Step-by-Step Guide to Build a $1M+ Home Service Business!

Today we're going to talk about what to do after you've already built a million dollar business. So you have a successful company, everything is going well, you've grown it past a million dollars, a seven figure business, but you're stuck wondering what should you be doing next? Like everything is going well and there's people in place to be able to handle admin sales and operations. But what should you be focused on? How this presentation is going to make you money is giving you the 10 steps that you should focus on to take your business to the next level. You've already crossed a million dollars. And if you're just still growing your business up to a million dollars, hey, this'll be something you'll want to use in the future once you've crossed a million dollars to know exactly what to work on. Because it's a completely different skillset that is required after a million dollars compared to when you've been growing up to a million dollars in annual revenue. Now, these 10 steps that we're gonna talk about today help me go from one location, Augusta Lawn Care, to over 150 locations worldwide. It also took me from being a solo operator where I was out in the field doing all the work myself, to having over 100 team members now that work for me. So I wanna tell you a story that kind of triggered this entire thought process, like, what do I do once I have a million dollar business? Well, it was actually one of the owners at Augusta Nation that purchased another company in his local area and he literally more than tripled his business overnight by acquiring this other company. And the acquisition went really, really well. The other owner just kind of didn't want to be the leader and the owner anymore. So they ended up becoming kind of the salesperson doing estimates and everything was going really good. The admin person was taking care of things and handling the office pretty well. And there was a good team in place. And you know, there was some definitely cultural dynamics of merging two teams out in the field. But overall the owner, this is the picture of the owner here. He was like, like, what am I supposed to work on now? Cause all of a sudden his business more than tripled and like the admin side was taken care of. He had a great person out doing the sales in the field and then he had great field staff. He's like, I just feel like I'm sometimes twiddling my thumbs, like, what should I be working on next? And really what this comes down to is that in that immediate acquisition that took place, he really moved from being a manager to an architect. And this chart really describes, in my opinion, the different roles an owner must be going through as they grow the business from zero to $200,000. You're the laborer. You're out in the field getting the work done. You're producing revenue for the business. And a lot of the stress that you incur is. Is going to be physical stress. Cause you're wiped out. As you grow the company and you start getting employees, you really start becoming a manager. When you have three, four, five, six employees. Now, the role that you really are playing is management. You're having to figure out how to hire and fire and encourage people and lead them and work on payroll structures and all these type of things. And that's what a manager does. And during this phase, I usually see a lot of stress financially, mostly because you, as the owner now, are no longer the labor. And because you are no longer the labor and producing revenue, there's a lot more overhead costs. And your profit margins get compressed simply because your best employee is no longer producing revenue. And that best employee is you. You're not producing revenue. You're actually overhead to the business now. And as you grow past 5, 6, 700,000, you're no longer in the field doing any labor. But as your business grows past $800,000, a million dollars in annual revenue, really the role of the owner switches to being that of an architect. And the architect, at this stage, the stress that you incur is mostly psychological. Because every single day, something bad is happening simply because there's so many employees and customers that you're dealing with every single day. It's just a lot of psychological stress. So it's not to say that one is better than the other, but it is to say that the role that you as the owner play needs to change. And we're gonna talk about today this role of the architect, because what happened to this owner inside of Gusta Nation when he made this acquisition, what happened is he went from manager to architect literally overnight. And so really, what was required of him as the owner changed very quickly. And so I wanna talk about what that new role needs to look like as the architect. And this is summarized kind of what I said to him in today's presentation. So what is the architect supposed to do? We assume in this example that you have hired laborers already and that you've hired a manager. Because if you've moved from laborer to manager to architect, it means as you move from each one, you've got to hire your Replacement. So when you move from being a laborer to a manager, guess what? You need to hire laborers. When you move from a manager and you move into a architect role, you've got a higher a manager. And so I'm going to assume in this example, you've already done that. You already have a manager in place, and maybe you're working towards that. But this will be good education in terms of what you can expect once you've done that. Because not moving your role as the owner will cause problems and mess up the team. It'll trip them up. Why? Because they're trying to be a great manager. And you're supposed to be an architect. But you keep stepping back into the manager role and you step into team meetings and dominate the team meetings. You step into hiring and firing when like you put a manager in place to be able to manage the team. Or worse yet, you're the architect. You're supposed to be the architect of that size of business, and yet you're jumping out in the field and like trying to help. I know the intentions are correct and sometimes leading by example can be effective, but your role is not that of a laborer. Your goal is to hire laborers and then have managers manage those labors. Your role is not to be out in the field doing the work and trying to step in and do the work for them. Trying to step and manage for your manager is going to mess them up and not allow them to take full responsibility and accountability of their role. Now, when it comes to the role of an architect, I have go over 10 different things that you want to be focused on at this stage of business. The first thing you want to be focused on is finding stresses and constraints in the business. So when we think about stresses, we think about like risks. And this is defense. Like, what are the things that I'm going to do to play defense in my business? Here's some of the things you can do to actually figure out where the stresses and constraints in your business. First off, leave the business for a week, go on vacation, go do something else. Like don't show up to the office for one week. And you'll very quickly see where the stresses are. You can see where the risks and where things start to fall apart. When you come back from said vacation, you will fix and create systems or hire people for those roles. Where there are stresses and where there are weaknesses. Once you've left, another thing you can do to find out where the stresses are at in the business is raise prices. Because when you raise prices immediately you're going to have complaints from customers. You're going to have different factors in the business that allow it to be more profitable. But those stresses will will be clearly evident as soon as you raise prices. Cause customers will start to complain if the service is not at a high quality standard. Another thing you wanna be doing is delegating all your daily tasks. Again, this is where are the stresses? Where's my time being spent in the business? I'm gonna try to delegate as much of those as possible. I'm also gonna create a metric scoreboard. This is some way of knowing exactly what the key metrics are KPIs key performance indicators in the business are, and making sure those are always being tracked. This could be your efficiency score. This could be your close ratio. This could be what percentage of your revenue is coming from recurring jobs. This is the number of new leads that are coming in. These are the type of metrics you're gonna wanna keep an eye on. If you are starting to be an architect, you need this data if you're stepping away from the business. You can't think that you're gonna be able to lead the company well without these metrics. Especially as you remove yourself from daily operations. Now, we talked about stresses, kind of the defense, but when it comes to constraints, I think of it like really the offense. Like, if I'm trying to grow the business and I want the business to do well, what's holding us back? Well, the stresses are that's the defense. But then also what's constraining me from growing the company? What is the bottleneck to growth? And whatever that bottleneck is, the thing that's keeping you from growing the business and being on the offensive. I really want to focus all my time and attention on this single thing. There's always so many areas in the business that you can improve, but usually there's only one or two that are actually the major constraints to allowing the company to grow, whether it be revenue or whether it be profits. And so I want to focus on that single constraint. Now to do that and to figure out what constraint in the business is actually impacting you. I use a 4L framework, and this is basically the flywheel of growth, which means if you keep solving the constraint in this diagram, you'll just keep growing faster and faster and faster. Liquidity. Think of it as money, cash, capital, whatever you want to call it, you need that. And if you can take that liquidity and turn it into leads via marketing, a salesperson, direct response marketing. Click pay per click on ads, whatever, you're going to get leads. And then if you take those leads, guess what you're going to need then. Next you're going to need laborers to be able to perform the work that, that the leads bring in. And then if you get a bunch of laborers, a whole bunch of employees, you're going to need leadership. And so this constant flywheel is what causes businesses to stop growing. They'll hit up against one of these constraints and they'll stop growing the business. They don't get enough leads. Guess what? You're not gonna grow the business. And until you figure out how to get more leads, you're not gonna hire more employees and you're not gonna hire managers. And once you figure out all these things, it just constantly, if you're growing the business, you'll find the next constraint. You're like, well, I got all four of those. Well, do you have enough liquidity? Because if the liquidity is low, if you don't have enough cash in the bank, you're not going to fund the growth to get more leads and continue growing the business.

Number two, this is the second thing we're going to focus on as the architect in the business. We figured out the stresses, we figured out the constraints. Those are the defense and the offense. But now we're going to create reinforcements and backups and redundancies because we figured out what the stresses are. So when we came back from said vacation, things fell apart in this specific area. Our close ratio went way down. Way less leads came in. Whatever those sort of weaknesses have now identified themselves. We are going to create reinforcements, backups, and redundancies. So these are some of the questions that you'd ask to figure out where I should be reinforcing, backing up and creating redundancies in the business. Ultimately, what you're trying to do is make the business antifragile. And that's what an architect's job is to do. Find the stresses and then fix them. And so one of the best ways to fix a stress in any sort of mechanical function is have something to help it, reinforce it, back it up, redundancies in place that if something were to collapse, there'd be a backup plan. So what happens if a specific employee leaves? Maybe it's your key manager, maybe it's an estimator, maybe it's your crew lead, Maybe it's someone that is the only person in the organization that knows how to do a specific service or function in the business. This is causing a massive risk to the business. And so we need to reinforce the company, reduce the amount of defense and stresses in the business by having these backups. So for example, can you do cross training? Can the one person who knows how to do run the excavator or run the skid steer, can they train someone else that also does another service? If you have five or six services, it might be a good idea to either a reduce the number of services to eliminate key areas. That one person leaving could completely wipe out that division. I had that problem before I had putting greens and we did artificial turf. But really it all hinged on one main manager that trained everyone and knew everything about the business. And when that person left, I didn't have a backup, I didn't have reinforcements. And because of that, I had to close down that whole division. But if you cross train people across all your equipment, across all of your services, and even just a couple of them, those redundancies will keep the business from collapsing if one person was to leave. Another thing you can do when it comes to creating reinforcements, redundancies and backups is what's the fail safe. If someone just doesn't show up for work, you're like, well, I got all these projects and everything's dialed in. We've got everything scheduled. But what happens if someone doesn't show up for work? Does everything stop? Can the frontline team members not do work simply because there's not one person to drive them around? You've created a stress in the business. So what do we do? We create a backup. We created reinforcement. We have another person that can drive. We have another truck that in case one breaks down, another one can pick it up. Another thing is that flexibility built into the schedule. So when it comes to redundancies, I don't want it to have where I'm maxing out everyone's schedule so much to the point that if one person doesn't show up and if a crew gets behind, if a job gets behind, if the weather changes, all of a sudden my business is completely chaos. I'm changing jobs around, changing crews. Crews are way over time. I'm paying them way too much. They're overworked, they want to leave. These are the type of things that break businesses because we haven't stepped back as the architect and actually done these things and ran through these types of tests. The third thing we're going to do as the architect is hire operators. You could also think of these as managers. But ultimately, when we think about these three roles of labor manager and architect, once you've moved into architect role. Doing more labor or manager tasks will not get the business to the next level. If you're like, well, I'm doing the exact same thing I've always done, but I can't keep growing the business. I'm like at 1.1, 1.2 million, just can't keep growing. It's likely, and I've fell in this trap too myself is I was doing too many of labor tasks. I out in the field trying to lead by example, which is super cool. And usually your team likes it. But that's not what's gonna get the best result for the business. And if it's not the best result for the business, it probably is gonna handicap them in the future. Their growth prospects within the company will be hindered if you're not doing what's right for the growth of the business. And that hurts, I'll be honest. Cause I'm right now also having to make big changes in my business and have operators in place. And, and a big chunk of that is like, I can no longer be manager, I can no longer be labor. And as you grow your business, it'll constantly be the shedding of what tasks you're willing and able and should be doing in the business. And so hire an operator. Some people call these general managers. But make sure that you're not doing these daily tasks because you can get bogged down in them very quickly. And if you're at a million, at 1.2 million and your goal is 10 million, you will not be able to do those same tasks today. And expect for the business to 10x it will not happen. Another thing when it comes to hiring operators is I found consistently that not finding a good manager or a number two, someone kind of like that, is your go to person. Once you've passed a million dollars in annual revenue, if you haven't found that person, it's gonna cause a lot of stress or a lot of key man risk. So let me break that down. A number two. If you've read the book, that fantastic book, highly recommend called Rocket Fuel and it talks about the entrepreneur or the visionary and then the integrator. The integrator is your number two. And that's like your general manager, the person that like, if you're gone, everyone reports to them. You gotta find this person. If you don't, you're gonna be stressed out of your mind and you're basically gonna be like an octopus with a whole bunch of tentacles. But ultimately they all reach back to you. And this is a bunch of Laborers and people out in the field. But everyone comes back to you. And if that's happening, you'll be stressed out of your mind. I've seen it time and time again when I do turnaround shows that people who have a million million five business, and if they haven't found a manager, if they haven't found a number two, they are literally working 80 hours a week, stressed out of their mind and on the brink of collapse. Also, if you're like, I can handle it, I'm not running, I'm not stressed out, this is great. Okay then what you are doing if you haven't hired an operator past a million dollars in annual revenue, is you have key man risks, which means you are the bottleneck. Which means if you got hit by a bus, everyone would lose their job. If you got hit by a bus, no one would have any work because everything is going through you. You hire, you fire, you get new jobs, you close jobs, you invoice, you do everything inside of the business. And if that's the case, you are the risk. And you need to find a backup. You need to find a redundancy if you've passed this threshold of revenue. Another awesome part about hiring an operator is it gives the opportunity to actually give your team chance to move up within the organization. And personally, I've never actually hired someone from outside the company and brought them in to be a manager or an operator. They've always started within the company and worked a year, two years, three years, five years plus before they're actually an operator inside the business. By hiring from within, it really changes the ship and shifts the culture from like, hey, this is not an entry level dead end job. There's an opportunity to actually move up inside the organization. This is one of the greatest benefits of having a larger company is the fact that when team members come on, you can point to other team members that have come before and started at positions like them and actually moved up inside the organization, made more money and been able to take their career to the next level. Great for business, great for hiring more people, great for the culture. Now the fourth thing that you want to focus on as the architect inside the business is what I call the S curve of price impact. And what we're trying to do is maximize profit. On the chart here, you can see on the Y axis the close percentage. This is what percentage of your jobs are going to accept the number of estimates you send out, what percent of them are going to get accepted. Now as you move price higher and higher, obviously less People are going to accept the job. Higher price, less people accept the job, less close ratio. Ultimately, if you, in theory, if your price was zero and you were giving everything away for free, 100% of the people who asked for an estimate would accept the job. So if you can see in the top left hand corner of the chart is like 100% close ratio. Essentially if your price was zero. Now as you add any sort of price, some people will leave. You can see that drop very quickly in close percentage as you add any price. Like anything above free, quick drop. And then there comes a point where as you grow, as you raise price, really crazy expensive, like $1,000 an hour, you're going to basically have almost zero close percentage. Like no one's going to accept a million dollars for your job. That's usually a thousand. So we can, we can assume that if we infinitely move the x axis all the way to the right and price goes way up, eventually we're going to have where the C point is on that chart. And that is like basically no one's going to accept the job. But here's what's crazy. Between A and B, I'm able to move price up a lot more than double. And yet my close percentage only dropped a little bit. And so really where the point on the chart is where it says B is really where I want to be at to maximize profit. Now point B is where I have raised prices to the point where I am very profitable. However, I haven't raised my prices so high that a very small portion of my estimates are being accepted. This is the pivotal point on the S curve. And this is what people, everyone in home services is like, man, I raised my prices and no one left. You're right, because you're somewhere between A and B on the chart. And when you raise prices, there wasn't a huge impact to close ratio and people still stuck with your business. And assuming that you have great service, assuming you have a great brand and a great website and great uniforms and great admin, if you have those things and you answer your phone, I guarantee you this S curve is extremely flat in the middle part. And that gives you a lot of price flexibility in order to be able to maximize profit. And that's what an architect does. You're pushing the boundaries, you're testing things out. That's what in an architectural firm and someone building a house, the architect, that's what they do. They're not building the house, they're not actually putting nails inside of wood. They're not actually Digging the hole. They're the ones stepping back from the building and running math like this and optimizing things. Now another thing, as you optimize pricing and you increase your prices, you're setting your labors up for success. Because ultimately you need good pricing if you're going to have a good pay for performance or P4P structure. If you have no idea what P4P is, go to p4psoftware.com training. It's completely free for the training and you can walk through exactly how it works. Ultimately it's giving a percentage of the revenue to the employees that are doing the work. And so if your prices are really low and, and your prices are not optimized, you're essentially throwing your team under the bus and they're not gonna be able to make as much money. So if I can optimize my prices, I'm gonna have a video coming out soon. Cause we raised prices by 30 plus percent at one of my locations. And I'm gonna show all the numbers in the breakdown of how much more profit we made. And we didn't lose tons of people, not everyone left and we raised our prices dramatically. And so I'm optimizing price cause now I'm the architect in the business and I wanna make sure my team makes a lot of money on pay for performance. Because I know if they're making a lot of money on paper performance, I'll keep them longer, they'll be more happy, they'll work less hours and make more money. That's a good thing for them. The fifth thing that I, as an architect am going to be focused on is creating dependable and multiple client acquisition channels. So the first part of this is I don't wanna have single channel risk. And that is I get all my customers from one source. And this is extremely risky. And if you are running a business to be getting all of your leads from thumbtack, all of your leads from Angie's List, all of your leads from Facebook, all of their leads from Google, all of your leads from word of mouth, these are all single acquisition channels that if you only are using them and them alone, you're going to have risk in the business. And as the architect, I don't want to have any risk. I'm looking for the risks, I'm looking for the stresses and I'm trying to eliminate them and I'm trying to create dependencies and backups. And so if you're getting all of your leads from one single channel, figure out another channel. This is Working great. I'm spending $1,000 a month on Thumbtack. I'm getting all my customers. Great. Spend 800, spend 200 on Facebook and figure out that channel. Watch YouTube videos, figure out a way to be able to get leads from Facebook. Why? Because I don't want an algorithm change or, or a platform change or a company like Thumbtack or Angie's or something going out of business to completely wipe your business out. That's a massive risk. Cause all of your leads are coming from one source. Another thing you can do to make your client acquisition more dependable and make sure that the leads that are coming in are much more steady is focus on upsells, your existing customers, sell more to them referrals, get other leads from your existing customers. Reviews. These are things that don't cost a lot of money by the way. They actually don't cost any money. You can inside of copilot send like a one click estimate email or a text blast to existing customers and upsell lots of services. You can get referrals, you can ask for a review. These are things that you're doing to eliminate having just one channel where you only get customers from that. And the worst part is where you have to pay every single time you get someone. Think of it like a toll booth. I don't want to pay the toll booth of Mark Zucky Zuck at Facebook every single time I get a lead. I want to figure out upsells, referrals and reviews to get leads coming in without having to pay for them every single time. The sixth thing that you're gonna do as an architect is paint a vivid vision. There's a great book by Cameron Herold about this if you wanna listen to it. But make sure that the goalpost and the mission are clear. Now. You don't necessarily need like exact roadmap of exactly how to get there. We're gonna like, everything's gonna be picture perfect, just at least directionally for your team to know where they're going. That's the best for me. It's always worked the best to give, get competent people, give them a great goal and then say go for it. I'm gonna give you the resources and trust to go for it. And yes, some people will trip up along the way, some people will make mistakes, some people will throw it back in your face. Some people will disrespect you, some people will go in the opposite direction of the goal and you'll have to let them off the team. However, make the goal post Clear. Cause you can't blame them if they go the opposite direction, if you never told them the ultimate direction you want them to go to. So give them clear boundaries of like, this is the end line, this is the finish line. This is the end zone. This is the goal post. This is the direction we're going. So in Augusta, for example, our goal post, our mission is to change the level of professionalism in the lawn care industry. For copilot, it is to give home service entrepreneurs the next step to take in their business. Whether that be raising prices, whether it be hiring, whether which customers they should raise prices on. Like, there's so many things in your business that can be fixed simply by having all the numbers in a CRM. That's why copilot exists. And our goal is to use AI and software to be able to take all this data and then basically tell you exactly what to do in your business. The mission of Mike Andy's media and all the things do on YouTube and Facebook and, and on social media is to give the roadmap to go from zero to a million plus dollar home service business. So if you're, whether you're just getting started or you're already on your journey and built a million plus dollar business, my goal is to be able to give you that roadmap, P4P or pay for performance software. The goal, the mission, the end result, the finish line, is to change the way laborers are paid. Now, all of these four combined, the unifying mission between all four of these kind of different, different missions, you might say different companies or different departments, and I have operators for each of these. The unifying mission is make home service business owners rich. I know that if we make home service business owners rich, a lot of the other things that I care about will happen. Employees will make more money. The industry will become more professional. Local communities, churches and organizations will be funded more. Because if home service business owners are rich, they will be able to get money to communities faster than government programs. I know this for the fact of, like, the cost for a government employee to be hired versus a private sector. The cost of creating jobs in the private sector is so far below that of the public sector. And so if I could make home service business owners rich, I've won the game. I know that making them rich will add more jobs. It'll add to money going to their local church, their communities, their baseball clubs, creating, you know, fixing up the park. This is what home service business owners and entrepreneurs do. And I want to make them rich. Now second Part of creating a vivid vision and painting this for your team is let the operators color between the lines. Which means here's the general framework, here's what the mission of the company is. I'm not going to give you every little detail. I'm going to allow you to have flexibility and creativity and, and the autonomy to be able to make decisions inside of your department. I'm going to allow you to hire, I'm going to allow you to fire, I'm going to allow you to make decisions, a lot of them without me, and I'm not going to micromanage you. This is extremely important. If you want to have a great number two, if you want to have a great general manager, let them do this. Give them clear guidelines, outlines and then let them paint in between, let them color and let them have some sort of stake in the decision making power. And if you're micromanaging them, you will lose great general managers, you will lose great operators, you will lose great number twos. Another part of creating a vivid vision is you wanna have a vision big enough for their dreams, your operators to fit inside of and all of your team or else you're gonna lose them. Like if your dream is like, well, I wanna build a business that has two employees, that's awesome for you. But don't expect to get a great operator or a great general manager that, that gets wildly inspired by your vision. You wanna make a vision so big that their dreams and their goals will fit inside of your vision. If you don't, they'll eventually have to leave. And that's what happens when a company stops growing over the course of years and they stagnate is great. People inside the organization will have to leave because they've expanded past the vision of the founder, past the vision of the entrepreneur, because they. A lot of times, a lot of times those founders stopped being the architect and they started getting busy with management and they started getting busy doing the labor. Instead of being a great architect, that paints a vivid vision big enough for the dreams and visions and goals of their team to fit inside of them. The seventh thing to do as the architect inside your business after you've grown a million dollar business is set the values. These are the seven core values of Augusta Nation. I will probably consolidate them into three or four in a few years, but right now these are the seven. First one, we embrace constant improvement. Everyone likes the idea of constant improvement, but when you actually are constantly improving and growing and changing, you get stretch marks, you get aches and pains. It's not always easy. There's going to be times it doesn't feel good to constantly change. But that's one of our values because we know in order, these are the seven values required to be able to hit the mission of changing the level of professionalism in the landscape industry. So your values point to the mission and these seven values are what we abide by and the values that we buy. At just one of my companies, Augusta. Second one is we are humble and teachable. I don't care if you're awesome. I don't care if you have great skills. I don't care if you bring great results to the organization. If you're not humble and you're not teachable, I don't want to work with you. And you say that's cruel. The best part about being a business owner and being an employer is being able to choose the team and the team member that you play with every single day. To my opinion, that is the best reason for being able to own your own business. And yes, there's money involved in the output down the road. You can make build things and cool stuff great. I'm all about the team and I want to be able to build the team the way I see fit. And I want people that are humble. If someone is gonna be so cocky and stuck up because they think they know everything and they're not willing to be taught, I have no respect for them. And therefore, when someone comes to me and they have something to share or they have some sort of critique, I'm gonna listen. I might not disagree, I might not agree, but I am not going to be proud or arrogant because my status, because I am this. You are not gonna tell me what to say. Like, that's not the inclination that I have and I'm not gonna tolerate that inside the organization. Therefore, it is a value. And I think if we're humble and teachable, we, we will change the level of professionalism in the industry because everyone will be willing to be taught and humble enough to be taught to be able to grow. Which in case, if you're like, I want to be teachable too. Blue collarsummit.com tickets are available. You don't want to miss it. Number three is we walk with purpose. You're like, what does that mean? It means that when we actually take decisions, when we make decisions, we are actually doing it with purpose and intention. We are doing it deliberately. We're not just like floating along. We're not waiting for like the tides of the economy or the tides of the industry or the tides of the labor market to push us around. Like, we're walking with purpose. And that is indicative when literally you walk across the office like, chest up, you walk quickly, like, time is of the essence. We get to meetings on time comes down to we walk with purpose. We get places we're not slouched over. We don't talk really like this. I don't walk across the office to. I have a purpose. I have intention of places to go. Four things we do more with less. If you're growing a business that's bootstrapped, which means you don't have loans and debt and investors and venture capital and private equity, you're gonna have to do with more with less. And that means not having fancy offices when you're trying to grow. It means not getting fancy trucks and equipment when you're trying to grow your business because growth sucks cash, you are willing to forfeit having fancy things in your personal life for a while. Number five, we put the team and others first. Number six, we figure things out. Number seven, we are emotional about our brand. So what does that mean? Well, if you're rational, it means that you're gonna be very skeptical of everyone. When you have a brand like a uniform in the military, you are emotional when all of a sudden you're put on the other side of the world. But because someone literally wears the same uniform as you, they're in the same. They have the same brand as you, you are willing to take a bullet for them. That is being emotional about the brand versus being logical. Like, oh, no, I haven't had, like, 10 years to be with them. I haven't seen whether. I haven't gone through a quiz or a test. And it's like, look, if you wear the Augusta gold, we trust you, just like you were in the military. If you wear our uniform, we're willing to take a bullet for you. That's emotional. That is not logical. And we are emotional about our brand. Now, when you're setting these values, the reason this is so important is you gotta set rules of engagement along the way of hitting the goal and the vision. So I want to get to changing the level of professional in the industry, But I've got to set clear rules of engagement. Like, this flies and this does not. And rules of engagement in the military, it's like, when do you pull out the gun versus when do you do something else? Like, there needs to be a clear distinction as to what actions are taken and a clear roadmap of rules and regulations of what we're going to do on our way to achieving the goal, this, the values will be the grand jury for how disagreements, problems or violations inside the culture are handled. So you're like, okay, so there's this really big problem. There's an issue with this. The customer said this or employees said this, or a manager said this. Okay, let's look at the core values. Which one was violated and is this worth getting rid of somebody? Like whether or not you fire someone should be dictated by. Did they go against the values of the organization? Were they not willing to be, you know, if we go back to the values, were they not willing to constantly improve? Were they not willing to be humble and teachable? If not, if they're not willing to improve and have a be on a performance improvement plan, they're going to get kicked to the curb. I don't care how polished, how long they've been with the company. If the values are actually the law, if the values are actually the rules of engagement and you actually believe those values will get you to your vision, they'll be the way that you distinguish between right and wrong in the business as you move forward. Number eight, again, we're talking about the things that you as an architect should be doing in the business after a million dollars. Forecasting and projections. Now, if we talk about the goal, the finish line, think of that as like you're running a race that's the end of the marathon. But it's kind of nice to know where mile 1, 2, 3, 5, 17, 19 and 20 are. On your way to the 28 miles by running this massive race. And so the reason it's important. Cause you can, it's easier as a runner if, you know, if I'm at mile 20, I'm gonna be potentially thinking differently. I'm going to be adjusting my speed, I'm gonna be drinking different amounts of water, I'm gonna be taking in different amounts of food based upon the mile markers and the metrics. So I need to make sure I have metrics for my employees to be able to know. How are we doing on this race? Are we halfway through? Are we almost to the finish line? These are the type of things that I used to not do. And I recently, only recently actually had the confidence to actually give a 10 year plan for my team. He's like, that's too far away. You're probably right. But if the goal is like way out here to do X, Y and Z, let's just use Augusta, for example. Change the level professionally in the Industry. Okay, great. What do we need to do to get that? Like, give me some numbers here so I can benchmark myself for success. Like, am I doing good? Am I behind? Am I ahead? Now, the reason in the past I didn't give really clear forecasting and projections for all the companies is honestly, I'll be honest, I didn't have a lot of confidence in the outcome. I didn't know with certainty that I would hit those targets. And so I thought, if I can't hit the targets, I'm not talking about it. And like, honestly, it was like too, it was like the audacity to say some of these numbers, like the amount of locations that we will need at Augusta Lawn Care to be able to change the level of professionals in the industry is mind boggling. The amount of revenues and all, the amount of team members we will need and the amount of things we'll have to invest in in terms of software, it boggles my mind. And so it's like to say those things out loud to your team can feel really awkward sometimes. And I don't like to set their expectations so high if I don't believe I can with certainty meet those goals. When I put goals towards my team, I set those as expectations. Those are not like, yeah, we're kind of shooting for them, we're going to hit those. And like, I am setting out publicly to my team, the people that work for me every single day, and I feel a sense of obligation to meet those expectations. And you're like, oh no, you're not promising anything. I take them as promises. Whether that's right or wrong, I don't really care. That's what I do. And that is when I set these forecasts and projections, I say we're going to do this thing and then we set benchmarks and mile markers along the race. I'm setting those expectations for myself to be able to hit those targets. Now, I only recently gave these actual metrics and numbers of success. And here's the reason why I did it. I talked about why I didn't do it in the past, but here's why I recently did. It can be very difficult for your team. Managers, operators, frontline team members. It's easy for them to get disillusioned with doing the boring work. And that is like, from where you're at now to where you want to be is a huge amount of time and they might have to spend years doing the same thing. And the company's growing and their role might change, but it might not. And Their skills might not have changed fast enough. Or potentially they just need to do the boring work because that's what's required to get to the end result. And you just need to add more people doing the exact same function in the business. And that can get really tough, especially for someone who wants to get ahead and they're chomping at the bit and they want to get to the next level of their career. They might spend two, three, four years doing the same thing. The only way they can usually get through that is if they actually know why their current role and doing the boring work is contributing to the very long term goal of success. And they can benchmark these metrics of success and the projections that we are making, we are making progress towards that end goal. And another positive thing is sometimes a team member doesn't see the full scope of how their role fits together with everything else. So the reason I recently did this is because, like, there are team members at Command center, for example, that answer the phones. Well, that's one very important piece of a big function inside of Command Center. And Command center is one part of Augusta Lawn Care. And Augusta Lawn Care is one piece of this entire organization that we just talked about that is trying to make small business owners rich. But if I never tell the end result, they're not gonna see how their piece of answering the phone well, fits into that grand scheme and that grand plan. And so I wanna make sure I give this vivid vision and then I create these forecasts and projections so they know that we're making progress towards the goal and how it all fits together. Number nine, again, we were talking about what you should be doing as an architect inside your business past a million dollars incentives and hitting goals and metrics. So for team members out in the field, I'm going to give them a piece of the profits for our team members out in the field mowing grass, doing lawns. At Augusta Lawn Care, we usually give 10% of profits on a quarterly basis. This is going to keep them motivated. And as you make a bunch more money, they'll still like you because they want a piece of the pie. Give them a piece of the pie. Say, well, you know, it's not fair that the business owner is making all this money and he works one hour a week. Okay, yes, Just agree with them. You're right, I'm going to give you a piece of it. And now all of a sudden they're on your side. They want the company to make more money, they want it to be more profitable, they want it to be more efficient. They want to cut waste, they want to cut low performing team members because they want the business to make more money. Because they have seen that the business making more money leads to them making more money. And most of the time giving someone more money leads them closer to their own personal goals. I know with confidence that most people giving them more money will lead them closer to their goals. It's a shot in the dark on a hundred other variables, but I know if I can give them more money, that is profit sharing and that will probably get them closer to taking more time off, providing for their family, going on a vacation or whatever else they want to do with the money I give them. Second part of incentives and hitting goals and metrics is the operators. Now I talk about operators as the kind of the heads of each of the divisions and the businesses that I run, all right? And then I have a C suite of executives that then they report to. Okay? But in terms of the operators for each of the businesses, if you're in this case your general manager, head of operations, however you want to phrase these, you want to make sure that they have certain targets also in place and you have profit sharing in place for them. For my general managers for Augusta Lawn Care, I'm going to pay them between 10 and 35% of the profits in the business are going to them. And there's a bunch of reasons as to why. I've talked about in the past, there's other videos that talk about how to do GM compensation plans and profit sharing, but ultimately I want to make sure they have incentives to hit the goals because it's not just about hitting the goals because that's the vision of the founder. That's not enough. Their vision and goals might not necessarily align perfectly with your vision and so give them incentives to hit your vision's goals so they can hit their own goals in life and they can put the money towards things that they're passionate about because they're not passionate about buying more trucks and more and growing the business and hiring more people. They want to go on vacation, great. Give them the money to do so. By saying, look, if you hit these goals and targets, the business will be able to afford more money for you and then you can do whatever you want with that. Copy and paste number 10. As an architect inside the biz, we're going to copy and paste. That can mean two things. One, expand your one location. So if you have one location, add more services, copy and paste. You can add more divisions. Copy and paste more Leads more crew, managers, add more customers. Copy and paste. If I have 100 customers, I'm gonna get 200 customers. I'm gonna add a new division, I'm gonna add a new service. All of a sudden I have a $5 million business. This is what the architect does, is copy and paste. Now the second thing you can do is start more locations. And this is like where what we do at Augusta, a lot of times we have multi unit operators. If you're bound by population, so you don't have a big population, you can't necessarily grow the business past 2,3 million in. In your area. Start in a different area, two hours away, an hour away. Start a secondary location. And I have another video that I can link to at the end of this one about how to do that if you're. If you also have constraints in terms of drive time. So you're like, I don't want to be driving. I'm really spread out. I don't want to be driving an hour, hour and a half to go. Service Crossroads. Great. Start a secondary location. Copy and paste. Copy and paste your current model into a different market that's an hour away. So you save massive amounts of drive time. You can also use the copy and paste method for multiple locations just to retain talent. Because your frontline team events a rock star, you're going to lose them. Your crew manager, you're going to lose them unless you can make them an operator at a secondary or tertiary location and start to copy and paste your business model in multiple locations. Okay, if you're wondering how do I do that, watch this video right here where it's going to walk you through how to start with $140,000 in cash and build a six location chain that is over $4 million in annual revenue. Check it out right here.