Saving Up for New HQ! REAL Monthly Financials for All My Businesses

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes and you're listening to the Business Bootcamp podcast. Today we're going to be talking about the different businesses that I own and how much revenue and profit we made in the month of October. It's now the first week of November. It's actually election week. Today's election day, actually, when I'm recording this. But we're going to talk about October 2020, what all the businesses did in revenue, what they did in profit, and just kind of give you an update. And if this is the first time you've watched these, make sure you watch the ones previously. You can kind of start seeing the story of the businesses as they begin to grow. But before we get into today's show, though, a big thank you. Today's sponsor, which is Gusto, if you haven't Already, go to gusto.combootcamp Try out the software completely free for 90 days when you use that code. And what's so cool about Gusto as we end the end of the year? We're getting the end of the year now, and you've got to do W2s for your employees. Got to do reports. That needs to be something that's done fast. And if you do not have a bookkeeper or an accountant doing this for you, Gusto can be that person. And you're literally paying like nine bucks a month and after the trial. So try out today completely free for a quarter, though. Three months, just go to Gusto.com Bootcamp alright, so let's go ahead and jump right into it. I'm probably not going to do individual videos for the lawn care divisions this month just because I don't have time. If I do, I might. I still might do them, but I'm going to kind of do them all together in one big chunk today. And the difference today is that I can now, not no longer, until I have some more clarity. Legally, I can't anymore share what the franchise is doing in terms of revenues and profits, only because one of our competitors also does franchising in this industry, kind of threatened me on a few things. And so I'm just gonna lie low for a second. Of course, I don't think I agree with it and I feel like what I was sharing was not illegal. And I will try my utmost to get that all taken care of. But for now, I'm gonna lump the franchise in with all the stuff I do with the media and the podcast and the course and the rest of it. So a little bit different than previous months, where I went into more detail this month. I'm gonna have to be a little more generic on that subject just to make sure that we're doing everything right. I'm happy, though, that our competitors in the franchise world of lawn care are mad at me because it means that they know we're gonna be a stiff competitor, and we are. I know that for a fact that they cannot service the franchisees the way we do, care as much as we do, and absolutely cannot do it at the cost that we do it. We are very, very, very lean at a corporate level, and we'll continue that. And that's the only reason we're able to afford $1,200 a month for our franchisees, whereas they're depending on four or five thousand per month as a. As a franchise grows. So I'm very optimistic about that, and I'm actually happy. I know I'm on their radar. So that's all I'm going to say about that. But let's go ahead and start from the top. The Augusta Long Care Corporation. That is the first location, the Bellingham location. And so their total revenues for October 2020 were $118,648 and definitely a drop, obviously, from September and definitely from August, when we have more projects here in our market. Once we hit October and it starts raining, we can't do any projects, like, in terms of grading or anything to do with, like, bigger projects, like dirt, because it just becomes mud because we have so much rain. Like, literally, as I'm recording this, it is pouring outside. Like, you wouldn't be able to do any grading for the next week even if it was sunny. So we don't plan or schedule any sort of large projects of any sort during October and beyond. So revenue dips a little bit, but profitability is still there just because of the fact that we are still doing residential mowing and recurring services and leaf cleanups and all the rest of it. We start doing a lot of leaf cleanups in November, but it definitely drops off a little bit. So that was the revenue for October 2020-1180-0064-8000. The profit on that was 27,892. However, a little over 20,000 of that was given as profit sharing. On my last video, I talked about profit sharing, and I put it in a pre profit. Like, I gave you the profit number and said that includes already having paid out money for profit sharing. Well, I want to make a little more clear, because there are some questions about that. So. So our profit was 27,892, but a little over 20,000 of that was given to the employees. So at conference landscape summit 2021, we're going to talk a lot about the profit sharing program, how to implement that for managers, how to implement that for your frontline staff, and how it really can change your culture. And some of you, like, my goodness, you gave two thirds of your profit away. So we do it on a quarterly basis. So don't freak out about too much. And it's definitely worth it. They deserve every single penny of it. They're the best team. And I feel like the profit sharing program is a big p of having them care so much about the business and why it is so profitable. So more on that at the conference. But again, 27,892 in profit, about 20,000 that was given away to the team in profit sharing. All right, Blaine. Anytime Fitness. So in the month of October, we do what we call club enhancement fees, where all of our members pay $15, and we get new equipment and we put that towards buying and improving the club. And we try to actually make it like we spend all the club enhancement fees on new equipment or improving the club. So, for example, this club enhancement fee is $15 per member. So we make a good chunk of change because we have about pre Covid, we had about 750 members, and now we have about 600 members. 620, I think. And so definitely dropped a little bit from COVID But if you watched my last video about gym, I made a video last week about how to do a gym post Covid, and some of the changes we've made to really actually get our revenues back to where they were before COVID So we're pretty much right back that level by using training, and we're really focusing on creating high, you know, very expensive packages for training, comparatively to just a regular membership. So, you know, a regular membership might sell for $50 a month. And we're going to be selling packages for 400, $400 and up for training per month, and so definitely increasing the lifetime value of the customers. We've been working on that. And so Our revenue for October 2020 includes the club enhancement fee. So that's why it's a little bit higher than last month. The total revenue was $46,830, and our profit was $16,010. And that includes we do a little bit of the profit sharing for the trainers as we begin to grow. That's all wrapped up, like, as a cost before the profit. That profit's like actual bottom line. But, and I'm sorry I was a little bit confusing, but these businesses are all different levels in terms of there's management and some of them don't have less managers. But in all my business, I have some form of profit sharing in terms of either management or the whole team getting a piece of the profits. So anytime Fitness 46,000 830,000 in. $46,830 in revenue, $16,010 in profit. So for Landscape Business course, that is landscapebusinesscourse.com the course is on there. If you look in the description of this video or the podcast, there's links that take you to other courses like the MBA course. You can do a one on one video conference with me. So that consulting call, all of that stuff combined lawn carewebdesign.com where we design lawn care and landscapers websites from scratch without any contract. All of this is being wrapped into the same number. So I'm sorry, I have to do this, I have to wrap it in also with the franchise. So the franchise is Augusta Lawn Care franchise. We now have 28 or 29 locations for Augusta lawn Care. And so that's been growing really well and it's become finally where it's sustainable. And we're able to start investing more and more into servicing the franchisees by bringing in more staff for helping them and really getting them going. So especially 2021 spring is when we're going to be bringing like Liz is moving from the Bellingham location into moving to helping with the franchisees exclusively. And that's going to be as we can afford it into next spring. But you know, so the franchise, landscape business course, lawn care web design, the books, the podcasts, the stuff on teachable, which is like the MBA course link below and the conference call coaching call down below those links, you can book those yourself and buy those. All of this is wrapped up in this number. And that total for October was $113,239 and the profit was 68,729. And I know that seems really, really high. And the reason for that is because of the conference. So you definitely should be signed up for the conference. Cause you can see here we're getting a lot of people signing up for it and it's going to fill up pretty soon. So Landscape Summit 2021 is happening in January and what happens is obviously people are buying tickets now, but the bulk of my costs aren't going to come out until December. And January, because the caterers for the food, the venue, all of that, some of it, you have to pay for deposits. But in most of, like, you're going to see this massive deficit in January and you're like, oh, my word, he's losing money. No, it's because right now I'm collecting the money for. For the conference tickets, and then we give it all. You know, we have to give it all away to all the vendors and the sound equipment and all the rest of it, and having my team there for the whole week. So all of that gets spent, not all 68,000, but a big chunk of that's gonna get spent for the conference. And so that's why that revenue has gone up dramatically. And as well as we did sell some franchises through the month of October, so that helps, obviously, as well. But the bulk of that, the big jump there is because of the conference and people buying those tickets. So Definitely go to landscapebusinesscourse.com conference. Sign up today, bring your spouse. Yesterday, one of our franchisees is bringing seven people with him and just showed the commitment to the team, and they value it. They see it. And we've done the same thing at our local team, too. Taking events where it's just a bunch of owners and we bring our entire team, and it just changes the culture. So hopefully that makes sense. That one's a big one. I know it's a big jump in terms of revenue and profits, and that's mostly due to the fact that I had to group the franchise in with all the other stuff. And I hope next few months, hopefully by 2021, I can get the legal thumbs up to split those back up. But right now we're kind of being threatened a little bit. And that's fine. That's very good. It means that we are doing the right things in the franchise. And a lot of pressure is being put on these franchisors that, in my opinion, are doing wrong practices by their franchisees. And there's a reason why.

I'm just gonna. Like, if they're gonna come after me, I can say a little bit about them. There's a reason why in the past two years, their franchise numbers have gone down. And in the past 12 months, we've almost sold 30 locations. There's a reason why. Because we're putting the franchisee first, number one. And they put dollars and cents. That's just the bottom line. And so anyways. All right, Mount Vernon, Augusta Lawn, care of Mount Vernon. This is an interesting one, because now that's Slowing down in our market a little bit. We no longer have two.

And so when next month's revenue comes in, it's gonna come down. Come down significantly. Mount Vernon, because now it's just Tim working and then one employee only, like, a tiny little bit, like maybe once a week. And so his revenue for October 2020. So if you don't know, the Mount Vernon location is an Augusta lawn care franchise, and it operates about 45 minutes down south of our first location. And it is run by a general manager. And I have not been down there this entire. Probably at least four months now. Three, four months. And before that, probably three or four months. So, like, I'm hardly down there. I talk to Tim maybe once a month about business, and we have a business meeting, but that's what I do with all the franchisees. So he's really treated like a franchisee. He has command center that answers all his calls, all his emails, does all his estimates and scheduling and invoicing and the whole nine yards. And so just a really, really efficient operation. So Tim down in Mount Vernon, he did $21,752 in revenue and in profit. He did $7,305 in profit. But then there was a profit sharing, a little over $7,000 that went to profit sharing. So basically broke even, bottom, bottom line. But that was because profit sharing happened that quarter, and $7,000 in profit sharing went to him. And again, we're gonna talk a lot about profit sharing at the conference. Definitely want to be there. We're going to talk about the manager model, like we're using in Mount Vernon, and then we're going to talk about more of the model that we're using in the local shop that's much bigger, has a lot more employees, and how to involve the actual labors and the team into the profit sharing. So really, really interesting. I hope you can come for that also. So for most of you, you know that I do some investing. And so investing in stocks this month was really, really interesting. October 1st two months, two first two weeks of October, the market just took off. And so midway through October, when we were traveling actually back from our trip. So Josh and I, at the beginning of October, traveled all around the country, visiting all the franchisees, about 10 of them, and it was great. On the way back, I actually sold quite a bit of stocks. And I vividly remember it because I was on the plane and was like, okay, this is getting crazy. And it was just like the mark had just gone, like, four days straight. Just Very, very steep high. So I sold off quite a bit. But then the past two weeks, the last two weeks of October, the market went down substantially. And so I bought back in even more than I was before because I feel like we're at a low, a lull. And literally, as I'm recording this as Election Day, I feel like regardless of who wins, the market is gonna go up in the next few months just because of everything from stimulus to really just the uncertainty if we have a contested election, all of the rest of it. So I guess by the time you're watching this, you already know who's won and whether I'm right or wrong. But basically, in my opinion, if Trump wins, you're gonna see a lot of the.

Cyclicals do really well. So, like, oil is gonna do a whole lot better under Trump in the next year if he gets in. And then you're gonna see, like, the recovery stocks not get beat down, but they're not gonna have as much of a bump. Whereas if Biden gets in, the recovery stocks like retail, restaurants, et cetera, they're gonna do a lot better because they know there's a much, much bigger stimulus package coming. So I feel like even though with Biden, there's going to be tax, There would be tax increases, there would be.

You know, some. Some pressure on the market in that regard, the amount of stimulus that's going to be pumped in from the Democratic, especially if they sweep, will be so incredibly large that I think it'll definitely counteract and the market will still go up over the next year, especially the next six months. And then if Trump gets in, I feel like because of the pro business approach that they have, cutting taxes, all the rest of it, deregulation, that's going to also lead to a market increase. And so I also. My theories in terms like short term, you know, the stimulus part is probably going to bump it a lot more, but over the next four years, okay, like deregulation. And then you have China, for example, if you're having a manufacturing company and Biden gets in, like, China's stance on China's gonna be a lot easier. So those stocks will do good. So just really, really interesting. I love this stuff. It keeps me sharp in terms of just looking at different industries and looking at our business, even from a macro environment, and seeing where things are going and how politics affects the economy. So in order, basically, for stocks in October, I was probably flat just because the beginning of the month went way up, and then I sold off a lot. And then on its way down. I've just been trickling in. And so the past few days, the market's been really, really good. I expect for November to be pretty good in the market as there's more confidence of what's going to happen. Like right now, there's just a lot of uncertainty. And I feel like regardless of who gets in, unless there's a contested election, that next few weeks and a couple months will be strong in the market. So that's for stocks, for real estate. We closed on my final real estate deal. I probably won't be getting another one for a while.

So real estate is really my way of making sure I don't have to pay taxes. And it's a hedge against that. And so for real estate, we closed our fourth duplex. So the day I got back from our trip around the country, I signed on my fourth duplex. And so now I have 10 units. I have 10 real estate units. And this past month we put about $40,000 in renovations for the real estate. And so those are all renovations to increase the value of the property. Obviously, again, I'm able to write a lot of this stuff off or amortize it this year for taxes, and that's going to be the biggest reason why. But then by doing so, we're able to increase the rent significantly at these properties. And so my cash on cash returns will go up and just the basic net oi net operating income. I don't want to get too technical, but it's going to make. The cost of the rent is going to go up significantly. But every single unit I'm putting a good $20,000 plus into and so put about $40,000 into renovations this past month for the real estate. But we need to make profit, I promise you that. And the reason for that is because with the rent moratorium or, sorry, the eviction moratorium, a lot of our, not a lot of some of our tenants are not paying rent. So basically we're just. I'm just happy to pay the mortgage, pay the, Pay the management, and then just focus on investing into the property in terms of improving it, getting the rents higher because rents are getting elevated in our market quite a bit. And so I think it'll be a good spot, especially come next year when I'm not like, actively improving the properties and having to like, kick people out and put new tenants in and all of that sort of thing. They'll start cash flowing really well. And so I look forward to that because we are going to be building a new headquarters for Augusta and in the next year. So we're already starting to look for property and things like that. All the money from Augusta Lawn Care Corporation, the franchise, Mount Vernon, all that's going to be kind of collected over the next year. All of that's going to be saved. Parts of that can be saved to go towards the new headquarters, because we want to build a place where we can bring everything together. Right now, we have three different offices in terms of the Bellingham location, their shop, and then we got the command center and the franchise, and then we got the studio. This is where I'm recording right now, the studio and the franchise training. And all of that's here. So we want to bring that all under one location. And so that's gonna take a lot of money. And so we have to do it on commercial land. We have to get everything built. It's gonna be expensive, but I feel it's gonna be really valuable to bring it all under one roof. We'll save significant amount of money every month by not having to have them all split up, as well as just the cohesiveness for the culture between the franchise and a local shop, as well as when we train our franchisees. No longer will it be like just training. It'll be like, hey, here's what we're talking about on the screen. If you look out the window, because we want to have them on the second store, it's gonna be really cool, all glass, and there'll be a lookout. And actually see what we're talking about. Like this. Here's the systems that we're talking about. Here they are in action, and that's what we want to do. So that's kind of the big thing in the next 12 months that we're saving up for. So all the money I'm making in terms of real estate profits next year, the local shop profits, franchise, all that's gonna be starting to get saved towards that, because we don't want to put the franchise in a debt burden. So we're really gonna be trying to chunk this thing off with cash. So that's the goal. I don't think we'll pay for the whole thing in cash. It's gonna be a big, big expense. But trying to save up for that is important. And in our local market, commercial real estate, you're looking at at least 200 to $300,000 per acre, if it's decent. And that's what's wetland sometimes. And if it's. If it's a good location, you're looking at like 400,000 per acre. For commercial land. We have to have commercial land. I can't do this on a residential because we're gonna have so many employees. And with Command center and training people, you just need one person reporting. You get in trouble if you do it on residential land. So gotta do on commercial land. We've gotta buy it. We're kind of done with the whole renting thing. We want to invest in a place for the long term, be able to have a place where the franchisees can come and learn a lot better. Have Command center all in one space, one in one place. And so I'm really, really looking forward to that. That's where all the money is going to be saved, though, for the next, like, 12 months. And we don't want to put in a debt that the franchise we want again. We're going to run that franchise like a lean, lean machine. The same way that people ask me, like, you know, how are you guys doing Augusta of Mount Vernon so efficiently when you're not even involved? It's because we have the systems in place, and that's what the franchise is built around. The same ways, like, as we're building Augusta franchise and we're building the corporate, we're doing the same thing. Like P4P is implemented for Command Center. Everything is super, super lean. We're not spending. We're not spending lavishly. We're very, very focused on cutting costs, being profitable as much as possible, and then taking that money and improving the service to the. To the franchisees. And, you know, they'll sell themselves. I don't advertise for the franchise. People who listen to podcast, people that, you know, especially in like, two to three years, will take off because it'll. The track record of those first franchisees that started with nothing, they'll start succeeding then. That first year is always hard, especially for the first franchisees that didn't have a lot of money, like, they kind of got to this year. Next year, they'll start growing. It's that third, fourth year. That's where they're gonna start really flexing their wings and feeling the power of the systems and everything. And so when that starts happening, that's when our momentum's gonna take off. And we already know that, like, next. Next year, we'll need at least five times as many people at Command Center. We're Gonna have almost 100 locations by the end of next year. So it's gonna be a lot of fun. Anyways, thanks so much, everyone. I appreciate you. Kind of hanging in here for the journey, the story. I know for some of you, this is inspirational. For some of you, this is. You just kind of want to stay abreast of what's going on here. I know some people are just watching. I know some of. Some of you are my competitors in the franchise world, and you're watching to see what we're doing. So, anyways, thank you so much, everyone. You listen to Business Boot Camp podcast. I'm Mike Andes. Until next time, be great, because nothing else pays.