Running 6 Businesses: How Much Money I Made in One Month

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes and you're listening to the Business Bootcamp podcast. Today I'm going to be sharing with you the monthly financial numbers behind the businesses that I run. I might take this episode down, so you might want to watch through it and absorb it because I don't know if I'll leave it up. But before we get to today's show, a big thank you, today's sponsor, which makes this all possible, which is Gusto. If you haven't already, go to gusto.combootcamp. you can try out their software completely free for 90 days. You do all your payroll, your benefits really easily. Be able to get health benefits and 401k plans and retirement plans and health education savings plans, all from Gusto, really, really simply. You can get it set up, has an app and very, very cheap for a monthly basis after the free trial. But check it out. Go try it out for three months, see if you like it. Go to gusto.com boot camp. Alright, so I did this YouTube poll and I asked listeners of and subscribers of YouTube, which everyone should subscribe, by the way. Like, my goodness, 60% of the people who watch the videos have not subscribed. So subscribe and then you can get this in your feed and be on the next poll. There you go. So right now, pause, click, subscribe. Makes Josh happy, keeps telling me I need to say that in the videos. So there you go. Go ahead and subscribe. But when you do, you get, like, posts from me in your feed in addition to just regular videos. And on there, I asked if people would see any benefit to me showing my financials. And I shared some of the cons or, like, why I haven't done it in the past, including things like, hey, people are just gonna misconstrue everything you say on the Internet and you publicize it. And two, it could hurt the team because my team is very closely affected by the profitability and we do profit sharing. And just people thinking that you're arrogant and you're just trying to show off on the Internet. And the fact that there's plenty of fake gurus and fake people on the Internet that are sharing their numbers oh so much. And they're just literally frauds and fakes when it comes to, like, e commerce and they're selling their $10,000 course and they're gonna show you how to make a million dollars in the next three months on Amazon. Like, this is the stupidest stuff. So all of those apprehensions is why I've never done it and then I ran this poll to see kind of where people were at. And 75% of the 300 and some odd people that voted said that it would be very helpful. It would be they're inspirational, educational for them. So I'm gonna go ahead and record this, I'm gonna post it. Maybe I take it down or maybe if it really is really impactful and helps a lot of people, maybe I do this on a more consistent basis. So yeah, I might take this down, but I'm going to go through the different businesses that I have and, and what I hope to do if I'm able to do this more consistently, maybe quarterly down the road, is be able to share the story of a business as it relates to the profitability and the financial statements. All right? And so I know that if I don't do this now, I'll probably regret it in like five years when certain businesses that are losing money that I'm running right now are now making money and successful. And I haven't been able to share that journey with you all. And so few things I hope today. I don't have any notes, by the way. Right now I'm just looking at a spreadsheet on my laptop. Then I'm gonna share numbers. I don't have any notes. What I wanna do today is a couple things. Number one, I wanna inspire people that are just getting started to know that, you know, five, six years ago I was, I, well, okay, six years ago I stopped. Okay, now it's, let me think, sorry. Six and a half to seven years ago I stopped going to medical school, decided to go into business. Ran, started Augusta Lawn Care part time while being a personal trainer and going to school, getting my master's in business at night. All right, so that was seven years ago. Fast forward to today. Now I'm sharing you these numbers. So hopefully it inspires that 18 or 19 year old, 20 year old that's in that same position coming out of school, coming out of college, whatever it might be, and hopefully it's inspirational. Secondly, I think there's a lot to learn from seeing someone's profit and loss statements. I know I'm putting myself in a vulnerable position and I know that some people are going to say all sorts of nitpicky things about it and I'll get some flack from it.

Before you say something in the comments or something negative, just ask yourself this question. Would you be willing to share your profit and loss statements publicly? If the answer to that is no, I highly recommend you don't comment. All right. If you're not willing to share your own financial statements and take that risk, then don't go to someone that's trying to help other people. I have no financial. There's no reason for me to share this other than to help people or if my pride was really, really weak. My ego is just that, you know, weird. But that's not why I'm doing this. I hope that my intentions are correct and I hope that you take them correctly and that I want to inspire. Number one, someone's just getting started and realize that, hey, you're in year one. Year two, it's not that glamorous, it's hard work. But years down the road that hard work pays off. This is not a get rich quick scheme. This is not get rich fast, like start a business thing. This takes years and years and years of hard work. And if you look at my tax returns for the, the first five years of my business career, I probably could have made more. No, I take it back. I could have made More Working at McDonald's on my tax returns for those first five years, the average of that. Now, of course, it's all paying off and people will watch this video. This will be the first video they watch. Like, oh, wow, this is so amazing. No, no, like years of not taking money out of the business, years of having negative cash flows because you're just putting it all back in and you're figuring out the systems and figuring out the procedures and making big mistakes. Alright? Had to do all that, had to go through all that stuff to get to what we're talking about today. So do not think that having five or six different businesses is what you need to do tomorrow. Do not think it's going to happen overnight. Do not think it's going to happen in a year or two years or even five years. It could take a long time to do what I've been blessed to accomplish and I couldn't get got here without a whole lot of people supporting me. And I'm not going to go down the list. But I just wanted to kind of preface that. I know some people are like, oh, you don't need to preface it. I'm going to preface it because again, I might take the video down. So let's just go through this. I hope that you can learn from something from this. All right, so first of all, I'm going to go over Augusta Lawn Care, the corporately owned location in Whatcom county. And that's the first location I started. That's the One I started six years ago and it's the larger of the two locations that we own at the corporate. Corporately. Right, so we have franchises. That's not what we're talking about right now. We talking about the corporately owned stores and what they do in revenue. All right, so first off, first of all, I'll probably have Josh like do a spreadsheet here of numbers. So we're going to have the Augusta Lawn Care Corporation. It does. Last month in August 2020, it did $199,000. 66. $199,066 in revenue. In profit it did 67,984. All right, so as I'm recording, this is the first week of September and I'm just going through August 2020's numbers. All right, so revenue 199 and profits 67,000. Alright, so again, this all tells a story. Was this a traditional month? No, not from a net profit standpoint. The reason was, is because we have now switched our business model to go from massive growth into massive profitability. All right, so I've been growing and growing and growing over the past five to six years or six years now. And now we flipped the switch to be profitable. So we increased our prices by $10 per hour. All the things that we talk about on the podcast at Landscape Business course, by the way, raised the prices by $10 per hour, simplified our services, really dumbed down, you know, not doing any crazy work. We don't do artificial turf anymore, we don't do tree chipping, we don't have big trucks. We are taking out our trailers and going to trailerless mowing setups. So like simple, simple, simple, simple simplification of our processes. We are cutting out waste, really making a lean machine. And you know, 30% net profit is, is better than most months. All right, but that being said, literally if you go back a few months ago when we were in hyper growth, we literally lost $9,000 like at the bottom line in a month because we bought three new vehicles, hired like five or six new people. That creates waste. We were, you know, hiring a lot of people, you know, getting rid of people, training. Then you're, you got three new trucks, we got more equipment, spending a lot of money on those things and infrastructure and all the rest. Now we got to the point where it's like, hey, we're not going to keep growing. We're going to focus on profitability. So we increase the prices, we reduce the service account and the service complexity and we really focus on making a Lean, mean machine. And yeah, big mistakes I've made in that business. And what I do with the franchise is now hopefully saving them years of time trying to figure out those mistakes. I would not have done artificial turf, I would not have done big trucks, I would not have done spraying, I would not have done tree work. I would have focused on what I do now. And so I hope that with like the franchise from the beginning, they can save the time, save the money of the things that I had to figure out. And that's why we started the franchise. And so that first, that's the first location last month did 199,000 revenue and profited 67,000 in profit. And our goal is just to continually increase prices, increase value, increase efficiencies there to really make that just a really solid profit machine. And I give about 27 to 30% of profits from that store back to the employees. So be very clear there. And the reason I do that is because I'm there three times a week, Monday, Wednesday and Thursday morning for meetings with the team. And I have great management in place there. Very blessed to have them and a great team. And so I feel like I should be giving back to them because I'm not so much involved in the day to day. And they do a lot of kind of testing and experimentation with certain things for so that the franchisees can benefit. Alright, so that's the first business. Next business is Anytime Fitness in Blaine. So if you watch the channel for a long time, you know that I bought Anytime Fitness, which is a gym. And I bought them about six months before we started Augusta Lawn Care franchise. And I did that because I wanted to learn their systems, the procedures, how they interacted with their franchisees, how they supported them, how they trained them. And we adopted their business model of charging just a set monthly fee for, for our franchisees instead of a percentage of revenue. And so I learned a lot from them. Definitely I've kind of taken what I needed from Anytime Fitness but with the whole virus that's gone through and Covid and everything, I have learned so much in the past six months from Anytime Fitness. So Anytime Fitness, it's a franchise. It was ranked number one by Entrepreneur magazine in 2015. So I bought into the franchise, purchased the gym that I actually used to work at back in the day, part time as a trainer. And so I bought him out. It was already a successful club, really wanted to learn the systems of the franchise so I could use those at Augusta Lawn Care. And yeah, it's been really a Good experience. It's always been profitable. It's always been really good. Now then we had coronavirus come along and we were closed for three months. In those three months, we were not allowed to collect payments for memberships. And so we lost a lot of, of revenue and we couldn't. Like, people canceled their memberships, right? So before COVID we had like a thousand plus members and our membership has gone down by about 30 to 40%. And so that stinks. But what we did is we've tripled our prices on training, personal training, group training, and we've really doubled down on selling that. And we've done really well. Like, our revenues are still down a bit, but Last month in August 2020, we did $40,196,000 in revenue. Total profit for Anytime Fitness last month was $16,187. Now, the reason that's pretty good, considering the fact that we just went through coronavirus, is the fact that we have an SBA loan on that business. This is why I want to share these numbers, is because a profit and loss statement and these financials tell a story, alright? And so you say, well, why is that number so good? The reason that number is good is because we have an SBA loan and the SBA loan is, is not making anyone pay on their loan until the end of the year. All right? So we basically are getting $5,480 a month that we would otherwise be putting towards a loan. We get to keep that. And that's the money I'm spending on advertising and really developing the training program. All right? So again, you could take that 16,184 and take away the 5,400 that we're saving on the SBA loan and really get what we're actually making. But again, we don't have to make any payments on the SBA loan until the end of the year. And so it's from a cash flow perspective, really good. And you're like, well, you shouldn't be taking it. If you're doing well, why are you taking government assistance? Let me be very clear here. I did not ask for that. The SBA literally sent us a letter and said, you're not paying payments until the end of December 2020. And the bank that we went through to get the SBA loan, they gave us three months. And then the sba, the SBA came through and gave us the additional to the end of the year. And that was across the board. And I'm not going to be foolish and not take It I'm going to take that money and went and hired another trainer. This is why government assistance is a good thing for the economy. Right. We took that opportunity, took the extra 5,000 that we're saving every month. I put that into hiring a full time trainer as well as marketing to get that training program up and running and try to replace as much revenue as possible from the membership side of things, which usually our revenues are higher. But again I'm happy that it's still profitable and cash flow positive. Alright, so that's anytime fitness. All right. The next one, the next grouping kind of business that I have is kind of a conglomeration, the media group. So includes landscape business, course, business bootcamp, podcast as well as the things I do like writing those books. So like Amazon Adsense from Google and YouTube which is not very much and just all the other stuff all in last month we made. So this includes landscape business course. The course landscapebusinesscourse.com includes lawn careweb design.com and so yeah, includes all those things. Last month in terms of revenue we made $9,306. So that's what we made from that. And 100% of the money that goes into this entity is used to create more content. Have content like this. Have content. Now I have a full time videographer. And so that $9,300 was from Core sales, lawn care, web design where we build landscapers websites. It's $400 per month. And so I think we have like eight or nine people already on that and so definitely check that out. All of that money is used to make more content. Alright. So that's why I've been able to hire Josh as a full time videographer and that's why you've seen so much more content. Usually I was doing like one or two videos a week. Now it's one or two videos a day because Josh is working on the media side of things. And so all the money I make from book sales, course sales gusto, our sponsor pays us and all of that money is used to create more content. And whether it be traveling, all of those things, that was a down month. Usually that's significantly higher more revenue. But is what it is. We did raise the price on the course and I haven't really been pitching it a whole lot. But anyways 9300 is what we made on that. In terms of profit we made a whopping $28. The reason for that is because again all the money I make on that is going to be shifted into paying for more content. So Josh, he's on salary. We have to pay for these lights in this studio and getting content out. And I send books out to people for free that are help needy and stuff like that. So anyways, that was landscape business course, the whole media group with business bootcamp, podcasts and stuff like that. All right, next one up is the franchise. Alright, now this one I could probably get into some trouble, but basically I just gotta tell you that the franchise is not making money right now. It's losing money. All right, it's losing money. I know it's going to lose money probably for the next six to 12 months. All right? And so right now, the profits that we're making, other businesses, that's what I'm funneling towards this through obviously owner's distributions and keeping it all separate. But what my goal is is to make all of my businesses completely independent of each other, where I'm not taking money from one and giving you another. So I don't just take money from Augusta Lawn Care Corporation, like, oh, directly to the franchise. No, it's gotta be paid to me. And then I as the owner then put money in like it's all done correctly. And I keep them as separate as possible, separate bank accounts, the whole nine yards. But more importantly, I want every business unit to be profitable. And I'm not like, oh, this is just going to be a loss leader lost forever. No, like the franchise is going to be sustainable within 6 to 12 months where by itself it makes money. Okay, right now we have 20 locations and we're growing and it costs a lot of money last year to just get the systems. So like the legal aspects of a franchise and all the lawyers and all the rest of it paid all that last year. This year it was mostly just trying to like just building the, improving the website. You have web designers and all the rest of it you're paying for. And then command center. So command center answers all the phone calls and sends out the estimates for the franchisees. It does not. It's not profitable. But again, as we scale it will become profitable. And so right now the fine balance that I walk as the franchisor is trying to make sure that our revenues and our profitability is sustainable. And that means I want to obviously add more and more support. But I can only do that as we get more franchisees and we're not advertising and spending a bunch of money on that. We're focusing on supporting our existing franchisees. And if the systems work and they do well, we will get more Franchisees and that's been working well. And so.

Right now we're in a good spot financially. And so I'm moving more and more resources to the franchise. I'm going to be moving the office manager that's worked for four plus years at the Bellingham location and move her into a part time position where she can help and support the franchisees. We're doing that this fall. And so my whole kind of thing right now is as much as we can possibly afford. We're trying to put more and more resources towards supporting the existing franchisees. We don't spend any money on advertising, really. It's just my content that attracts people to the franchise. So last month was definitely lower on revenue because we didn't sell any new franchisees. And the goal when it comes to franchises is when we sell a franchise, it costs us quite a bit in legals and we got to set up their website. It's a substantial cost. Even though it costs 15 grand to get started. Most that's ate up in just costs. And so all the training aspect, the website, getting them all set up, the legal part, we cover all that for them. And so most of the initial fee is just ate up in that stuff, about 60, 70% of it. So last month we didn't actually collect any initial fees. So the revenue is pretty low. So the revenue for the Augusta franchise was 19,635. That's usually double twice as much as that. But the profit is pretty much standard. And that is we lost $1,240. It's very standard. We just try to keep it around zero. We're always losing a little bit or just a little bit above. And basically it's like as soon as we get more money, we're putting that into more support for the existing franchisees. We do not spend a single dollar on trying to get new franchisees. I'm not interested in that. I know that if we support and make the existing one successful, that they will, you know, the franchise will do great. There'll be lots of people wanting to get in. And we've seen more and more of that as we have to weed more and more people out of the application process. So August 2020, for the franchise, we lost some money, definitely a lower revenue month by about half, but it's because we didn't get the initial fee part. But obviously it doesn't really change our profitability because most of that goes right into, you know, the expenses of getting them all set up. And so that's not gonna be a money maker. And if I continue to do this, you'll see this trajectory that will not be a money maker from a profitability standpoint probably for the next six to 12 months again before we get about 50 franchisees, 40 to 50 franchisees. I think it'll be more sustainable. And so we're not putting money constantly in, but the franchise from my perspective, I'm not looking at as a moneymaker for at least two to three years because every single dollar we get in profit will be put into support revamping things. So a big step we took this year because this month, and even though this number looks really small right now and doesn't look like we're making a bunch of money, like it's, it is sustainable. It is definitely something I'm very, I know in the long term will be very profitable. But the, the thing that we're really focused on is just building the support network. So for example, we actually started building version three of our P4P system. We built version two and literally two or three weeks after being completely finished with it, having the apps in the App Store and being ready to go, we immediately went to version three because we could afford, I know we can afford it based upon what our growth is and where the revenues we've got, the initial, the monthly fees coming in from the franchisees. It's a set monthly fee. So it gives us a good amount of like knowing exactly how much money I have to work with. And so now we're at the point where we were able to afford that. I know we can afford the developer and I'm really looking forward to what we're going to do there. I have a lot of plans for what we're going to do with software in terms of CRM, P4P profit sharing and open book management down the road. And so as we get more money, that's exactly what we're, you know, putting the money back into that. Alright, so negative 12, $40 from that. All right. Augusta, Mount Vernon. So this is the second location that we started about six months ago down in Mount Vernon. And it is going to be really to be the proof of concept for a smaller operation at Augusta Lawn Care. So the local shop, the one we just talked about, the one that did 199,000 revenue last month, it has been around for a long time. It has a lot of employees, a bunch of trucks. I think it has 13, 14 or 15 trucks. Think it's something like that. 12, 13, 14, 15. I think 15, something like that. Many trucks, a lot of, you know, really established. Right. I want to prove that the Augusta model also works in a smaller environment where you only have a couple employees. So down in Mount Vernon, Tim, he's my brother, and he's the general manager. He gets paid a salary, and he gets paid profit sharing for on a quarterly basis. And so down there, Mount Vernon last month, they did $23,807 in revenue, and they had a profit of 11,938. So almost a 50% profit margin down there. A very lean model. One employee with the general manager. The general manager works out in the field, then does estimates in the evenings. And very, very lean, Very, very profitable. And I really like this model, having 1, 2, 3 employees and still being very efficient. They focus on high prices and they're not focused on volume and just grow, grow, grow and advertise and bit more trucks and all the rest of it. Like, they have a $300. They pay for a land area where they park their trucks, they dump their debris. And it's just a great model. I want to keep it like under 40,000 in monthly revenue, because I really feel like that small model will also work for someone who wants to stay in the business or working and still make it very profitable. So, like, Tim would usually be the franchisee, and he gets a salary, and that salary is before this profit number. So this profit number is after all expenses are paid. And like, and I don't work there. I don't do estimates. I don't go down there at all. I haven't been down there in like six to eight weeks. Eight weeks probably. And I don't go down there at all. I meet with Tim once a week on Saturdays for about 30 minutes and just go over if he has any questions as the general manager. But I'm proving that model so that a franchisee is like, hey, I don't want to build, you know, 30 employees. I'd rather have two or three. I want to work out in the field. And you can still be profitable using the systems. And so he pays franchise fees, he pays command center, just like another franchisee would, all the same fee structure. And these are the numbers he had last month down in Mount Vernon. So 23,807 in revenue, 11,938 in profit. So those are the businesses that are existing. What's interesting is starting next month. And yeah, next month is when real estate will start becoming a part of this game too, because this year, again, I've been very blessed. All the stuff that I've been working on has kind of started to be, like, profitable and having money in the bank. I'm a big proponent of using that to put it back in the businesses. But anything left over, I didn't want cash sitting around. And so I've been able to buy some really good real estate deals. And so this year I've added, in the past couple months, added eight units to a rental portfolio. And so Now I have 10 rentals that I own. And so within two months, I'll start sharing those numbers, possibly because that's when I'll have them all on their lease and like, get them all set up. Right now we're in escrow on two deals. And so that's from a real estate standpoint. That's what we're doing. How I do it is I've never taken money from the businesses until this year. So I've never taken money from the local shop local, that first location, until this year. And I use that money for the real estate deals. I use it for the. Mostly for the franchise. But really what I use for the real estate deals is my own personal money through the stock market. And so this, the past month, in August, the stocks that I do own, they appreciated by about $38,000. And so I've only really gotten interested and involved in the stock market for the past 2020. Right. I really went all in when the stock market crashed in end of March, beginning of April, really went all in and made really well on that. Really been fortunate to do that. And I've taken all of that money and moved it now into real estate. I feel like I've kind of rode the wave. I'm not trying. I don't do penny stocks. I don't do, like, high growth, like, crazy stuff. I feel like I've gotten very lucky the past few months, and now I'm going into more of passive income stream, which is going to be the real estate. And so I'd say about 90% of the funds I use for the down payments on the real estate came from the stocks. The other 10% was probably from just profits that I accumulated from Augusta and stuff like that. But most of the profits that I make in the businesses, I try to keep going back into the businesses. I'm at the point of stage in my life now. I don't need the money. I don't need it for a house. I don't have a fancy car. I don't take crazy vacations or anything like that. So I want to invest back in the business give as much of the profit sharing back to the employees, take the money that I do have left over put to the franchise. And then money that I make from stocks is directly going into real estate. So I still have a good amount of money in stocks that is kind of like my piggy bank. That's where I keep my cash and move more towards a conservative kind of play with my stocks now that I've taken a lot of the money out and put it into the real estate deals. So in the future I would be able to share cash flows on those 10 units. They're all larger units besides one studio. They're all like three bedroom units. So they're bigger. And in our market a three bedroom house goes for, you know, three, $400,000. And so this is not like, you know, $50,000 a door. These are bigger properties. These are, you know, in our market it's just more expensive. Cost of living is really high. They'll, the game is appreciation, not so much cash flow. I said that on one of my videos though and someone was like, oh, that's a crazy strategy. The thing is, look, if it might not cash flow now, but in five years the rents will probably be, you know, $300 more per unit. Guess what, that's straight profit now. So definitely in the long term it's a cash flow game as well as an appreciation game. So hopefully everything that I said today made sense was insp. And helped you kind of, you know, put together some things in your mind. If you're a landscaper, definitely check out the video. I made those really in depth actually went through the profit and loss statement item by item in the expense categorization for the Augusta Lawn Care local shop. So thank you so much all for watching supporting the channel and I look forward to continued success and giving you as much information and knowledge as possible. Make sure to check out lawn careweb design.com if you want your website back built for your landscape business, landscapebusinesscourse.com for more training and tips. And until next time, be great because nothing else pays.