The Secret to Scaling Past 10 Employees (Coaching Call)

I think mainly it's me. I think I'm the problem.

You've been doing it for a long time and you're burnt out right now. We need you to show up to work and being happy about it.

I like to introduce myself, name is Juan Alvarado. I know we communicate a little bit there through Instagram and I've been doing trees for a long time. It's kind of what I do. And you know, we're kind of at a slump where we're at, you know, and a lot of that is, I think has to do with me, you know, so just trying to pick your brain a little bit on, you know, some changes that I can do. Obviously, I've been following you for a while, not just on social media, but on YouTube.

So.

Right.

So right now you guys are doing trees in Sacramento. How many team members are with you now, Juan?

So right now we have one at the office who answers the phones. We have one guy who does 99% of our sale. So I kind of brought him along, taught him everything, and now he does all of ourselves, like 99% of it. I do very little of it. And then out in the field, we're down to three, six, nine guys on the field. And then we have two guys that we do lot maintenance. We have one crew that we do lot maintenance that I kind of didn't want to do lawns because I honestly, I mean, I can mow a lawn, you know, I can, you know, anybody can mow a lawn, stuff like that. But some are expertise at it. So we just did it because one of these customers pretty much begged us to do it. And I figured, okay, if I did one, I just sent out a couple emails and I filled out my day for or my week for one crew, a two man crew. So we do that now. Kobe, we were running a lot more Kobe, we were running five crews, you know, and that's a three man crew. But I think you and I know and a lot of people know Covid was, you know, a special time, you know, So I, I, I, I always tell Everybody we skipped 2020-2021-2022-2023. Seems like 20, no, 2024. Seemed like it would be 2020, right, going from 19 to 2020 because we were running three crews in 2019. So to me, like, it's just kind of started all over and you know, and we didn't struggle at all through Covid for no work. Like we were like, you know, four months out, five months out. Like everybody, if you Weren't busy during COVID you had a problem, you know, but now we're back at, okay, now I got to strategize again and figure out where do I want to go from here. You know, a lot of it is being complacent, I think, and being comfortable of where I'm at. I think that's the biggest problem, you know, so we didn't do much advertising the last, I don't know, four or five years. We didn't do even pre Covid, we weren't doing much advertisement. We are doing some now, but it's. I don't know if that's where my money should be going or what's. You know, I. I don't know. You. You know more about this than I do, you know, so.

And what. What's your kind of goal, Juan, with it? Is it to grow it to, like, 5 million? Is it to you know, make it more passive and get a general manager? What's sort of like the goal that you want?

My ultimate goal. And it's really simple. I just don't want to struggle for work. I'm comfortable where we're at. I mean, obviously, if we get to 5 million, 6 million, it's fine.

But we're not there. You know, I think we're going to be like, at 2.5 this year. Last year, we were at 2.9. You know, Covid, we were in the threes. But like I said, that's Covid. That's something that, you know, I don't think it's very hard to get to. I think get into my 100,000, you know, because I worked for Valleycrest. I don't know if you're familiar with Valleycrest. It's a huge Corporation, spent 12 years there. So when I left, I was making 50, 60,000 a year. So making that on my own was really easy. You know, getting it to 100 was really easy. 200 was really easy. Even once I got to the million mark, to me, it seemed really easy. It's been since 2009, so, I mean, it's been a few years, but it seemed like I got there really easy. It seems like to get over the 2, 3 hurdle mark, I think it's. I find it, like, extremely difficult, and I don't know, because my energy's kind of gone down a little bit or. Or what. But it seems like it's almost impossible to get it up any further, you know?

Yeah, it's very common. Once you hit around 10 to 12 employees, regardless of the revenue to kind of hit that plateau of like, something in the organization has to change if you're going to continue to scale. And so, like, my big thing is like, do we want to scale or do we just want to build? Book ourselves out so far where it's just like, look, we raise prices, we optimize profits, and we don't necessarily aren't trying to grow. But we need a more dependent. From what I'm hearing, we want a more dependable lead source to ensure that we not always, like, wondering where the next job's at.

Yeah, yeah. And we stay. I mean, this month has been pretty tough, but we're still staying somewhat busy. I think next week it seems like really slow for us. You know, we've been staying pretty consistent with the two crews. We were running three up, up into January, and then January we were running three, but four days a week. So then I made the decision to, hey, let's cut it back down to two. So the guys that we do keep could continue to work their 40 hours. But now it's getting to, okay, well, now we're doing the two crews. And it seems like this is going to be the first week that we might have to run it four days, you know, so tomorrow we really don't have nothing on the schedule. I mean, I have little things here and there that I need to tighten up and I got to take care of. But nothing that's really, like, was sold because I told Jeremiah, which is the gentleman helped me in sale. I told him, hey, just leave everything and push it for next week so we can at least get four days next week. Yeah. You know, so. And another problem, too. I mean, I think it is. I think mainly it's me. I think I'm the problem. You know, I hate to say it, but I. I feel like, like in your organization, if something's going terribly wrong, like, you know, you may not catch it right away. Depending on how big you guys are, you may not catch it right away. But if it gets big enough to where it gets to you, then I feel that you're the problem, you know, because you didn't do nothing about it. You didn't address it. Right. Like, for example, we have this gentleman who's working for us, but he's does a lot of side work. And I feel like there's a huge conflict in that. Him doing side work and him working for us, you know. But I also have a hard time letting him go because I'm like, okay, well, he doesn't have a full time Job. And, you know, I think I care too much and I think I need to stop caring about the business, about the people in general, and care more about the business.

Yeah. Like, one thing might be something to consider to want a current size of the business is like, does it need a general manager that will come in and be less emotional about the operations of the company?

100% it needs it. And yeah, because I'm too emotional and, and I'm too like, for example, they're out of sick days. I'll tell the girl at the office, just pay them for the day because I feel bad. Right. Versus you being my general manager. Let's say you're like, sorry, dude, you only work four days. What am I supposed to do? Yeah, right.

At your current size, if you can say, go from 2.5 to say, 3.5, by you focusing on everything besides operations. Like, I feel like right now you have admin, you have sales, and you're basically serving as the operations person.

And I'm not doing a good job at it.

And you just got to get someone in there that is incentivized on profitability. Right. And they're going to be much more by the book. They're going to be create standard operating procedures, they're going to be much more rules and regulations. But the reason you don't do that is because you don't want to feel like the bad guy. Where what you do is you hire someone that is strong operations and they're incentivized to ensure that you're profitable. And then, then by you delegating probably what is 60, 70% of your day, you're then going to go focus on growing the business. Things like optimization of the website, upselling existing customers, turning a $10,000 job into a $20,000 job. Like, these are the things that you are going to be really good at. And then, then you focus on the two things. One, strategic growth like that, and secondly, leadership of the team. Because now you're going to have an admin person, you're gonna have an operations person, and you're gonna have a salesperson that that leadership team needs cultivating. You'll have to step in occasionally and be like, hey, you could do this better than the sales. Hey, you could do this better on the admin side. Hey, the operations side, this could be, this could be tweaked. But now you step away from the business, act much more like an AR builder, the manager in the, in the building. Right?

Yeah. That makes 100 sense. And, you know, not something that, that I hear you a lot on your videos mention, you know, stepping away, you know, so you can do other things, you know, and honestly, like, I'll be flat out honest with you, right? I don't do nothing all day. Generally, I don't do anything. And a lot of that is my mental health. I think the last year or two years, I think it's my mental health. Or am I, am I using that as a crutch of saying, oh, it's my mental health, it's my mental health. Like it got to the point where I don't even want to go to Home Depot, you know what I mean? Like, I'll send one of my guys, hey, can you pick this up at Home Depot for me? Hey, can you do this? So I'm forcing myself this year, like me taking this call from you or dealing with this, like, I'll be flat out with you. I thought I scheduled it whenever it was last time, but I guess it didn't go through. But I wanted to reschedule because something came up. But that something that came up was in my head. It wasn't something that came up that I had to be somewhere or do something right. So I think it's fighting through, through that is my biggest problem, you know.

Do you think, Juan, that's like in, like a outside of work thing, like other issues that you're dealing with, or do you think that is like in the business there's just things you, you don't want to do. You've been doing it for a long time and you're burnt out.

I think it's the business that it's burned out. I love. I've been married for a long time. I've been with my, I'm 42. I've been with my wife since I was 15. So we've been together for a long time. We have three kids and then two, two more. We had little ones. So we have a 27 year old and we have a four, five year old. So I mean, at home I'm, I'm the happiest. I have the best supportive wife. If I go out right now and spend a hundred thousand dollars on a car or whatever, she won't tell me anything. And I think that's maybe the problem too. She'll be like, I like it. Thank you. It's nice, it's nice. You know, so she's really supportive, you know, whatever I want to do in life, she's super supportive. So it's not at home, you know, and then honestly, the person at the phone is my daughter, so she answers all the phones. The gentleman who does ourselves, his name is Jeremiah. He's my son in law. So he married my daughter. So. And, and he was just working with me before he even married my daughter. We kind of grew up in church together. So I known him since he was, you know, a year old, two years old. I kind of known him throughout the years and then as teenagers and then, you know, obviously he started working for me and then he had interest for my daughter. So then that works out. Other than that, those are the only two family members I have working for me.

From your perspective, Juan, like, what do you look forward to in the business? Like so daily operations? Like do you like team meetings? Do you like.

Training your, your, your son in law and your, and your daughter? Like do you like seeing them succeed? Like what's the thing like that? Like outside of the money, what's the thing you enjoy about the business? Like I know like right now you're burnt out on it. What part do you enjoy?

It's going out there, seeing my guys happy, smiling and seeing my equipment. I don't know why. I'm big on my equipment. I'm one of those persons who bought way too much equipment and don't really need it right now. But I also, sorry, I also have a hard time getting rid of it now. I like going out there and making sure that they're happy. Like I cook breakfast, I'll cook breakfast for them. That's what I like to do. You know, it's not very productive. You know, it makes them happy, but it's not very productive.

It's also huge for attention. I, I would imagine a lot of your crew has stayed with you for a long time.

Yeah, I got some guys, like three, four guys. I've been with me for over 10 years.

Right. So like I think there's definitely value. It's hard to attribute profit and loss value to keeping the crew happy. But like if that's the thing that turns you on and like right now you hate. No, let's just go hate the day to day operations. Going to Home Depot, we got to find a general manager. Got to find someone or an operations manager really. Someone that when things are going wrong in the field, they call that person. And, and the difference for me when, when I think operations manager, I think when things go wrong and when people want to call out, who do they contact? And if that's you right now, that's why you constantly feel this way is because you resent the fact that when, as you grow the business, you get more jobs, you get more customers, it just creates more stress for you that you do not enjoy. There's more runs to the Home Depot, there's more complaints, there's more issues, there's more problems. More people calling out and saying, hey, I don't, I can't work today. And you giving them money for free and then feeling jilte the back end.

Right, right. Okay. Yeah, that makes a lot, a lot of sense. You know, right now Jeremiah takes the blunt of it, which is a sales guy. And I've always been, Jeremiah should just worry about sales. His goal should be sales. They shouldn't be bothered by, hey, I, I, I can't come in tomorrow, which they're going to call Jeremiah before they call me right now. And that's because I was absent for like six months. I had a little motorcycle accident, um, and I was out for six months because I physically couldn't do it physically. And then it got to mentally, I couldn't do it. So Jeremiah really, that's when he stepped in doing 99% of the sales. Before, he was doing maybe 40% of the sales and I was doing 60% of the sales. And then he stepped in, took a huge, I mean, without him, you know, I wouldn't be here today because, you know, he carried the company for, for about a year or so, you know, so yeah, he, he takes a big burden of that. And I've always said, like, dude, all you should worry about is sales. You're a sales guy. And I think it's a problem. He's not commission based, so he's salary based. He's out about 115, almost 120. And he's just a good worker, you know, he really is. He's not going to take advantage of anything.

You know, like what I think you might want to do, Juan, is because, like, I think that the, the benefit of getting him not to do any operation, like when I hear them contacting him, he is acting as a general manager.

That's what he is. He is right.

And so I think if we want to be able to allow him to focus on sales, we simply need to delineate what is operations and what is sales. We look at three functions of the business. We have admin, operations and sales. Right now he's doing sales and operations. I would try to delineate that and say, hey, let's write all the things you do. Here's the operations, here's your sales. I want you to Focus on the sales part. Because I happen to believe that if you reached up 25, 30% of his day, that's currently being ate up on operations and the crew calling out and all this stuff. If you really cut that off of his schedule, even if it means promoting, this is an idea and I don't know who this individual is that's doing the part time work. If you say, hey, let's have this honest conversation around the fact that you're doing work outside the company, it's probably hurting us. You're not going to say that. You're just thinking that you're going to say, hey, do you want to be my operations manager? It would require you to not do outside work. But like, would you be able to do that? I'm not saying that's who we should be.

Right.

If you're able to do that. Jeremiah then focuses on sales exclusively. I think that's what takes the business to the next level in terms of revenue and it's number of like leads. Because right now he's, he's, his attention's too split. He's trying to lead a team of 12 people and try to do sales. Like we find once you cross eight people, that general manager rule starts to need to be split up. You need to have a sales operations and an admin person. And so in my opinion, once you cross seven people in the field, you get the 8, 9, 10, now there's nine in the field, one person in the office. And these are large scale projects. There's so much operations. If he could cut that out and then just focus on sales. And this is the thing, I think once he does that, he's able to focus more on upselling. He's able to focus more on like pitching existing customers past customers. Like if one, if someone did a job a year ago and we're not pitching them every three, two, three months on a different type of service, that's a huge sales opportunity. But right now he's not doing that. Cause he's busy doing operations.

Yeah. And he doesn't do that. You know why? Because I never train them to do that. Because I would go to a customer's house and I'm not the type of guy who would be like, hey, I see this tree needs to work. We'll do it for an extra 250. And like, I know I should push those more because that's at the end of the night. We're already there. The crew's already there. That's an extra 2, 3, 4, $500. Like we should push those a lot more. And I just don't because I feel like I'm being pushy with our customers. And some customers need to be pushy. Like you need to push them. I'm one of those customers, like, if I want to do something and if they don't push me, I will make a decision. I'll just not do anything, you know? Yeah.

And, and what you do, what you do, Juan, is you take your, your admin, you take your sales, and you take your operations heads. So that's how I be looking at it. It's like three different departments. We have sales, operations, and admin. You put heads of those, each of those departments, and then you give them very good profit sharing, even if it's 30% of the profits and you get 10% to each. For example, you could, you could adjust this however you need to. But like now when they see five chipper trucks and two of them being used, the salesperson knows that if he can just get those trucks in operation and by using upsells and getting more leads, that's like 60, 70% profit because you just have to pay for the cost of goods sold, which is the labor.

Yeah.

And so this is the type of thing that right now there's no incentive for them to fill the trucks. There's no incentive for them to upsell. And so we, like, a salesperson without any sort of commission base is like, almost useless. I know.

Yeah.

And like, he, he cares a lot because he's related to you. He's a hard worker, but he's also involved in operations. I would be like, well, you are going to sell and, and now you're going to have your base salary of 1:10 or whatever it is. But anything in addition to this, you can, the sky's the limit. You get 10% of profits or even potentially say anything above 2.5 million in revenue, you're getting a percentage of now all of a sudden. He's very incentivized to grow the business and get more leads, I would probably just say based on bottom line profits. So you can speak to your leadership team the same language. They all three are just constantly thinking about profits.

Yeah, yeah. Because the guys too, like, for example, if they get an extra job, like, there's no commission for them, there's nothing for them. So what they do, oh, here, call the office instead of, hey, Jeremiah, I got the street. Send you a picture. How much do they want for it? You know, and I think that's, that's, that's a problem, you know, and it's not because I want to be greedy with the money. I just don't. I just. How do you put those things in place, though? For example, like, how do you know what's fair to give the crew? You know, let's say they got an extra job for $400. I don't know what's fair. I think of, you know, if I gave them, let's say 30 bucks each. Let's just say, right? I'm like, you know, 30 bucks I think of, that's nothing. What am I going to do with 30 bucks? But I have to keep realizing, like, that's not my $30. That makes a huge difference for them. That's their lunch for, for the day, for the week, however they want to do it. You know, I'm thinking of $30. What, what's the third dollars do for the company? It doesn't do anything.

Once you incentivize Jeremiah, like, and he, he's thinking more about like capacity of the trucks, profitability, etc. He will come up with these ideas like, this is what. This is. Why, like, having someone just focus on sales and then giving them any sort of incentive on profitability is so important because, like, you don't need to come up with the ideas. You just need to incentivize and put workhorses in place.

He needs to figure it out because he's getting the profit out of it. He's getting incentivized for.

Okay, he knows we can afford, he knows if it's a $500 job, I can afford an X amount. And like, I would, I would encourage, like when that, when it comes that time, you make it simple for the guys. Like, hey, look guys, if someone wants an extra job, you send me a video. And if they accept it, you make 50 bucks. I'm going to get to you in cash for the next team meeting. And so what we would do is we'd have stacks of cash at the next team meeting. And we're just handing, okay, you got review, you got an upsell, you got a new customer. And like, it creates this, this culture of we upsell, like our crew out in the field of salespeople. We're getting reviews and then we're reading the reviews off that mentioned a certain crew member. We're talking about a certain upsell of so and so that sold an extra thousand dollar job. And we're just handing out cash. And I'm gonna take the hit, I'm gonna hit, take the hit on taxes. I don't care. I want that culture of cash being handed out at team Extra. Couple hundred bucks on their paycheck doesn't mean anything. But $200 being given to them at a team meeting in front of their peers. Let's go.

Yeah. Yeah. You know what? And it's so true, because we just. I got some writing on here, but you see, we just did these. Literally. I just got them in the mail today. I ordered from vistaprint. They came in the mail on Monday or Tuesday, and we already got two reviews, so. And we got, like, 300 reviews, I think, online already on Google. So this is out of two this week. And I told the guys, hey, it's 20 bucks per crew. You come back with the review, you guys get 20 bucks, and we'll figure out how to split it between you three. So, yeah, I think doing those things, it's. It's. It's. It's working, you know? And I'll be. I'll be flat out 100 honest with you. I'm the problem. Because all these ideas that you're telling me, like, I have all these already in my head, but it's like I can never execute them. It's like the guy who says, I'm gonna work out tomorrow, I'm gonna work out tomorrow, I'm gonna work out, and you never work out.

I think the big thing, though, is one is because, like, I don't think it's your strength and, like, you built a really big business based upon the fact that, like, even you just, like, love the guys. You do great work and you care a lot. And so I would just lean more into that and less on, like, operations and sales. You have a really, really good salesperson that cares deeply about you and for the business, huge win. Incentivize him so you can pay him $180,000 because he grew a $5 million business for you, right? And just incentivize it. He's like, I'll give him 10%. Like, you want your three heads of department, sales, operation, admin to always just think about one thing. Profitability. That way they're constantly protecting the bottom line. And then you. You go spend your day meeting up with the guys, giving them an extra ice cream, being at the shop when everyone's there doing barbecues, doing, like, that's what you. Your jam. You get attention. You're the. You're the mascot. Like, you would think of yourself as the mascot.

That's exactly what I do. I'm serious. Like, that's. That's what I like to do. The guys get here and like, hey, man, there's some sodas in the ice chest. Hey, man, I got the, the elote guy, you know, the guy who sells the ice creams. He's coming over today for you guys. Hey, tomorrow, don't eat. Make sure you have a light lunch because I'm cooking tomorrow, you know.

And then like, you dropping it on. On job sites, and then all of a sudden you start dropping on job sites, okay, you're not worried about going to Home Depot. You're going to go talk with the customer and you sell them a massive job. You sell the neighbor. Because you're there. You're just around. You're the mascot. You're the guy that is just like, everyone's happy to see the crew loves you. They don't bring their problems to you. They're not asking you for time off because they, they know they need to go to the operations person. Like, you've built the business to the size where and the profitability where you can do this. And furthermore, I believe you'll be more profitable and financially successful by letting a, like, giving away some of the profits. So look at my locations, for example. Over 50% of the profits now are going to either the team general manager or regional manager. And it's because, like, I'm never there. Like, I. I need to focus on other things. And so if your focus is going to be, I'm going to be on, like, the mascot. Like, I would literally name yourself the ma. Like, you are the mascot. You're like, that would be your role. And like, so if there's, like, there's a big initiative around sales, like, well, that's Jeremiah's problem. You know, the guys don't know they're going to figure out the HR software system. Oh, well, that's operations and admin. So you guys have a good. You report back to me. But now they're all incentivized around profitability. So you're not worried about people taking advantage of you, Right.

Right. Now let me ask you this. Like, when it comes to Jeremiah, like right now, right, he says we're slow right now, he does some door knocking, right? So wherever the crews are working, he's knocking on some doors just because he didn't pay out his day, right? But when he has a full day, most of those leads come from the phone at the office or previous customers. Right? So how do I get Jeremiah? What I'm trying to say is how do I. Where do I find the difference? At on when to pay him when he gets new leads, or do we just look for a dollar amount a month and then give him a bonus from there? Or how, how would I structure that?

I'm a big fan of your size. Unless you're going to go to multiple locations, et cetera, to, to simply give him bottom line profit percentages. Because if you give him just top line revenue, you will get more leads, you will get more jobs. He will do a better job of upselling, he'll do a better job cross selling, all of the above, but you won't make any money. And now you start watching his back because you're like, well, what are these jobs actually profitable? Now the crew's not able to hit budget hours. Now the scheduling gets behind because he didn't put enough hours on the job because he underbid it. So like you don't have to want to worry about in perverse incentives. It's like, don't do based on revenue, don't do based on jobs. Just do, hey, bottom line profits. Because, because this is the thing. If he can fill the trucks that are currently not being used, you are literally going to make 50 to 70% profit on those jobs. Because you already have the truck, you already have the equipment. You're already paying for the insurance. It's locked and loaded.

Yeah, I am paying for it. I'm getting tired of paying for the insurance for these trucks. They'll sit there and I would say 90, 90 of our equipment's pretty much paid for.

And I mean his problem, right? Like make it very. Now, your leadership meetings is simply instruction of like, okay, so the three trucks we aren't using out there, they're paid off. We're paying insurance on them. If we go get a job and we pay say 20% or 25% of our revenue goes to wages, we're 70% profitable in these jobs. Okay, what do we do to do that? We don't want to spend a bunch of money on marketing. I think the biggest opportunity for you, Juan, is going to be like, how do we email and text customers when we're not as busy? Like for example, next week I would be taking what's the service right now that everyone's needing? Great. I'm going to email the thousand plus people in my database and I'm going to get 10 or 15 estimates tomorrow. Now the salesperson, the reason that those ideas are not being implemented is because one, you don't really need the money, you're okay with it. Two, Jeremiah is not incentivized to push the envelope.

Yeah.

Incentivize to make sure you're comfortable and you are comfortable. So right now he's doing a great job. You just simply need to give him the incentives to make more money.

Okay, yeah, yeah, that makes tons of sense. So do it more on the, on the profitable side of it versus just the top line of it.

Yeah.

Now, when it comes to your employees, I hear you mixing a lot that ppp, right. Paper performance. How do you, how would I incorporate that into a three man, like let's say a tree crew.

Yep. So what I would do is I would, I would. So let's just say there's a $5,000 job. We're going to assume that people get different percentages of the labor revenue.

Okay. Right.

So with trees you have very wide variety of skill level. You have arborist, you have people in the tree, you have people just dragging branches.

Right.

So you'd have different base pays and percentages of compensation for different levels in the company. So you might have a level one, a level two and a level three of different base pay. Because you got to have a certain base pay to get an arborist. You're not going to get an arborist for $18 or $20 an hour base. Right. Can't happen. So you're like, hey, what's the base? But then you're what you're also tracking, really what all people is. I'm tracking their base pay. Then I'm also tracking the percentage of revenue that is earned them by pay for performance. So the more revenue they make, the more money they make. Now if they're split up on a job though, you can have different base pays and different percentages that go to them. So an arborist might be 40 bucks an hour base plus 25% or 30% of revenue. Great. And then I'm going to be doing lower levels for my group on the, on the ground.

The ground and stuff like that. Right, right. That makes tons of sense. See, and right now I think the problem that we have. Right. And that I would see coming up with this would be like, for example, like the job that one of the crews did, they started, it's a three day job. I think realistically they could have finished it yesterday. Right. It's a twelve thousand dollar job. They could have finished it yesterday. It had six thousand dollars day. A day. Right. So instead they went back out there today and they only had a four thousand dollar day. Right. But because a lot of that too is like right now, like how can I Incentivize them to finish the job in two days when the following day they may not work.

I don't think anyone's going to complain if you paid them the same you would have paid for yesterday and today. If you. But there is no incentive for them to work less. They only make more. They make more money the longer the job takes.

So would it make more sense? Okay, let's just say, for example, right. Having to $6,000 days and then giving them almost enough to where they're home the next day because they finish it early and they still kind of got paid.

Yeah, 100%. Because right now let's say for example. Let's just say for example, you just. Three day job there is, say it's $15,000 and let's say 12. Okay, great. So 12,000, let's assume 4,000 of that is going out to wages. Okay. What we do is P.4P is essentially say you're getting paid $4,000 in this job. Regardless. If it takes you one day, two days, three days, or an entire week, you're getting paid $4,000. And so now it's just up to them to beat it. Now do. Would they rather just finish the job early and have tomorrow off? Yes, because I get paid the same amount.

Yeah. Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah. If you're looking at that. Yeah, me too. I'll be like, I'll take tomorrow if I'm gonna get paid anyways.

You're right now you're thinking very much in terms of I need to fill the cruise schedule. That's also what leads to inefficiencies. Because you're like, oh, we're not really busy. I'll just let them kind of take their time, like whatever. Well, if you were stacked up with work and you're like, I need these guys get jobs done and then they're incentivized to get more jobs done, all of a sudden you would find they would increase efficiency about 25 to 30%.

Yeah, yeah. Because every time we have like a little party here or we have something, everybody finishes early, you know, or Friday, everyone finishes early. And, and I get, you know, because I was in the crew for a long time, so I know how it goes, you know, I know what it's like when your boss calls you at three o', clock, hey, there's this emergency job you got to go do, you know, you go do it, but you're not happy about going to go do it, you know, because it's Friday and.

Right now they're probably not happy when on a Tuesday they get off at 1:00 clock and it's like, man, we didn't have work today. Well, they wouldn't care so much if they just completed 15 hours of work in five hours and got paid for 15.

Yeah, see, this is what I mean. They're too nice. Like yesterday, for example, a crew, three man crew came in at 2 o' clock and they got paid till 3:30, you know what I mean? And then, yeah, they're out there cleaning this, doing that, you know, and then some people are, you can see they're not doing much. But.

Which is the thing, Juan, that is a very nice thing to do. The challenging part is there is no system as to how that is delegated. Like doled out. Yeah. Paid not. Or not. And so what happens, especially once you start getting less involved in operations, is people start to think that people are playing favorites because they got rounded up to 3:30. Well, why am I not getting rounded up to 3:30 today? And so you just want to create a system for being kind. You want to be like, for the care that you have for the team, you need to systematize it. Like, you want to pay them well, you want to be paid fairly, you want them to work efficiently. Like, you just need to create a system for that care. Because right now the care is literally just like whether or not you want to give it to them.

Right, Right. Yeah. That's basically what it comes off to. Because some guys who, not that I don't like, but I don't feel like they deserve, you know, when they're sick and like, you call in too much, I'm not going to pay you. You know what I mean? They don't get paid for it. And other ones are like, yeah, right.

So it's like, look, now, now them not showing up actually has a benefit, has a, an impact on their paycheck. So, for example, I give 10% of my profits to my crew out in the field. If they don't show up to work, though, if they, if they call out or if they're late one time and a quarter that gets halved. If they do it twice, that's gone. So now instead of like being like, I don't like this guy, I like this guy, they do good. I'm like, hey, if you want to work harder, great, you'll make more money. If you don't, you'll make less money. And eventually no one will want to work with you because you're not efficient.

You'll get fired. Yeah, yeah, definitely.

But these are the type of systems that, like, once you get out of operations and you allow then Jeremiah to be focused on sales. Because I genuinely believe your biggest unlock here, Juan, is contacting previous customers.

We don't. We don't contact any of them. Nice.

I bet you have thousands. Like, how many in your database do you know?

Tons. But the problem, see, I don't have. What do you call it when something grabs all your emails and saves every CRM? I don't, I don't have that. So I have. I use Invoice to Go. So Invoice to Go does have everything, but I manually have to go and look for every single one of them.

Yeah, I know, I know.

So that's like, to me, that's a huge problem. Like, I wish I could just go through a list and be like, hey, we did that tree. That tree. I don't have that. And we have. I mean, I've been doing this since 2012. So I've been using invoice to go since 2012 because I tried switching to jobbers, but Invoice to Go obviously won't give me all that information because they know I'm going somewhere else and I'm not paying them their $900, $200 a year, whatever it is that they charge.

Yeah. You know, yeah, the challenging part, they don't do like the email, the text. Like you can't mass text your customers.

No, no.

If you did that right now to the thousands of customers, you would get leads through your. Like, you would not be spending money on marketing.

I don't know what's a lot, but on Google right now we're spending about $8,000 on Google through Google Ads is what we're spending her a month. A month. Yeah, that's what we're spending. And we're not swamped.

I know one seems ridiculous.

We were doing Yelp 1600 on Yelp, right? Yeah. And Yelp, it's not for treat people because most people are going there for restaurant reviews, this and that. But I do like the review. So I said, hey, just cut it back down to $300 a month. So at least we're on there. At least we have the reviews. But yeah, it's about $8,000 a month through Google is what we're spending on crazy.

Yeah. You like? Yeah. Like, I would task your daughter with figuring out what's the best software for you all. And the thing I would be thinking about is not how it invoices or estimates I'd be thinking about what is its mass email and mass text capabilities. Because if you're able to tap into that, you will not spend a dollar in marketing. You have you, I would guess you have four or five thousand customers you've served. And I would guess that if you send an upsell to them once a month, just an email about, hey, this like something in the news or like a local tree, something going on or fire prevention or whatever, you just pitch that once a month and you're going to get 10, 15, 20, 30 new jobs from it. Like so, like there's Jobber. There is. Jobber doesn't do mass email or mass text, but it does integrate with something like mailchimp. So mailchimp would be another idea, like if you didn't want to switch to a different CRM.

So jobbers. And what's the other one?

You said there's jobber. There's the challenging part with jobber, and this is the part that I would be careful of, is you're gonna have to also integrate with mailchimp because they don't do mass text and mass email. So you really could potentially get away with going to Mailchimp. Now you're gonna be looking at four or $5,000, probably four to $500 a month. If you're gonna mass email and mass text through mailchimp, I'm completely biased. We have copilot CRM. We do mass texting and mass emailing through that. You're looking around $300 a month.

So pilot yours.

Yes.

That's your system that you guys use in place that you came up with?

Yes.

Okay.

And so, so like that's an option. There's service autopilot, there's aspire. Like at your size, I would rather you spend $500 a month on software than $8,000 a month to Google. Because furthermore, like everything he's doing right now in Google Calendar should all be in one spot. So like everything should be going where your admin person can see what they're doing. They can track every single estimate invoice on one customer profile, then track the monthly automations that you send out to customers. So for example, someone gets a $10,000 job, we should have an automation to send them one month after, two months after, three months after, and sell them other stuff, ask them for a review. Like all of that can get automated. There's no reason to have invoices to go Google Calendar. And like I'm assuming like everyone, like it's all over the place. And yeah, yeah, we're not messaging customers.

Different things.

Yeah, right. All of that can go in one spot. I was with a company last week over in Salt Lake city doing around 2 million and like, same thing. They had like one thing for the crew, One thing for FreshBooks was invoicing and estimates. Like, we gotta get it in one spot. That way you don't have to be there and you can see everything that's going on. Like, there should be no reason why, for example, Jeremiah can't be at the job site, attach a voice note and then the admin person put together the estimate. Because now you have a very expensive person like Jeremiah being able to do an estimate in two minutes and make a video.

He does, he. He's got it that far because the girl at the office, she'll create the estimate. All he has to do is literally fill it in and send it. So that saves them time.

Yeah, Yep, totally. And so I think getting a lot of these systems in one spot, they estimate the invoicing, the marketing, that's the big piece. Like, I would rather you just like, if you're like, hey, I don't want to switch software invoice to go is like hard to export out of. First off, I would just go, go do something like mailchimp, where all you do is import emails and phone numbers and you text blast and email. It's a little bit pricey and it's not connected, which I don't like because I preferably like it where you see everything. You go to a customer's profile and you see all the emails they've got, you see all the text messages they've got. That'd be the perfect spot. But I would, I would task your daughter with this. Like, she's going to be the one that is in the software all the time. Tell her, hey, hey, here's the three or four options. I want you to go demo these out. I want you to see which one's going to work the best. But I would really, really emphasize is we want to focus on can we mass text and mass email our custom customers? Because I genuinely believe if you do that right now, you will wipe out your marketing budget. Like right now, $8,000. Juan. Like, let's just step back for a second. We'd rather give that to your daughter and to Jeremiah.

Yeah. Oh, yeah, definitely. I don't want to give it to Google.

So we give it incentivize them, right? It was like, basically, hey, look, I want, I don't want to spend this $8,000. I'd rather give that to all of you. To do that, we need to market to our existing database. Because I know this for a fact, Juan, when you send a monthly email or text message to your customers, you will get about half a percent to 1% of them responding, every single time, asking for more services. Because you guys do a great job. You have tons of reviews, Customers are happy. There's no reason why they aren't going to use you again, like once a year, twice a year. There's no reason whatsoever.

Let me ask you this real quick though. Now, like, in the tree industry, right? Like, it's hard, like, to upsell, you know, like you do with maintenance. Because maintenance, you could be like, hey, we can redo this flower. But hey, we can rebark. Hey, we can do this. Hey, we can do that with the tree industry is a little bit harder. Like, what would I re. What would I try to upsell to them? Gutter cleaning or. Or window washing. I'm just saying, like, for example, like, I'm not understanding that because the customer.

You served six years ago needs the same service because their trees grew again. And so it's not so that you're asking, you're looking for recurring. It's not even that you're upselling them, is that you're keeping them warm in your system. Because five years ago, they don't even remember Environmental Tree Service.

Yeah, no, they don't.

But they will if they will if you've kept them warm. So we would have customers where we served them. Five years ago, I sent em an email. All of a sudden they accept a $20,000 job. I'm like, where have you been for five years? But we kept them warm. Every single month, you're sending them a text, you're sending them an email. You make it really easy, like, and you can customize the email templates. And the text seem very personal. So it's like, hey, it's Juan over environmental. Just want to say thank you again for that service. Hey, if there's anything you ever need from it again, hit us up. They'll get like a large open rate. You don't have to make it salesy, you don't have to make it pitchy. This month we are focusing on, you name it.

Yeah, I got it, I got it. I see what you're saying there. Yeah. Or maybe even giving them like a little newsletter. Hey, it's, you know, it's getting ready to summer. Make sure you guys are watering your trees properly. Just whatever to do. With that, hey, winter's coming. Make sure your trees are safe. Go out there and look and look for any dead branches. I got it. I see what you're saying.

You know, it's like, and you know, the certain trees at certain times of year have problems. So, hey, this is the autumn gold ginkgo. This is the deodoric cedar. Like, you just go through whatever problems are happening each month and it's just a, you know, there's 50% off. There's. If you're really busy or really, really slow and you give a promotion, you just fool your schedule for the whole week.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I, I see, I see, I see what you mean. And a lot of that just has to be more. Like I said, I have all these ideas. Like, this has been in my head for months and I finally sat around and just did it.

So what you do is you reviewed.

In less than two days.

Totally. And so what you do is you take this recording, you're now going to give it to Jeremiah, you're going to give it to your daughter and say, hey guys, I want these. I want to do sales. Operation admin. I have a department head of each of those. I'm going to give you all a percentage of profits every single quarter of the whole business. I would rather pay you than, than Google to make this happen. We're going to need more leads to get more leads, we're going to need to get software that is going to be a mass message and mass text our customers to get leads pouring in. So Jeremiah's fully busy with sales and then we're going to get someone else to handle the operations. So that's not even what you think about. Instead of doing five or six estimates a day, going to do 10 or 15 because that's all he's going to do is sales. That's how the business grows. But more importantly, you focus back on what you love doing. Because now when you, when you have 12 guys and they're all 30% more efficient because they're getting paid upon performance and you're like, well, how is that going to work? Your operations person will think about P4P. You don't need to worry about it. You simply say, hey, look. They're going to be like, hey, boss, like, how do I make these guys work harder? This is a problem. Well, I've heard about this thing for help P4P. Think about it, look into it. They will come up with the systems because now they're incentivized based upon the fact that the Difference between them not figuring that out and make and figure out is 20 or $30,000 in their paycheck.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think the problem is that I think, like, Jeremiah, my daughter, my wife, like, a lot of people, like, they look at me for these answers a lot of the times because we didn't have nothing growing up. I still. We still don't have much now, but, like, I'm probably the one that's doing the best around my circle, right? Like, I don't have friends like you. You know, I don't have a friend like. Like doing way better than me because I'm very homebody. I' my family. So all these people look at me like I know all the answers. And I feel like a lot of times I'm carrying all this weight for everybody and, like, I can't keep carrying this load. I told my daughters, like, one of you two need to figure it out, because I'm tired of carrying the load. That's what I tell them jokingly, but sincerely. Like, I mean it because, you know, like, where my daughters live, like, we bought that house for them. You know, where our offices. We bought that property. The cars my daughters drive, we bought them for them, you know, like, I feel like I'm carrying all this load. And like, like, like I tell them so many, like, I need some help. Like, I can't carry all these loads. And that's when I was like, okay, well, I got to just start talking to people to help me out. I reached out to you. You know, I've been doing a lot of, you know, I always listen to podcasts and I guess you call it motivational videos, I guess is what you call them, you know, and they do help me, but they only help you for a short spam. And then they're just like, you know, like, I hear this a million times. Like, I need some real world stuff, you know, And I feel like that was you, you know, like, he's real world. Like, I see these videos. Like, he deals with this stuff. Maybe not directly under your. Your. But one of your franchise. Like, you're dealing with it, you know, so that was one of my biggest reasons to reaching out to you. Like, okay, I think he's going to get a lot more than a lot of these people who are just, you know, are trying to get famous on. On Instagram or on YouTube or whatever. That's really the way I feel like they are, you know, like, they're not really education. Like, they're trying to sell you a corporation Force is what I felt like the most, you know?

Yeah. Like, I think the, the distinction you're made, the challenging part you're running up to right now, Juan, is you're switching from manager to architect. And that's a painful process. The architect steps away from the building. They are not inside building. They step away and they, they get resources to the building. Hey, let's hire this contractor. Let's get more material. Like, they're away from the building. But then you. What, what, what? The key here is getting a leadership team in place.

Yeah.

Leadership that is going to do the doing.

Yeah.

So you can step back and be the leader. And like the most effective thing that you will do in a year or two, when the businesses say doing 3.5 and you have these leadership teams, the most important thing you'll do is train those leaders. The second most important thing you'll do is inspire your team. I happen to think you'll do really good at those. And you'll light you up.

You'll.

You'll enjoy that process. The whole right now, like chasing invoices and estimates, figuring out who's clocking in and out, who's taking advantage of you. All this is minutiae you do not need to worry about. And it's boss you down from doing these two things really well.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can definitely see, see that. That's a huge, A huge part of it, you know, And I feel like, yeah, like you said, we have someone in sales already. We got someone already at the office. It's just that supervisor. And we've been talking about it for. Honestly, we tried it with one of our guys that moved up. And I promoted him because I felt like he's helped. He's been with me since day one. Is English isn't the best. And I felt like I owed it to him. But I knew from the beginning he wasn't good at it because his English isn't there. He can communicate with the customer, but when a customer's upset, the last thing he's trying to do is deal with someone who can't speak the language perfectly, you know, So I knew he wasn't going to work out. And he did it for like six months. He was great to motivate the guys to get the jobs done faster. But when it came to talking to somebody, the customers, it wasn't him. And I feel bad bringing in, let's say, like you, for example, as our supervisor, when we have guys here who's been here longer, but they're not qualify for that. And I have a hard time telling them, sorry man, you're not qualified for it. You don't speak the proper language or this or that. I feel really bad saying that. And I think that's what helped me, held me back from hiring a supervisor. How can I overcome that? Or how can I like a way not to feel guilty about it or you know what I mean?

So there's two ways you can do it. One, if you want to solve the problem fast, you have a conversation with the team as to why you are getting someone from the outside. Okay? That's like the fast way to fix it. The, the longer term is, hey guys, next year 2026, we're hiring an operations manager. And if you would like that position, you can have a one on one with me tomorrow morning for 15 minutes and I will tell you what you need to do to change in order to get that position. Because right now there's no one here that's qualified. And I would rather hire from inside the company. I would rather move people from inside the company. But right now no one has the skills. So if you, if you're willing to take critical feedback, I will give you what you need to do to hit that position. And then there's going to be people in front of you who say, hey, I need to take an esl. I need to take English as a second language course. Like if you figure that out, you're, you're going to be able to get this position. Or I need to figure out certain mechanic training techniques better. Like I need you to be able to do the roping. Like whatever it is you would have those conversations. And then if no one steps up, you have full license to go hire someone next spring outside the company.

Yeah, but see, right now I'm more into the point where I want to do this now. I've been pushing things off, I've been pushing things off for the long time. I don't want to wait till 2026 to get a supervisor. You know, even if we go down to, let's say we go down to one crew because of the workload, I still want to make sure I have a supervisor in place. You know what I mean? So I think I'd rather just go and bite the bullet. And if some of these guys get upset, then they might just have to get upset and leave. I guess that's the way I have to look at it. Seeing like I have another employee, right. Who only works three days a week because for some reason he was granted to take Thursdays and Fridays off. And I feel that's unfair for me because he's holding a full time position for somebody who's really good. But this guy's also been with me for 12 years. So I have a hard time saying, hey, either you work full time or you leave. But I feel like he's taking advantage of because he's growing his side thing, which I'm okay with that for him doing something on the side, but I feel like I'm helping him along and I'm hurting myself. Right?

Yeah. Like the bottom line is this, is this conversation what you're talking about is draining you from the energy you need to be a great leader. And leaders leadership is different than operations. And you're getting sucked into operations and this problem is sapping so much energy from you that you're not being a great leader. And so like, like that's just the thought, like the real, real. And like right now, like you figuring this problem out is not your problem to solve. Is an operations manager that should be dealing with this person having a hard conversation, having a one on one and figuring out the schedule. This is not your problem to solve. And because you're trying to solve it, it is draining you of energy and is therefore preventing you from being a good leader.

Yeah, yeah, it definitely draining me because I'm to the point like where, you know, I have toys. I don't even use my toys, you know, I can go on vacation. Like literally we have an rv, we haven't used it in a year and a half. It's just sitting there. We even have a sprinter van. We haven't really even used it. You know, I can go to wherever, Lake Tahoe, Cancun, wherever I want to go. But yet here I'm sitting here in this office, you know, because everything seemed like it's just stuck in the life out of me. And you're right, it's because I'm keep putting, you know, like when they say stress is only caused for things that you didn't take action on. So I feel like I like this whole thing. Three days it's been going on for two, three years that it's just been stressing me and it's just bottling me up. Like I need to deal with it, you know, and that's why I'm like, I want to just deal with it now. I don't want to do this six months from now. I'm like, I'm to the point where I want to take actions today. I want to take action like, you know, today, not tomorrow.

Then what you can do to prevent, you know, making people mad in the company is you tie again, incentives with all this. Right. So, for example, if I happen to believe that most of your team knows the fact that you can travel and you don't because you're just always at the office. Yeah. What you say is, hey, guys, going forward, we're getting an operations person here and I'm going to be giving now a percentage of the profits to the team every single quarter. The team's gonna make more money based on you guys working hard. I want to be able to give back to all of you. Now, to make that happen, I need someone to be able to handle. Oper going to be hiring Joe Blow from down the street. It's going to come in. He has 10 years of experience. He's going to come in, he's going to be starting with all of you out in the crew for the next three, three, four weeks to get assimilated, figure out what we're doing here. But he's going to become the operations manager. And so that's the fast way. Right. But you're going to tie incentives. You're going to be 5, 10%, whatever you feel comfortable with of profits every quarter to the team out in the field.

Yeah, yeah, that makes tons of sense there. And that way they don't get their feelings hurt too much by me just bringing in, like you said, Joe Blow from down the street, because he's going to at the end of the day, so it'll be some profit in for them is going to benefit them as well.

On a $3 million business, if they're 10% more efficient, you're making $300,000. You can afford to give them some more money and hire an operations manager.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. Definitely. I can always do that. And I think a lot of it's just holding myself a little more accountable and, you know, pushing to it. So I think what we'll do too is like when we hang up, I'm going to book another meeting for you, but I'm not going to put it out. Maybe in a month, two months, because I'm one. It's going to cost me money, right, for me to talk to you, but it's going to cost me some money. It's going to kind of hold me accountable too, as well, you know, And I get to pick your brain, you know, like, I got tons of notes that I've been writing down. I get to pick your brain, and I can maybe not implement Every single thing that you told me. But if I implement two of these things that you told me, it's going to be, you know, a lot better. So I think my first step, you would say I need to first get all my systems into one place. That's number one. Because I don't want to keep spending that money through Google. I feel like it's not even really even working. Like, you know, and another guy too, like the guy who does my website. Like I, I used him, but I don't feel that he's like the best. Like he, he put me onto Google Guarantee, right? But what happens when he switched me to Google Guarantee, for some reason, I don't know why Google suspended my page. So I lost everything, right? All my reviews, I lost everything. So I said, okay, there's no point on me spending money on ads if I can't be found nowhere online. So stop all the leads. And I think that's why we had a rough start to the year because I passed everything till he got everything back and he finally just got our Google page back. But our ranking is like, it's almost non insistent because we have to, I feel like we have to start all over again. So I feel like I need someone better. And he doesn't charge me much a month. I mean he only charges me, it's like $800 a month is what he's charging me. So I feel like it's like he's, oh man, I lost you. I feel like he's not getting paid enough. You know, if you don't get paid enough, I feel like you're not doing the best that you can. But I don't know, like you go to this online, right, and you look for, you know, agencies and stuff like which one of those do I trust? Which one of those do I pick? There's so many of them. You know how, how would I work towards that?

Yes. Like these are, these are small problems, right? I think like what I want to focus on now because I think the website can be improved. I have a whole list of stuff I saw on here that can be improved. We can figure out later. Right now that is a very small problem compared to the fact that you don't want to show up to work. And so like I think we fix structural issue first and then little things like sales, conversion rates, SEO. That's a thing down the road right now we know we need to get customers in a database, whether it be mailchimp, copilot job or anything that we can mass message our Customers because we know immediately we're going to unlock $8,000 a month that we're currently spending on Google and we're going to be able to now give that to the team. And then we're going to establish an operations manager. Whether it be internally or hiring someone. We're going to go an operations manager and we're going to have a leadership team in sales, operations and admin. You are not in any of those three roles. Anything that comes on your plate, you're asking yourself is this a sales thing, is this an operations or it's admin. And then you delegate it off to that person. You are the leader. You're the person that shows up in the morning. You show up at job sites. You're the one that rallies the troops, gets them excited. They love you. If they come to you about getting more paid time off, you go direct them. The operations manager, you do not make that call. You are a leader. You are not an operations person. These are very different skills. And then you incentivize those leadership if you do those three things when we have very different place in six to eight weeks.

Okay, so incentivize the first. Start off with the leaders first.

Getting that operations manager, getting all of the contacts in one system that you can mass message customers so you don't have to pay Google. And third is incentivizing those leaders based upon profitability. If you do those three things, we can figure out the website, I can give you resources that no problem, we can figure out lead flow and Google reviews and pay for performance. But right now we need you to show up to work and being happy about it.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So then I'm going to work on those three things and I'm going to book a call with you anytime. Yeah. And then probably within a month. What do you think would be realistically would be to book another call? Two months. So book another call in about two months and then I might even do it sooner to be honest.

But if you get it done, if you get those three things done, let's go.

I appreciate it.

You got it.

We'll be in touch. Bye bye. We'll do.

Bye bye.