The Brutal Truth Business Owners Try to Avoid

Today I'm talking about the one thing that keeps many home service business owners in operations. Working 14 hours a day and answering every question their team has. You're addicted to being busy and it's making you poor. The reason your business is stuck isn't because of your employees. It's your ego. You want to feel needed more than you want to feel free. You don't build systems because you like being the system. Your business doesn't need a hero, you, it needs a leader. My name is Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care. And now we have over 190 locations around the world. But I started with one and I know what it's like to have to let go and create systems to get yourself out of daily operations. Today I'm going to share that story of breaking away from my first location and what you can learn so you don't stay stuck in operations and working 14 hour days. It's a trap of being needed. You like it when people ask you every question because it makes you feel important. You have all the answers. You think that having all the answers makes you the boss. It actually makes you the bottleneck to your business's growth. You built an octopus business. Every arm leads back to the head and if you were to get whacked, everything falls apart. Admin comes back to you, operations come back to you, sales come back to you, and you're like, oh no, I delegated it. I have an estimator, I have an office manager. But every time something wrong happens, every time a customer complains, every time a job goes off the rails, they come back to you looking for answers. That's why so many home service business owners stall out at about 8 to 12 employees and are on 1 million to $1.5 million in annual revenue because everyone's reporting back to them. And even in the military they only allow six to eight people many times to report to to one general manager or to one leader. And in this case, when it comes to your business, if you have 10, 12, 13 employees, you can juggle that by working 14, 16, 18 hour days. But eventually it catches up with you when you start trying to grow past that simply because you can't work enough hours to manage effectively. When every single person reports back to you, the need to be needed keeps you small. I remember the first location for Augusta Lawn Care when I had delegated the admin side. Then I delegated operations and doing the work. And now finally I had hired an estimator that was actually Lee, who's still with us today as the estimator for that location. And I remember the feeling of not being needed and feeling uncomfortable when I'd show up to meetings and not even know the employees that had been hired for my business. But it was so important to be able to sever myself from daily operations so I could focus on growing the media and the franchise. That year when I handed off sales was the most profitable year that location ever had without me being there. Why? Because it forced me to create systems for sales, operations and admin. It allowed me to be able to go work on the franchise, which now has over 190 locations because I was able to cut ties with daily operations. And for many business owners, the thing holding you back from your hopes and your dreams and why the business exists. Like spending time with family, having your hobbies, being able to have time in the evenings or on the weekend. That's your why. And what's holding you back is your desire to feel needed inside of the business. Busyness is a drug and you don't feel comfortable unless you're overwhelmed. I understand the first few years of business, everything is chaos and you're constantly working and it's required to get the business off the ground. But that same skill is not the thing that's going to serve you well when you have 5, 10 years under your belt, you have a great team in place and you're starting to try to create systems so the business runs without you and without working 14 hour days. And so what happens for many home service business owners is they actually start to feel guilty when things are running smoothly and if you're not exhausted, you feel lazy. Busyness is your drug, chaos is your high. And we got so used of doing that in the first few years of growing the business and and it served us well then. But it's actually the thing that will shackle you to your business and keep you from your dreams in the future. The business can't grow if you're constantly in a state of chaos and busyness as the leader. And if you're constantly looking for the chaos that comes with growth, you will rarely ever go into profit mode and actually make money in the business. This is a self fulfilling cycle of chaos, unprofitability, you working more hours and the cycle continues over and over and over. Business feels productive, but it's just procrastination with a time card. If you're struggling with letting go of daily operations, letting go of sales, allowing other people in the organization to do the jobs you've been doing or take on the problems that you've been handling. One thing to think about is creating deprivation. The reason that you worked 14 hour days, the reason that you've been doing that for years and years and years to grow the business is because you had a sense of deprivation. You had a huge gap of where you are now and where you want to be. That's deprivation. And so you worked like crazy to try to bridge that gap. And now as you've got to the place where the business is successful and it's doing $1 million in revenue, you have great managers, you have a great team. I don't have that sense of deprivation anymore. I don't have that desire or that will or the ability to be able to work 14, 16 hour days and you actually start to beat yourself up over that lack of deprivation. There are two routes you can take once you've hit this place and you don't have deprivation. One is to be content with the size of the business that you currently have so that it serves the goals of your outside business life. Like spending time with your family, having a hobby, being able to take weekends and holidays off. Is this you every single weekend cracked up on energy drinks late at night, trying to figure out where you're going to put the job on the schedule. Invoicing, scheduling, billing, leave it to homeworks, go to home DOT works and make sure that you don't spend your time at midnight drinking more caffeine.

You couldn't make it up.

The second option is to actually create artificially more deprivation by setting your goals even higher. This is what happened at my first location because now I had stepped out of daily operations. I didn't hire people, all the sales were going through somebody else. I created deprivation by saying, hey, we don't want to just have one location. We want to have a thousand locations for Augusta Lawn Care. That's a huge amount of deprivation and a huge goal that I now had. This huge gap I would have to work towards. In addition to saying I wanted a thousand locations, I also said I wanted to take the company public and actually go on a stock exchange with the business and have investors. Another huge level of deprivation because I was so far away from reaching that goal. Only you can determine if you are going to extend your goals and make them bigger and create that sense of deprivation or realize that you've hit your business goals and put the business in profit mode, allow other people to run it so you can focus on your goals outside of the business. For many home service business owners, Their desire to, to be in control keeps others in the organization from leading. It keeps other people in the organization, other managers, other leaders from really stepping up and rising to the occasion. At the same time that someone's doing that, they'll say, I can't find good managers. When the truth is you never let them manage. If every decision runs through you, you'll never build. Mid level management. And great all star team players don't want to be working for someone that constantly they have to go to and report every little problem they face. They want to be able to see a problem, come up with a solution, and then execute on it without going through you. Without creating that kind of culture, the business will choke at the ceiling you created. And I'll admit, when I was at my first location, I had created a ceiling for the business because a lot of the sales position depended on having great experience, understanding a lot of different services. Like we're doing tree chipping, putting greens, artificial turf, we were doing excavation, we were doing grading, tons of different types of walls and pavers. It was chaos. But ultimately I became the bottleneck because I didn't simplify the business, I didn't standardize things. I had created a bottleneck of a great salesperson. Once I removed that bottleneck by saying, hey, you don't have to be incredible. With 20 years of experience, I created systems for over the phone estimates and instant quote forms from our website to make that role of a salesperson easier to fill and replace. So if you're already struggling with getting a great general manager, why not just make the requirements for that role simpler by simplifying and standardizing and creating systems so that role is easier to fill. The problem is you like being the firefighter, the fixer, the hero, and I know what that feels like. But your team pays for your ego. Customers pay, your family pays, your spouse pays. Your need to feel like you're involved in every decision in the business is the most expensive tax on the business. Look, I get it. Systems feel threatening because they replace you, but that's exactly why you need them. Allow the system to replace you so you can focus on higher leveraged tasks. Create systems in admin so someone else can answer the phone and do your emails. Create systems in operations so that one of your crew leads can take a video and your job notes and go execute on the job without needing your opinion. And then ultimately the goal is to get to sales, to be able to hand sales off to someone else. And you can simplify that by doing estimates over the phone. And using instant quotes from your website. Ultimately, ego is the hidden tax that keeps you broke. I'll say it again, ego is the hidden tax that keeps you broke. So often the times when I go on turnarounds, I'm looking at liquidity, I'm looking at leads, I'm looking at labor. But ultimately, if the leadership could actually realize that their ego is what's keeping them from raising prices, their ego is what's keeping them in services they should have no business doing. It's keeping them driving an hour, hour and a half into service areas they know they shouldn't be going. And, and it's all built on ego. But ego is the hidden tax that keeps you broke. And I remember even after letting go of sales operations, admin at my first location and I was working on the franchising, trying to get it started and I was trying to get everything set up with legal stuff and going through all of that rigmarole and I remember I would be driving and I would see my crews at the gas station and I would also run into people like my customers in the public and you'd hear murmuring like, oh, so and so didn't do this right? Or they didn't no so on. And so the office said this. And immediately the inclination is to jump back in. It is to take back over. It is to take the reins back and say, oh, this is a problem and I'm going to fix it. And if you've been in that position where you're trying to let go, it's very difficult. You might see an online review that's bad and your first inclination is I've got to jump in, I've got to fix it. Instead of thinking about the fact that the systems you've built are the things that need worked on, not trying to jump in and solve every problem for your team. Rich owners replace themselves with systems. Poor owners protect their problems. It becomes their identity. Your job isn't to answer every question. It's to design a business that doesn't need you. Leadership isn't about being in every room. It's about building rooms that run without you. What served you in the past will not serve you after you pass a million dollars in annual revenue. As you build out a mid level management team, as you develop managers and leaders underneath you. Freedom isn't earned by working more any longer. It's earned by letting go. If you don't step out of the business, the business never steps up. And I found that even in my first location when I wasn't needed in the business anymore and like, everything could run without me. That sense of, I'm not needed here anymore. And I had to change the scorecard. It wasn't about how many hours I worked at the office. It wasn't no longer about how many estimates I sold or the pride that I had of selling a big job. The scorecard had to change. It was now about free cash flow. It was about how little I showed up to the business. I was actually proud of the fact that I didn't have to show up for a month, six months, a year when I wouldn't have to show up at the office. It was about how much profit sharing can I actually give away to my team and to my general manager. And so we've gotta make the decision as a leader and the entrepreneur. You can't keep being the octopus, always having a tentacle in every aspect of the business, but at all tying back to you. It leads to you being exhausted, busy, admired and broke. I encourage you to kill your need to be needed and finally scale the business and allow people under you to grow into their full potential. The business does not need your heroics. It needs your humility to realize that you're trying to pass something off to someone else. And you've got to create systems so they can be successful. The decision is simple. Ego or enterprise. Are you going to scale up? Or are you going to allow your ego of constantly wanting to hold on to every aspect of the business and have all the answers and be the guru that everyone goes to, or will you let those things go, systematize the business and be able to grow into the future? One thing that always found comfort in is when Jeff Bezos said, if I make three good decisions a day, that's enough. Instead of you having to make answers for every job, every crew, every single customer complaint, every call and every email, just ask yourself, what are the one, two, maybe three good decisions that I need to make today? I can guarantee you it has nothing to do with operations. It's not about closing the next job. It's not about answering the next phone call. It's about creating systems for the business to run without you. So this week, in conclusion, I want to give you a challenge. I want you to audit your ego. I want you to track how many questions you answer that someone else in the business could have answered. And before you jump and just give them the answer, ask them what they think they should do, because you'll be amazed. And many times the answer, they already know it, but they're coming to you simply because they've been rewarded in the past for doing that. And they've been shamed or punished in the past for making the wrong decision. Audit your ego. Because if the business can't run without you, it's not a business. It's a job with a whole bunch of overhead. Kill the need to be needed. Build the systems. Buy back your time. That's how you get rich.