🛑 Take Your Lawn Care Business to the Next Level! Get LEGIT & Know Your Numbers!

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes. And today I have a very important announcement. But before we get into that, I want to share a story of something that happened to me. When I was 18 years old, I went to Nairobi, just outside Nairobi, in Tigoni, in Calanguari. And I was at different hospitals and clinics volunteering. And it was right at the end, after I had graduated from my bachelor's and before I was planning to go to medical school. And I was volunteering a lot in these hospitals and clinics and orphanages. And there was a particular day when a child come in, and we didn't really know what happened to them, but they came into the emergency room. And that was kind of where I loved to be at in terms of just seeing as much as I could and observing as much as I could then. And this little child came in. I would say he was probably 2, maybe 3 years old. And we don't know what happened, exactly what happened to him, but basically he was dying. And we don't know if it was impact from something or. Or if potentially had some sort of a heart attack. We don't really know. The clinic that we were at didn't really have the best medical facilities. And so essentially, myself and another volunteer did CPR on him. And unfortunately, he passed away. And it was extremely tiring, honestly, to be on your feet and him being unresponsive, and we're just trying to keep him alive and eventually just having to let him go. And that was extremely hard. And I remember the impact that it had on the nurse that I was working with. She was from Germany, and she. It took her a good solid two to three days to come back to the emergency room and keep working with us because it was so just emotionally draining and damaging to see that. And all that time and energy poured into this little boy that we were working on and then him passing away. And I know it seems somewhat of a crude example, but it impacted me a lot. And it also, when I think about business owners that are also. They seem like their businesses are literally falling apart. They are on life support. They are getting CPR on their business, as it were. It can seem like the same way. So much time and effort and energy is poured into something, and it's so hard to see that just fail and give up or potentially go bankrupt or lose all of that. And so often the time I ask myself, why is it that businesses get to the point where they are on life support, they are financially struggling so much, and sometimes it's labor issues or employee issues that they have previous debt problems or, or tax liabilities, et cetera. But so often the times I find they do not have their numbers. They don't know what their balance sheet is. They don't even know what a balance sheet is. They don't know what an income statement is or a profit and loss statement is. And I was at GIE the past few weeks and talked to so many different business owners and I would ask them certain things. And so often the times they just simply didn't know their numbers. And so I really look at knowing your numbers kind of like triage. And what I mean by that is when someone would come into the emergency room in Africa, the first thing we would do is do triage on them. And when we talk about triage in the medical facilities and medical system, it's hey, I'm gonna take your heart rate, I'm gonna take your blood pressure. These simple metrics can share so much about what the body is going through and its level of health. And what's sad in, in our businesses is so many of us have no idea what the triage or the numbers and the health of our business is like. Therefore we can't make good decisions as to what strategic changes we need to make in the business are. And so I really believe that if someone came into the emergency room bleeding, the first thing we would do is what's your heart rate, what's your blood pressure? We checking those things. But when it comes to your business, people, they a lot of times will contact me and be like, I'm failing, I'm failing. And yet I can't even get numbers from them that is their heart rate or their blood pressure from their business. Cause they don't know what those numbers are. And unfortunately, it's not like in the medical system where I can just throw a ban on someone within 30 seconds. I know their blood pressure. I could do that in the medical field. But in business it's not like that. If someone's been years and years where they don't know their numbers, they're not tracking their bank accounts, their statements are all over the place. They don't know how much cash is in the bank. They don't know their hourly rate. They just don't know any of their numbers, I can't help them immediately. It's going to take a lot of time to balance the accounts, figure out their financials. Is this business even solvent? And so because of this, what I've determined that we have now created for all of you is what we call lawn care. Bookkeeper, lawncarebookkeeper.com and what I hope this does for so many of you is allow you to perform triage on your business. Now, triage doesn't necessarily mean that you're unhealthy or that you're dying or that you're going in an emergency room, because triage is also done at your checkup. When you go to your general practitioner, your general physician, the first thing they'll do is they'll weigh you. They'll figure out what your blood pressure is and what your heart rate is. These are the numbers they need to know just to do an annual checkup, just to figure out, hey, how healthy is the body? What's the trajectory of the health of this body? And I think the same thing goes for your business. It might not mean that you're failing or that you don't know what your business is doing, or you're flailing and you're dying. It seems like it might mean that you simply need to do health checkups on your business to know those numbers and then be able to make strategic decisions in terms of how many people should I be hiring, what kind of equipment should I buy? When should I do that? Should I be growing more right now? These are all things that you can potentially have good data around by knowing your numbers. So this is an income statement, also known as a profit and loss statement. Same thing. And this is my end of Q3 for one of our locations that shows the month to date metrics, or, sorry, year to date metrics, and month to date metrics for quarter three. So that's an income statement, a profit and loss statement. It shows all my expenses, all of my revenues, and exactly what my profits are for every single month. And I look at the income statement or the profit and loss same thing over the course of time, like a story tells a story. That's why I want to have one every single quarter. That's what I want to be able to see year to date and be able to track that over time. Now, this is a balance sheet. It tracks my assets and my liabilities. So this location, for example, is 665,355.62 in assets. All right? And then like my income statement here, you can see this location through three quarters through Q3, had $230,386 in profit. And in September, they had three pay periods. So it was a lot more on payroll, 102,000 in payroll. So therefore, the profit was only $2,581. So these are important numbers to know. And if that seems like, well, that's just a bunch of numbers to me. These are numbers you need to know. If you're going to an accountant, if you're going to an attorney, if you're going to someone to get advice, they're going to ask the first things they're going to ask. If you're going to go to a loan, you're going to try to expand your business. These are the things that you're going to need. Lawn Care Bookkeeper is something we've now created for you to be able to get triage on your business. That is your income statement and your balance sheet. Your balance sheet is like a snapshot in time. This one right here, it shows your assets and your liabilities. What are the balances of all your different accounts, Whether it be credit card debt, cash in the bank, whether it be accounts receivable and accounts payable. These are all important little numbers that you need to know to be able to make good decisions in your business. Lawncarebookkeeper.com is going to offer you the ability to be able to do payroll number one, as well as be able to do QuickBooks reporting to be able to have these numbers on a quarterly basis. We'll track all of your expenses every single day. We'll be able to put it into these reports for you. And in addition to the reporting side, which is extremely important, we'll also be able to do your payroll through the same QuickBooks account. So what's really cool about lawncarebookkeeper.com is that all of the cost of this is determined by payroll is by how many employees you have. And then the cost to be able to do all of your bookkeeping and your reporting is going to be based upon your monthly revenue. So I really encourage you. Go check out lawncarebookkeeper.com there's more videos in there. Exactly what this is going to be able to do for your lawn care and landscaping business. I truly believe this will be a game changer for some of you and give you the information you need to to make good decisions when it comes to your business. When you should be buying things, when you should be growing, when you should be advertising, when you should be hiring. All of those important things that you need to make decisions in your business really need to revolve around the numbers, the triage that we hope to give you. We can't necessarily make the decisions for you. I can't do that. If you're not part of Augusta Lawn Care and the franchisees. But this is the ability to be able to at least get the numbers so you have the triage and necessary to make an analytical decision and make positive, strategic decisions in your business. I hope it's super helpful for you. Check it out. Go to lawncarebookkeeper.com and we'll see you there.