The Blunt Truth: Should You Join Augusta Lawn Care Franchise?

Is Augusta Lawn Care the right franchise to join for you, for your business, your family, for your team? And this presentation is really for you if you're thinking of converting your independent lawn care business into Augusta Lawn Care. Also if you're thinking of starting your own lawn care business from scratch. So if you don't even have a business right now, you're not been in the lawn care industry and you're just thinking about starting one, this is also going to be for you. Also, just in general, I know there's a lot of you that might already have questions looking throughout the website, talking to other owners, talking to Lee, and seeing if Augusta Nation is a good fit for you. And I want to answer those questions on this call as well. I want to give a little bit of background and a bit of a story in case you don't know, kind of why Augusta even exists. So 18 years ago, I was 11 years old, I started mowing. To me over on the left hand side, we live in a little city called Blaine and a little neighborhood called Sealinks, and we actually still have a ton of mowing customers in that very specific neighborhood. I think like almost every single house, it's great. But I started mowing grass when I was 11 years old because I knew I was gonna go to college when I was young. So I started college when I was 13 years old. That photo in the bottom was when I got my associate's degree and then my bachelor's degree there on the top right hand side. And I went to Western Washington University. I thought I was gonna become a doctor. And that was like my whole sort of notion growing up was, I'm gonna become a doctor, I'm gonna become a physician. I'm probably going to go into some sort of surgery, whether it be heart or brain surgery. And so because I knew that was what I, I wanted to start college early. So I skipped grades, I did a couple years at home and just like crammed everything together to be able to start college when I was 13 years old. And I paid my way through college using lawn care. So that's when my brother and I, he's the one on the bottom there, we started Andy's Lawn Care and that's how we paid our way completely through college, didn't have any debt and was able to kind of get our way through now 11 years ago. So now I was 18 years old, I had finished my bachelor's degree, I was applying for medical school. And if you know about that process, you go take what's called the mcat, basically the college admissions test for getting your md. And so during that process, I decided I'd go over to Africa. And I volunteered there for six weeks in and around Nairobi, the Tigoni Kalangwari. The hospital down on the bottom left is Wima Hospital. And also met some really awesome kids at these orphanages. And so over there, we were just, like, doing anything and everything to help the patient. We'd usually see between 40 and 60 patients a day. I spent a lot of my time in the pediatric burn unit, especially in Tigoni Hospital. And just seeing these kids, it was transformative. It was everything I wanted when it came to medicine. And when I went over there as a quote unquote, medical student, they basically let me do anything, anything from surgery. We did birthing injections. I worked a lot, like I said, in the burning unit, but there were just so many cool things we were able to do. Coming back to the U.S. i determined, though, that I was not going to be going in the medical field, mostly because I started shadowing doctors in the US and realizing I was going to see way less patients. I was going to do a lot of paperwork. There's a lot more bureaucracy. Insurance, insurance. It was just not something I was super passionate about. And more importantly, I didn't want to spend another 10 years in school to be able to do brain surgery or heart surgery and then do the same four or five procedures the rest of my career. I already was a little bit entrepreneurial, so, like, I knew I. I knew I wouldn't be okay with that, doing the same thing every single day for the rest, you know, next 40 years of my life. So that's when I was like, look, the only skill I really have is to progress. That's when I started Augusta Lawn Care. And so this is me. Yes, we. We actually wore white uniforms. Not smart when it comes to lawn care and landscaping or working on in the heat all day long and in the dirt. But that's what we did. We were basing off of. I played a ton of golf. So you can kind of see in the logo, there used to be a big golf ball with a golf flag. Flag pole. Very quickly realized that Cease and desist came from Augusta national, the golf course. And they said, nae nae, you can't do that. I was like, I'm just a child. But nonetheless, change the branding and the logo a little bit. Obviously are not wearing white overalls anymore. Those white overalls, though, on the backside. Greenskeeper. We were kind of going after the whole Caddy look uniform of Augusta National. So had to avoid, avoid that we had no affiliation whatsoever with the Masters. And that was 11 years ago. We started Augusta. Now few years in, there really wasn't a lot of evidence of success. Although I started Augusta longer. I started my master's in Business administration at night at Western Washington University. So I'd work usually around 5 to 6, get up, work all day, and then at 6 till 10pm I would go to night school and do what's called an executive mba. It's, it's called that because usually the people there already are executive or business owners. So it's pretty cool. But I work there from 6 to 10, usually class projects to 11:30 or 12, come back home and just do the same thing again. That was the first couple of years of Augusta as I was trying to do both of those things. Getting my MBA and you know, started 11 years ago, almost ended eight years ago. And the reason for that was because I was running a business without systems. I was running a business that all depended on me to get new jobs, make sure the job went well and make sure we got paid for the job. And the reason it almost ended and the reason it's because we didn't have systems is because I should not have been at that job site. And that job site, what I'm referring to is a workplace accident where underneath that dump truck, an old dump truck that is probably completely illegal because the way it's built, it was on a farm. We bought it. I think I bought the thing for like $3,000 and put a couple grand into it. All that to Say is a 1991, I believe, Ford LL7000 dump truck. And the PTO, the power takeoff is a thing that spins underneath the dump truck and allows that dump bed to actually dump out. And sure enough, that cable had broken from inside of the cab and, and it was again a manual cable that went down underneath the cab and then engaged the pto. Well, it broke like a week before. So I had already probably at least 20 or 30 times gone underneath the dump truck and just manually engaged that lever instead of relying on the cord which was broken. So on this specific day I loaded up this dump truck, I think I. Three years, three yards of, of cobble rock. And we're doing a landscaping job at the time. I think we're doing like seven, $800,000 in annual revenue at a crew of like four or five guys. And we were really growing a bunch. I had just hired Liz as my full time office person who's now in the command center and helps run the operations for Augusta Nation. But back then, she just started in the office. So all that say I loaded up the truck, I was headed to the job site, was going to dump the material, head back to the job site, or head back to the shop after showing them the job, and then go do estimates for the rest of the day. That was kind of my rule at the time, was basically full time estimator. And as I was dumping the dump truck and I engaged the PTO on my way back out from underneath the dump truck, I got my hoodie caught on in the shaft line of the PTO and it just spins. And if you, you know, if you haven't looked up, you don't know what a PTO is, just type into Google or YouTube PTO accidents. And it's not cool. Usually people will lose their arms, an appendage, a leg, a finger, or just get killed because the thing will just, it's not, you're not going to stop the PTO and, and so it can dump probably 25, 30,000 pounds of that back thing. It's not going to stop because of me. And so it wrapped up and within a matter of just a split second, cinched my shirt and my hoodie up around my neck. And I remember looking out underneath the dump truck and fortunately the gearbox can kind of actually see it now. The scar where the gearbox pinned me up among my bicep and kept me from actually just spinning over and over and over again. Thankfully, unfortunately, it got super tight around my neck and then all of a sudden just like broke open and I fell out. And so I'm very thankful. That being said, for the next week and a half, two weeks, I couldn't work and I went to the hospital. I remember still being on the hospital bed, that bed right there actually in the photo. And I remember literally facetiming my crew, walking them through the next job, simply because I didn't have the systems in place to ensure that the jobs got done without me there. And so over the next week and a half, two weeks in bed, trying to get things, you know, just, just healing up, I started to think about what I learned in my master's in Business administration in my business school. I was like, look, I know how to run this business. I know how the, how systems should be built. I learned this stuff, but I never applied it to my small business. I always had these big Fortune 500, 500 companies and how to run these things. And so I actually started just documenting Every single thing I did in the business and what I needed to fix and in order to be able to make the business profitable. And so this is really when I started to share my story of turning the business around. If you're way back, way back, me sitting in my room on the left hand side there. Then I upgraded, I got a little whiteboard and started talking about like what I was doing in the business, how I was changing my pricing, how I instituted estimate videos. Estimate videos would have saved my life in terms of what happened with the PTO accident because I should never have been there. I should have had a system in place where I gave the crew a video and they went to the job site without me being there. And I was very fortunate because I didn't have any dependence when that accident happened. But if I would have, the business would have gone bankrupt because it didn't have enough profit, it didn't have enough cash on hand. And if it wasn't for Liz and some phenomenal team members, that business would have gone bye bye. And the vast majority of home service business owners, the vast majority of landscapers inside of our industry, if they were to have this type of accident and they are prone to because they don't have systems in their business, it would wipe them out, especially when they have kids and they have a family. And so I get pretty worked up over this and I started sharing my story of like here's what I'm doing around pricing, here's what I'm doing estimate videos, here's what I'm doing on pay for performance. So eight years ago I started landscapebusinesscourse.com and this still exists today. It's completely free, you can sign up for it. But the reason that it's called Landscape Business Course is because I still remember searching on Google for a course like this. Actually just walked me through how do I actually build a landscaping business. Like I knew ethereal kind of like theory about MBA and massive companies like how do I do this in this small of a business? I'm trying to build a million dollar company here. I need to make it profitable. How do I have systems and procedures? And so there was nothing there. And so that's when I started Landscape Business Course and just started documenting what I was changing inside the company. And if you actually look on the first few videos of Landscape Business course you actually see marks all on my, my neck because it was about three weeks after I came back to work that we actually started shooting these videos and I left some of them in here. Even though we updated elements of the course because I wanted people to see, like, that's actually what happened, like, three weeks after that accident. I was immediately like, okay, these are all the things I have to change. Here's what I'm going to do, and I'm going to document everything. So six years ago, a couple years into now, changing all aspects of the business, and it's starting to become very profitable. Very few people that I was sharing these systems with were actually executing against them. And the reason was that people that saw me on YouTube or listen to the podcast, they really just looked at me as like a content creator, a consultant, an outsider. And I don't blame them, honestly. And one of the examples, like pay for performance, the book I wrote, my hourly is a failing formula. It changed my business. It went from not making money to the very next year, I had $280,000 in distributions. And I talk all about it@p4psoftware.com the book I give away the entire trainer out@mikeandys.com P4P and I promoted a ton. There's been thousands of people read that book. There's been thousands of people that have taken the course that I give away for free. And literally, to date, less than 130 companies outside of Augusta Nation have actually fully implemented P4P, using the software and actually doing it right, where they give reports, their team, they're able to adjust for every single job. There's manual adjustments and. And the structure of the system is actually fully implemented inside of their business. And so five years ago, going back a little bit, I wouldn't have skin in the game. I was tired of being looking as a consultant, tired of not having skin in the game, tired of people just like, oh, that's a good idea. And like, I would come and try to help them out and just didn't want to do anything. And so I needed to make sure that this change actually happened. I needed to create two things, a brand and a community. And the best way to do this was to start a franchise. Now, the fastest way, if I were to just try to make a bunch of money and, you know, very profitable, I would have started a mastermind. $999 a month. I have a Facebook group, I have a daily livestream, and I have, like, quarterly meetups where we do, you know, very. Only if you're in the group, you could be there. And honestly, if I was selling that right now on this webinar, I bet I can get almost everyone here to sign up the Ability to be able to talk to me every single day, ask your questions, meet up with a group of like minded people four times a year and at a different event, be able to be on a Facebook group and share ideas in a safe environment. I think like, I genuinely believe I could have 500 to a thousand of those, which is a six to $12 million business by the way, and probably being ran by a few executive assistants. But the problem with that, it would not change the level of professionalism in the landscape industry. And the reason it would not is because it would have no brand and the community would not be as strong because they're not, they do not wear the same uniform. And so I had already actually seen the power of franchising. And I still to this day I'm a franchisee at Anytime Fitness. And I remember seeing like, I remember thinking like, how in the world would you ever start an independent gym with. After seeing everything that I've done at any time fitness, like all the training and the systems and the software, I don't even know how someone could make it as an independent gym. And I'd already seen the power of what franchising did and the fact that I would from day one, at any time fitness, show up once a week, run a meeting, look at the KPIs, you'll tell the office manager and the trainers what to do. And I was done. Follow the systems. So in fall 2019, I said in five years it'll be obvious that joining Augusta Lawn Care is the right move for all lawn care companies. Now, Last year, in 2024, the average location revenue increased by 27% year over year. We're on track this year to become one of the largest residential mowing, if not the largest residential mowing company in the world, as well as Christmas lights, by the way. But joining Augusta Nation, in my opinion, five years after making that statement is the smart financial move for any lawn care business. The same way that I would say that I can't believe how someone could start an independent gym instead of just joining a franchise like Anytime Fitness, where you have all the support, all the technology, all, all of the training. The same thing is true for Augusta Lawn Care. And I, I truly believe that to my core. Our mission at Augusta Lawn Care is to change the level of professionalism in the landscape industry. That is the prism by which I make every single decision inside the company. Now how are we going to do that? We're going to raise the expectation of the customer. Well, what does that mean? Well, that's What Amazon did because competitors eventually like Amazon will be forced to adopt our standards. 20 years ago, two day shipping was not a thing. Free shipping was not a thing. Free returns was not a thing. But how Amazon changed E Commerce is they began to the customer began to expect these things from all of their competition. And now E Commerce is completely different because and the people that did not adopt those standards, they ended up failing. The Sears of the world that were so massive 20, 30 years ago no longer exist because they did not adopt the standards that Amazon began to enforce the because customers started to expect it. So I want to build a franchise that I would join and I began to realize that the only way that people were going to actually adhere to these standards was I would have a brand, I create a community and then everyone else around them would have to adopt those standards because we started to compete with every single landscaping company. So here's what I wanted and this is what Augusta Nation does today. First off, there's no royalty, right? There's no top of the line royalty. If you pay, there's no penalty. If you grow of royalty, that in my mind is what it is. The bigger you get, the more you have to pay the franchisor. That's not how it works. I guess the lawn care there's no perverse incentive. One of the things I hate about royalties is the fact that when you hear information or training from me as a franchisor, you run it through this filter of well what if he just trying to make more money off of me as a royalty and inflate my top line revenue. And the bottom line is that's the truth in many franchises that is the truth. If they're making a cut of their top line of your top line revenue, they're going to increase. They're going to encourage you and push you to get salespeople market and advertise a percentage of top line revenue when in reality you just want to be profitable. The reasons reason we got in a business is to be profitable and make a bunch of take home distributions. And I think there's a lot of perverse incentive when the franchisor is getting a piece of the top of the pie and you're getting the bottom line profits. I don't like it. So no royalty or marketing fund at Augusta lawn care. Now US Lawns has a 6 to 8% royalty. Spring Green has a 10 to 12% royalty. Grounds guys, these are other landscape lawn care green industry related franchises. They have a 7 to 8% royalty. Now just outside adjacent to Lawn care in kind of the home service industry. Mosquito Joe has a 12% royalty. Glass Doctor is a 6 to 9% royalty. And Mary Mae's has an 8.3% royal royalty. Again, if you're going a bigger business, this is really, really detrimental. And this is when I talked to franchisees before starting the franchise at Augusta Lawn Care, I talked to them what they hated the most and their best operators, the people who've grown two, three, four million dollars businesses, they were resenting the franchisor because the more money they made in their business in terms of revenue and the bigger they got, the more they had to pay the franchisor. When reality, the vast majority of your training and education and adoption of systems is in the first 12 to 24 months. After that, that's when you really start to grow the business. But you need the franchisor less. You want the systems, you want the brand that's a, or to the ongoing improvement of your business. But you don't need as much handholding and yet you're paying them more. It seems very counterintuitive. So instead at Augusta Lawn Care you pay a flat 1600 dollars per month, flat monthly fee. Now let's look at if you're going to build a million dollar business, what this would cost at Augusta Lawn Care versus these other franchises. So in a million dollar business in top line revenue, if you're paying $1,600 per month at Augusta, it's going to be $19,200 per year. So for everything we're going to talk about in this rest of this webinar, this is what it costs per year. Now if we compare that to a million dollar business that is in these other franchises. Just as a nothing against these franchises, this is a collective kind of representation of home service franchises. 8% royalty is going to cost you $80,000 per year. In other words, Augusta Lawn Care is 76% less in terms of cost if you're running $1 million business when you compare the franchise fees. So I want to build a franchise that I would join. Here's what I, here's what I wanted and this is exactly what Augusta Nation does today. You can leave Augusta Lawn Care anytime, you can take your customers and there is no penalty.

This is what I would want if I was to join a franchise. I would want the ability, if I don't think this is serving me, I can leave. And it's not going to be detrimental to, to my customer base. And I, I'm not going to have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to leave or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Many franchises are many franchises. When you sign that franchise agreement and literally unless you die, you're going to be paying fees. Even if you close the business down, you'll continually have to be pay pay fees. Augusta Lawn Care if that sixteen hundred dollar per month fee is not worth it to you, every single month, you can leave at any time, you can take your customers and there is no penalty. Now the reason no other franchise will do this is because the vast majority of them are owned and in the pocket of private equity. Kkr, they recently bought Neighborly Work capital, bought Subway like Blackstone. These massive private equity firms love franchise and they know that they can buy these franchises that are established brands, increase their prices, they can mistreat owners. And the bottom line is when you have a 10, 20 year agreement, if you don't have the ability for a franchisee to leave at any time, it doesn't require constant updates. And this is why franchisees many times will not renew after their 10 year agreement is because they get in the teen years is like man, they just keep upping the fees and causing more and more cost to be part of the franchise. And whereas for us, for Augusta Lawn Care, I have to constantly prove to you that that $1600 per month is worth it because you could leave at any time. I'm incentivized to do two things. You keep you in business because I get a monthly fees. I want you to stay in business. Look at just incentives. Like Charlie Munger says, you show me the incentive, I will show the outcome. And if you're incentivizing top line revenue, yeah, you're probably gonna get top line revenue, but you're probably not gonna be super profitable. I'm incentivized to make sure you stay in business and constantly prove the value of the $1600 per month that you pay to be inside of Augusta Nation. Now another cost associated with a franchise is the initial franchise fee. For U.S. lawns, it's $49,000. Spring Green $50,000. The Grounds Guys is $35,000. Now that initial fee does cover a lot. And I don't want to make it sound like those are horrible franchises or anything, like there's a lot of actual costs and I want to go through those. So first off, what that fee covers, you got your legal setup and your franchise license. There's an actual legal binding document that any lead that comes into a specific area you're going to get, you get training week. Usually you're going to come for four to six days to any of these franchises and get trained up on all their systems and procedures, get a website completely built for you and a software package system playbook giving all your systems, they give you all their equity in terms of their brand power, access to that and exclusive territory rights. So any lead that comes in usually is going to go to you. There are franchises out there like Subway that don't give franchise licenses that have territories away. I'm not a huge fan of those because it really does pit franchisees against themselves and causes a lot of infighting. So other franchises just outside of the green industry that are in the home services, their initial fees. Mosquito Joe's 42,000 glass doctor is 59,000. Mary maids 37,500. I actually just talked to a Mary Mae's franchisee the other day on a plane. He had like 20 locations. Very, very cool. Kind of does it on the side. But their franchise fees, $37,000 is their initial fee. Now what's the initial fee at Augusta lawn care? It's $24,000. That's the initial franchise fee compared to all those other ones, Substantially less until now. We actually now have a full refund option of the initial fee and how that works. It's called the Give Back program. We launched this last year. I want to share what exactly that is. Now you get your initial franchise fee refunded to you. Now it either happens a after five years where you can take that money and put it towards your next location or in 10 years I will simply give you back that money. I would say cash, but it's technically going to be a check. Okay, I will give you that check back. So if you pay $24,000 a day and you join Augusta Lawn care, either in five years, you can put that $24,000 towards your second location or next location, however many you've built by then, or at the end of 10 years I'll just give you that money back. The only three, three things you have to follow in order to be able to get be eligible for the Give Back program is follow pay for performance where you pay your employees. The harder they work, the more money they make. We have a system for it, we believe in it strongly at Augusta Lawn Care Open book Management where you share your numbers with your team, they can actually move forward in their career. And we change this whole notion that this is a dead end job in the lawn care and landscape industry. The third thing is that you've got to have your trucks wrapped and Looking good. As long as you do these three things, the initial fee at Augusta Lawn Care is coming back to you. So quick recap. You get the initial fee refunded. The only real cost is that $1,600 per month flat fee. So let's see if it's actually worth it and just do a cost comparison analysis. So what you get first off, you get a great looking website. At Lawn CareWeb Design.com we build sites for $499 per month. Now if you were going to go build the site elsewhere, you would, that's what you'd be getting. $499. We built it at Lawn Care Web Design. We build this. It's all part of your monthly fee. It's included. Now I will say this. The domain authority of Augusta Lawn Care is so much higher than any site we've ever built at Long Road Design. And the reason for that is because every single day there's tens of thousands of people that are searching and coming to Augusta longer services.com because of that. The average time now for our new locations to get on the first page of Google is less than one week. And so this is consistently happening. We choose certain markets that we know we can dominate online and we are ranking within a matter of a week versus Long Care Web Design. Even where we do a lot of work on these sites, we charge $499 a month. They will still take three to six months many times to get on the first page of Google because the brand authority, the domain reputation of Augusta Longer services due to the fact they're plugging into a network where they know that these are reputable companies all across the country and all across the world. Now you also get access to pay for performance software that's p4psoftware.com usually you'd be paying $199 a month. That's all included as part of being an owner. Inside of Augusta Lawn Care you also get augustalights.com we launched this this past year to solve the Q4 collapse that happens with so many small businesses in the green industry. This was our very first year. 74 locations inside of Augusta Lawn Care signed up for Augusta Lights and did lights this past year. We believe that within the next 12 to 24 months, we will also become the largest residential Christmas light installation company in the world. We have instant pricing to be able to offer value packages to customers right from the website. And again, this is all included inside of your monthly fee. It also includes exclusive webinars and training our own Christmas lights installations. We have meetups, 20% off discounts on all the product. Some of them are actually more than that now. And dedicated web portal to buy from that is specifically for Augusta Lights. By the way, if you come to Blue Collar Summit, you know you get two tickets inside of Augusta Nation for 500 bucks instead of if you paid what's going to be when we have it next, which is gonna be 1199 per ticket. And you also get a landscape summit, which is a whole additional, additional part of the conference just for Augusta Nation and the after party. So you basically save another $158. Okay. If you were to join, you're paying $500 for two tickets instead of $2,398 for two tickets. So again, more savings if you add up all these hard costs. It costs. It costs almost sixteen hundred dollars a month. If you're just not part of Augusta and you have us build your sites and use our software, p4psoftware.com and you come to conference. So just not being part of Augusta is already going to cost you around sixteen hundred dollars per month. But what you also get that sixteen hundred dollars is what I talk about now. So you get instant technology, exclusive technology, just Augusta longer. First is their instant quotes from our website. No admin time and you sell jobs 24 7. If you go on our website, you can literally see pricing immediately as a customer and be able to check out. Now we do it for mowing. We've just added winter services so we can sell again during the winter. Sell customers that are on our mowing schedule into a recurring service throughout the entire winter and keep that recurring revenue coming. We've added snow services. So if you're in a market where there's snow, we have instant pricing on our website available for snow. We also have upsell forms. So once they do check out and they get mowing or they get another service, it's immediately trying to upsell them other services from inside of our website. Now in 2025 coming pretty soon when they actually check out, they're going to be able to put their credit card on file and all of that information will go directly stored into Copilot CRM inside their customer portal, there will never have to be a reason to reach out to the customer and ask for credit card information just to get them on the schedule. Now it'll all be one seamless step. Right from the website you also get access to Max AI. Max AI is something we've built for almost two years and spent hundreds of thousand dollars developing at command center. And the reason we do that so you can get your phones answered 24 7. Now only 38% of missed calls will leave a voicemail. And so literally 62% of all missed calls like you're not hearing from them. Those are leads. Those are lost leads. And so we answer our phone 247 and in 2025 max is actually going to be able to start giving pricing, selling mowing jobs and collecting payment information over the phone. Again. He's about 50% faster than a human. It's cuts down on admin time also raises the level of professionalism that customers expect from the brand. And the price sensitivity drops dramatically when they start to realize they're dealing with someone that is answering their phone at 11 o' clock, at midnight or 11 o' clock or midnight. Like this is the thing that separates you from the rest of your competition. You also get exclusive training. So in person training, it's happening this week literally. There's another one next month in person training for owners and general managers here in Blaine, Washington. Now this year we're actually launching for the first time GM training, which means you can send your general managers here in addition to the regular owner training. So as you get more and more locations you will send them here and they get in addition to the regular four day training an additional two days. We actually go over the mechanics of the mower, we go over dispatch and we talk about how to actually interact with you as an owner to make the location profitable super, super valuable for all our multi unit operators. This past year, about 20 locations inside of Augusta Nation were ran by general managers. The number is going to be over 40, almost 50 here in 2025. As more of our owners are starting to get their second, third, fourth and fifth location every single day you get access to a daily mastermind. With myself, I do them every single day. I did the one this morning. Monday through Friday, I'm going to take any question that is submitted and I'm going to do that live. You get a text message directly from myself right beforehand and you can hop on live, submit questions. It's awesome. All of Augusta Nation quarterly we do a roundtable. All the owners hop on Zoom monthly you get a coaching call and you get access to a specific software we built to be able to track your metrics on a monthly basis for all of your important KPIs and be able to very quickly see where, where you're falling in terms of what number out of all the locations. Like oh, I'm ranked 32nd in close ratio across all of Augusta Nation. All that information is from the dashboard. We built that for the coaching program. You also get access to the digital ad templates. So setting up your Google Ad, tracking your Facebook pixel and then being able to actually have creative video, text and copy to be able to make sure that you can run ads and they're profitable. You also get brand deals. All right, I'm just showing all the things that come alongside of the actual hard cost savings with that $1600 month is all this other stuff. And I'm only going to show you some of these brand deals. Hustler, 27% off. Echo, 20% off. Gravely 22% off. Ferris I think is 25% off. Right. 20. Like all of these companies we save money on and these are just the ones that we got in 2024. There's a whole bunch more on our website. You can see the different preferred vendors. There's actually a WhatsApp from one of our owners, Connor said, he said just in savings between deals with Gravely Green, Touch Echo, Ramp Rack, et cetera and now Discount Tire. I feel we will save greater than our royalty to Augusta this year. It's wild how much in discount you all are able to get for us. So again, just in the, just in the brand deals, saving more than $1,600 per month. You also get access to the Pro shop printing portal. This is actually from Vistaprint. We pay for them to build this all out so you can immediately access and order door hangers, shaker boards, any print marketing, every door, direct mail. We do custom designs, all a whole bunch of them in there and it's 30% off. You get free shipping as well. One thing that I'm, I haven't mentioned here, we're launching this new instant quote door hanger technology where people scan a QR code to accept their estimate. It's very cool. You also get access to Command Center. So we really look at Command center as the ability to be able to scale from 0 to $500,000 very quickly by you as the owner. Focusing on sales and hiring only any ad and work whatsoever is a distraction. We want you to focus on sales, increasing your close ratio and getting more jobs at Command Center. The cost to use Command center is between 94 cents and a dollar and 46 cents per minute. If you look at other comparable services like Command center, you have Call boss, you have Jill's office and nothing against them, just comparing costs. They range between a dollar and $4 per minute. Augusta again 94 cents to $1.46 per minute. And these are agents that can actually go inside of your of your copilot CRM account and actually take payment, actually see your routing. They know the systems of the business. They can upsell customers into winter service, into snow, because we know how the systems of Augusta ran. And so we can actually go do things inside the CRM, not just make you tickets for every little voicemail and ask like a. You know, operate like a fancy answering machine. Now, if you're a larger business and you have an office staff, awesome. If your spouse does your office work, great. Having access to command center is really an insurance policy because something ever to happen to your office person, the last thing you want is all of a sudden the business is massively affected. If your spouse needs a break, if you want to go on vacation, it's not all hinging on that one person. I really believe that one of the best things about Gusta Nation is that you're building a sellable asset. If you have systems and it includes training for the new owner, you're able to actually sell the business because the buyer has confidence that they're actually going to be able to operate the business. So they have training, they have systems that they can follow, and they have a third party in the form of a franchise to be able to vet the numbers that are being given to them by you as the seller. The vast majority of locations inside of Augusta Lawn Care that do go up for sale do end up getting purchased. And it's because other owners know the systems, they can vet the numbers. And this allows you to be able to grow your wealth, scalability, copying and pasting multiple locations. We have Augusta business model where we believe you build the location as fast as you can to 500,000. You throw that thing into profit mode, you stop buying trucks, you stop getting more employees. You get under eight employees, six to eight employees max. You hand it off to a general manager, you turn that thing into profit mode and get up to 7, 800,000 annual revenue. At that size, we want to be able to generate $200,000 in profits from that location. That's going to take a few years. In profit mode, we're raising prices. We're not going to buy more trucks. We're going to stay in profit mode. And then my objective, my way to scale this business is a tap into command center and use the general manager to copy and paste that model over and over and over again. I can send my general general manager for training and on a monthly basis. They also get coaching from the coaching program. Now the 3F program is a way for you to be able to attract better talent. We actually cover the cost of the initial franchise fee or anyone that has worked at your location for two years. There's been multiple owners inside of Augusta Nation that came up through my locations and now a lot of other owners that come up to the program, work two years and then wanted to start their own location. This allows you to attract really good talent that you would otherwise not be able to get. But they want to join Augusta and their way in is to be able to work for two years and then go start their own location. Now the brand awareness is something that right now is actually a little bit harder to quantify. But based upon current standings, when I compare all hundreds of sites that we built, Long Care Road Design, a home service web design versus Augusta Lawn Care, we have about a 25 to 30% lower customer acquisition cost. When I compare against those sites and I can see all their Google Ads, I can see all the faith. We have a lower, about 25 to 30% lower. I believe we can get that down to 60 to 70% lower customer acquisition costs across all of the nation because of the thousand locations we will have worldwide. And now when people think about lawn care, they think about Augusta Lawn Care. Now phase one of this program just launched and it's Augusta Leeds the program down the road. The objective is to be able to give owners a per lead price when it comes to marketing. We have the templates, we call them done for you ads where people can watch the videos, make the go through the tutorials and set up their Facebook ads, set up their Google Ads, do all the tracking. We give you all the tools to do that yourself. But many owners consistently say we don't want to manage it, we don't have to deal with that. And they'll go and sometimes hire other third parties. But there's management fees, there's monthly fees, there's contracts, 12, 24 month contracts. We are building a program called Augusta Leads. Inside of this there'll be a flat, flat fee per lead. So you'll be able to start a location knowing exactly what your marketing budget is if you use the program. Because okay, I need 200 leads, 200 leads multiplied by that set per lead price, I'll know exactly what my marketing budget is. This is extremely scalable and allows you to again not have to focus on the marketing aspect as much. This is something we're building out. It's been something requested by our owners on a lot over the past few years. And so we're going to be focusing on it and we've already launched phase one and phase two is coming out next year. But ultimately all of that I've said so far really the reason people should join Augusta Nation and I truly believe every landscaping company should. The reason I believe if you took away all the things we've talked about, the brand deals and everything, the reason someone should join Augusta Long Care is for two things. Two words. Augusta Nation. Inside of Augusta Nation is a special group of people. You can share equipment, tips and employees. If you have nearby owners. We always see the location that grow the fastest are around other owners, owner groups, friendships and meetups. You share your wins, you share losses and you can give advice without feeling competitive like you would if you were doing a local meetup where other people are literally competing with you on jobs. These are some of the screenshots from different WhatsApp groups for things like the Christmas lights hubs. This is the local one. In Washington state we have different WhatsApp groups for general managers based upon multi unit operators. Have a lot of different opportunity to connect people out at the when we went to the golf play topgolf, people standing in people's weddings meetups, this happens all the time. This is some of the group out in Colorado. There's a group out in Memphis last year went out and meet up with them for a couple of days. Someone ran a marathon together. Jason Murphy had like 70 owners out to his place and did a whole workshop on Christmas lights installation. So all these benefits we've talked about here are on top of the savings financially. And so today if you join Augusta Lawn Care, we have a special offer and that is you get the first three months at $0 per month, your franchise fees. So you come into training, you get three months. After that, no franchise, no franchise fees. And our goal is that if you're changing over from another lawn care business, you're able to take that money and use that towards painting your trucks, putting your new decals on, etc. There's cost involved so it's going to save you $1600 per month for three months. Also you're going to get 50% off for the first year after that. So really the first three months are free and 12 months after that you're getting 50% off. So in all the savings of joining us to lawn care Today, you get $14,400 off. This will more than cover the cost to paint your trucks, put new decals on if you have an existing business as well as come out for training, if you're, if you're just getting started, this savings is the money required in our opinion, to get that business off the ground. This $14,000. If you put that into your marketing and that first year, you'll be able to really scale it very quickly and take advantage of command center advantage of the instant pricing because you're driving more traffic to your site and to your business. Cool. This is the last slide. To claim the discount, all you got to do just go to gusalongerservices.com franchise, mention the workshop today. I know some of you have already booked this call with Lee. You got to pass the screening process. Only about 1 of 7 people that want to join Augusta actually get in. I think about me one to six now, but. So I can't guarantee if you book a call with Lee, you're going to be able to get in. He's going to also ask you questions, make sure you're a good fit for Augusta Nation. We try to keep that community extremely tight and the quality of the candidates inside of it very solid. So pass that screening process. We'll also look at your territory. We're going to do a full analysis, like a 30 page document you're going to get of everything we see in terms of market opportunity, competition, the competitive analysis. What is the market demographics in terms of income, in terms of people moving, are they moving away? This is the type of thing we're going to do for your territory analysis. And the third and final thing is you do have to pay that franchise fee and come to training. By doing all of that, you join Augusta Nation. So I.