both inexperienced, unfortunately. And that's another thing is like, I probably should have not hired two inexperienced landscapers to work with me. But regardless, down the line, I feel like simplifying services, I think I've heard you talk about it before, but I couldn't find any resource on it. And I was curious your opinion on that, the land, my side.

Yeah.

So when it comes to the landscaping side, it's actually pretty rare that someone says what you just said, which is like the landscaping side, we don't make money. The mowing side, we make money. Usually the tempting part about landscaping is the fact that you do make more money and then people keep building around it and they keep adding more and more services and more and more complexity and bigger size jobs. And so you're definitely on the path that's correct, which is simplify and standardize. Now the reason I say this is when people hear simplify, they mean, they think it only means they can do simple basic like jobs that someone could do within an hour of training. The other thing though is standardize, which is taking what you currently do and just saying we're gonna do it the same way every time. And so, for example, if you're planting a hedge, you only plant 2 different types of trees for the hedge. And I can guarantee you, 2 trees in your market would suffice for 95% of jobs for a hedge. The same thing is true when it comes to pavers, walls, etc. And so before you go out and say, I'm going to cut off the entire landscaping division, I'd ask myself 2 things. One, what are the jobs that you could leave your crew doing and they'd be okay with it? And you probably know, okay, it's like these 3 or 4 different types of jobs. I can leave them there, they will get done on time and on budget. Those are the— that's the first area I'd focus on. And I potentially would say cut everything else, but if you're not going to cut everything else, it's got to be standardized, which is we're not going to offer custom work every single time, custom types of materials, custom types of trees, like custom colors. It's got to be the exact same thing every single time. And usually you can go back in your in the work for even the past month or two and just look at the jobs that you lost money on or that you were constantly called back to and have a pretty good understanding which services you need to cut out completely.

Yeah, that's good. I guess like right now too, like let's say I look back on some of the jobs that we completed this year and, you know, last year I had a very experienced landscaper. He had like 10 years of experience and I felt like we did pretty good. I would say anywhere between like I don't know, 30 to 40% on landscaping, um, or our labor revenue rate. Uh, mowing is usually around like 30%, maybe sometimes lower. Um, but now with these two guys I have this year, we're literally like— and maybe it's like because I have three guys in landscape crew, it doesn't justify it, but it's where— I mean, on some of these jobs we're at like $50 an hour. We just did like a $20,000 install. And I think I calculated our man-hour rate after it was like $63 an hour. I'm like, I can't do that, right? And so you're saying like, if not cutting back, then at least standardize things to where it's not so custom every single job.

Yeah, exactly. So like before I cut walls and patios completely, we went down to— there was one block that we installed for walls and there was one block with one design and one color for pavers. And it's amazing. As long as you present it correctly on the sales side, you can still sell 95 to 98% of those jobs just by standardizing. I will also say we did that for a few years and then we realized we can still cut this out as long as we replace it with recurring revenue. So if I was you and you're in the camp of, hey, I'm making a bunch of money on mowing, which by the way is higher quality revenue, by the way, all of your time and attention and your late evenings and weekends thinking about the business is spent on these landscaping jobs. If that was all deployed, that discretionary effort was deployed towards your mowing crew, and your mowing jobs and getting more mowing customers, you're advertising for them and upselling those mowing customers into simple projects. You could probably keep your landscaping crew busy with just the mowing crew upselling landscaping jobs that are simple, like mulch installs, bush trimming, property cleanups, pressure washing, like all these little basic things that you could potentially add to the business in terms of upsells. You could probably keep this crew busy after cutting out 50% of their revenue of jobs that were complex and custom. Which by the way, complex is the opposite of simplification. Custom is the opposite of standardization. And so right now, anytime I hear custom, anytime I hear complex services, those are things that I know are very difficult to scale. Are they possible to scale? Yes, but way more difficult. And I'd rather do things that are easier in life to make more money. And so I'm not gonna take the path of most resistance, which is complex services, They're custom. Every single project, they're gonna be different. Guess who's gonna be the one that has to be on every job? You. Guess who's gonna have to manage the project?

You.

Guess who's gonna have to order the materials?

You.

Guess who's gonna have to teach the crew on every single job how to do the new design of the pavers?

You.

Guess who's gonna have to hop on the excavator 'cause no one else has done the drainage this way exactly before? You. And so you become the bottleneck. It's very hard to scale any business where you're the bottleneck. And so what I would be doing in this business, I would be looking at what are the services that are constantly pulling me back into the job? Usually those are also the ones that go way over budget, by the way. You can very quickly identify, and for most people, you don't even have to look back. You like immediately, top, off the top of your head, list off the 3 or 4 services that you just know you're gonna go back to and you don't have not, you do not have the confidence to price the job within 10% budget hours. Meaning if it's a $200 budget hour job and it takes $400, that's 100% increase or overage on budget hours. There's no way you should be doing that service. If you can lose your shirt and do twice as many budget hours, or in your case, you're probably doing half the amount of labor revenue that you would make mowing grass. You're out doing a project hardscaping job and making $50, $60 per man-hour. You're not making any money. And so cut those things out knowing that if you cut those things out and it gives you time to focus on mowing or the thing that's making money, like enter any service we've just talked about with the thing that is currently not making money but taking all of your time. What's the thing that is making you money but you're not spending any of your time on? If that is existing and you just cut this out and you focus more on this, you would make more money. And furthermore, I will say, if you cut out 40% of your revenue on these big projects and these big jobs that you're being pulled into, it's sucking all of your time and energy. If you just cut all of it out, 40% of revenue, and spent your time training your mowing crew, creating upsells, text messages, email blasts to your existing mowing customers, you would probably fill the landscaping crew with the simpler services that they can install, and it would fill up their schedule now with work that they can do without you. And it's profitable, and these customers have a lot higher lifetime value, and you're able to recoup the customer acquisition cost of mowing customers faster. So what you can do, go spend your money on marketing for mowing. All right, next one up is coming in. Welcome to the show.

Hey Mike, quick question here. How do you deal with negative reviews?

All right, is this on Google right now?

Well, it might end up on Google. Yeah, we're having a little discrepancy with the customer. Um, I think it's a lot of communication stuff going on, but, uh, I mean, the dude, he was like, yeah, we have— he was like, I got a Google review drafted, a Yelp review drafted, a BBB review drafted. I mean, it's like, you can't— everything we have tried to do to please this guy, it's just not working. I've gave him a $2,000 discount. I've done so many things to try to accommodate for this, and, uh, unfortunately I haven't heard from him, you know, in the past 4 or 5 days. But I mean, he seems like the type that just isn't gonna let whatever is bothering him go. I'm trying to get to the bottom of it, and, uh, he's just picking at every little thing. I mean, it's just one of those customers, like, you cannot please them.

So is this a project?

He might potentially leave you.

Is this a project install?

Yeah, we did a project Yeah, so what we did, I have a gutter company. I've talked to you a couple times before. I think you even made a YouTube video about my company, like using my website and stuff. But, um, so what we do, we installed gutter guards for him, cleaned his gutters, filled his gutters. We did underground drain work, uh, repairs, replacing and stuff like that. And, uh, he just, he just, like I said, it was a lot of miscommunication. He thought we were going to be there for like 4 days I've been in business for 6 years and never been on a job for 4 days. Um, what I told him was 4 to 5 hours, and he— I guess he thought it was 4 to 5 days. Um, and then like what's really bothering him is we were there for— we were there for about 4 or 5 hours, and he keeps breaking it down. He was like, well, you made like $2,000 an hour, $1,500 an hour.

Is he complaining about the work? Is he complaining about the work quality?

Not so much that he's complaining about like he doesn't think it's worth what he paid for the time. I said, well, sir, you had every chance to get other estimates and so forth. I said, we do not work by the hour. We work by the job.

If we work by the hour, we wouldn't be in business.

He is so caught up on like, he will— it was like $1,500 an hour. Lawyers don't even make that. And I'm like, we do not charge by the hour. We charge by the job.

Yeah, lawyer sits inside his office and does not have a whole bunch of trucks and shop space and insurance and workers' compensation. And trailers and equipment. So like, you know, the comparisons go back and forth. You will always get customers like this and it's so easy to get in this knickknack back and forth with them. And more importantly, all the mental energy you have spent just thinking about this. The bottom line is a negative review from this customer will not impact your business in a negative way. The reason is, is because the customer's only complaining about price and you are transparent about your prices. No other future customer will care. If he went on there and said that you did a bad job, very different, right? And I would say if you've tried to give money back, you've tried to accommodate, like you've done everything you can and you're going to make mistakes. But in this case, you have not made a mistake. The quality of the job is fine. They mostly have buyer's remorse because they figure out the fact that you make money and that— so, right.

So go ahead. Go ahead.

Ultimately, when it comes to an online review, the only thing I'm caring about is the future customer. I do not care about the existing customer because I have already likely exhausted everything possible to make them happy. And assuming you have done that, which you have, you got to just let the chips fall where they are. Because if they go online and spew, your response to them is not going to be bringing up everything you've done, all the refunds. You're not going to— you're going to be responding with the future customer in mind that's going to read that review. And as a customer that would read that review, I don't care if that person thinks they overpaid. If the quality of the work is good and I'm looking at my estimate from you and it is saying that it's going to cost $1,500 to do this task, I am judging $1,500 versus the problem that I have and your solution. And so there are going to be some people that will not understand that they are paying to solve a problem. They are not paying you per hour. They're going to be people like that. Yeah, do not worry about their online review.

Yeah, and that's where, yeah, I mean, this dude's probably going to put it because his emails are like like 2 books long, man. I mean, it's crazy. And he's probably going to put like a 2-book, you know, review. I mean, and like there was like a little drip coming from the gutter. Like he took a picture of that when it was like a heavy rain. And then like, like stupid stuff that he's just nitpicking on every little thing. And then he was sending me pictures of this stuff. I'm like, dude, you got to be kidding me.

Yeah. I mean, I would let it go. I would let the chips fall where they are. You've done everything you possibly can. At the end of the day, there's going to be people you cannot make happy. And they will always hate the fact that you make money from them. And at the end of the day, they don't see all the expenses. There's no way you could ever justify this in the eyes of that customer. That customer is gone. They're never coming back. Let's not try to save them and their relationship. Let's wait for the review because most time they won't leave a review. But if they do, just make sure your review response is with the future customer in mind, not them. It's very easy, especially because you've gone through all the drama with them, to when they post an online negative review, just to start spilling all the tea, talking about all the bad stuff they did, the pictures that were not correct, the fact that you gave them money back. Don't worry about that. It's just a function of we want to think about the future customer and the future customer wants to know, does this company back up their work? And so being able to notice, hey, the response back to this person freaking out over 2 pages, like, first off, when I see a review where someone's left like 3 pages of text, about a home service business, that person has too much time on their hands, especially if it's around a small job that you did in 4 or 5 hours. They have too much time on their hands immediately as a customer. I don't even have time to read the review. And if the future customer is the type of person that reads a 3-page huge review and then believes that person when they never said anything bad about the work that you did, but just simply the fact that you made money, I don't want that customer. And so it's actually sometimes a good pruning mechanism to keep bad leads out of the system and prevent people like this from ever getting back into the business. And so, um, you know, there is many, many bad reviews about Augusta Lawn Care, and specifically a couple websites where negative reviews are bound. They all aggregate to one account because they type in Augusta, like, it pops up. So like every bad review is in one spot. And if I wanted to be on the constant negative mindset that just drains me and like keeps me awake. I just have to open up that one page and I would immediately lose sleep. I would immediately not be thinking about how to improve the business. I would immediately not be thinking about my team, the next customer, the next person I can serve, or creating opportunities inside the organization. And so to focus on what you can control, because what you can't control is the Karens of the world and the Kens of the world that will just constantly bombard you because they just love sapping you of your attention. And so you're going to have to cut ties with this person in terms of if they're going to leave an online review, fine, let them. But don't let it take over your psychology because it will prevent you from doing a follow-up. It'll prevent you from pushing through a, a, someone throwing up a random like, I got to think about it. You won't push through those things and those objections because now you're on your— you're playing defensive, you're on your heels. And so don't allow something like that to prevent you from being on the offensive and think about the growth of the business and the growth of your team and the growth of you being able to solve more customers' problems because it's debilitating. And if you— the reason it's debilitating is because you care about the customer and you feel horrible about it. And the fact that you have $2,000 back, I'm not thrilled about because it's probably all of your profit. However, it means that you care. And so just keep caring, but don't worry about the 1 out of 100 that you're not going to be able to make happy no matter what you do.