Sorry, There's Something I Didn't Tell You...

This will be the hardest keynote I've ever given my whole life. If you're a sympathy crier, I'm warning you right now. Yeah. What made you want to share this?

I don't want to share this. That's why I just want to get.

Through this one keynote. I just need to get through this one.

Then there are some more technical.

I can talk about compensation models and marketing all day.

Economics, let's go. Even philosophy I'd be okay with, but this one's tough. The untold turnaround. In 2024, I traveled to over 30 struggling businesses in North America, and most of you have seen the show on YouTube, post on Facebook, etc. And it was great. We go out and travel to these businesses that are struggling, and we spend one day with the owner, usually actually a few hours, trying to turn around their company, and we call them back, usually six weeks later, and see if any changes have been made inside the business, if they've made any improvements. I admire the business owners that even allow us to come on the show and apply to come on the turnaround show. And the reason is because I'm publicly showing their weakest moments in their business. I'm publicly asking their employees about their failures. I'm asking them about their personal issues, the debts that they have, the struggles that they face, and the problems that we as business owners encounter every day. But yet I'm asking them to put it on a public stage and throwing cameras in their face and microphones on their T shirt. And many times in the comments you might have seen people will get vicious.

Talking about people when they cry, when they have tears or when they go through struggles and they mock their decisions and things that they've done in their company to get in a really bad spot. And it kind of annoys me because.

These people are publicly allowing me me to come in and talk to them at their lowest moment in business, when they feel like giving up. And the last resort is you to call me. One turnaround episode last year was ongoing the entire year. None of the thumbnails you've seen so far or the 30 that I've shared publicly. We've never released the video because the turnaround isn't actually over yet. Today I will share the beginning of that story, and on Saturday, another speaker will share the other half. And this is the story of the untold turnaround. I hope there's no sympathy criers cause I'm gonna cry.

I just wanna get to this keynote, dude.

This is the hardest one.

The start of it. Was three years ago, January 2022, landscape summit, which this event used to be called Landscape Summit, specifically for lawn care and landscapers. In the Q and A session at this event in Ferndale, Washington, I was asked if I would ever start a CRM and start a software business. And at the time I said, I don't want to start a CRM. I don't have any plans to start a CRM. A CRM by the way, is a customer relationship management tool. Think jobber, copilot, service, autopilot, lmn, et cetera. But I said, hey, no, I don't want to start that. I knew the struggles. I knew enough people in software to know that that was extremely difficult. So fast forward a month or two later, time going on, and I started to realize that robotics was not going to be the thing that separated the noobs from the pros in this industry. In the United states, there's over 600,000 landscaping companies.

The vast majority of profits will go to the top 10%. And what I see the top 10% doing over the next several years is embracing software. Now, as time went on in 2022, I started getting frustrated because we are starting to scale up Augusta Lawn Care and the franchises and all the locations. And we started having a lot of issues with scaling it up internally at command center as well as just issues that I knew would be easily solved in terms of deposit thresholds, credit card requirements on file, etc. So I started getting frustrated with it. I started seeing it affecting cash flow, different aspects of the owner's locations. And the question started to haunt me like where did the founder led companies go into in software when it came to lawn care? In the lawn care and landscaping industry, a good friend of mine had recently sold out his stake as co founder in another company that I had previously been using. And even more recently, the founder of lmn, Mark Bradley, has sold out his position in lmn. And I see this as a massive loss to the industry. And the reason for that is because once the founder has left, you can consistently see these companies flounder. They do not innovate, they do not push the envelope and they stop investing in their product. And because of that, our industry falls behind. And I genuinely believe that the lawn care, landscaping and home Service industry is five to 10 years behind when it comes to software. And so I said, where are the founder led companies? There's no one pushing the envelope here and willing to invest in your amount of money over the next 10 years to catch us up. So in summer 2022, I had talked to a friend for a couple years and I've been helping him with his business already and kind of trying to help him get the business more established. And I acquired the code base from LawnPro. Lon Pro is still in operation today. And I said, hey, look like, I think we can improve this. There's all these different aspects that are good inside the current database and I think these are the improvements that if made, would be able to massively improve the industry. And so basically I gave away a minority position of the company in order to be able to take the code base and run with it. And I didn't tell anyone about this. This was 100%. Not a single soul knew about what was going on behind the scenes and the negotiations and the attorneys and everything that we were getting involved here. In July of 2022, there was a day when the current, the CRM that we were using previously went down for six hours. And I remember the hate and the vitriol that was cast upon them on Facebook and on groups. I remember we had to let everyone go from command center. I was like, you can't do anything, you can't log in. It's embarrassing to take a phone call.

And it's not, it's not, it's not working.

And I remember thinking, these are going to be my problems if I do this. And then Liz came to me the exact same day without us talking and said, you know, in the future, if we do this, this is going to be our problems. October 2022 says down now in Bellingham at Landscape Summit we announced that, hey, I'm going to launch a. Launch a CRM. Over the past one to two years, there has been very little innovation and leadership in the CRM world for service based businesses. Now I have gone on record saying that I had no plans of starting a CRM. And at the time that was true. But over the past 12 months, as I've tried many software systems, looking for the best alternative for Augusta lawn care and trialing many of them, getting to know the founders, getting to know the tech developers, and looking at the actual tech stack behind these products, I realized there was no other choice but to start my own. And it is for that reason today I'm very happy to announce that starting In February of 2023, CoPilot CRM.com will become available for all of us to use. We took the code base from Lawn Pro in summer of 2022 and spent the next six to eight months rewrapping it, improving several aspects of it, and rebranding it to Copilot. On February 2023, we launched Copilot CRM. And that was almost two years ago next month. Now in 2023, we just hit the ground running immediately. I started investing in the engineering side of things and. And getting more engineers. Previously, the code base had four engineers working on it, and so we immediately more than doubled that and then tried to triple that throughout 2023. By doing so, we had this massive ramp up in the amount of features that we were pumping out. Cool. And then in December 2023, Augusta Lawn Care moved in. And so about 150 locations moved into Copilot in December 2023. And at this point, we were firing in all cylinders. Everything was going incredible. We had basically just eclipsed actually getting into profitability, which is insane for a startup and a tech company that is pouring money into something like this. Everything, if you talk to me, then we were going to conquer the world. We had just done a launch at last year's Landscape Summit, and it displayed deposit thresholds and card on file crimes. And we were hyped in January 2024. So a year ago this month, we tripled the number of members inside of Copilot.

And then we entered into bugh.

BUGH was not fun. We had so many bugs coming in. It went from 5 to 10, which is a very manageable amount of bugs. And in every software, there's going to be bugs, but the threshold of pain that you're willing to endure is basically how much can I then allocate towards innovation and creating new features? So you're always balancing this out.

And we went from that number to 50.

And then 80 and then 120 and.

Then 150 and.

Then 180 and then 200 and then 220 and then 240 bugs reported and documented inside the system.

And everything was breaking. This one's tough.

First off, because I'm sharing personal videos.

That I made that I didn't think.

I was gonna share with everyone. That's tough. But more importantly, right now, it's like Copilot just like debilitating.

At least once a day, I think I want to quit.

Just painful. Like, literally just like you look at someone will say something on Facebook or whatever, and just like daggers because it's true stuff. We're messing up such a. It's so fragile right now.

And like, I'm not sleeping.

I don't need to do in a lot of the areas.

But I can't get in. Really nice. Do a lot of engineering and doing what I can in terms of like leading the team etc, but.

Exhausting. It is, it is. Every time I see I can feel this wave of like anxiety every single time I open up and see a message or something goes on or I get an alert, something going bad. Today there, Today there's over 50 bugs in psychopod.

And that's after like two, two, two weeks of just solid fighting bugs.

Stop development, stop the roadmap and we're just fighting bugs.

We are losing members.

Going back into bur.

All of our destinations, using it. Every single location is using Copilot.

And literally a week later everything broke up. Just messed up.

In the moment when you make the video, you're just doing it to document it. This is the first time I've gone through like so partly going through hell this past year. I knew that we would come out.

Of it and I knew that I would want it documented.

So I did, I made videos. But in the moment you're not thrilled about it. You'll see even when I show the video, I just turn it off sometimes.

Just like, oh this is so stupid.

Because in the moment you're not. But I also wish I would have had more videos back when I was sleeping in the closet. I wish I would have had more videos of me working out in the field for 12 hours and then going.

To school for four hours and then getting up a few hours later to do it again.

Like I wish I had that documented. And everyone says that like Alex says the same thing. So like when I was going through hell, I'm like, I'm gonna document it.

So stupid. Emails broke, texting broke.

Merge tags broke, sequence automations broke, push notifications broke, iOS broke, Android broke, the native version of the app broken.

In, app alerts was broken, literally every single piece of the software. Absolute joke.

I do believe that we will turn things around.

I have no doubt. Especially the past couple weeks. Made a bunch of really good changes. I fired some lower left debt, lower level devs. I'm doing everything I possibly can.

And that's the only solace I have, everything I possibly can. And so I'll show those videos tonight.

And like hopefully the goal in doing that is not I feel people feel bad for me. It's none of that is the matter of they have felt that same way and they are not alone. And if they have any respect for.

Me in the fact that they travel.

Across the country to be here to listen to what I'm Talking about. I would hope that they also realize that even I went through those same things this year.

Took the family on a vacation, the entire extended family, all the nieces and nephews. I worked for the vast majority of the day and night.

I'd say maybe 50% of the day I would work here and there taking meetings, etc, maybe 60% and then once they went to bed, I would work all night, five or six hours at least. We were there for four days in Mexico. It was an awesome trip. Loved it. Worked every single minute almost. And if I wasn't working, I was thinking about it.

But it so bad dude. Just like reliving like I remember like so vividly like not sleeping and like, like it's torturous and like. Yeah. So right now.

Every day I want to quit.

Every single day I have my head, I open my head in my hands and just say this hurts.

Because something new will break, the servers will break, something will break. And every single day I will disappoint the people that I love the most.

So do I think I'll turn around 100%? Do I think in a year I'll probably watch this video and laugh at myself? Probably. But this is hell. This is hell.

And so this was that Mexico trip. This is the social media version of what most of us tell that was we took four or five days in Mexico, had the privilege of taking everyone down there.

Had a really nice place right in.

The water and I did not think about anything besides issues in the business. I scheduled all my engineering meetings throughout the night because we had teams around the world and were working literally 24 7. I was rebuilding the engineering team as a non technical co founder trying to.

Figure things out.

And yeah, it didn't get any better.

So it's just a. After 3am.

And the site's download.

I contacted Dustin. I basically said like throw money at this thing, we need to fix this no matter what. So.

I said if there's a button here for a million dollars, I just push it. If we get to fix this problem.

Crazy. We don't even know. I sit down right now.

Oh.

So painful.

Again. If we don't have this up in like 20, 30 minutes, this whole thing is just.

Everyone starts waking up right around 4am Eastern when everyone starts hitting the API.

Oh man.

Oh so dumb.

What are we doing folks? Goodness gracious.

Don't worry, it gets worse.

I think it'll end good. Like I think it'll be motivational at the end.

But the first 25 minutes, reliving all that stuff, dude.

And then in spring 2024, people started posting about it. And if you're in the crowd, I'm not trying to blast you, okay. I just asked the support team to.

Get me a few screenshots of comments about me.

So I'm not gonna read them. You can see on the screen, good times. Let's not make this too much. All right, so these are on Facebook, public posts. These were inside the member group, people.

Saying things about me, the CRM, etc.

I did not capture these or keep these. I just asked the support team, Parker can be my. My witness to go grab these for me. But, yeah, I know almost all these people, by the way. And the thing is.

They were right.

Every single one.

And although if you would have looked at, say, in Instagram or social media, you would have seen the Mexico trip, et cetera, for many of us here, there is an untold turnaround happening.

And.

You don't show that part of your life. Maybe one out of a thousand, maybe one out of 100,000 people that watch my videos actually ever apply, and we ever actually see the depths of the.

Despair that you're going through. My mistakes can affect them. That's the challenging part with a brand and community is you make yourself vulnerable to the mistakes of others. And so I'm human, and especially when we're trying to make things happen and make changes and improve the systems, I'm going to mess up sometimes. So I hope I can reverse course and improve and course correct and get better feedback loops to make sure that doesn't happen. But ultimately, me making a mistake of something like Copilot affects them. So that's also a liability in joining a franchise or any community or entering a relationship or starting a family. Like, there's liabilities and risks involved. So. But, yeah, like, I'm not gonna hide it. Like, yeah, I messed up big time. So hopefully it, like, yeah, yeah, don't.

Worry, it got worse.

But I wanted to directly address currently what we are going through and during the stage at Copilot and just answer as many questions I possibly can by communication. I know over the past couple weeks, I have not been in the Facebook group very much, and that's because I've been having my head down, making sure that structurally, I can do everything I possibly can inside of the business to make sure that these bugs and these issues are resolved. And we continue to work towards our roadmap. We have decided to wait on the release of new features. We have a lot of work already completed, completed on Things like the waiting list, digital signatures on on estimates, chemical applications, etc.

We have a lot of that work.

Completed and we were planning to beta test that and then release it into production March 1. We are going to delay that for now. I expect that to be at least two to three weeks. But that is an indefinite period of time because we must stabilize the system and we are making a lot of changes internally, both in the team, how we do our code development, how we do quality assurance and testing, et cetera. And I understand that that doesn't solve the acute pain that it is causing in your business and the pain that is anticipated if you enter in your spring rush with a faulty system. I know that for the vast majority of our users, the amount of dependency on the Software will more than 4x after March 1st. For the vast majority of our users.

Due to, due to the fact that.

We enter spring rush. This is across all home services, not just the green industry. Spring is the time that we get.

Most of our leads.

We are extremely busy and we can't have these bugs and these paper cuts and these failures on the software's end. I 100% understand that this is causing business pain and we must fix those problems first before we do new features, et cetera. I know that I in the past had said, said that we would have the chemicals done by March 1. However, there is more pain being caused than the, the positive benefits that would be brought on by that use case. If you are a chemical applicator that was fully anticipating that by March 1st you'd be in the system, we will happily refund you any sort of any fees whatsoever. And I know that that is not a trend that I want to continue in the future of promising things. And then it gets a month and then two months and then a year and years down the road. I hate that. It's not something that I want to be known for copilot. But understand that right now we must focus on the bugs, the stability of the system, etc.

Yeah, that was a humble pie. That was a video too and I did not look at the comments because I'm sure I got flamed. All right, so I think this is the last one of the last videos. But we just started having like say sorry. It was eventually just like I felt so out of control. We're pushing all the deadlines and this, this video, if you notice the last video, same shirt as the video that we're about to play. The last shirt was inside out. All right, Wasn't really clicking, firing all cylinders.

Let'S go ahead and see this one time.

And so I just want to be honest about the timeline. I do believe it'll be one or two more months of bug hell. I think it'll be two to three months before stabilization. And we are considering stabilization at a certain number of bugs in our system. There will always be bugs, but we believe we can get it down significantly back to what it was last year and that would be 80% reduction of what we currently have in terms of bugs. And I do believe that towards the end of those two to three months, we will be able to start releasing features that are 60 to 70% done. And that includes the wait list that includes chemical applications, signatures and estimates and a lot of features on the dispatch board, etc. That we have literally 60 to 70% completed prior to four weeks ago. Stopping the development of that. I know I'm not in the Facebook group every single day, responding when people tag me or making comments, et cetera. I can only take so many inputs in a day and right now being reactive on my part is like very, very would be a poor use of my time. I'm in with the team every single day trying to make improvements and help all 700 users of Copilot. And so as much as I very much like being one on one and addressing people's comments and concerns and emails one on one, I'm just not doing that right now. I do believe my time focused on the entire code base, the team making sure that leadership is in place and problems are being solved is the best use of my time. That being said, someone had asked me an email, they said, are you like taking down note of people that are saying negative stuff right now? I'm not. First off, I'm not seeing it really if it's. If someone's saying something in the Facebook group or I know some people have made some videos about me and stuff like that on YouTube and things and it's fine. I deserve every bit of the frustration being given to me right now and I deserve any of the criticism at this point. As a leader of any organization, you or I will get the brunt of the praise as well as when someone. When things go wrong. And so we are in a very low low. And so I will get the brunt of that and I deserve all that frustration. And if someone needs to leave Copilot because the spring rush is coming up and they're like, hey, I need to make. I can't wait another couple months. I need to be able to have these Things more ironed out. I understand and I apologize. I didn't. I. If I would have anticipated this going into 2024, I would have been more clear and honest about that. I did not anticipate this at all. I didn't think that what happened in December, January, that's getting increasing so many members would have this kind of impact. And I thought we would be able to fix it in a couple weeks. I. Genu genuinely did believe that.

No, the product needs to get improved. It needs to get fixed. Dude, everyone, yes, they deserve apology. They just want the stinking thing to work. The issues I was having.

Got to a point to where I just didn't want to use the software. I didn't want to be in it. I dreaded having to, you know, go in copilot and do what I had to do. I eventually ended up reaching out to Mike Andes personally. Kind of like listed all the. All the things, you know, like, hey, if I'm paying you 250 bucks a month and I can. I'm still having these issues, like, that's. That's not right with me. And so we've done a better job of stabilizing things.

There's still a little bit more to.

Go in the next couple months. I think that will, you know, that.

Will evidence itself over the next couple months.

But.

Whether that's healing for me, I don't know, dude, I don't even wanna think about it.

This is more like painful thinking about this again. Cause, like, this is stuff that I thought was not. I thought, like, it was in the past, like it was done. All right, so spring 2024, I came to the realization that this was going to take way longer than anticipated and. And cost 10 times, if not 20 times more than I anticipated. And one of the actually lowest parts was actually in May, I was flying out of Alberta from a turnaround and I was in the airport and all our flights were getting canceled. I was the media team. I think it was actually just Terrell at the time and flights were getting delayed and everything. And I got this text message and basically was like, hey, Mike should really just turn around his own business. And I was like, you're right, he probably should. The challenging part was I could actually not do the work required. If it was just a matter of like, hey, you need to put your head down and get something done, I would have been doing it. I would have been like, on whatever was required to just keep working. But I could not fix these problems. And so in summer 2024, I realized there's a massive skill gap of the amount of users that were inside the system and the code base, that the fragility of it and what kind of skill from an engineering perspective was actually required to be able to bridge this gap. In summer 2024, we decided, hey, this is, this is not a quick fix. This is a restructuring of millions and millions of lines of code in that I realized because of the investment that was going to be required, I need to buy out my partner. When the business was at its worst point, we were bleeding cash, we were losing members, I was funding it all myself. I said, in order to be able to turn this thing around, to take millions of dollars and I and I will have to buy out my partner. And so the minority partner that I had at the very beginning, that came over from the previous code base, I paid him ungodly amounts of money to make sure that I owned 100% of the company and can make the investments required to turn things around. And that was very, very difficult.

Personally, I could like there was a huge investment just to get that cash and make this bet. This is the biggest bet I've ever made on my personal self because at the very lowest moment, I had to go all in, in from a cash perspective to be able to make sure I own 100% of the company and then could reinvest back into the business. So then we started restructuring the engineering team, restructuring how this was all going to work and how the API works in the back end, et cetera. In summer 2024, that's when Josh, who you'll hear from on Saturday, Josh Kahl made a big gamble on us, big gamble on me. More specifically, he had been working with us part time as a consultant in his. While he was working his other job previously at ActiveCampaign, which is a massive company that has over 200 million in revenue, very established and had a fantastic career. And Josh made a bet, and I don't know necessarily why, he can maybe tell you on Saturday, because I've never asked that question, but he decided to come join full time and that was what we needed. It was.

It was an answer to prayer. It was at my lowest moment. I could not turn this thing around.

And whenever I watch the turnaround applications, because people submit videos all the time and talk about what they're going through, I think about this moment for me and I needed help.

And the humility to be able to.

Recognize you can't do this on your own. Mike is obviously a big reason I joined Copilot when he was telling the untold story, he was asking or wasn't sure why I joined Copilot 1. Obviously Mike, you know, he has a really incredibly bold vision, very sincere ton of transparency. He was very open with me about the books, about the struggles of the business and he has a very clear mission to see sincerely help small business owners build the American dream. And Josh made a big gamble leading me a big company. But more importantly put his reputation on the line and started to go to bat for us for engineers, knowing that that was really the deficit in the team. And these are not quick hires. This is not like hey come interview and we'll hire you tomorrow. These are 6 and 12 and 18 month processes of courting these people and bringing them from very well paying jobs and publicly traded companies to try to join the team.

Over the course of the next few months we start retooling the support and onboarding. This is the only thing I could really do. I cannot change the code base. I could not. I cannot do code. And I did a little bit of code way back in my college days, but not enough to be able to fix these problems. And so at the peak in February, you can see our churn was 11% every month. And that means that every single month 11% of our customers were leaving. If you run the math on that, in nine months you will have zero customers problem. No matter how many customers you will add to this, you will never be able to grow this business. Over the course though, over the next several months, because I was able to start focusing on other aspects besides the code and the engineering side, I was able to focus on things like the customer and the member roadmap. There's something I could do, I could actually focus on this. How do we actually get people to use the system and use the software? The same way that when a customer accepts an estimate that is not the end of your journey with them. There should be an on onboarding process. How do we actually get them to get more of our products and services that they use? And so I created this, the member roadmap really started to dig into this. But just because those low, those lowest moments had kind of gone through does not necessarily mean the turnaround was done. All of the hiring and the engineers that we are now bringing on board, I was starting to realize the impact financially what this is going to do to me personally.

Budget from engineering tech and product stp.

So we're ballooning our expenses massively. We're hiring a bunch of people. It's awesome. Super good, but gotta pay the bills and we're probably gonna double spend here. So for every dollar we make, we will probably lose $2.

Sounds like a great budget. Never lost as much money in the business.

Kind of reminds me a little bit when we started the franchise, but at that time we were losing maybe 20 cents for every dollar. Now we're losing 100% of a dollar every time we spend a dollar. That's just.

So gotta make sure you can afford it. It's already ballooned to six figure losses. Probably double now, so gotta figure out a way to figure it. Like to pay for this though we get more users but and hopefully we can by spring. Like as we go into the off season, things are much more reliable. We haven't had any crazy incidents, etc. But I don't really blame people not wanting to join. It's been 10 months since we last released a meaningful feature.

And yeah, now it's a matter of can we hold our breath long enough to get out of this Just financially gonna be a big, big spend here. So what killed me was having to buy out Patrick from a cash perspective that just, just kind of tapped me out this year. So then we got October, November, December, January, February, we got six months here. And so if we can get our stuff together and then show just how much of the back end has actually improved and changed. So try and just tonight figuring out the budget but then also figuring out what's the path here. How are we getting back on track? How do we actually tell the story to users and win their trust back? So here we go.

So then in December 2024 we got the bugs down by about 80%. We're not there yet, but we are on our way. I want to recon, go back and look at the hardest year of my career and what did I mess up on and what did I learn. Hopefully you can take these learnings and these lessons and not make the stupid mistakes I did. So first off, what I messed up on, I got stuck in growth mode. Growth creates chaos. You've heard me say before, growth sucks cash, but growth also creates chaos in the business. And I got stuck in growth mode. I kept growing. We literally tripled in a matter of just 30 to 60 days. I also messed up on being cheap. I didn't surround myself prior with people that had the similar goals as I did. So I started to spend over $12,000 a month. Between personal coaching as well as getting inside a group of people that were all doing SaaS software as a service, people that were like minded, that were ahead of me in the game, that were at the same size or above me. What I messed up on, every problem seemed like the end of the world. There was multiple times I went more than 48 hours without sleep. Multiple times. Times. And it wasn't a matter of me working hard.

So that's just.

I'm alwaysn't like some great hero. This was anxiety not allowing you to sleep. This is your heart racing and feeling like no matter what you do, even if you did fall asleep, you'd never wake up rested. That's what this felt like. I didn't share my goals with my team. It was a big mistake and it doubled the time that it took for me to bring on key team members that did help us turn around the business. I would share the goals and what is the mission of the company and what's the end result? What does those look like in 10 years actually giving them a roadmap for that and actually shared it instead of being so conservative and not wanting to share everyone else. What I had in terms of planning I messed up on, I moved too quickly. What I learned from that is listen, test, iterate, get feedback, repeat, then launch. And I just kept launching stuff. I kept going and going. I was just going so fast. Instead of just listening to members, listening to customer feedback, listening to people around me testing these things, iterating on those incrementally getting feedback again and repeating that cycle over and over and over again. The reason I need a VP of product like Josh is because that's all they do, is they talk to people, they iterate, they get feedback and they just keep going through this cycle. And to me, as a founder, as a CEO, as an entrepreneur, that slows me down. What I learned is that one good change in a business every six weeks, you will do just fine. I would argue one good change every quarter, your business will be fantastic in a matter of just a couple years. And so instead of trying to pound things out, I'm talking about features here. But think about in your own business. You're going to leave this weekend with 100 different things you want to be doing in the business. And you're going to hear all the keynotes and all the talks and you're going to talk to five other people and have all these brilliant ideas. And if you just do one of them in six weeks, it's the main one, it's the one that you know you should be doing, but you're not the one major domino in the business. If it would topple, would change the trajectory of the business forever.

So my entire thought process around business completely changed. Instead of being so fast and focusing on the pivot and the innovation, just focus on doing it better. You cut grass, just do it better. You talk to customers, just do it better. You do sales calls, just do it better. You don't need anything new. You don't need anything flashy. You don't need to leave this conference and go change your business model or implement some crazy new marketing scheme. You just need to take what you're doing right now and do it better. And none of us want to hear that, because the people that do that aren't in this room. Entrepreneurs will go, we want to do the next shiny thing, and you're going to get 10,000 ideas, and only one of them needs to happen.

What I learned is that culture fit, when it comes to employees and team members, culture fit is 101. Having experience is 201. It's the next level. Ideally, someone has experience, been there, done that, 301, and expect to pay accordingly. When you start bringing on the level of people we needed to turn around the business. I had never paid that in my entire life. And I had made less on my tax, personal tax return than some of their salaries. What I learned is you're going to have to let small fires burn. Prioritize and execute. As Jocko says, focus on what you can control. I had to realize I could not fix the code base. I needed to have people in place that could. And then I need to focus on what I could focus on. The member experience, the onboarding process, other aspects of the business that I could actually control. And what I also learned throughout this entire process is that in war, you gotta turn off the noise. And what that turned out to be was me leaving over 30 groups, WhatsApp groups, Facebook groups, personal stuff, just shedding everything. And it happened over the course of one week. And Dr. Kashi said, you need to get quiet. You have too many inputs. You need to get very, very quiet. People do deserve to know what happened on my end because I left groups, I left, like, I just cut everything out as part of, like, when there's chaos, it's like in a time of war, you've got to get quiet. You gotta regroup, and then you gotta get violent. And that's what happened. Like, that's how we were able to fix it. Like, hire whoever you need, untapp the budget, like, we have to fix this. And the violent part was, like, getting out of every single group, social obligations, like everything has to go in order to focus on this thing.

And that was very, very painful.

So in a time of war, and if you're going through this stuff, I'm talking about my experience, but please relate this to your own self because I promise you this will work in the time of war. Turn off the noise, get quiet. Still remember sitting at the gym early in the morning and just leaving group after group after group after group. People I love, people I would love to talk to, people I would love to interact with and just leaving group after group. I've got to get rid of all these inputs because the noise is too loud. You can't act with precision when it's loud. Why in golf, why in these other sports do they get quiet? Because they need to be precise. And in times of war, if there's so much action and noise and you have so many inputs in your life, you will make the wrong decision. And I was doing that over and over and over again. And then get violent and violence, obviously many times is looking as a negative thing. What to me what that meant is like you get quiet, you need to get a plan and then you just take all out action against it. And so I got an assistant and I did not get the assistant because I needed an assistant. In the long term, what I needed is I needed someone to hold me accountable to, to be extremely systematic about spending every single minute of the day. And so whether it be calendars, email processing, text messages and how everything was processed had to be figured out. Cause I needed to get all the inputs dialed in so I could focus on what needed to be the most important objective in the business. So would it be getting groceries, whether it be having someone clean the house, whether it be getting doing the laundry. I needed all inputs, everything get quiet. What I learned is if I as the leader do not have a clear vision, I will only attract mercenaries. Mercenaries. They'll get the job done. They will. You will only attract these type of people in your organization if you do not share the vision that you have for the company to recruit missionaries, people that will take your business to the next level for you and have the skills. And they've been there and they've done that before. My goals must be big enough to fit their goals inside. And this is where I started to share the vision of what we were going to do with Augusta Lawn care Copilot and the media team. What I learned this is Alex has been talking about this a lot recently is don't think small and allow others to earn skin in the game. So many people are unwilling to partner up, to give equity, to be able to give profit sharing, to give distributable cash to their general manager, to be able to start a second location and partner up with someone. And it's because they're afraid of thinking larger enough to with someone else's goals fits inside of their own. Elon only owns 20% of Tesla. He's worth like $400 billion. Bezos owns 9% of Amazon, over $200 billion. Jensen Huang from Nvidia, 4% of the company. And this is where the whole notion of dig, build, bury began. Because as you go through an experience like this one, and when you're starting a business or you're going through a situation in your life that seems hard, this is what the process looks like when you first start a business. You're starting out on flat ground, you're at a job, you're at a 9 to 5, things are comfortable, you're on a stable footing, and then you begin to dig. And the digging process is not fun, nor is it something that is glamorous. It's not something that's posted about on social media, it's not something we enjoy. But the digging process usually entails the first three to five years of starting a business. And that's the digging phase. And you're hustling and you're working and you're trying to get everything you possibly pouring into this business. And in doing so, you actually go down into the ground to build the foundation. You do not start building from the ground up, you start digging down. And the reason most people will not achieve the success and the height of the building they want to they attain to have is because they're not willing to dig deep enough and they're not willing to put in the three, four and five years required to build the foundation strong enough to to build the success on top of that they want and aspire to have. And you dig the foundation and it's hard. And then you build the business and you pour blood, sweat and tears into it and you're up late nights and all of these things are happening. And then when you're done all of that, you bury the foundation. After building the forms and pouring the concrete, you bury all of the work that you've just put in.

And after the first three to five years of starting a business and after the digging phase and then building the foundation and slaving away and being lower than the people that you left back at Your nine to five, after the comfort and everything that you left, and they're up above you, pointing down on you, because you're in the hole and you're in the foundational stages of your business and your organization.

After all of that, after all the work that you put in, you bury it. And you never think about it again because it's painful. The dig, build, bury thing is, like, so real. You try not to think about it.

And that's how I've been for so.

Like, the past six months since it all happened. But now I have to relive all this. And you try to bury these thoughts and the emotions that you had to go through to be able to get to that time in your life. And those are not the pictures that are posted on Instagram. Those are the stories that are happening behind business owners every single day. And that is the untold story, the untold turnaround that many of us are experiencing, even this weekend. And if someone like myself that will publicly go out and try to turn other businesses around am going through the pain that I've gone through this past year, I know there are people in this room that are experiencing a turnaround of their own. And it's an untold story. And there's not videos and cameras in your face. And I'm not publishing you on my YouTube channel. But you've come to this event with $501,000 left in your bank account, and this is the last resort to be able to turn the company around.

And you have an untold turnaround story of your own. It's not easy. Everyone thinks they see the turnaround show and they're like, oh, they should be doing this. Like you're Monday morning quarterbacking this.

It's not easy to turn around a business, especially when there's money being lost. You have people saying negative things about you.

It's very public. People that you love. You're affecting them negatively. It's not like a customer. I've had angry customers.

That's not this.

This is people that I love and I care about and I've poured most.

Of my career into.

They're the people that this is negatively impacting, and they're the people who are mad at me. And so they go through the same thing, though, in their own personal life. We just don't capture it on camera. And that is when they go home and the wife is telling them that.

They need to quit.

Their family is telling them that they're failures.

That happens.

And we just happen to be able to encapsulate that. So it is my obligation to share that with them so they know they're not alone. Including the person that goes out and travels and does turnarounds, he still has.

To go through the same thing.

Maybe 2024 for you wasn't all sunshine and rainbows. You're going to hear people get up on the stage and talk about how they've grown their business and all the things that have gone right and everything that has gone fantastic. And you're going to be inspired, but you're going to go back to your life and you're going to say, what's wrong with me? Because 2024 wasn't all that and I didn't grow my business and I actually made less money in 2024 than in 2023. And I'm considering giving up. And I'm also almost tapped out financially and I have a lot of debt to go back to this year and I'm running out of cash in this off season. I don't know if I can make it through this spring rush. Maybe you lost time, maybe you lost money. Relationships that you held dear you lost in 2024. Maybe there's someone trust that was broken or health that you lost in 2024 and others made sure that you know about it. And the people back on top of the ground, they pointed down at you and they made sure you knew that you were digging down deeper than they were. The people you went to school with, the people that you used to work with, your friends, your family that told you not to start that business. And you've had a 2024 that is not one to remember, but it's one to forget that 2025 proved them wrong. 2024 might not have been all sunshine and rainbows. Maybe your friends and your family, your spouse, parents, siblings, school buddies, co workers, they said you failed. And maybe they're right. You might not have screenshots from Facebook, but you know what they think about when you go to a friends gathering or a family gathering and their sly little remarks about your old 9 to 5 and what it could have been and how you should have just stayed in school. You know that and you feel that that 2025 prove them wrong. Maybe 2024 wasn't all sunshine and rainbows. Maybe you fell short of your own expectations. Maybe you gained weight in 2024. Maybe you lost your partner to divorce. Someone gave up on you, and maybe they kicked you when you were down. And I know many of the people in this room, even though I can't see all of you in the back because of the lights. I know a lot of your stories and what you've been through. And the thing that inspires me about the industry in home services is it attracts the people that are in this situation. This today we were having the Augusta Nation conference before everyone showed up publicly. And almost every single person when they told their story came from a broken home. Almost Every single one.

That's what this industry attracts. And I don't believe that that person should be counted out on. And I believe that even if you had a 2024 where you fell short of expectations and other people counted you out, let 2025 prove them wrong. Because the difference is that they are counting your success in days and you are measuring it in decades. And right now, they are right. Because you are in the hole and you are building the business and you are in debt and you are at loss of what to do next in the business. But you're not measuring your success on days, weeks or months or even years. It'll take decades to build the skyscraper. The dream that you have, it will take years to accomplish that. But without. Without the foundation, without digging and building and then burying the beginning stages of a business, you will not be able to build the building. And when people come to see that building, no one looks at the foundation and admires it. What do they do? They look up and they admire the glass and the metal and the architecture. But none of that is possible without the pain that it took to dig, build and bury the foundation. And I find the vast majority of people that come to a conference are in that stage because you realize the pain you're in and you need other people to inspire you from the top. People say you can make it. And other people on scaffolding have been in the business for five or 10 years to be able to reach over to you and say it's worth the pain you're struggling with.

That's why you come to conference. That's why you're going to talk to business owners this weekend. Because it's other people, whether they're in the pit with you or they're up on the ground or they're above and they're screaming from the top of their tower saying, you can do this. That's why we have Blue Collar Summit.

And when we talk about proving them wrong, use what you got. If it's a chip on your shoulder, if it's pride, if it's envy, regardless of what it takes to stay in the hole, do not get out. It's so easy to quit. And that's why 90%, almost 95% of businesses won't hit a million dollars. 90% won't make it 10 years in business. It's because people have a ladder back outside of the foundation, and they're not willing to put in the pain and effort that is required to dig, build and bury. But let your game performance prove how hard do you practice? You do not need to say this to people. You don't need to talk about how hard you're working. You don't need to make an inspirational quote on Instagram about how much you're slaving away in the hole. You just let the scoreboard do the talking for you. In a game, it just takes a couple seconds to look at the scoreboard and realize who's winning and who's losing. You don't need to convince everyone how hard you've been practicing and what you I did this conference and I had these ideas. Just execute, just do way more work, way more reps. The difference between excellence and mediocrity is the reps that people have put in to go from one to the other extreme. If you talk about Kobe Bryant and every other element and aspect of excellence that we aspire to be, it's because they put in the reps. Great basketball player once said this quote, Legends aren't defined by their successes.

They're defined by how they bounce back from failures. And so if your 2024 was filled with failures and you come to this conference as your last way, your last hope to turn around the company, let me first and foremost say this. The person you're looking on the stage is in the process of a turnaround. The person sitting next to you is in the process of a turnaround. The person sitting behind you and beside you and the people you'll eat your food with this weekend are in the midst of a turnaround. And it's an untold story. That turnaround story was never told. And I'm sharing with them because every single one is going through a turnaround themselves. It's just not on video. It's the untold turnaround. The untold turnaround of yourself, your personal.

Health, your relationship.

Your spiritual walk.

People are going through turnarounds, but there's not a camera and there's not microphones.

Picking it up all the time.

What will your turnaround story be? And for some, the turnaround isn't necessarily even inside their business.

Some need to have a personal turnaround. Some people need to have a Spiritual turnaround. Some people need to wake up and realize that they're not going to see their family if they continue the way they are with health.

What will your turnaround story be today? I've tried to share the low moments that I had, and it wasn't easy to record those moments. And some of them I could not share. However.

That'S my untold story.

You probably won't record pieces and parts of it. You probably won't be able to document it. But I want to know, what's the untold turnaround story you'll tell one day?

Because some people need to exercise, they need to eat better. You want to be able to hold your grandkids. If you want to live a longer life, you want to be there for your family, for your spouse, you. You're gonna have to do a turnaround. You're gonna have to hit rock bottom. You're gonna have to actually ask someone else for help. And this is why I admire the people that reach out in the turnaround show and just ask for help. Cause they realize they need support. They need someone else from when they're down in that pit to reach down and pick them back up and give them the support they need.

What will your turnaround story be? I respect a person that can admit failure. They can realize they're in a low moment and reach out for help and then do something about it.

There's examples in this room tonight that have done this very exact thing in life and in business over the next couple days. I want to share some of them. I didn't have this one in my notes. Ryan, could you stand?

This is one of our owners inside our gustonation. I recommend you talk to him this weekend. He owns several locations. Five, I believe, very successful. Three years ago, he had a turnaround of his own. And he went from. How much did he weigh?

440 pounds. And as of this weekend is now under 15% body fat and extremely shredded.

That's Ryan Payne's turnaround story. But what's your turnaround story? Because whether or not you're telling a story on a stage or in front of your family, in 10 and 15 years from now, the actions you're taking today, the meal prep that he made, the hours he put in the gym, all the pain and agony he went through that is now affecting. If you don't mind now, his wife talked to her. Is this okay if I say she's now lost 55 pounds in this last few months?

Your turnaround story is going to impact someone else's life.

Don't be selfish. You might not just turn around your business or your personal life or your health for yourself. It might be for the person next to you. And the pain that I went through this year, if it's anything, if it's anything, is for all of you to see that even when you see someone that you might aspire to be like or you think they're successful, they have a turnaround story of their own. And all the fancy pictures and everything that's going well and all the big highlights and the money and the revenue and the growth that people will see on social media, the untold turnaround story is not being told.

And I say all of this this weekend. When you talk to the people, when you're eating with them, I don't care about their age, I don't care about their color, I don't care about their size, I don't care the revenue that they're doing their business. Realize that every person that you talk to is going through a turnaround story of their own.

And where you'll be at in five or ten years from now is going to be determined by the actions you take after this weekend. Now it's been like a six month of just like a slow tread up the hill. Everyone thinks the turnaround happens immediately. And they watch a video of mine.

And they're like, why six weeks later.

They should have done this and this and this. It doesn't work like that. Especially when there's like personal dynamics and family stuff and there's things going on, there's mental stuff and all these things in a business owner's life. And so it's been six months of.

A slow trudge up the mountain. And that's what a turnaround is. And so one day we'll have the.

Resources to be able to like follow.

Up with these owners six months, months later, 12 months later.

And it takes that time the bigger the business too.

And so.

Yeah.