Road to $1 BILLION... WE ARE MOVING!

Today in the video, I'm going to talk about selling off an Augusta Lawn Care location that I've owned for years. It kind of kills me to sell this location because it's such a great cash money making machine. I talk about selling a piece of real estate. So we needed about 1.3, $1.4 million in cash. This topped off the rest of it. I'm going to talk about consolidating three offices into one headquarter building. Okay, so we're at the new headquarter building that we're moving into next month. I'm going to walk you through the three different parts of the office and really all of it comes back to this.

All right, so the day we actually sold the tiny house, it's behind me right now. I'm gonna walk you around the property. But we sold it for $799,000. Full cash offer. All this is gonna be fenced off. So much more private. And this is where down the road I want to put a pad of concrete and put a nice hot tub. We got a hot tub situation, which someone stole the COVID we think. I don't know what happened to it may have blew away. I haven't been here in a while since they put an offer in the house. I was like, all right, we're done. But built this and then brought this in. Also built this fenced area where the Augusta Lawn Care location for this county down here. This alone will pay for the mortgage of the entire property, which I'm also getting a renter and my shop space. So it's a win, win, win. I'm trying to utilize the property to its fullest extent. So I bought this house about three and a half years ago. I bought it for 550,000, put about 150,000 into it and with fees and all that, and then sold it for 800,000. So not like a great return. Honestly, I made probably 100,000 ish. But honestly, I put 150 grand into the mortgage and then I'm walking away with basically 250 like. So I almost doubled the money, but it's not great. The reason why we are doing this. So this is all one piece of one piece of land. It's one acre. But the reason we're doing this is twofold. Whoa. It looks good. Looks really good. Wow. So this is where the Augusta Long Creek location used to exist. So they'll probably use this for like RV storage or boat storage or something like that. Um, but reasons there's really two major Reasons why I sold, number one, most importantly was just headspace. Like, it was a bit of an annoyance to have tenants here and then take care of the tiny house. Like, it sounds crazy, but, like, we would come down here, what, every two or three weeks just to make sure, like, the chemicals in the hot tub was fine. And just having to think about that, I didn't want to have to deal with it anymore. That's the biggest thing. Because, like, in terms of the. The renters, like, they paid for the mortgage and it's a good investment, but having that in my head didn't want that. I need to focus on the businesses we need to lock in. As Brandon would say. If you look at it, it's like, oh, my goodness, this is a tiny little farmhouse. This thing is over 3,000 square feet, because it has an upstairs attic and bonus room, the main living area, and then the downstairs living area. So it is now sold as of tomorrow. Don't worry, I'm not trespassing. I signed the papers today. Tomorrow it closes and I will no longer be here. So it served us well. We had it, the Augusta location, being able to be here for a couple years. And then they moved, I think, like 15 minutes. I've never been to their new shop space, but back when, you know, we moved here, it was good, tiny house, very nice. Brandon and I spent some very good quality time there. And then the tenants, they were great. We had. I had one tenant the entire time, and they didn't want to leave either. I kind of felt bad about that, but honestly, I just needed to get this off of my plate. This is like, what, 45 minutes from our house. So it's just away from the office, away from the businesses. And now the second reason is, is why we're doing this is because now we have the cash sufficient to build the whole headquarter building without any debt. So we needed about 1.3, $1.4 million in cash. This topped off the rest of it. And so now there's plenty of money to be able to make sure that's built, and there's no financing needed. So ultimately, when it comes to selling the real estate down in Mount Vernon and letting go of the tiny house and the hot tub and everything we loved about it, it really just comes down to focus because the tiny house, the real estate, doesn't have to do with the Holdco, which is the media team, it is Copilot, CRM, and it is Agustination. And if it doesn't have anything to do with those three Things, it's got to go now. I also sold the Augusta Lawn Care location down in Mount Vernon. And it was difficult because it made me like $80,000 in distributions last year. And I never set foot there one single time. So I've had two Augusta Long Care locations for over five years. The second location I started in 2020, right during the middle of COVID Now that actually the one I am selling right now. And I'm actually selling it to a previous general manager of mine named Marcus. Having some sort of platform with Augusta Lawn Care Services and seeing how systems operate and what a healthy business looks like, what an unhealthy business looks like. What are the KPIs in the business? How do you know if you're being successful or if you're just doing everything for show? Things like that. You've learned me that I could really take with me forever. And I could also teach to the people after me. Marcus already has another location. He's been running it for about three years. It's doing phenomenally well. I think he's close to hitting a million almost this year in revenue is about seven to eight employees. And he's been looking for a second location that's relatively close and either has to go down to Seattle or my location above him. And so I'm looking to sell it to him mostly so that I can just focus on the Holdco and any of my attention or time, as well as my regional manager, which is Nick. Any time we spend on that one location takes away from us working on stuff for our guestination. And right now we're actually trying to scale his department in terms of owner success and the coaching program. And so anything that takes away from that is really what I'm trying to cut. And I started this location like five years ago for about 60 to $70,000. I was able to make a really good exit in terms of the multiple on that. However, again, this all comes back to focus. The reason that I'm selling this location is not because it's unprofitable. The Mount Vernon location was only serving my personal income and my personal needs. And I can get by with the gym, my other real estate, the 11 units that I have, as well as the Bellingham location. And so again, focusing on the Holdco is the mission in all of this. And this location is just like it is such a model of what the Augusta model is. And so it's been in business for exactly five years. Like five, five years and a few months. And the first two and a half Years or so was growth mode. We were just doing door hangers. Even with COVID stuff. We got in trouble a couple times doing door hangers during COVID did ran ads. Really grew very quickly. The two years every single quarter has distributed cash. And I think the year before that it was like three out of four. But the last two years every single quarter and so it'll do this year, around a million dollars in revenue. It's been in profit mode for three years, has five or six trucks, six to eight employees, depending on the time of year. And it just is like a money machine. It did around 25, 26% profit margins. And then I give about half of that to the general manager, the regional manager and the team. But I've never even been there. I have never been the shop space that they're at. They're actually on a farm. They dump there and everything. I've never been there. I'm not in daily operations. I've never hired any of the employees. It's strictly been ran by the general manager and the regional manager. And it just goes to show that the systems work. And it kind of kills me to sell this location because it just is such a great cash money making machine. But it really is the time to move on and show, hey, this is the five year progression. I'm going to hit so many benchmarks. And I think this is the copy and paste model. You just take this and you copy it and keep going. But ultimately Nick and I need to focus on the Holdco and Augusta Nation as a whole and we do not want to be thinking about anything else. The cool thing is now that I've sold that location and Marcus is running it, I can show you some of the numbers behind how much I was making revenue. The profitability location after five years. So the full video is down in the description, but here's a clip kind of showing the distributions of of that location in the past year. Now I want to show you what I usually don't show and that's distributions. Now that I've sold the location and there's no active team members there that I'm responsible for and that I am paying, I'm willing to share what distributions are actually coming from the location. This is the distributions between myself, Nick, who is the regional manager, Tim, the general manager and the crew out in the field. You'll see here at the top, Tim, he is the general manager, made $73,000 in distributions. That is on top of his regular W2 salary. And right now it's 70,000. So yes, he made 140 plus thousand dollars as like an overall wage. But keep in mind he was very loyal for five years and when he first started, he started $50,000 a year and there was not a lot of profit sharing to be had that first year and two years. And so if you're getting a general manager, you want to make sure that they have an incentive to stay with you. And certainly the fact that he's able to triple his pay over the course of that time is certainly an incentive. Once you have a track record to be able to copy and paste this business model, you can actually show a general manager that's newer and say, hey, look, I know at the beginning the revenue, the profits aren't going to be great and maybe give them some revenue incentives. If I would go back and change something in year one and two, I probably give them more revenue incentives. So that way the general manager would stay more engaged and be able to still make some bonus and incentive even though they weren't profits to be had in terms of distributions. But it worked out for him. And honestly, like this quarter, like this month when he gets his profit sharing, it going to be huge. It's going to be over $25,000. And I just didn't want to show that now because I wanted to be 12 months rolling and I wanted to be much more the, the fifth year and not bring it out even a couple more weeks here to where it would inflate these numbers. We had our best quarter ever as we went into the sale in terms of profits, in terms of distributions, in terms of profit sharing. So to not inflate the numbers, I brought it back to September 1st because if I was to extend it into even like next two to three weeks, the money that's already hit the account and the profit sharing is happening, this number would go up dramatically, like a lot. And so but this is, I think, a really good representation of what's possible without trying to be make it look so super optimistic. I'll show you my setup here. Usually actually don't have a teleprompter, but right now I do. I'm trying to play with it, just seeing if it helps a little bit, create a much more smooth transition than right here. We got the Rodecaster, the Shure mic that we use for the podcast. And then around me you can see that we put these up. I don't know if it's going to help at all, but from a sound perspective, this is like the worst room in the world here. I'LL go over here and you can probably hear it. Check 1, 2. It's way more echoey over here. Probably can't hear because I have the microphone, but it's way more echoey. And so what we did is we jerry rigged these sound blankets from the ceiling up until next time month when we head over to the new headquarter building where lower ceiling we can put much more soundproofing. But you can tell here audio actually is quite a bit better, I feel like with these sound blankets just keeping it from reverberating around the room. And what we're doing is focusing on two major pillars of content that we haven't in the past. And so right now we've always had the turnaround show really being the driving force of all the content for the shorts, for the main YouTube channel, et cetera. But right now I'm really starting to create content for the 1 million plus business owner, kind of 1 to 5 million dollars in annual revenue. And that's on the podcast. And that's the second pillar of content we're trying to build out is the podcast. We're actually hiring someone full time, trying to make sure that the only thing they do is the podcast live show and submitted questions via video. So you can actually go to mikeandies.comquestion, submit a video up to 90 seconds long that you might have, and then I will answer it directly on the live show and on the podcast. And so we're trying to create these new pillars of content, hiring new team members and trying to create something other than just the one pillar of the turnaround show and go diving deeper into some of the concepts for business owners that once they get attracted into the content and they start growing their business, they're going to hit other bottlenecks that are much more deeper concepts around hiring and marketing, how you do tagging on your Facebook ads, all these other things that are much more in depth and detailed. That's what I'm trying to cover now with these two other pillars of content that are much more bottom of the funnel compared to the turnaround show, which is much more top of the funnel and awareness and gets a lot of eyeballs because it's more entertaining content. So today I actually have four videos that I'm recording in studio. They're all going to take probably 30 to 40 minutes at least to record. And then I also have two podcasts I'm going to be recording today. The first one is about the danger of boredom at the top. I've been talking to a Lot of owners at Augusta and it's like, hey, the business is going good, things are going really smooth. And now I'm kind of bored. Like what am I supposed to be doing now that the business is profitable and everything's going well? You know, it's one of the things, do I cry here? Like I'm doing so good and it's profitable and things are running without me. Now what do I do? And so that is certainly something to be thinking about once you pass a million dollars in revenue. Now I just finished recording a update for all of Copilot members. A huge update coming out today and that is file compression for video support inside of Copilot. This is actually a feature I've wanted to have from day one at co pilot and that is the ability to be able to take a video and attach it from the mobile app and shows up inside of the CRM. The problem is when you record like on your your phone for example, it could be like a 1 gigabyte file size. So we have to build built in compression. And also the back end had to be completely rebuilt in infrastructure wise to be able to handle these massive file sizes. So I'm really looking forward to it. It allows for estimate videos, upsells project updates. All the videos now inside of the app attached to the customer profile. It's a huge unlock. So recording the video now, the announcement and it's live inside Copilot. I'm super excited.

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A couple weeks ago in the vlog I showed you all the office for command center, Copilot, CRM and the media team. And we've been there for the past couple years now. A couple years ago we were outgrowing our previous office and we gave it to a vote to the team as to where we should move. They chose where we're currently at in the strip mall because it was so much more cost effective and we saved thousands of dollars every month on rent. But the challenge is we've continued to grow the Headquarter building project is still massively delayed and still stuck in permitting and could still be another year and a half. So it's not really fair to the team that we're stuck in this current office with 40, 50 people, one bathroom, and we actually rented the next door unit just so we could get access to the bathroom. And a lot of people end up going down to the end of the strip mall just to use the public facilities. Especially for the ladies, it's not ide. So we're looking at new office space. I look forward to sharing with you. Okay, so we're at the new headquarter building that we're moving into next month. I'm going to walk you through the three different parts of the office. So from the top you can kind of see everything. And that is command center where co pilot will be. And I'll walk you through everything below us in terms of private offices and the break room. But this is going to be where the media team is at. We'll take out the current dividers and put the team in here. Then we have office number one, which will get turned into a studio probably for like live streams. Another office that'll probably be turned into a production facility for courses and kind of having a black wall. There's a lot of space here, so be great for a studio. Studio number two and this will probably be just a private office for one on one meetings. We'll make more room here for more desks and can easily get the media team here. Right now I think there's like 11 or 12 people in the media team, but some of them are remote. So I think here we could easily get 15, no problem. Upstairs. If we go downstairs, you can see this area is probably where copilot's gonna be up against this wall. All of the dividers came with this lease, so we're basically taking over a four year lease from the previous tenant. And so back in here is a bunch of the restrooms. Very important part of the tour. Boom. So in our previous place we literally have one toilet here. Now we have a couple stations, urinals, et cetera for both men and women. So that'll be nice. Water stations. And then this is the break room.

In here. So just finally a little more space for the team and just a place to be able to sit down, have lunch, etc. And then over here is probably the biggest limiting factor. And for now we'll just keep the studio at the other building for training. This will be the conference room. So for leadership team Meetings anytime we do any training with the workshops and the franchise advisory, anything like that will be able to go in here. So good, good for meetings like 10, 15, 20 people. And then the private offices along here. So there is one. This will become storage essentially just because there is no, there's no windows. But nice seating area here for the team. We're able to get inside the lease for that to be all included so we don't have to get as much in terms of dividers and furniture. All this will just come with it. So kind of nice. Another private office storage. This goes to the parking lot, then two more private offices here. Our goal is to kind of like make sure that no one's actually in the private offices. But it's more a function of just giving space for like one on one meetings, private meetings, anything like that. But most of the team, including myself is going to be out here on the floor. So this is where we have all the cubicles for command center, co pilot for the engineers as well as all the support and sales team. It is really nice that we get these, all these dividers. Usually these dividers between the whole office would probably be, I don't know, 40, 50, $60,000. But fortunately we have the lease this as is and all the stuff becomes ours when we sign the lease. Which saves us quite a bit of money on just the build out. So all the computers, desks, chairs, all that stays with it. So this is where copilot will be. Along here probably put the sales team, Brad from Home Service CPA in here. Just because these close nicely, offer a little more privacy on private calls, etc. But that's basically it. That is the whole. We think we can get like in terms of workstations is about 50 to 60, but you could easily get more people putting in some desks in certain spots and probably get 70 people in here. So it should definitely for the next couple years while we're building the headquarter building serve as a good spot for us to stay for now. So if you're like me, you're probably thinking how much does this cost me per month? This is a big building and it's not cheap. By no means. However, the cost of one engineer is more than what we're paying in rent per month for this facility. And so I certainly see the value of having our in person team there. And also even when it comes to like leadership meetings, even our remote team, we fly them in to meet at this facility. And so right now between the media team copilot And Augusta. All three of those have remote teams and they're bigger than our team in person. However, it's still a huge benefit to have people together for training, for collaboration, for leadership meetings. And I still find a lot of value in me going, being able to go to a place, being able to capture content, to be able to meet with people. And it's super special. And if you look at any massive business, anything, anyone's built something super special. They almost always have an in person component and an office building, a place they can call home, a place for the team to get together. So this, this is actually where I wish we were right now for the headquarters. This is the property that we've had for four or five years. And we have five acres. Ace starts here, goes all the way back into those trees, way beyond those trees. And this coming soon sign, you know, this has been the bane of my existence. We have been coming soon for the past.

I think, two and a half years, this sign's been up. And so you might be wondering, like, why are we spending all this time and energy and money, millions of dollars, on this headquarter building and this property that we spent years now trying to get built? Like, why I just move on actually really comes back to the main part of this whole video, which is focus. Because right now the Bellingham shop is in an office. We have multiple offices that we're split up into. We walk down the other side, the strip mall to be able to go do recordings. Having everything in one building is the objective, one property. And I find a lot of value and synergies when have the whole team together. Because it's very easy for someone answering the phone at command center to get to. Disassociated with the fact that it's pouring down rain and the team members out in the field, in the trucks are going out into that weather. And so by having everyone one spot, they actually get to see them driving in, they get to see them coming back at the end of a long day when a project went way over time. They actually get to feel that. And they actually get to feel what it's like to be out in the field with the crew. And the crew is able to see the value of command center answering the phone. And the media team is able to capture all of those moments and. And copilot is able to actually see the struggles of the team members and the command center and be able to create the best products for our members at Copilot. And so the objective of getting everyone in the same room everyone's in building. Everyone, same property is really just going back to the fact that we are trying to focus on the things that really matter and cutting out the distractions, cutting out the noise, focusing on the signal and the few major things has always served me well. Okay, check this out. So this is actually all of the building in pieces right here, including all of the metal posts, massive frames that go back up over here. So we have like all the materials for this entire building project. Basically just sitting here at this property doing nothing for the past couple of years. And what's crazy is we bought all of this material in 2021, right in the middle of COVID when everything was like super expensive and everyone was so booked out for building all the subcontractors. Whereas now we went back to them, all the subs. And our budget actually hasn't changed simply because now in our local area they don't have a lot of building projects. So kind of a mixed bag of goodness. Also, if we would have actually started building in 2021, I would have had to get a bunch of debt, albeit at really good interest rates. So it wouldn't have been a bad thing. But fortunately, because now the time has gone on, we should be able to pay this with cash and we have plenty of reserves to make sure, like we won't have to get any loans. But I'm walking back here. This is the kind of the back of the property, way back there we do have a well that we dug. And then this is kind of from the, I guess you'd say the middle of the property of the five acres, but it goes all the way to the back inside those trees. So we should have plenty of area to store materials. The building itself though is going to be up on the top of the property. This will be like parking. And then we gotta do a big water retention area down below there. So it goes all the way from those trees over there all the way up to my car and then way back into those trees. So plenty of room to expand. And I already have plans for a second building. So the plan is that four year lease that we currently have that will be just command center once this building is complete, the first one. But the day we get occupancy of this first building, I'm going to be trying to get a second building on this. So when the four year lease is up at that office that we're moving into, once that's up, I'm hoping we can move over here and start a campus with a second building on this land.

Alright, so pretty normal day, however, I am headed into the studio and the media team was like, you need to record. And the reason for that is because this is actually the last podcast I will ever record in this studio. And technically this is the only second place I've ever actually recorded videos. The very first one was when I was in my room up against the wall and just recording basically all the mistakes I was making in the business and what I was trying to do to fix them. That was after my accident. I actually looked the other day, as of today, it was nine years ago exactly to the day that I started making videos on YouTube. That was the beginning of the YouTube channel. I got this notification and that was about two weeks after I got in the accident in the PTO. And so this space came available. This one, right, that I'm in right now came available because next door on the side of that wall is where the gym is at. And so that's when I started living here in the closet, which I'll show you now. But it's also where I started making videos instead of in my other bedroom up against the wall. So this is where I slept. Oh, and I was on face track. What are we doing? So that's where I slept, sleeping there on the ground. And some people were like, why is it still there? Well, cause I still will crash in there occasionally when I'm completely drained. But this is the very last time I'll record. I'm gonna make two podcasts right now for the Home Service Millionaire podcast. But you can see they've cleared this whole area out because in the next couple days all that studio equipment is going out to the new headquarter building. Pretty jerry rigged. The new headquarter building is gonna have a very nice professional facility that'll be actually engineered and built for what we use this podcast studio for. But this is the very last of an era, probably a solid six years. Six years where you might remember this little thing, this corner, this was the original OG background. Then we moved to this. But yeah, very nostalgic, Very nostalgic. But I'm looking forward to the new headquarter building and looking forward to getting rid of this jerry rigged setup. And so this massive adjustment and this, what this vlog is really just documenting is the fact that sometimes you have to cut away in the short term, things that look good, things that are profitable, good ideas, good business ventures, good real estate, things that you would enjoy. But in the effort of focusing on the mission and the goal, and the goal is to make home service business owners rich. And for Augusta, it's to change the level of professionalism in the landscape industry. So I encourage you keep doing this.

Ideology.

Lock on. Dan.

Let's go to a new office. No. He does. Come on. No. Come on.