the SECRET to Build a $1M+ Business (that runs WITHOUT you!)

Hey everyone, my name is Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care. We have over 80 locations around North America. And today I'm Talking about the 10 steps you must take in order to remove yourself from the business and be able to work on the business instead of in the business. And whether that be going investing in real estate, or doing another business venture, or starting a second location, these are the steps you must take in order to grow the business to the point where you don't have to show up every single day. It gives you opportunity to go do other things or potentially, if you really enjoy it, be there. But it's not a requirement. You're not chained to the job. I'm talking through those first 10 steps. And the first one is honestly the one that most people don't get past. Because I truly believe the first step is simply growing the business past $500,000 in annual revenue. You've got to grow it past that point. Until that point, you're going to be a revenue producing member of the team, or at least bring all the sales and generating every single lead that comes in. So you've really got to grow the business past 500k. So that's your first step. So you might say, man, I'm not even close to that. Well, that's fine. There's nine more steps. This is the first one and this is the hardest one. Most people won't even get to this point and that's growing the business past $500,000 in annual revenue. Now the next thing that I think you should do, and that is build a safety net. And for everyone, this is gonna vary. Like if you have a family, if you have a house, if you have dependents, you're gonna probably want a larger safety net. I would say you want at least two months of payroll in your safety net as a minimum. For some people, they might want 6 or 8 or 10 if they're gonna be more conservative with their growth. And before they move on to stage three, they wanna stop at the safety net and kind of. This is what Dave Ramsey would call like your emergency fund. This is sort of the safety net for your business. So if something goes wrong down the road, you at least can pay your employees, you're not going to go bankrupt, and you don't speed through stage one and then just keep growing and growing and growing. This is usually a good thing around the $200,000 marker and then a little after the $500,000 marker to take a little bit of time, slow business growth down A little bit so that you can actually get some cash reserves set aside. That's just five. This third stage of again removing yourself as the bottleneck to the business, because for most businesses you are the bottleneck. So how do we remove you from the business is the most important thing. The third step in all of this is simplification of services. Now if you're selling products, simplify services. If you're selling products, same exact things apply. Instead of having 20 SKUs, 20 different types of products, sell two or three. If you look at Apple, they only sell two, three, four different types of phones. They don't sell 100 different phones like an Android device. That's why they have a very high profit margin business. So when it comes to service based businesses, you don't need to offer 10 different services. I'm in the lawn care and landscaping industry. People don't realize that tree service is completely different than pulling weeds and trimming bushes and mowing lawns and treatments and irrigation. And we're gonna do fertilizer and pest control and then we're gonna do spraying and then we' going to do pools. Every single one of those hardscaping patios, walls, every single one of those are completely different businesses. Because they're outside doesn't mean you need to offer them. So simplifying your service is extremely important. The reason most business owners will never be able to be outside daily operations in their business is because their businesses are so complicated and the services they offer so complicated and so varied and so different that no one else can actually do them the same way that the owner does. So what do we do? We become the master juggler. Always there juggling 100 different things. When it's like, look, why don't we just juggle two balls or one ball? Why don't we just skim down to one service or a couple products and get really good at that one thing, really profitable at that 1, 2, 3 different types of service that we might be good at. Instead of trying to be everything to everybody. The fourth thing we're going to do in the same vein of thought is going to be simplify sales. Because usually the last thing that an owner lets go of in their business before they get out of the business is the selling. Bringing on new customers, bringing on new leads and talking those leads and trying to convert them. Whether that be giving an estimate proposal if you're doing project based work like landscaping, or whether if you're selling products, the salesperson, the person closing the big deal, the person that takes A lot of pride, usually in their ability to bring more revenue to the business. That is something you must simplify because guess what? You can go find a rock star at stage three. You can go find a rock star in stage four. Someone that's really, really good at operations, someone that's really, really good at selling. But guess what? They're few and far between. It's extremely hard to find. And it's gonna be much more dependable that you actually get out of the business and scale the company if you just simplify things instead of having this. Of course, I dropped the pen midway through, so now we're switching to red. So the thing is, instead of trying to have this really high standard of what you need from an executive or from a general manager, why not just lower that bar by simplification? And simplification doesn't mean you can only do dumb little tiny things. You can do very complex things, but you can standardize and create systems around those services and the way that you sell those products and services. Okay, we're switching to red because I dropped the black marker. Alright, number five again, we're trying to remove the bottleneck from the business, which typically is the owner. And that stage five is going to be admin help. This is when you're going to get someone to answer the phones, do the bookkeeping, run payroll, answer the email, do everything in the business that really is sucking all the life out of you. Now notice in this stage of simplification of services and sales, we have not hired anyone yet, but we have simplified them. But now with those simplified services, I'm going to go hire admin help. This is usually the easiest step for everyone to do because they don't want to do office work, they don't want to answer the phone and do estimate proposals, typing them up and running calculators and running payroll. And most of us as business owners, entrepreneurs, we don't enjoy this one. And usually we actually do this way too soon. And therefore we put this, this person doing the admin help isn't super effective or efficient because we haven't done number three and four yet. So again, this needs to be done in sequence. So I'm gonna go hire someone to take the calls. Take away all the things that throughout my day I'm constantly being reactive to. Oh, an email comes in from a vendor. Oh, an email comes in from an unhappy customer. Oh, I got a really bad online review. Oh, I've got to run payroll. Oh man, I gotta QuickBooks. I gotta run my QuickBook. All of that constant being reactive throughout the whole day. A phone call comes in, oh, ring, ring, ring. I gotta drop everything I'm doing and answer the phone. Being reactive throughout the whole day is going to hopefully subside when you have someone to take those things off your plate and guard, guard you as the business owner. And so when things are coming in all day long, instead of you reacting to every single one, now you're more deliberate with your time because you have someone taking all that frontline communication in the form of an office manager or someone that they're assistant. All right, number six, this is when it starts to get interesting. This is when you actually go hire, you're gonna go hire someone to do your sales.

So again, in products or service based businesses, this is the hardest thing to usually give up as the owner. Now look back here at stage number four, we simplified sales again. A lot of people will get this out of sequence and go hire someone to do sales before they simplify sales. And they wonder why it's so hard to find people and no one can sell like they can. And they're always so inconsistent with their estimate proposals and they can't sell the customers and close them like I used to. Well, why not just try to simplify your sales process? Why not try to simplify the way that you do estimate proposals? Simplify how much knowledge the estimator or the salesperson needs in order to close the deal. Okay, simplify it, make it simple. How can I get an entry level person to do this job? Well, when you push yourself to that extent, it's like, well, I can't offer this service or this product because it takes years of training and you gotta have all this technical knowledge. Well, maybe that's something you're gonna have to cut out or standardize or create a system around in stages number three and four. But number six is we've got to hire sales. Someone else has got to be producing the revenue and bringing in growth for the business. Alright, stage number seven is the stress test. So the stress test is when you as the owner are going to leave the business for at least one day and you're just going to leave, you're going to see what happens then three days, then one week and then two weeks. So this four step process of the stages of the stress test is one day, three days, one week and two weeks. And what you're going to do is just basically leave and see where the holes in the business are. The best way to find out what the holes in the business are, where they're at is leave. Because you as the master juggler, when you leave, see what balls drop to the ground. Those are the ones that you're gonna have to create systems around. Those are the ones you're gonna delegate. And those are gonna be the ones that are gonna probably be the thing that keeps you from getting working on the business and leaving the business. Because the stress test is kinda like, hey, what happens if I wasn't here for a day? And you might be surprised? Things actually continue going on just fine. And because you have a great admin help, and you have great help bringing new revenue, you're like, oh, wow, they actually did a great job. And when you come back, well, there's one, two things that maybe we could have done better or we tweaked that. But hey, that's fine. I'll move to the next stage of the stress test. I'll do a week, I'll do two weeks. And you'll be surprised if you've hired good people and you've actually gone through the simplification process and you have a good safety net financially and you're a sizable company already, you're probably like, man, it runs better without me. That's stage number seven. Do the stress test. In other words, if I try to bend this pen, how hard can I bend it before it breaks? So before my business breaks and it falls apart, I just leave. Stress test it. Try a day, try three days, try a week, where you don't come into the office, you don't answer email, you don't answer the phone, you're either on vacation or you're doing something else. You could be at your house for all I care. But you're not involved in the business daily operations. And you start to realize.

Where the stress in this marker, potentially the cracks start to form. Fill the cracks and continue on. All right, step number eight is finding someone to do some of the hardest things in the business. Because at this point, you've delegated admin work, you've delegated sales, but now you've got to do the interviewing, hiring, firing and training. Alright? So you gotta do interviewing, hiring, firing and training. You gotta find someone to do these things. Find someone that's good at hr, someone that's good at, has good emotional intelligence and can interview people and get a pretty good pulse on them and hire them, go through the hiring process and then actually fire people when they're not a good cultural fit and they can have hard discussions with people, that's a hard hire to find. Is this person. Now they also got to train people. They've got to be good at actually creating systems around training and getting new people in the team. So a very emotionally intelligent person for step number eight. Now step number nine is gonna be that you hire a GM now a lot of times, but not necessarily all the time. That person is gonna be the person who does your interviewing, hiring, firing and your training. Especially if you are a very culturally driven organization, you're probably gonna hire the person that does all these things and move them into a GM position. So that GM is going to basically do everything that you would do on a daily operational level. They already have the admin help taken care of. The sales part they have taken care of. Now, sometimes in a smaller organization, maybe 8, 900,000, we're not talking millions and millions of revenue here. At that stage, the person from number six might become the person in number eight and become the person in number nine to the point where the GM does the interviewing, hiring, firing and training as well as the sales. Now once you start getting past like one and a half million in revenue, you're going to need more multiple different levels of management. You're going to need a gm, but you're also probably going to need someone in sales in addition to just the general manager. Now office admin, that's always got to be there. You're not going to have your GM doing admin help because their value is so much higher. But again, if you're in a smaller organization, maybe 600,000 million in revenue, the salesperson might also do the interviewing, hiring, firing, training and be the GM. But as that business goes past 1.52 million plus, you're going to need a general manager. And then you're also going to need someone in sales and the admin for the office. Alright, now what's the tenth step? If you've hired the general manager and basically you become a spare tire, you can remove the dam. And what's the dam? The dam is you, the business owner. There's the bottleneck for everything in the business because right now you are the bottleneck for everything in terms of growth, expansion, development, you're the dam. As the business owner, you keep everything from flowing. The natural progression of a river is the water just flows downstream. And for businesses, as some people think, it's really complicated and it's really difficult. Businesses are built to grow, they are built to expand. If a good business is there and you have good systems and good marketing, good brand in place, it is built to grow. But what keeps it from growing, what keeps the water from flowing downstream and following that very natural progression of gravity is the dam, and that is you. So you've got to ask yourself, how do I remove myself from daily operations? These are the step by step processes to do it. I could give you very, very loose fairy, kind of like, oh, dream big and grow your business. But this is the step by step to actually make it happen to where you don't have to show up to the business. And if you do, great, it's like a spare tire. If you're there, great. But if you're not, it's okay. We're still going to move down the road.

That's my recommendation. That's what I've done in my businesses and help my franchisees at Augusta Lawn Care do. And I really believe that this is the way that you can scale your business, replicate your business, duplicate the business, or go do other things outside of your business in other industries. Diversify. Go invest that money and do good for your community. I'm Mike Andes. I hope that was helpful. And if it was, check out mikeandys.com for more information and feel free to pick up a copy of this book, P4P. Why hourly is a failing formula. It's on Amazon and Audible. I promise you you'll enjoy it.