RIDICULOUS… $1M Gutter Company Can’t Pay the Bills

Almost million dollar business. And then $10,000 in the bank account on average during the winter. It's kind of ridiculous.

Today we're in Montana visiting David with Paramount gutters.

At the end of this month, after everything's invoiced out, we should be at zero. If I don't get this figured out, it would continue to create a bigger snowball.

Last year, he did $940,000 in revenue.

Pulling some money out of my personal account, putting it in the business to cover payroll.

The fact that we can have 40 grand the next month have 110 grand. The 50 grand.

But the hole gets bigger as the company gets bigger.

But right now has more credit card debt than cash in the bank. First six months were floating cash flow.

Exactly.

Credit cards and cash.

Who's all gonna see this video? And David has 19 grand in credit card debt. Like, that's scary.

And it's stressful when that is higher than your cash balance.

Very stressful.

The real problem is that he loses money all winter long and leads drop off a cliff.

Lead flows die off pretty significantly. Couple truck notes, and we've got this big shop to pay rent for. At least the two winners. I couldn't keep two crews busy. This winter has definitely been the worst winner by far.

This is the business turnaround show and then the siding job that they're on now that the big $200,000 one.

Just to be crystal clear, I want nothing to do with siding.

My name is Mike Gandies. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care, where we have over 180 locations around the world. And I travel the country fixing struggling businesses. That's how you double the business with the same number of customers. And then by doing this, you now offer something that can be done during the winter. The business is going to do 2 million with the same number.

Yeah.

Doing the same.

Yeah.

The same cruise.

Yeah.

I like goal is to give David a strategy to turn around the company in the next six weeks. So in his application video, he was more or less like, hey, nine months of the year, things are good. The other three months, like basically the first three months of the year is when I have my offseason and it stinks.

Biggest thing for me and the reason I'm submitting this video is my offseason, and for me, that's my first quarter. It's terrible.

We are coming in the middle of the year. But so far, to date, he is $30,000 in the hole in his P and L. He has more credit card debt than he has Money in the bank.

Last year we did 940,000. But we do. There's definitely a lot of times in the winter and we're just in bad cash crunches. You know, payrolls coming up. Pulling some money out of my personal account, putting it in the business to cover payroll or an almost million dollar business. $10,000 in the bank account on during the winter. It's kind of ridiculous.

I think this is going to be a classic case of having to solve the off season and going through what is his options to do that. And I think that'll be the main focus. I had to guess.

Feel like I'm meeting a celebrity.

Oh no, man.

How you doing?

I'm doing well. Dude.

This weather is great.

Yeah, Good stuff. Good to meet you, man.

Yeah, man.

Thanks for coming.

This is a great shop space you got.

Thanks. My name's David Troyer. I own a rain gutter company in Great Falls called Paramount Gutters. The door company has those two bays and then the other bay is a cabinet guy. So there's four of us in here. Yeah.

You all just rent?

We all just rent. We got our box truck which is for our second crew that's still here today because we're on that big siding job. We're going to be at our third year anniversary in August. Last year we did about $940,000 in revenue. But yeah, we got this. And then the truck and trailer set up that just rolled out, they were doing gutters. So we have set up for two gutter crews.

Got it. And then on that siding job they just basically are all going there.

So I got one more company rig and they all jumped in there. So they got all the tools. They're all we have like a container. Ok. We stock quite a bit of our own material. Like our downspouts and our elbows and our coil. These are some coils I have of the oddball colors. And see there's two different sizes of everything too. So we have a coil for our 5 inch gutter and then a coil for a 6 inch gutter. They're different widths. So yeah, the inventory part of the gutters can be a little overwhelming. Got everything. Tear the gutter off. See what size of fascia board it is. You got the hinges, Matt?

Yeah. Yeah.

I totally forgot to put that on the work order. Y We should have one more bag. If not, it should be in the other trailer.

Got him.

Trailer should be good. Don't forget to mark it complete.

And then your office gal, she's off site remote. She works from home and just part time.

Yep.

I got Chris. She's my office admin. I got her answering the phone beginning of May. So that's been amazing. Cause I was answering all the calls and not always doing the best job.

And your day to day, is it mostly sales? What are you focused on most between.

The sales and the production? I got her answering the calls and then she has access into my calendar and I block off time in my calendar. So she sets appointments directly into my calendar. So I'll go look at the jobs, meet the customers, give them a quote between the estimates. And then just scheduling, like ordering materials, scheduling the jobs, telling which crew to go where. That's what my day consists of.

Cool.

And then the siding job that they're on now. The big $200,000 one. That's uncommon, Right? Like usually a smaller ones.

So we're trying to do gutters, right? That's all I want to do is gutters. But I can't keep two crews at least. The last two winters, I couldn't keep two crews busy during the winter.

I'm getting a guess that Q3 and Q4 is really strong for him because he doesn't seem to feel huge amounts of financial pressure outside of the first half of the year. And is that constraint mostly the weather or.

Mostly the weather Getting gutter.

But lead flow is pretty much the same.

Gutter lead flows die off pretty significantly about January.

Yeah, dude, the siding thing is gonna be a problem because he sold so.

Much of it already.

My thought might be maybe we just do siding during off season.

I probably do about half retail and half subcontracted through the general contractor. You know, we can still do gutters in the wintertime. And the retail side of it, people just don't think about their gutters in the wintertime. We're trying to figure out how to cure the wintertime seasonitis. That's where I went to siding originally. It was like, well, this, you know, I had contractors asking me to do it. Like, hey, you guys do such a great job. We really need siding guys. And I me with my shiny object syndrome. Oh, you bet. I'm your man. I like to find something new to do and not do these old, old boring things, you know, that I've already had in mind. But the old boring things are the ones that make the money.

Most home service business owners and blue collar folks, because we don't come from money. And we're like, oh, people are offering us money. We should definitely do that service. And I get it. It's like, you are struggling. So for so long, just to get leads, and then when leads come in for any service, like, I gotta take it and $200,000 of siding, let's go. That was like 25% of last year's revenue. But it's also gonna mess up his entire year. Because when he should be doing gutters and focusing on the core competency he's getting by, some other random service didn't.

Make a lot of money. And then this past winter, I was like, okay, I got this, this big siding job. I know my numbers on it. It's dialed. And that job got pushed off until we started it in like, the end of April, like May.

You thought you were gonna get it?

I thought I was gonna get it during the wintertime. And it wasn't able to get started. And it's taken longer than anticipated. This winter has definitely been the worst winter by far. It would continue to create a bigger snowball. If I don't get this figured out.

This is what people do. They like, I'm gonna add an ad. I'm going to solve my off season. Let's add siding in addition to my gutters. But the problem is siding has the same demand curve as gutters. We fall into the trap that we just. He's currently in, which is in the middle of his busiest gutter season. He has a massive $200,000 job for siding. So you just make your. Your off season even more abrupt and crazy by adding another service that has the exact same demand curve as your core service.

I've got so many gutter jobs signed right now, I need to have two. I could almost keep three crews busy right now. And I got one crew out going to belt for the, you know, the ninth week putting siding on.

He does do revenue during those three months. The question becomes, is it actually weather dependent or is he just getting less leads? I have a feeling it might actually just be he's getting less leads. Can you do more siding during the off season compared to gutters or just.

A matter of, like, that's what's available? Like, that's the work that I find that's available during the wintertime is those siding jobs.

Got it. But we really don't advertise siding.

No, not at all.

Just the contractors that know.

Just the contractors.

Yep. Yep.

And like, this big siding job we're on now, that's through a general contractor.

Got it.

And your current crew, the guys that come in for the gutters, I'm assuming they don't really have siding experience.

Usually not normally. No.

Problem is they have sold a $200,000 siding job. It's on the books. But half his crew can't do the work. And so if you want to become aware, I can still be profitable if I keep someone around for three months now I got to reduce the amount of complexity, reduce the amount of custom services. Otherwise I'm going to be always like, I can't hold key. People just build the business where you don't really need to keep them and it'll still be profitable.

I lucked out. I have a pretty good crew Right. Right now on that siding job. Like, I've got more experience labor out on that siding job than my gutter crew crew.

Like. Right.

And the gutter crew brings in more money, right?

Yeah.

So basically the first half of the year is us getting to zero, essentially because we did ourselves a hole in that.

That's where I'm at. Right. Like I was just with my accountant yesterday and like at the end of this month, after everything's invoiced out, we should be at zero. Like we're, we're going to start making money.

That's just because like January, February, March is just so we used to beat up.

Right?

Yeah.

Our revenue dips down and then my profit margins tip down. Like, I don't make near the profit margins on these sides. Adding jobs.

Yeah.

We can step into the office. It's not much.

2021 means when you started. Right.

I started in 20, 22, 90 grand. Then we went to about 640. And then last year we did 940. I'd love to break that million dollar mark this year. And I think we will.

Having a revenue goal is actually like, not really the greatest goal usually because it's, it's arbitrary. It's an output. What's easier to control is we will cut out siding. We are going to add a service that fills in our offseason season. Like, focus on the inputs will generate good outputs. The outputs is a shot in the dark. The debt isn't super frustrating to me. Like, or like a big, big red flag because, like, it's all collateralized against the trucks.

Yeah.

And then the challenging part is the first six months we're floating cash flow.

Exactly.

Credit cards and cash.

Exactly.

And that's the stress we want to try to avoid. Have you seen the Foil framework?

Cool.

From a liquidity perspective, really. Like when we look at like, what are some of the constraints and then we can figure out like, what, what's the solution stuff. But like liquidity problems. I think it's mostly we have a cash crunch during first half of the year, for sure. And the challenging part with that is second half of the year, once you start feeling like you have money, then you're like, oh, yeah, I don't really have money because I need to stack.

I'm going to spend it all.

Exactly, yeah. Right. Now, what's kind of the monthly. If, like, there was no revenue coming in, what is the cost? Like, we have shop space, insurance, the.

Truck payments floating around that 20 grand mark.

Got it. So we really need to do at least probably 40 grand a month to.

Kind of break even with the amount of labor it takes to do that. 60 is about where we break even. Like that first winter, we went into lockdown mode, more or less. Like, I didn't have quite the debt. I was running out of the shop at my house. Boy, that second year, we got a little more guys, you know, got a truck note, and we got this big shop to pay rent for. This winter has definitely been the worst winner by far.

In April, you had a big month. Was that when the deciding gotta pay 50 down?

That was a. It was. It was a deposit, wasn't 50. Yeah, it was a deposit.

Yeah.

Got it.

We're getting started on that.

That's what I figured. Because I'm like, wages stayed the same, and then we had this revenue jump. So I'm assuming, like, your hardest month this year was probably March.

Yes.

Because revenue still up before that. Big jump in deposit.

Yeah, yeah, that was tough.

But in general, it's just like we have a crash crunch in the.

In the first quarter.

Yes.

We have a cash.

Got it. We can solve that. And then we have that. We have credit card that we're floating throughout that time.

Yeah.

It ranges from 10 to 20 grand, which is. I think right now we're at 16.

Yeah. And it's stressful when that is higher than your cash balance. Because you're like, very stressful.

Yes.

Okay, I got you. I got you. I know exactly what it's like. So credit card balance, first half of the year, same thing. Okay. From a leads perspective, we'll come back, we'll, like, go through these and fix them. Ultimately, if leads stayed the same for the first quarter of the year, we wouldn't have the liquidity problems. The constraint is leads. Like, how do we get more leads during the off season? What I'm concerned about is adding in siding, which has the exact same demand curve as gutters. When gutters are busy. The siding is also really Busy. And when the gutters slow down, the siding slows down. So I don't see it as a service I should add to my business to solve the off season because all it does is compound the complexity and the insanity of spring rush.

Just to be crystal clear, I want nothing to do with siding. Like, you don't have to talk me out of it. I'm so sick of this cycle.

Yeah.

And the siding has the same demand curve. We get busier with siding in the summer if we would do siding jobs. So.

Right. Everyone thinks, oh, yeah, I'll add to the service. And all they're doing is adding another service that has tons of revenue when their core service is also super busy. Just compounding, like, how many employees I need, how many more trucks I need, making it more crazy. And then your off season looks even worse because a function of revenue is even less of a percentage compared to your best months. So siding.

Bye. Bye. Yep. Yeah.

Okay. When I look at your website, there's definitely some low hanging fruit in terms of focusing on jobs.

Did you look at my current website?

I did.

I should have.

Is there a new one coming?

New website? Yes.

Okay.

Like, ready to go?

Okay, cool. No, you're fine. No, you're fine, you're fine.

I want you to look at it. But it is quite a bit better. So what prompted the rebrand and that stuff? I knew I needed to get the truck wrapped. Trucks wrapped. We almost had a design in and then I got onto the mascot idea and then that derailed everything. And I went and got the mascot made. Went to Fiverr. Somebody off Fiverr made the mascot. It's like, well, if I'm doing this rebrand, I might as well do a new website.

Just in terms of highlighting the existing services that we are offering, having service pages for each of the things that we do offer, etc. I think having a great website will bring enough leads to potentially help with that area. If you're like David and you're trying to grow your business, whether you're doing gutters, landscaping, cleaning, and any home service business, I highly Recommend Checking out homeservicewebdesign.com we build hundreds of websites for different home service businesses, and many of them double their business in the first 12 months. Go check out some of our work. We'll see you on the other side.

I have room to grow on my sales side of things. I don't know if you noticed, none of my trucks are wrapped either.

Okay. Everyone thinks that you need a mascot because we have Max and Augusta and we have Monkey Man. Don't know his name from Paramount Gutters. But realistically, what you need to have is something that is identifiable to the customer, something they remember. And sometimes that can be your name, kind of a cool off the cuff name. Or the trucks. And that's why we want to wrap the trucks, because we want to be remembered for something. The color of our trucks, the color of our uniform, the name of our business. And sometimes a mask is helpful, but a lot of times it does not fit well with their brand. It's not memorable. So don't think that just adding a mascot and slapping on your truck is somehow going to solve everything. But Monkey man kind of dope. Where's the monkey come from?

It's a mascot. We just came up with it this spring and we're getting the wraps. I don't know if you notice, none of the trucks have any. Yeah, yeah, we're working on it.

When we look at like the five ways to cure seasonitis and. Yeah, I know you've read the book. Seasonitis is the disease that many home service business owners have. I made up the name. But really what it is is that for one quarter of the year we have seasonality, where leads drop off a cliff, revenue drops off a cliff, and it kills many home service businesses. The first one being locked down, not really possible when break even is at 60 grand.

Exactly.

If we didn't have the shop space, we didn't have any debt. If you still operate this out of your garage and there's a couple thousand dollars a month of expenses, we could.

Do it and it'd be fine.

The first cure is to lock down. That is lay off everybody and shut down the business for a few months. When leads start drying up and we don't do any work, everyone just comes back in the spring. The second one more and better. It's a function of like, can we advertise or get more leads during the off season by simply advertising more? Tier number two for seasonitis is more and better. That's upselling getting more and better jobs from our customers. The challenging part is like say for example, gutters and even a website.

Yeah.

Is you're gonna get massive amount of leads. But our hope is that we have.

Enough leads to get us by during the off season.

So the lead flow, when does it really. When you feel it hard, like it drops after Thanksgiving. When is that?

It's really busy. Up until Christmas, we're pushing hard. And then January, it feels like we're just catching up on all the Loose ends. And then all of a sudden, February, it's like, oof.

Why aren't the phones ringing? Yeah, like, okay, got it. So we're strong all the way. And then all of a sudden it just drops off close to like two to. With two and a half, three months maybe.

Yeah.

Okay, here too is we're just going to Juice Q4.

Yeah.

We're going to advertise. We're getting tons of leads. We're going to try to take what may be our second best quarter and actually just get so many leads. We're going to probably spend a quite a bit on marketing and then just book ourselves out through that. Otherwise.

Yeah, that makes sense.

So that's one option. And I think that's probably going to be part and parcel of the next thing. Like, if you get dump snow, if you get two feet of snow here, do you have to basically stop operating?

Essentially, yes.

Okay, cool. That's the part I want to solve. Because if you have a bad snowfall, you could have a month where you're in the. Yeah, all right, we'll come back to that. So adjacent, I'm going to do tier three here. Number three is adjacent services. These are other services I can cross sell to my customers. They have a different demand curve than my core primary offering. Cure number four for seasonalize is adding a recurring service. Some sort of a maintenance plan that keeps me busy during the off season. Sure. For being recurring revenue. I know right now we don't have any. I look to it as like I'd love to have it is because the lumpiness of the revenue, the fact that we can have 40 grand the next month, have 110 grand the next month, have 50 grand is just hard.

Yep, yep. Right.

Especially when we're trying to, from a liquidity perspective, have one month's worth of revenue. That means you basically have to have 100 grand in the bank just to be able to float by. Five is a whole different brand. I feel like that's where you've gone with siding. We don't even really have a site for right now.

No. And that's. It's.

Yeah.

Direct to the contractor.

And tier five is the last thing we want to do. And tier number five, the last but not least, is adding a complete, completely new brand. Completely different. Kind of like siding versus gutters. Completely different. And it's the last one we should offer. But right now with Paramount, he's offered siding when he's doing gutters, but there's a whole bunch of juice to squeeze in. Cure two, cure three and cure four. Have you ever played with the service side of gutters in terms of clearing out gutters and things like that?

So in the past when we get a call for gutter cleaning, it's a pain in my butt because I'm pulling my guys off of install. Normally that's in the spring and that's in the fall, especially falls, we're super, super busy and I'm pulling my guys off installs to do these $250 cleaning jobs for two gutter crews. I have like, I think it's six guys right now and I only need five guys for my gutter crew. I got one guy that's really good. I'm gonna get him set up in his own rig. I want to try and do gutter cleanings this fall. So he's going to be helping me out with some of my leaf guard installations, my repairs and my gutter cleans. I don't know what that's going to look like completely, but I'm very open to doing something like that.

Okay.

One opportunity is when you sell a new install trying to get them on their current. The challenging part is no one thinks I'll clean out their gutters until they're chock full.

So like sell a gutter cleaning package.

Yeah.

Right.

I've thought about that and I know there's other guys in the industry, not necessarily here, but on the Facebook pages and whatnot. The only issue I might see with that is I also sell leafguard. I'm almost selling against myself. Like hey, sign up for my gutter cleaning or buy my leaf guard.

Like, or think of it as options. Right. So yeah, hey, we install your gutters and then afterwards we have two options. Leafguard. Higher upfront cost.

Yeah.

Or do you just want to be on this where we have a lifetime warranty and if there's a leak or anything happens, we will come back and fix it for free. As long as you're on our maintenance package. And here's the thing, you could actually sell both. Just because you have leaf guard does not mean you're gonna have leaks in your. And after a snowfall that things don't get adjusted. Yeah. The reason I like the, the maintenance and I think we can sell it well is your slowest period of time is when the snow's melting and it's getting back into spring. You can do all of your adjustments to people's gutters in like February, March. Instead of just a warranty, you actually sell it as a service package.

Service package.

Like we're going to come in early spring and make sure that after the snowfall, we're going to adjust everything.

Yeah.

We're doing inspection slope.

Right.

Make sure it's sloped.

Right.

Make sure that if anything breaks on the joists, the downspouts didn't get readjusted. A snowfall. You could definitely take every single existing one time project and try to turn it into a current revenue.

Okay.

And then I would just schedule the service visits when you're slowest.

Yep.

It's like we are not putting gutter checkups in the middle of July, August, September, October. Like there's. We're not.

That would be tough. Yeah.

If someone calls and they want gutters, you're just getting them on the one time.

Yeah.

It's after that one time is installed, say, hey, would you walk through everything looks great. You show them pictures, whatever it is. Hey, we have a couple options. We can do leafguard so you never have to clean these things out again. We can have the service package. And by the way, if you get either of these, we warranty these forever.

Yeah.

There's ever a leak, we come back. And then the service packages, we're going to come and clean out your gutters. So middle of your off season, we're going to come early spring, we're going to adjust if there's any damages and if there's any leaks throughout the rest of the year. It's all covered.

Taken care of.

Yeah.

So what we're really trying to do is build value in that maintenance package because everyone in their cat wants to sell recurring revenue. And so a customer is used to being upsold. But if you can actually prove that the value of the recurring service is greater than if they do this a la carte and that like most of our customers need this a la carte thing, why not just do this other thing that is cheaper and allows you to be able to have peace of mind adds like way more value. So just saying, like, oh yeah, we like lifetime warranty. Well, the problem with that is you might not show up. There might not be real value attached to that insurance policy. And that's why people hate paying insurance. Because like, you might not ever use it versus, like, like, hey, I'm going to give you home insurance. But even if you don't use it, we're going to do X, Y and Z in your property. And that's what we want to offer in that maintenance package. I think what would be interesting is if you start thinking as the business scales is you have your install Crew and then you have a maintenance crew. The maintenance crew can do the leaf guard and the cleaning.

Right.

Because you don't need a lot of skill to put leaf guard in. So I don't want someone who has like construction ability putting in leafguard.

Yeah.

So you could actually look at as like, hey, I apprentice people. They come in, they work on the maintenance crew and then you get elevated to the install. So you can take a lower level employee and make them profitable. So I think recurring slash maintenance, you can go top line revenue much faster when you have one time projects and big contracts. What grows a lot slower is recurring maintenance, is recurring revenue. But the value of the business is extremely high when you have recurring revenue because it's much easier to step out of the business if not Every single job is different. Every single job is complicated and completely different every single time. The opportunity with installs is you can grow very quickly. 600,000amillion. You're going for 1.2. Like you can grow fast. The recurring is gonna be the slow trickle.

Yeah.

The goal though is to be able to cover your expenses with your recurring.

Okay.

So you know at all times in your back pocket. My expenses are getting paid for by adding in this recurring maintenance package that he can upsell existing customers. We're hoping that we can make these big lumps in revenue that are up and down one month making 150,000, the next month making 20,000. We want to level this out. This will allow much more stability inside the business. Are you usually meeting the customer in person for the sales?

My new website has a online price calculator. You can price your own gutter system out. It still kind of requires a site visit for me. So I'm going in for that ACL surgery. So I'll be on crutches for two to three weeks. At least that we're about to experience how well these online estimates can do. Should I try to do away with in person estimates?

No, I don't think so. I think it's a function of we need to have a sales presentation either before because they want to meet us or after when we're going to upsell them. If we can take a $3,000 average ticket when we sell gutters and upsell them into Leafguard or potentially into Ice Guard, we could turn a $3,000 customer into a $5,000 customer. That's almost doubling the business without getting any new customers. You look at three stages. The lowest barriers we install.

Yep.

The next one is we install with a leaf card. We're getting about 30, 35% of those people. Now then there's this third stage which is we want to get them on a recurring maintenance package. And like this trifecta. Yes.

Yeah.

Gotcha.

And so I would probably have some sort of incentive for your crew because I'm assuming you don't go back to the job, do you?

No, no, I don't. And I try. My crew does very little interaction with the customer. Like I try and do all my upsells beforehand.

What you do is say, hey, if I'm in person, I'm going to sell it up front.

Yeah.

Right. So I'm there. I might as well have the leafguard and I would have a like this size piece of paper where I'd be like, we have three packages. We have three options for you. Now that we have a three tiered sales system, we need a presentation to be able to make sure we can actually convey this to the customer on our website, over the phone and in person via this printed off laminate sheet. Everyone loves options.

Instead of using.

It's $3,000. $3,000 for your install. Then we got 1500 and then we got you on the maintenance package. I would also discount my leaf guard if they get on the main package.

Yep.

Have some sort of. Okay, okay. So you have a ramp.

Because now if I could get twelve hundred dollars over the next three years from someone that I know. These gutters are new and I'm gonna. I did a great job.

Yeah.

I'm not gonna.

I'm willing to give them a really good deal on a week.

Leafguard. Yeah.

Like what's the cost on leafguard? If you're paying fifteen hundred dollars for.

The customer, I'll probably have four hundred bucks in leafguard.

Right.

Like that.

So I. I'd be willing to almost break even on it on the leafguard. So you say, hey look, it's $3000 to install.

Yep.

We got $1500 for Leafguard. Or you pay $600 and you sign up for this other package.

And the idea would be the lifetime value of that maintenance package.

You just got to keep them for more than one year.

Yeah.

As long.

And then. And then we make more money than if they would have just bought the leaf.

Correct?

Y.

Correct.

I figured he was going to do something with the upsell. And I really like the maintenance plan. And like one of my first concerns was how. How is. Am I going to be selling against myself with the maintenance plan versus the leaf guard? Like how's that going to work? And then he talked me through that. I think it'll work really good. And doing some of that value add stuff like, hey, this is. We charge this much for the visit, but you get one of these visits in the maintenance plan. Like, that's cool.

So that's like the trifecta and I would really try to measure is how many people convert from 1 to 2 and from 1, 2 and 3.

Yeah, yeah.

And then what you could do is if you're doing in person, great, you're going to actually have this print out. You're going to be like, here's the packages and you're going to sell for it.

Yeah.

If you are not in person and they sell over the phone or via the website and just sign up for one or something, I would incentivize the crew, like to sell this stuff.

Yeah.

Okay.

He said it cost about $600 for the Leafguard. He installs it for 1500. So I think we can afford $100 to the crew. If they're the ones on the after sale. They upsell the customer now before the sell. He's trying to upsell. But if we miss that opportunity, whether it be phone, web or in person and the crew does it, I'm very happy to give my crew $100. Like you're going to spend that money otherwise on a Facebook ad, so why not give them the money? So this also becomes like you change the D now to the team to where like, hey guys, here's how you sell the leafguard and here's how you sell the maintenance package.

Yeah.

And you're willing to really incentivize them to.

For doing so.

Exactly. Well, if you want to change a culture, you want things to be very visible. And so I'm going to take the hit on my taxes and I'm going to hand out cash to the team at a team meeting to reinforce that like hundreds of dollars are being given out every week to the people that are doing this upsell thing. So that way for the people, like, I'm not going to upsell, like, I am not a salesperson. I don't want to do this like, oh man, they just made $500. Oh, they made $1,000. Like they start to actually feel a little bit of FOMO on the fact that they're not adopting the system. So I would really think about from a leads perspective just. And the labor perspective is like upsells upsell the three tier path system. A lot of times we think that we need more customers and more leads and more advertising. When reality we just need to take the customers and the leads that we do get, convert more of them and upsell them even more stuff, sell more stuff to the people that are already giving you money.

So we're doing a one, two punch of a recurring maintenance and then also just selling more and better.

Exactly. So we're using cure two and cure four.

Right.

So cure two being more and better during that last quarter, trying to get more leads for the off season and then cure four, which is over the course of time building up our recurring revenue. Yeah, let's take it back to cure three for a minute, which is adjacent services like things that are aligned with gutters but not gutters.

Exactly.

And specifically stuff that we could potentially do during our off season. And so my question is, what about doing things like ice dams or repairing broken stuff from the snow or even putting in like tape that is heat tape. Does that ever come up automatically?

Afraid what would happen if I would sell that ice stand removal? We'd have to have some clear language in there. If I'm selling them and leaving a maintenance package.

Yep.

And they get ice dams, they're gonna call me and say, hey, you're signed up. I'm already signed up with my, with your maintenance program. Come do my ice dam removal versus upselling that. But I don't know. But I also have the market of everybody I haven't worked with yet. Ice dams, that's cool. When the weather's bad and I can't do anything else, that's when the ice dams happen and that's when we could do those.

What about installing heat tape?

Just haven't got a lot of calls for it. I guess anything like this, the heat tape, ice dam removal, those type of services I'd have to market for.

Okay, so this is how I look at it, our tier one package. All right, so tier one, that is install only. All right, so install only. Then what we're going to do is we're going to have leaf guard and then we're also going to have ice guard, the heat tag, and that's going to heat tape.

Okay.

And then this is going to be maintenance. So this is like tier one, Right. Tier two, tier three maintenance. I think this new three tiered sales strategy will really serve paramount. Gutters. Well, we're already getting the install. But then tier 2 is how can we upsell them into either ice guard or leaf guard? And then the third tier, the best, the creme de la creme, as we also sell them a maintenance package where we get net recurring Revenue. And so every time we sell, we're like, this is the cost to install. And then there are two big problem with gutters. They get blocked up and they get frozen.

Yeah.

Which one of these do you want? What do you want? Both of them. You potentially give one of the way these for free or a huge discount if they sign up for this.

The maintenance package.

The goal is now we sell everything.

Yeah.

So we take a $3,000 customer, turn them into a $5,000 customer with recurring revenue. That's how you double the business the same number customer customers. And then by doing this, you now offer something that can be done during the winter. The reason I like Ice Guard and I like even doing the steam thing potentially is when you cannot install gutters. That's when you can.

That's when we can be doing all.

So even though you might only do it for two or three weeks.

Yep. Yep.

It's the two or three weeks where.

You can't let sitting on our hands anyway. Exactly.

Yeah.

And then you're going to run ads when everyone is. Has a ton of snow and can't get out of their house and they're worried about things breaking. They got a leak coming to their roof.

Yeah.

Now they're calling these.

Yeah.

And you run, you run an ad, it's showing that and you just show like the steam how it works and you run it to a Contact Us. Now you're sitting there with your phone because you're not doing anything else.

Right.

Just waiting. Just people to send messages.

Yep.

What I like about Mike is it's very practical. He doesn't say, oh, level up man. Like do better sell more. Like he says, do this upsell. Sell this ice dam preventive package on this gutter. Like, like just very practical. And in a world of fake Instagram influencers and bozos just pedaling their crap like, you know, they took an online course, now they're business gurus. Like, Mike is very refreshing. And so that's what I really like about him. And then, and then this winter he really started talking about the seasonitis thing. And I was like, yeah, I feel.

That I would also say is in your maintenance, you might be able to increase the price if you include one time per year steam. And what you say is like, hey, usually our steam is a minimum of $249 to do this. Right. So we're gonna do that and these other two things where we're gonna check out after the snow, make sure things are lined up. We're gonna clean the Facade outside of the gutters. And we're going to clean the gutters out. So this is almost like install preventative. Like preventative stuff being leased and ice. And then we have our maintenance plan.

Yeah.

And so anything above $99 starts to get a little expensive for the maintenance plan.

Okay. I would agree for $99 a quarter.

So inside of this we're gonna have cleanup or clean out. I really.

Yep.

Clean out. We're going to have fix it. Which is going to be kind of like a warranty.

Yeah.

I would look at more like that. And then we're gonna have one time steam per year.

Got it.

So now we're gonna have. When it gets snow after a couple years. And we have 300 people on this.

Yep.

On that.

Guys. Snow. Great. Can the gutter jobs. We're all going on.

Come in. Get on the steam truck.

Yeah.

Right.

So you have. You keep your crew busy. And I'm okay with the fact that we might literally only use it a few weeks a year. But it helps me sell this because I say, hey, if we come out one time, this is actually. This is what I lean into.249 is what we do for steam plating.

And that's already included in your $99 a quarter package.

I like it.

And that steam machine, that's not that expensive either. So it's not like we're buying a whole new truck and adding a whole new.

Yeah.

That shouldn't be a big deal.

Forget discounting. I think this is what we lean.

Into then lean into that. That Steam.

Steam alone's 229.

Yeah.

And that's included in your maintenance.

It's included in your pay.

400 bucks.

You're basically cleaning out of your gutters. And a warranty lifetime for 1.9 each year.

Yeah. I like it.

And then you really just have two visits a year guaranteed. One being. And then one. Any sort of fixing, like repair stuff.

Yeah. Yeah.

That makes sense.

You will come around back to that. Okay. Leadership side of things. The team's pretty solid.

Yep.

And like, you got good foreman. I don't see that really as a huge.

Especially if we can keep my. My lower level guys busy during the winter. And I don't have to hire. A lot of my gutter guys hate hanging siding. So I know like this winter I lost one guy just because he didn't like siding.

Is it higher skill? Is it different type of work?

It's all of the above. On an average week, my gutter crew will be on at least 10 different job sites. Installing gutters is not hard work. The siding, we're just, you know, it's a mindset thing. We're going to be out here for however many weeks and we're just plugging away stuff they barely know how to do. And they're on the same job site day after day. They make the same money. But a lot of my crew is younger. They don't care about the money as much as the experience and having fun.

Cool. Yeah. I think like really from a leadership perspective, all we're trying to do is keep the crew busy during the winter.

Yeah.

So yeah, it's like if we can just solve winter work, a lot of this, we will not have people, good people leaving because they hate sighting.

Yeah.

Over the next few weeks, we have work to do. I'm going to say rebrand with one wrap plus website.

Got it.

Yep.

I want to see truck. If ideally wrapped with you, your crew, something identifies paramount and the monkey. The next part is going to be cure two, which is ads in winter. In Q4, when we're trying to fill up Q1, we're really targeting the fact like winter's coming. Winter's coming, like alert, alert, alert.

Right.

Trying to get more gutters on. And then you're going to schedule them six to eight weeks out into February and March. That's our goal. And then I would have a Q4 ad which is going to be trying to fill Q1 and that is going to be very much leaning into like winter's coming. Don't have leaks in your house. A thousand dollar gutter repair. If left off, could this winter cause you $20,000.

How would that work if I'm marketing it like that? And then I don't get there until the winter time.

Because when you get in the sales presentation, you can, you can explain.

Okay, got it. You know, he's saying, hey, these are the Facebook ads that we're going to run when, when this happens happens. And this is the other ad we're going to run when this happens. Like the season specific type offers. That's cool.

Cure two is ads in winter. That's kind of, I think it calls it that Q4. So we're trying to sell the fear of leaks and massive damage. So get your gutters on the schedule. Then we're also going to do another cure too, which is not just selling more, but also better, which is upselling.

Yeah.

We're going to create, let's just call it a three tier system.

Yep.

So three tier upsell system. And so now every single time we are selling the job, we're gonna sell leaf gutters and ice. So when we get slow, instead of going to Facebook first in the queue in Q to this and you're gonna like Leafguard, obviously. October, November, just sell this stuff like crazy. And then you just switch to text and emails around Ice Guard as soon as it starts getting cold.

As soon as the weather turns.

Yeah. Yep.

And then just selling more and better. Like I like that as well. And it's. And I kind of wondered if he. Like I've. I've read his new book and I saw it kind of in my back of my mind. I wondered what he was going to say. We kind of just took all the approaches and took a little bit of each.

We're going to also do a little bit of tier three. So we're kind of doing all the like tier two, three and four. Tier three is adjacent services. So that is going to be where we really start to actually sell Leaf Garden, Ice Garden individual.

Yeah.

As their own.

So these are going to be cross sells.

Now we're moving along.

We're going to do Cure four which is going to be our maintenance package. This is part of our three tier upsell system. It's going to be a slow burn and I'm going to incentivize my crew to sell this, sell that.

Yeah.

You're not in person and don't expect at all one year. Like it's year after year slow.

Yep.

So now we take a customer that is 3.3grand for installs. We get up to 5 grand on average ticket and recurring basis. The business is going to be 2 million with the same number.

Yeah.

Doing the same.

Yeah.

The same cruise.

Yeah.

I like it.

Yeah.

This is very doable. I like it. I did quite a bit. Some of this is wintertime specific. Right. But I have a solid game plan. I feel like Update is live. The new website is on. I still need to. I believe I remember what Mike said. We have to add specific pages for each service. So that did not happen. The new website's up. We got one trailer done. So that's super cool. That wrap is on the monkeys. He's up there. He's big and people can see it. It's pretty cool. I don't know why I didn't do it. You know, three years ago in the. In the. Mike Andy's massive, obnoxiously large piece of paper. I've got good feedback from it. So, okay, so we got the gutter quote here. This is our main Quote. Right. And so I write all this in by hand and fill in the total, and then we have our optional upgrades. And so leaf guard that's already pre filled in the leafguard part. And then description and totals. And then this would be for the winter time or heat cable removal or any other upgrades. Like sometimes we'll do downspout hinges or whatever. So I just left that blank there. But yeah, so that's. We have our two optional upgrade sections there and then our maintenance plans. Clean flow plus Clean flow basic. And then I'll have, you know, fill in the amounts there. And then the customer. So I give this to the customer. They'll fill in the gutter color, they'll fill in the downspout color, and then the grand total of everything that they selected. So if they check the gutter quote, the leafguard quote, and a maintenance plan, you know, they'll fill that in, sign it, and then text me a picture. It was a material. One of my material at the supply yards. He was. He referred me to his brother's house, and he called me later after I'd given him a quote. He's like, dude, that. That quote sheet that you had, I seen it laying there on the. On the counter when I went to go get a drink of water when I was over at his house. And that is so cool. Like, I love it. So that was good to hear. We're coming to the end of the summer here. So fall is gutter cleaning, and so I'm gonna come up with maintenance plans. I'm hoping to do a lot of those as well.

But, yeah, I'm.

I know Mike said, you know, we're dealing. When we're dealing with these projects, we can get a lot of revenue quick. And the maintenance plans is just kind of slow and steady. And so, yeah, I just got to be patient and push it and upsell it as much as I can. So, you know, when I. When I hand the quote to the customer, I was like, here you go. Here's your obnoxiously large quote sheet. And they laugh and they're like, that's big.

But.

But we like it. You know, we can actually read it. We. I got that one job I pulled. I've only got one guy on there, and, man, I hope it gets finished up here and then not the end of this week, but the end of next. So. Yeah, and that's the last job. That was that big job that we had been talking about, and that is our last siding job. Told the guys multiple times. It's Our last one. And they look at me sideways and say, yeah, huh? But it's serious. I told him it's serious. We're selling. We're selling our. Our pole jacks and our planks and. And, you know, our siding specific equipment. So we're going into winter with a couple different ways. So I'm. November and December, we're gonna just try and fill our pipeline, like, as much as possible, right? So we're not spending. Right now. We're not spending any money on ads and. And we're busy. So hopefully it can hold out until November, December, we're gonna just throw a ton of ads out there just for gutters in general and leaf guards and try and fill our pipeline into January and February and are traditionally dead seasons. So that's approach one. And then, yeah, approach two is getting into these cold months like the ice dam remover. So I've got quotes on that ice dam machine, and I'll probably pull the trigger on it. September sometime get that machine in. And then in those cold snaps in those weather conditions that are creating those ice dams, I mean, I'm gonna just throw money at Facebook and Google with very specific ads like David with Paramount Gutters in Great Falls, Montana. These. This weather system we've been having, you know, yada, yada, yada, if you call us, basically. So very specific offers. That's the game plan. That's what I was thinking too. I was like, man, you need to. You need to call me in. In the winter time or right after. Then we can really see how this stuff works. But I. I feel really good about the game plan for it. It's been great. And this month, not this month, we're in August, so July has been incredible. It was the most revenue we've ever done. So that was cool. Set a record full swing into the gutters here this. This fall and this winter and go from there.