The Secret to Dominating Home Services in 2026!

This is a brand new approach to home service businesses and it changes everything. What if I told you that hiring less people would make you more money? What if I told you that selling off your trucks and equipment would make you more money? This video will unveil a secret that will change the way you think about your home service business. My name is Mike Andes and I have owned a home service business for more than 18 years. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care, which Now has over 150 locations around the world and does over $50 million in annual reven. Before you judge and say you can't grow a business if you cut your employees and you cut out more trucks and equipment, let me just ask you to think about these questions. What if you reduced capacity? What if you reduced revenue? Hear me out. This is not for the person wants to grow, grow, grow, but actually wants to make profit in their business and make money that they take home to put food on their table. What if you sold one or two of your trucks? What if you laid off one or two of your employees and and after you did that, what if you stopped spending money on marketing and advertising? You just put that money in your pocket as profit. I recently did some consulting for a home service business. They were spending between 4,000 and $5,000 every single month on advertising. Now at the time they had about 12 to 13 trucks and they had more than 12 employees. But the employees only worked about 30 to 32 hours a week. They weren't full time working 40 plus hours every single week. Also, I noticed when I went to their shop that three to four of the trucks were always just sitting there. Sometimes I went and five or six of the trucks would be still sitting at the shop being unused. I told them to sell off three or four of the trucks. This would allow them to have less insurance costs and less maintenance costs associated with just having more trucks and equipment. Also on some of those trucks they actually owed money. And so if they're able to cut out that fixed expense, all that extra debt expense that they're spending on every single month, massive win more money in our pocket. I also told them to lay off 5 to 6 of their employees and get their total employee count under eight employees in just one week. Here's what happened. They went from being booked out less than one week to being booked out for more than six weeks. And they saved more than $700 every single month on just auto insurance from selling off a few of their trucks. They also saved $5,000 per month on marketing they were spending on Facebook, on Google and all these other platforms. And instead of doing that, they spent $0 on marketing again, $5,000 in their pocket. And if you're wondering, well like how in the world would they still get leads? Well, they don't need as many leads because now they have less employees, they have less trucks, and their capacity is very close to what they already have in terms of leads that just show up every day because of their website. Having a great website brings in a certain amount of leads organically. Having trucks out in the community has a certain number of leads coming in from referrals and people seeing those trucks. If I can just bring my capacity closer down to that organic lead traffic amount, I don't have to spend thousands of dollars trying to artificially grow my business and spending money on these middlemen called Google and Facebook and every door direct mail. And that is what steals the profits from our industry. Home services in my opinion can easily be a 20, 25% profit margin business. But for the vast majority of us, because we can't build a great website and because we don't know how to do budgeting correctly when it comes to how big our business should be, we end up spending all of our profits on these ad platforms. Now the manager also was able to get a couple hours every single day back because he had less employees to manage after laying off several of them. Essentially they were doing the same amount of work but would just fewer employees. But now these employees were working full time. By having less employees to manage, this general manager was able to spend time on doing follow up phone calls and their close ratio increased. The general manager had the same amount of work being done by fewer employees. You say well how is that going to make you more money? Because not having to manage an extra 4, 5, 6 employees, their clock in and out time, their paid time off benefits, people calling out, making sure they're routed correctly throughout the day, answering their questions, all of these things was taking time of the general manager to focus on those operational tasks and managing people instead of selling more jobs. Now in a matter of just one week, they raised their prices from $80 per hour all the way up to $100 per man hour. Now that's a 25% increase in prices. And so that's crazy. How in the world would you do that? It's because they started to book out five, six weeks into the future instead of just a matter of a few days. And the did that is because no longer did they need to sell one time projects every Single day, multiple times, just to keep their crew busy. Now they had less crew members, they had less trucks and less equipment, they were closer to capacity. And so that difference between what they had in recurring revenue and then a little bit on top in terms of one time projects was able to be spread out into the future. And when you're booked out five, six weeks into the future, you should probably raise prices. In a matter of just one month, this home service business was able to go from a negative profit margin to making money back in the green. Why? Because they cut out excessive employees, they sold off excessive trucks, they reduced their capacity, and then they made sure they spent time and energy on actually selling the leads that were already coming into them organically. By doing that, they booked out in the future and raised prices by 25%. It's easy to think that if you have extra trucks sitting around or you have plenty of employees that you should just go spend money on ads and market and get more leads and grow the business. But in doing so, we spend all of our profits on getting the leads. So many of the times I see people trying to increase leads and get more jobs in order to get closer to max capacity, when reality the fastest way to get to max capacity is just lower capacity. Sell trucks, sell equipment, let go of some part time employees and get focused back on, on making the business profitable. You might be asking, why are you making this video? Why would you tell people or encourage people to grow their business less? Maybe you're just trying to compete with us and keep all the leads to yourself. No, the fact of the matter is that the vast majority of home service business owners don't make any profit. And how do I know this? Because I see hundreds if not thousands of profit and loss statements every single year. And the vast majority are in debt and don't make profit. And yet all the while, one thing I see consistent is they're spending tons of money on Facebook, on Google, on getting all these leads from Yelp and Angie's List and every door, direct mail. And these middlemen are sucking out the profits from this industry. I encourage you to grow the business to a point where you make profit and then slowly build it over time instead of trying to pour all this gasoline on a fire that isn't even kindled yet. It makes me mad that home service business owners that work 60, 70, 80 hours a week are not able to provide for their families and earn massive amounts of stress simply because of this carrot that's being dangled in front of them, that they should always grow their business. There's gotta be a finish line that we can actually say, this is enough for me to be able to make a profitable business and then maximize those profits, because that's the reason we got in business. And if you're wondering, well, what is that perfect size business where I maximize profit, when should I stop growing my business? Watch this video here. Because I used to think you had to do a million dollars in annual revenue, and I was very wrong.