The Truth About Jonathan's 3 Year Vacation

A sabbatical is a full-on do no work period.

Right now it seems like torture. My identity is wrapped up in it. I would feel immense amounts of guilt.

There's no way in the world a 3-year sabbatical would have happened had I not sold the business.

I don't care how premium you want to be, you're going to lose customers. If value is higher than price, people leave.

And so the way I think you use AI more is literally every single thing you do, start with AI, even if you think it's dumb.

And then another situation where All I can do is tell this person they need to cut this person out of their life and run. Welcome everyone back to the podcast that has no name, that we try to manufacture debate and disagreement, but we try and still fail to do so. And the podcast that we still fail to have really good nicknames for each other. But I am— I—

that's right. I haven't— I haven't brought mine back for you. I haven't even tried yet.

Well, currently we're at the Sultan of Service and the Pharaoh of Franchising. And it has a decent ring to it. I've never been called a pharaoh, but that's what we're sticking with until we hear otherwise in the comments. But for today's cold open, since how we do this is we alternate back and forth each week and we'll stick with that until we see a better way.

I'm liking it so far.

Yeah, I like it. So for this cold open, I want to mix it up. You know, we've been doing some hot takes. I want to do more visual. So we're going to see if this works. But I'm gonna have— Visual. Yeah, I'm gonna have Jay show you two images and I'll preface each one, okay? So there's—

Okay.

There's three scenarios. The first scenario is that gas vehicles are outlawed, all right? So whether this administration or the next administration or aliens come along and no gas-powered vehicles and you're forced to switch your vehicle fleet in your home service business. So I'm gonna show you two images. And I just want to get your opinions, your hot take. You can even do a long answer in terms of which one you would recommend for certain people. The first one is the Slate, the Slate truck that just came out.

So, oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Show that image.

Yep.

I got that image here. We got $24,950 starting now. We got our—

You're really having to cram the equipment on there.

Yeah, yeah. You know, you scale things up and down with AI a little bit. They're 5.5 feet. Come on now. Okay, so that's version 1. This is your first option, okay? Now, again—

That looks cool. I like the look.

It does look cool. It also got a lot of Instagram comments when I posted it. Second option is the Cybertruck, okay? A little more expensive. We do have a little more power. I don't know about the deck here. I don't even know what happened with the ramp situation. But nonetheless, if you had to choose between the two, you can give all the caveats in the world if you'd like based upon which service.

But if you had to pull a trailer—

if I'm not— I'm not— I'm just showing you the images. Which one, if tomorrow City Turf was forced, would you be switching to either Cybertrucks or Slate trucks?

It'd have to be the Cybertruck. Oh, because there is more room at the end of the day. And is that— I know, is there though?

They're both 5.5 feet, the, the back.

So the bed, the bed on the other one's really 5.5 feet?

Yeah, I mean, it's the same because the single cab Oh, but the thing is, this— I don't even know if the Slate could handle that much weight in the back because the Cybertruck could definitely pull a trailer.

Yeah, and the, the great— and the thing about the Cybertruck is with that depreciation curve, they, they're gonna become desirable. Um, they might be as much as a Slate at some point. Not really, but okay, um, we're going with the Cybertruck. Okay, yeah, but you threw me with the bed thing. Well, I know over the years Huh. I think the other one is way cooler. If I just wanted one on the road for pure looks, at least at the moment, I like the other one. I like the small size of the Slate. I like the price point of the Slate. You just haven't given me a lot of options here. Like, will 5.5 feet really hold? Like, could you— you could probably make it work for pest. You couldn't make it work for fur— like, for fur and stuff, you'd have to pull a trailer if you had a tank or Yeah, don't worry, I got trailer covered in the third option here, so don't worry. Okay, okay.

So for now though, we're going with the Slate, assuming that—

I think the Slate's cooler. If I have to pull a trailer, go with this.

And you get two for the Cybertruck. You get two for the price of one. Two for the price of one. But you have no stereo. You have— have you seen the inside of these things?

Yeah, but you can't use your phone and it has— oh no, it's like, uh, you have to bring your speaker. You're right, you're right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I have to bring your Bluetooth speaker. Oh man, I gotta love it. Okay, all right. I think they're clever.

I wonder how they're gonna do.

Okay.

It's really interesting.

Okay.

All right.

Next one, best guerrilla marketing. Okay, so you have to use no Facebook ads, no Google ads. I know you love postcards, not happening. You have some sort of budget, we'll get there, but you have to do one or the other. First one is going to be branding on a space rocket. No disclosure, just all of a sudden at the next launch event, Your logo is at the top. Okay. That's option number one.

Do I have to be able to make this work economically? Like be able to afford it? Or does that not matter?

You know, in the world of SpaceX, we don't think about numbers. We don't do any spreadsheet math. We just send it to the moon.

So, okay.

So now let's assume the budget for a moment. You have the same budget. Okay.

So let's, okay.

Let's just make up real numbers. $5 million to put your logo on SpaceX rocket. Okay. Okay, now the next thing we're going to show you— you have $5 million, so you could do more than one of these, but the next option is to do it on a hot air balloon. Okay, here it is. Now you could probably get quite a few of these for $5 million, so—

okay, so I could spend—

yeah, you have same budget, $5 million, either on SpaceX rocket going to the moon, literally you're gonna go to the moon, and then you got hot air balloons.

If it's literally going to the moon for the first time, I mean, first time as in with them sending it, I'm not getting into that debate, then I'll take that one. And especially if it blows up, that'd be very good for marketing as well.

But I got the ads write themselves, you know? Yeah, yeah. It's gonna blow up.

Oh, to get incredible publicity. So, but the hot air balloon thing would actually be cool because for $5 million, I assume you'd be able to have a ton of these things, but I don't, you'd have to really manufacture getting the press to actually pay attention to it. That's— that would be the hard part of that strategy. Whereas with the SpaceX thing, the going to the moon thing, I think a lot of people are ignoring the SpaceX launches at this point. But if it's going to the moon, yeah, or if something bad happens, there's publicity.

Okay, so you're going with the SpaceX rocket?

I, I think so. If it's going to the moon, yes.

Yes, if it's going to the moon.

Okay, if it's not going to the moon, I'm going with the other direction.

If it's just bringing up satellites or AI in space, who cares? Okay, so if—

but if I could put a bunch of hot air balloons all over my market, that's the thing. That's really—

that's why I chose the hot air balloon is because I just— I'd get like 500 of these things.

Oh yeah, no, that'd be amazing.

Oh yeah, like you'd actually drive results in your market. Now if you say SpaceX, you know, I don't really care if someone in Abu Dhabi wants their lawn mowed. I can't serve them, right?

Right, agreed. So okay, all right, but if it goes to the moon, okay, everybody's paying attention. Exactly, exactly.

Okay, we got one more. Okay. Um, so this is like, you can take this a couple different directions. Okay. These are far-fetched ideas. Okay.

As if the others weren't.

Yeah, no, the other ones are very realistic. Very realistic.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, these ones are a little more far-fetched, a little in the future, just a few years. But you've got to choose which one is the most viable or you think is going to happen, like the plausibility of it happening is more real. Okay, okay. And so if you had to put your money on this and invest into it, into, in City Turf, which one would you use? So first up is going to be a drone. You saw this one, we spoiled this one. Oh yeah, the drone delivering a robot mower. There you go. Probably from the SpaceX satellite situation, dropping them. That's probably how these get distributed. So we got the Augusta Lawn Care drone dropping a Husqvarna robot mower. 'Cause, you know, one of your beefs against these Roomba mowers is like, who's gonna manage 'em, who's gonna move 'em, uh, security, what if they die, what if they need maintenance? Hey, I solved it. We're just gonna have a drone go pick it up. And they're already doing Amazon Air drone deliveries, uh, so I feel like putting a robot on there isn't much more of a payload compared to a few books. Okay, so that's option number 1, all right?

The books aren't that heavy, yeah.

That was my pitch, that was my pitch, okay. Okay, second one, second one is the CyberCab. Now the CyberCab doesn't have a bed, but we could put a trailer on it. And so in this case, you'd have the employee in the back seat, they'd be able to have lunch, text, be on TikTok, etc., show up refreshed to the next lawn, and then they just will hop out and use the lawnmower instead of the robot mower. So really, this is— are we talking self-driving or are we talking about robots? Which one's gonna dominate first? Take it away, my friend.

Uh, which is gonna dominate? Well, I like the vision of the other one better, I'll put it that way. That's the one I would want to dominate.

The robot one dropping on this one?

Oh yeah, like if I— if drones could fly in and drop up 3 robots off and let them mow and then pick them all back up and move them, that'd be epic.

We're not far away.

I like that one.

We're not far away. I feel like—

I like that one.

When we're going public, I just need to show this image and immediately we are going to have our $2.2 trillion IPO. There it is.

There you go. You could be— and I like this one because this one comes in with video cameras able to immediately examine the whole property, find all the things they're about to complain about, upsell them everything they need. Like, it's— this is the dream right here.

Honestly, we just partner up with Amazon. While they're delivering your books and your prescriptions, they can also have the lawn mode.

Mow your lawn.

It's simple.

Unfortunately, they're gonna have to wait for 4 hours. Actually, you're gonna have to wait for about a day for that stupid Husqvarna mower to finish its job.

Oh no, no, it can go, it can go do other deliveries, and then when you were ready to return your Amazon packages, I figured that's what it would do. You'll move it. Perfect sense. Okay, fantastic.

So those are good. There's a lot— I love the, uh, branding. I love that. They look good.

You know, we had to spice it up. Okay, so what have you been working on this week, JP? I know you're out of town. Uh, you know, the commitment to the pod is appreciated. You got the shirt, we got the microphone.

Sure, brought all my gear.

Let's go.

Yeah, yeah. No, I'm in, I'm in Wyoming, so, uh, this week I'm not doing a whole lot of stuff. I'm just going to be keeping people moving. So I've been hiking, basically we're hiking every day. And so when I'm done here, if that's what I'll do the rest of the day and, and, uh, I'll check in with the team on if to keep them moving, but that's, this will be a low work week. I'll put it that way.

Let's go. Cool. Um, what about you this week? Technically, I think the day before this video goes out, I will have said publicly that I'm going to be going and starting the corporate location. This is the first corporate location for Augusta. It's not far from where you are at. Like I think what, 30, 40 minutes?

Yeah.

Near Dallas. And so I'll be going there this fall. We're gonna live there for 6 months and then launch it in next spring. And we're testing several things that we've wanted to test. And there's not really anyone else besides me that's gonna test it for Augusta. So I did the same thing 3 years ago for getting from like the first 30 days of a location. And we tested, uh, door hangers, the AI phone calls, and a couple other things. And so now we're testing like another group of things, but this is the first corporate location. The other locations in the past, I've owned them. This will be the first corporately owned location and we'll scale, uh, from there probably.

Oh yeah. So do you still own locations?

I do. Yep. But they're like, and they're, but they're not considered corporate owned, correct? Yeah.

Oh, okay. Yeah. Okay.

So.

So in other words, instead of the money going to the corporation, the money goes to you. Is that all you're saying?

And then for the existing locations? Yeah, for the ones that are starting out now though, it'll be the corporate.

So are you gonna— would you build more corporate locations over time? I know a lot of times people have them or they'll build them and sell them. Like, what are you thinking about?

Like, we have increased the initial fee for new people coming into Augusta, mostly just to increase the barrier —on the financial threshold for people getting in, that slows the amount of people coming in. And so it's either A, do I invest in infrastructure for the owners and the franchisees, or do I invest into the corporate expansion side? And I think I'll focus more on both of those things in terms of we're not running ads for people to join Augusta. People, if they want to join, they can, and then we'll just make the system better. So that's kind of really been the focus. To invest the money back in.

How many franchisees will your business support? In the long run or right now? Well, I don't know what long run means. You might be thinking of adding additional— Yeah, right. I don't know what— what's— can you describe what right now versus long run means?

Yeah, right now there's about 140, 150 owners with 215 to 220 locations. And my hope is that we have 1,000 locations and about 300 to 400 owners. So really focusing on allowing them to be able to scale, have multiple locations, especially in those smaller markets, have a GM, they go over the next market and start another one. And so that's really the focus. So I would say that's what I was asking. Yeah, 300 to 400 would be kind of my top in terms of the number of owners I'd want to service instead of doing like 1,000 owners in 1,000 locations.

Yeah. Is that all US-based?

US, Canada, and Australia. Oh, okay.

Yeah. Do you have some in Australia already?

Yep, we have a few over there. Yeah. And then this is their offseason. So we're getting a few more to join here.

Coming up. Have you ever been over there?

Yeah, a few times. I actually went to Jim's Mowing.

Okay. 2 years ago. I knew— I think I— you did a video on that, didn't you? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. So cool. Over there a couple times. But let's jump into today's podcast. Okay. So this one is a build off of a hot take and a question that came in. Because we had talked a little bit about, uh, you know, you'd put your Professor Galloway hat on for a moment and made a comment.

Little less liberal, but yes.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. But I'll read the question. I kind of shortened it a little bit because it was a pretty long one, but it said, Jonathan, you've said you expect the mental health crisis to get worse. A lot of young men today seem lost, isolated, delaying marriage, struggling financially, or lacking purpose. Why do you think this is happening? And if a 25 or 30-year-old man asked you how to turn his life around, What would you tell him to do, avoid, and change immediately? Now there's like 5 questions in there. So I'll let you unpack it however you like. I think this has a lot to do with the mental health side, as well as young men, and you made a specific comment around young men. And so maybe unpack that. And then what would your advice be to someone that might be feeling that way?

Yeah. Oh, I'm clearly no expert on this topic. That, and giving it just a little bit of thought, you know, the one thing I would kind of start it out with is I can't possibly speak to, like, people are wired differently. And I, I know of some people that are just like, their chemical situation appears to be a little bit different. I can't possibly speak to that. I'm not even talking to that person here. I'm more talking to the person where I feel like there are things in life that you could possibly do to impact how you're feeling, the situation. This is a pretty complicated topic, and I don't— I haven't really listened to enough other people talk on this topic. Well, I've listened to several people talk about it. I don't know what the prevailing wisdom is on this, so I'm just kind of giving you what I think, my opinion. And so I don't want to minimize it for those that, you know, it's way more complicated than everything I'm about to say. So one of the reasons why I'll do, I'm going to kind of run through some of the things that come to mind on why I'm negative. I think one of the biggest things, reasons I am negative in terms, well, let me put it this way. I'll kind of give a little bit of the end. I'm, I'm pretty, I'm optimistic that there's hope and potential for improvement. And there's a conversation happening. Like this seems to be something that people are aware of. It's not like there's an awareness around this. So I always think that's positive in terms of we could make change, but I would say I'm generally negative. This isn't going to get better, which is not normally where I stand on most. I tend to be fairly optimistic, but on this I'm kind of negative. And the reasons why I'm negative, I'll kind of start at the top. I don't feel like I'll just use a very elementary one. Like when it comes to diet, I think a lot of this stuff Again, a real risk of oversimplifying here, but I think a lot of stuff for a lot of people, if gets cleaned up, if they just eat differently and work out, it's just, you, it's proven that's true in so many facets of life and how people feel and their energy level and their motivation. So I think it's one of the contributing factors to a lot of people, you, that are really don't have any motivation or mentally beat down or beating themselves up. It's like, it's this vicious cycle of being trapped. In this place where you just don't feel good. And so if your psychology, your physiology is not in a good place, then your psychology's in a really bad place. And it's a vicious cycle that's brutally difficult to get out of, like, oh, like very, very difficult to get out. So I think that right there is a top-level thing. It's both the problem that I'm not optimistic about. And it's also one of the solutions that if I was talking to somebody, this is the top, and I have had these conversations. With multiple younger people that have come to me for advice, this is always like the starting place in my mind. Because then you get to a baseline and you figure out what's really going on, but you got to clean that up. The other thing that I think— I just— my theory is there's tons of contributing factors here. So how do you put your finger on the one? And just watching in my world, so I have two boys. Riley will play video games, but Riley never really, he'd play them, but he never really let himself play them a lot. He never really let himself be on social media that much. He was— and whereas my other son Gage was very much in his— on video games. And when we were— and I'm getting to a point here around video games— when we were— if I could do it again as a parent, I would have been hardcore. But when he was, call it 12, we moved— or younger— we moved to a different— and he moved away from all his friends. And I noticed on the Xbox, they'd all put on their headsets and they'd— he'd walk around the house talking to his buddies. Like, it's how they'd be on the video game playing with their buddies. And that was really cool. It's how he kept up with all his old friends. And so we let a lot more video game play happen. And if I could go back and do it again, I would do it very differently. And I just— and I see this with so many kids his age. And the video games were so different. I feel like I'm gonna turn this into a long answer, but I think it's a very interesting— hopefully it's interesting, you know, one. Um, I think it's a different time when the Xbox and all these PlayStations turned it into this audio thing where it was like you could now talk to all your friends like you were on the phone. It, it just real— and it, it really changed how video games worked. And that was around the time when my kids were young. And you think it's a positive thing?

You think that's a positive thing because there's the social connection or not?

I thought it was at the time, okay? And I still think it's a positive. Oh yeah, yeah, no, I think it's a positive thing. I'm not negative on that at all. I think what— I'm not being real clear— what it did with us in our house is I think we ended up letting him play video games a lot more because of it. Also, back then he played like, um, Minecraft and stuff, and some of the games he was doing is building things. And I— but I look back at what, what happened. I think as a parent, what we got wrong is we let them play way more than we should have. We should have put a lot more time blocks on it than we did. And so this, no, to the whole point, it's like this whole dopamine world that we now live in. Like you get, whether you're on social media or you're playing video games, it's that immediate dopamine hit. And I think what the, the big negative here is, I'm not necessarily negative on video games, but this problem with these constant dopamine hits is that as soon as we now have to encounter anything hard where we have to work on something hard, we don't get that immediate hit. Our brain just wants to immediately switch back to the easy stuff, playing the video games, getting on Facebook. I put this as one of the single biggest— my personal theory is one of the single biggest problems. We've all wired ourselves to constantly be getting this dopamine hit. I think a lot of people are saying this one. This is not my own idea or anything like that. So as a parent, if I could rewind time, this is one of the single— this is the single biggest change I'd make as a parent.

Because if I see it happening everywhere, if I had built a whole world in Minecraft in one week, Why is my business not operating at the same level after 5 years?

You know? Yeah. Yeah. It's like, yeah, it's just, there's so many things. It's like, and so there's just so many things that give you those constant hits. I really think this is one of our biggest societal problems. We've removed all the friction from life in so many ways now, uh, because, well, it's just a different time than like when my parents were growing up or even your parents were growing up. It's like, there's just less friction. And so I don't think that a lot of kids are having to live in a— there's different socioeconomic worlds. People live in different places, but a lot of kids don't have to live with much discomfort anymore. They don't have to do many hard things anymore. And so I just, I think that's one of our biggest problems. I've got maybe two others. Another one I think of is— Quickly, Jonathan, on that topic.

So from a parent's perspective, how do you, Okay. And you can use your own personal experience or be more prescriptive. How do you bake in elements of doing hard things without becoming the overbearing parent that takes a young person to actually rebel against you because you're forcing them into something that's not easy?

I, I think the, so we'll use the cell phone as an example. I'll bet most parents have been through this. You got a young kid, you wanna delay. How old your kids are when they get the device, every single one of their kids has the device. You're the only parent that's holding out. A lot of people face this. And so that is— so you're battling— you kind of touched on something where I, I don't know the exact answer, but you're battling this whole, how do you kind of— how do you be strict and but at the same time not push them away and run them off? And I don't— and every kid is made completely different. You have— you can't be the same parent to each of your kids. So that is a very fine line, I think, as a parent where you're kind of feeling your way through it. And so I don't know how you answer that question at a prescriptive level for everybody. I think as a parent, you've got to kind of navigate this. If I could do it again, I would have just put more hard limits on it and more— I like the concept of earning the time, like whether it works or not, but I like the idea that you get these things done, you do these things, you get this amount of time. Again, they're— you're gonna— if you're a parent, I don't care what kind of family you're running, how good it might be, they are gonna fight you. There is no getting around it because all their friends are on there playing, and that's their social world. Like, when I was— where I grew up, I grew up in the country, you know, you'd go outside and play with all your friends, you know. But now your friends aren't outside. Like, this is how you hang out with your friends if they're all in the games. And you're not on the games and you're not hanging out with your friends. That's a really challenging thing for a parent like that, because that becomes a big part of social, because that's where everybody's at. They're either doing that or they're in sports.

And would, and would there have been resentment for someone like Gage if you say, hey, you're not allowed to spend time with your, your previous friends by being on these games, for example?

Well, and that's the perfect example of my child. So Gage, for example, does not care about money. He doesn't care about stuff. He, like, he doesn't care about any of that stuff. He doesn't care about like the name brand things. He only cares about friends. He only cares about the social element and his phone is his social connection and his games were his social connection. That's why it's so complicated. Like, and so, you know, I don't, I don't have the answer. I just see what the challenge is here. Uh, but I do think as a parent, from having been through this, if I could do it again— I can only speak for myself— I would make a much stronger attempt to massively limit the time, uh, because I think the negatives outweigh even, even more the social media, if I could, than the, than the games. The one other thought I had on this one is I can't help but wonder, and this may be again different economic classes of people, but I can't help but wonder how many kids could never articulate this, but they've essentially watched their parents despise their jobs. Yeah. They've, they've watched their parents basically not be happy, uh, arguing about money, trying to get all the stuff, get the new cars, get the bigger house, do all the things. And they, or the kids observe their parents. On social media or at the party talking a big game, but at home they're not loving life. And the kid's like, why would I want this? Why would I want to play this game? They could never articulate that thing, but it's another reason why they, uh, they sort of like, they're in no hurry to go play the normal game of life where you're gonna go to college because college didn't actually even yield for their parents jobs they love. Uh, get married because I think, wow, great. 50% of people are still married, but how many of those marriages are actually any good? Not 50%, not even close. I think most marriages are actually like a shell. Okay. So they see what's, what's happening in their marriage. Like, well, do I really need that? Maybe they can't articulate it. Like there's all these things in society and in their families and in their homes that they've observed. Again, they're not making a decision to opt out. They haven't thought through it. They're just at a subconscious level saying, "I don't care about any of that. I'm having more fun talking to my friends, playing my games, doing the thing." So is that also part of the explanation? I don't know how great of an answer that is, but those are some of the things I think about. I've thought about this stuff as a parent because I see— we have a lot of friends whose kids are doing really great. But I see a lot of, a lot of their sons kind of being slow to move in life. And it hasn't necessarily been easy and they're in great families, successful families. Uh, and then the other thing is I've noticed, and I've heard this said on social media, I feel like the girls are doing better. Like the girls are more— when you get into the work world and you get into the college, the work world, that traditional path, the girls seem to be doing better than a lot of the guys. The guys seem to be moving slower. And I don't know why that is because the girls had the same access to social media. The only thing that I— like, only difference I can think of is they played less video games. So it's, it's a tough one. I have no idea.

I have a couple, uh, images I want to show just for, for data's sake. The first one, okay, maybe Jason, we can pull up the average age, uh, getting married. So this is over the course of the past approximately 120, 130 years. So very interesting that as in like the '60s and '70s, for example, the average man was getting married around 23 years old. Now that's up to 30 years old and, uh, approximately the similar woman, 2 years younger. Uh, next slide, uh, shows another graph I wanted to show also a little bit of the socioeconomic part, and that is, does this also have an impact? And that is the cost of living increasing so much to the point where it's almost feeling like I got to opt out of the system or like it's not working for me because now this is— this graph shows house prices compared to the median household income. So back in '85, it was like it's always ranged around 3 to 3.5x. Now it's like 5x. So significantly more expensive in comparison to the median house, median income. And like, is this even attainable? Like if I may, if I'm coming out of college making $60,000 or $55,000 a year, Am I ever going to afford a $700,000 or $800,000 house? And so the next slide— sorry, I got 2 more, just some data here. And this is the marriage rate. So 78% was back in 1949, almost 79%, and then in 2022 it's come down to 46%, which is actually a pretty large drop. Like, if you go from 8— like almost 80% to 50% to under 50%, we're talking about a, what, 40, almost 40% drop and pretty substantial. And to, to your, to your point, is this, are these things going to continue? The last slide I have is also around more of the economic side, I believe. Um, and that is, um, percentage of women married before age 30. Actually, this is for, for women, so I kind of flipped it over the women's side, but this is the percent married at the age of 30 by decade. And in the 1950s, it was 93%. Fast forward to this decade, it's 28%. And so pretty staggering numbers. But I wanted to kind of just like set some of the data around what Jonathan's saying. And two questions I have, Jonathan. Is this a problem that needs to be solved, or is this just kind of like we're evolving into this new era? And is it healthy to specifically the young men, because that's 95% of who listens to this, And if, if someone is in that case, in that scenario where they're like, okay, I'm not married, I feel like I am still spinning my wheels. I'm 25, 28, 30 years old. What should be my next steps to kind of break out of that? Because I see it. I do see it as a problem for myself.

What do you mean for yourself? In what way?

If someone's watching this and they're 27, 28, they feel like they are spinning their wheels. They feel like they're still attached to a lot, a lot of the dopamine things of whether it be dating apps or gaming. These elements of society and they realize that there's a different path and they want to get back on the more traditional path, what would be some of the first things you'd be saying to them to think about? I know you, you mentioned diet. Oh, okay. Exercise. Yeah. Yeah. But what would be some of the things to, as the question that came into us, uh, said, uh, how would you turn the life, their life around to use their, their words?

Yeah. Before we go there, kind of going back to those slides, I don't actually know. This is where I feel like you could talk this topic in circles. I think it's really complicated. I don't think I would make a strong argument that the idea that people used to get married in their early 20s was better. I mean, I'll go back to, great, you're married. Or the other argument I'll use is, great, you never got a divorce. Like, there's a million people who like don't believe in divorce. They don't get divorced. I'm not arguing against that, but their kids aren't stupid. They're seeing that this is a miserable situation and nobody's happy. And maybe I don't want any part of this. Like, why would I want it? And there could be, you could make an argument that getting married really young for a lot of people does not lead to a great outcome. Like, so great, you got married early. Great. You stayed married. Who cares? It was, it wasn't a life well lived. It wasn't a great example for your kids. So this is where I don't necessarily think that the data saying that getting married younger or things have changed and people are getting married older is. I'm not convinced that's actually a problem. I don't know how to think about that. I'm not, I'm not convinced it's a bad thing. Tiffany and I got married at 21 and our joke was when Riley turned 21, we both looked at him like, and he's very well put together. Like, could you imagine Riley getting married right now? And he, it wasn't because he was immature or anything like this. Like he's 21. Like, I, you know, I think there's this argument for, so I'm not bothered by people getting older. It's more, but I mean, and also I look at the world that Like, how the heck do you find somebody these days? Like, it's like, it's so— it, it's back then. I think a lot of people probably thought, go way back in time, like, that they only had so many options. And I'll bet there was a little bit more settling. We'll put it that way. That sounds a little bad. A little more settling. Yeah.

And they didn't have any other options. They only had this. Yeah, yeah.

It's like, this is what you do. Like, you know, the people you went to school with. You've picked, you find somebody, cuz this is what I wanna do. Now we have too many options. So it's just the opposite problem. We have too many options, too many apps. You, there's too much like idealism of, you know, you're looking at social media and the person needs to be this and they need to have everything needs to be perfect and you're never gonna find that perfect person. And so it's switched to the different, a different kind of a problem. I, I just feel like we've swung to a different extreme and eventually it'll probably settle somewhere in the middle. Um, so I, my point there was I don't look at the marriage data and say, hey, this is, this is really bad that people are waiting. I do think that story, I thought that was a good slide you put up about the data around the world feels unaffordable. This is a big conversation, you know, politically, and it's a conversation that's happening now. You're like, kids are, how do they get into their homes? How do they afford college? It feels too hard. I think that was a, that was a great slide to put up. I think that's got to be very, very real.

And just like, get out of the system because like, there's no way I'm going to be able to afford a $5,000 a month mortgage to at least have parity with the house I grew up in. I'm never going to be able to afford the car payment. I look, trying to look, I need a six-figure job. There's no way I can do that. So I'm just going to opt for something that is potentially something I can feel like I have some domain authority in, like a video game or something that, you know, might give that dopamine sooner than a career that might take me 10 or 15 years to develop. Yeah.

I grew up hearing the narrative, this is what my life is supposed to be. Now I'm here. How am I ever gonna get that life? Mm-hmm. And you're kind of beat down. Yeah. And that, that could explain a lot. Now, if I was just talking to an individual and we're like, hey, how do we work? How do we get you to where you want to go in life? And we're just focused on a person. That's where I get into this conversation of let's get you to the, a mental place where you are as sharp and optimistic. I just believe optimism is so important. This idea that you believe tomorrow has a chance of being better for you. And if you're just tired and you don't feel good, how could you possibly, like, we've all had that experience. You've been, we've all been through this as a builder. There's those days where you're just. Done. Why am I doing this? There's mornings you wake up, you don't want to do any of this. If you perpetually live in that state, how could you possibly win? And so back to what I said at the very beginning, that is the baseline to me. If I'm working with an individual, we've got to get you to a place where your feet, your, your body is feeling as good as it can, because then your mind will be operating at the best place possible. I would tell you, uh, Delete all your social media accounts. Doesn't mean you can't come back to them someday. Delete them all. Um, I would tell you to install Freedom on your computer, which blocks all your websites that you don't want to be looking at, and create a new habit. I, I've used that myself. I mean, I keep everything blocked all the time because I just noticed that I will accidentally end up looking at the news when I'm supposed to be working on something really hard. So it doesn't matter where you're at. Even if you're in a really good place and really successful, it's a battle that everybody has. I would tell you to like literally put your video games away in the closet for a period of time and just create, cuz it's all about creating new routines and habits. I, that's the hard, one of the really hard things for a lot of us. I don't care what level of success you're at. It's, it will, you'll, it will always be the thing you battle. We all battle it. I battle it. You're constantly fighting. Bad routines. And so you've, you've got to get temptations out of your life. It's like, if you don't want to eat junk, then don't have junk in your fridge. If you know, if you don't want to go out drinking all the time, then don't hang out with friends that go out drinking every night and are constantly texting you to go do it. Like you've got to change your environment. So those are the places where I would start. And then I, the other one is like, what's the thing you could do? And this is pretty common advice, but what's the thing you could do that makes you kind of nervous. You're afraid to go out and start a business. You're afraid to go get this job. You're afraid to— there's some, there's something that kind of goes back to what I was saying earlier, where I feel like as parents, we've been at risk of making things too easy for our kids. And over time you learn confidence and resilience and enduring pain. You learn that by doing stuff you don't want to do. And doing it over and over, like in small doses, a little more and a little more. And eventually you develop these skills. It's kind of, we've talked about this before. It's this idea that in business, a lot of growing a big business is around this idea that over time you get kicked in the face enough times with a problem that you don't know how you're gonna solve it, but you keep solving the problems. And when you look back, you're like, we always engineer a solution to a problem. We always solve the problems. That builds confidence. So that you'll spend more money on marketing when it's scary, you'll hire the next person when it's scary, you'll go do the things that you don't want to do, even though they're scary, because the— if you look back at the story of your business and of your life, I've been through that a million times and it's worked out. But if you don't ever, if you don't ever get that experience, then you never build the confidence. And so if I was advising somebody, I would say, what are these micro little things we can go do that you're nervous about doing and just take that little baby step and let's start doing them. And then you grow that resilience muscle or you get comfortable with discomfort and you grow confidence. And that is, I just really believe that where most guys are made to, you know, do hard things, uh, to, you know, get out there and try things. And so you've gotta put, if you, I, If you're not doing that, then I just think there's a gap in most people's lives. And so you've got to kind of force yourself into that environment. And then you've got to surround yourself with people doing that kind of stuff. Like back to the common knowledge, you've got— who are you hanging out with? Those are some of the basic things that are just really basic, but I think they work. Yeah.

One of the things you said that I agree with a lot is the optionality creating discontentment. You didn't say those exact words. But I think, I think of like when you go to Denny's, for example, you have like 200 different options to choose from. It's very visual. You have a lot of options. A lot of times you just like get overwhelmed with like, what am I going to order? And regardless of what you order, you always kind of think about the other 199 options you could have had. And it, it, I feel like in a way, whether it be relationships and dating apps, whether it be even business, like a lot of times we talk about how easy it is to get into business, but it's also, you know, contributes in a way I feel to, well, I, I should go start this other business and this other business. I'll have, I talked to someone yesterday, had 5 businesses, dropshipping, automotive, golf carts, uh, a couple other things he's working on. And in a way it's because it's so easy to start. Like it's like, I got Shopify, I can have a business up in 1 hour. Yeah. I can, I can start the social media thing and have this other thing going up. And so I think, feel in a way, the one thing I was thinking as like if I was talking to someone, I, I would almost say remove options. Like give yourself no option but to go to the gym. Give yourself no option but to go to this job every single day and make more money. Give yourself no option by gaining skills instead of just thinking about the short-term money because the skill lasts with you forever. The, the amount that you're getting paid, especially in your 20s, is so low no matter what, cuz you don't have any skills. But if you can gain skills, even if you don't make a lot of money, that's what compounds in the long run. And this is where like internships, getting around, the right people is so valuable because that skill sticks with you forever. But a lot of times we're optimizing for the extra couple dollars per hour or the extra little incremental step instead of thinking like, I have 40-year career. If I can gain skills in this first 10 years, those things will stick with me forever.

Yeah, well, that's really good. And that was the premise of my Five for 50 name. The one of the motivating factors for the name was that so many entrepreneurs, especially young entrepreneurs, are looking around beating themselves up thinking that they're failing because they haven't achieved some amount of success that they're seeing on YouTube or Facebook. And so much of that isn't even real. And, and they're thinking they're behind or they're losing. And then how many people just sort of give up or think I'm not good enough and it's not even slightly true. And that is, I think that's a huge problem right now. People are, they're seeing themselves in a negative light when they shouldn't be. It's really hard. It takes years. You got to go all in. You can add to your point. That's what made me think to say this. There's a big investment in those early years. Call it your 20s, or for some people that started a little later, cool, your 30s, who cares? Cause you're going to have a, you're going to live for decades and decades after that. I'll give you this example. I, uh, I know somebody who's just like really beat down in their career and wishes they had gone another direction. And they're in their early 40s and they feel like it's too late to start over. It's like, you've only been in the work world for 20 years. You've got 20 or 30 years more to go. Do you, would you, are you really just going to mail it in at 40 and say, well, too late. So I guess, you know, the rest of my life, I'm going to be dissatisfied as well. I think there's this also, this to your point, like the 20s or early 30s, great time to be investing. There's so much life in front of you. That is really, really important not to forget. Like at any point, it's probably worth reinvesting, reinventing yourself and investing. If, if we will, your future self 10 years from now possibly say, oh gosh, I wish you hadn't possibly invested to make our life better. Now your future self is never gonna be disappointed that you reinvented yourself, learned new skills, put your head down, fix things now. I like that frame.

Speaking of like wanting to quit, wanting to just getting discouraged, speaking about this individual at 40 years old, but any age really, you recently made a video, the title caught me, it was more of a Q&A style video. And one of the topics was like, is this, is it worth it? Like all the stress, all the mental strain, and pressure, is it worth it? And so I haven't actually finished the video, but the title got me thinking. And so I made a video yesterday. It'll come out probably a couple months, but I was trying to isolate what are the, some of the reasons why people get to that stage of wanting to quit in business, or like stressed out, burned out, etc. And so I kind of bucket into 3, um, I'm sorry, 4 categories, 3 of which are skill-based, one of which is like the Wild West that I can't label. So like the first one is I run into a sales, sale, sales skill gap. Like I just can't get more leads. I get so frustrated because year after year after year, I just can't grow the business. It's slop. So S-L is leadership. It's like I can't get anyone else to run the business or do a project without me being involved. I constantly feel like I'm micromanaging. If I turn my back, stuff messes up and like I fail as a leader. Uh, again, the positive thing is that these are skills that can be learned. The last one was operations and it was like, I cannot get my technicians to just do a high quality job. Therefore I'm gonna go back to being solo or I'm gonna retreat the business or keep it small. And this, again, operations is a skill. It's like, what training methods do I have? What compensation models do I have? Uh, what kind of SOPs for one-on-one meetings do I have? Like, these are skills. The last one of the, of the four, the, the framework I kind of created was personal. And that was the one that's the hardest. 'Cause like chemicals in your brain, it is your weight, it is your personal relationship, is the mental health not only of yours, but then the people around you. Like who, who knows what decisions they're making now? It affects you. You show up to work and you didn't sleep all night 'cause you're managing something with, with their personal issue. And all of these things eventually lead to the stress of building a business is stressful in and of itself. But when you compound it with either A, beating yourself up against a wall and feeling like you do not have the skill to get the business to the next level and eventually just giving up or stressed out, um, wanting to throw it down, burnout, or the personal aspects, which we've touched on around health, et cetera, just feeling completely crippling. And when you have personal stress and business stress and you don't want to give up the personal side, i.e., a relationship, your family, the people you're meant to lead. Uh, even from a patriarchal perspective, a lot of times the business is the one that gets cut. It's like, well, yeah, I've got to cut it. And not to say that's the wrong or right thing, but I've just tried to bucket those 4 different categories of what is these— are these stresses, and then what can you actually— action steps can you take to gain the skill or prevent or create defenses in your personal life to avoid the cataclysmic failure of quitting. Yeah.

Well, I mean, my reaction to that is those are all great points. Uh, one of the things that I thought of when you were saying that is I think a lot of the people look at their situation. You used a skill example. So there's something not working. They can't find the right people. And instead of looking at what I would encourage people to do is say, okay, can you look around and find examples of people where this is working? Can you find examples of businesses that are finding people and are hiring and are getting bigger? Can you find examples in your market of people doing this? If you can find any examples whatsoever, that tells you it's a skills gap. It tells you it's a fixable problem. And so I would— so many people, I think, unfortunately phrase in their mind, this is a negative. I can't do this thing. I can't find these people. I can't make this thing work, or what, I can't find any good clients. There are no good clients. There are no good employees. And I would encourage people to reframe this and look around. And because I think this is where it starts. If you can look around and find examples of it working, that should give you hope. And it should tell you that this is in fact possible. So now I just need to go on the journey to figure out the how and who can help me figure this out. Because A ton of business. I mean, there's a lot of business owners out there and most business owners are just normal people of normal intelligence. Most business owners are not necessarily like crazy. They're not Elon Musk. We're just, most of us are just pretty normal people that just put our heads down and figured it out and got really good at a certain thing in life. And for most people beating themselves up, they're just as capable as everybody else. And so I would really encourage you to look for people people that are doing it to give yourself proof it's possible. The personal side's a little different. That's a tough one because that gets into some pretty brutal decisions around what you cut out of your life. And people have differing opinions on this. Like, I— if I have a toxic family member, I'm of the opinion I'll cut them out. But not everybody would agree with that because it's family. But I do think that, you know, and so I'm not giving advice on that one, but I do think that You have to— or the way I would choose to live my life is if, you know, I've got to opt— if somebody's toxic and you've made all the effort you can to try to improve that relationship and fix that thing, there comes a point where it's just abuse and you shouldn't live in an abusive environment. And that literally does create a lot of problems for business owners. Sometimes they're the problem. I mean, let's be frank, sometimes they're the ones creating the issue in their personal life. But, um, on that one, I think you have to sort of go through a checklist of, have I done everything I can to fix this situation? Have I, you know, I like that example of, you know, when you're unhappy with another person, instead of finding all the faults with that person, have you fixed all the stuff with yourself first? I like that kind of thinking. It's really hard to do. So I would be saying like, if, if I've got this person in my life, that's just constant conflict and problems? Have I done everything in myself first to try to fix this? And if I have, there comes a point for some people, you have to cut this stuff out of your life. That gets into, again, a more complicated conversation. But I have seen enough examples where I do think some people are living in personal situations that will make it impossible for them to ever be successful in business because they're such a mess.

Where do you stand on that kind of stuff? Yeah, it's personal side is just so hard because you have to ask. It's so personalized, right? It is. So if you say, hey, cut people that are toxic out of your life, yes, it does. Makes great for Instagram because you get both sides of the extremes then coming into the comments. But it's not that way. Like every situation is so individual. Like I'm thinking of two very different cases right now inside Augusta where one very difficult friction in a relationship because of depression and needing to get medication, etc., and working through a problem together. Uh, but still very difficult nonetheless. And then another situation where all I can do is but tell this person they need to cut this person outta their life and run. Yeah. And how do you create a framework for that? How do you say, well, if, cuz it's very similar, but yet there's so many different little scenarios that go into it. And I always like, the thing I always, I think I might have mentioned this before, is I always like to keep myself humble by saying like, my, my brain is just a bag of chemicals and whether it be some bad sleep, too much caffeine, a little bit of, uh, you know, jet lag could put me off and make a bad decision. Yeah, it's when someone starts to make that repeated over and over and over again, whether it be an employee, I've got to cut them. Like, you're— they're part of the team. The hard part is when that person— when you've married that person, when that person is your spouse, when that person is your significant other or a child. Like, where's this line of commitment versus doing what's right for the whole organism. Like eventually if there's a cancer, I gotta sever the whole arm off and that's not fun and exciting, but I'm trying to save the rest of the body. And that's usually a pretty easy analogy when it comes to business cuz like get rid of the employee, they're a cancer of the organization. But what happens when that person lives in your house? Not the same.

It's hard. Yeah. Very hard. And this is the challenge with having conversations like this. Yeah. I've all— this has always been my problem with answering questions even from the stage. Is I, I, I feel a lot of responsibility around giving accurate advice. And when you're talking at this level, prescriptive, general, um, and you're getting into these kinds of topics, oh, it's, I almost don't even like having the conversation. I wouldn't have the conversation one-on-one because to what you just said, the, every situation is so different and it's so complicated and it's so hard., um, that, uh, you really wanna be able to spend some time talking to that person and trying to help them work through that thing versus hoping they find their solution watching a YouTube video.

And I think the reason I put this, this question as the first one though is because I do believe that talking about it gives some sort of hope to someone that might be working through it. And also for the person that is struggling with it, realize they're not alone. Cuz this, most people have gone through some sort of scenario where they, or even have to make these hard decisions, whether it be in their personal life, whether it be cutting people out of their life, getting rid of certain aspects like video games or whatever it might be that is not serving them well or their future self. And not talking about it is, in my opinion, almost as damaging as just, "Hey, I'm not gonna go there because we can't give anyone a perfect answer." But it is just, it impacts so many people's lives. And so I appreciate you, uh, fancying it on the first question.

Yeah. And then last, I'd say this stuff is— building businesses is so hard, and living a great life is so hard, and having a great marriage is so hard, and raising good kids, it's all so hard. And so much of the what we see now in the world we live in, just, it's all the fake, it's not real. And Pete, back to what I've said, people feel guilty. And people also sell easy. Every— everybody trying to make money, whether selling coaching or information or buying software or whatever, everybody's selling easy because that sell— if you were to, if you sell, it's gonna be brutal. You're gonna hate your life for the next 5 years. Nobody buys that thing. And so the whole world is showing quick results. Like everybody knows this and easy. And so people then feel like something's wrong with them. But when you live in this, the building of the business and doing all these things, it's not easy. And people need to— that's why this covers— another reason why conversations like this are so good. I think people just believe that something's wrong with them in business. They have accumulated some debts trying to figure out how to be a business owner. Everybody had to figure out, and they think it's wrong. They're the ones that something's wrong with them. And I— you— when I've talked to people like this, like, I don't think you understand how many people are in a similar situation to you. They think they can't find team members. This is what everybody feels. This is how I felt. I can't find any good clients. Like all these things, everybody feels all the exact same stuff, but nobody talks about it. All they give you is the vanity metric of their gross revenue or how great things are going. It's— when I did the coaching, it was one of my biggest challenges talking to individuals who I had a great relationship with. I felt like they didn't want to let me down. And they would not tell me reality. They would sugarcoat it. Even when we're doing coaching and I'm talking to them on the phone, they would tell me a lot, but they wouldn't give me everything. And I needed everything to solve the problem because people feel like there's something wrong with them because everybody else is winning and it's not just them. And I actually think most people are not winning. It's the exact opposite. And the people that end up winning eventually come to terms with and live in reality and say something's not right. And then they go on a journey to figure out how to fix it. And until you get to a place to understand that, like, you're just like everybody else, you're having all the same problems, you're, you're going to always just think it's you and you're never going to figure it out. It's never going to get better. So I think this type of stuff is incredibly important to talk about. I'll say one more thing. I've said this many times. I came up learning marketing through this Dan Kennedy world. So I went to a bunch of Dan's events. And, um, so he had this conference called the Info Summit, which was more for like mastermind groups and marketers, or is all, all his stuff was for marketers. It'd be more like people that have mastermind groups, coaching groups, sold information online way back in the day. They'd be writing eBooks and selling it. And I went to that, those events over many, many years. And then I got to know a bunch of people in that world that were really successful. And one of the biggest observations I had is you would see people just killing it and winning for like 2 years, and then they disappear. And that was— this goes back to like 2008 timeframe, 2007. And that has always stuck with me. And I've been very aware of that. We see all the winning in the moment that they came up, but you don't see the implosion on the other side. How many people have built so many different businesses, started over multiple times, started a business, sold it, started a new one, started a business, closed it, started a new one, started a business, went to a different industry? It's, it's— you only see the short moment of time when they're winning, but you don't see what came before and you don't see what came after. And that is, that's where people get misled and they think again, it's them and it's not like everybody's going through stuff. It's been hard for everybody. Mm-hmm.

I think it's like this dichotomy of either A, they take it so much that it's just them and it's their problem and they're the problem and it comes to this depression or mental health issue. And then the flip side is they just blame everyone else. It's the economy, it's the government, and now they give power to someone else. Or it's my manufacturer or it's my vendor or whatever. And now all of a sudden they have no power to actually make change. And so there's almost this balance of Yes, you aren't a special snowflake in that you're the only one going through these problems. But you also do have the ability to be able to reframe this as out of your control to a skill set that I can adapt, I can learn, I can get around the right people, I can go observe, I can be humble enough to learn from someone else and solve these problems in the business. That's just going to take time longer than you would hope. Yeah. Yeah.

So unfortunately, it's going to take a while, but it will work out if you do the right stuff.

All right, let's move on to the next topic. Now that we've had a thorough—

spent a lot of time on that—

hour down in the Down in the dumps, let's talk about something a little more casual. So this one is another question that came in. So as always, if you guys have questions, these are many times what prompts these discussions. It's about should a contractor offer an annual prepaid discount? I have not heard this part, but they said JP said he doesn't, and Mike encourages doing this for fertilization weed control. So first off, is this a true statement? I have not heard you say this before. And if so, Uh, maybe give your reasons as to why a prepay for an annual is not something you'd do.

I hate prepays.

Give me, give me the logic. It's true.

Let's see if we can—

yeah, yeah, we gotta generate some, uh, some controversy. So yeah, yeah.

So no, I, uh, I've been very negative on prepays. So I can't remember all my, uh, well, there's some math to it. Okay, let me kind of run through a list. Let me tell you what I first like about prepays. Let's start out positive. Okay. Here's what I like about taking all my ammo.

Here you are going to play both sides of the road again, and it's going to be very balanced. I don't think it'll be balanced.

I'm more in the negative. Okay, all right, go ahead. I think, I think I'm gonna say one that you're gonna probably agree with though. Okay, so, um, I like that— this isn't the one— I like that you could lock down a person in a set, because a prepay is essentially, it's a version of a contract in my opinion. You're locking them down a little bit. Okay. So it gives you time to really earn their trust and build the relationship versus somebody that might come in, you don't get them results fast enough, they just leave. Okay. That's one positive in my mind of a prepay. Another one is allows you to recover, it allows you to bring money in to recover your cost of acquiring the client so that you can grow the business faster. And then the other one, which is, I'm sure you'll say, uh, you know, it brings in cashflow faster so you can grow the business. Like those are all positives to me and I know there are others. Okay. Now for my negative ones, the reason why I don't like it for City Turf specifically. And by the way, I wouldn't tell somebody you shouldn't or can't do a prepay. I'm just going to tell you why I don't love them. City Turf does not do contracts. We push hard on the concept of no contracts. You can leave. It's risk reversal. You can leave us at any time. That's our positioning. Prepays are like a contract. That's my belief. And the other one, the other reason why I do not like them after doing coaching and working with so many companies is yes, they are great for bringing in more cash to grow the business, but I do not see companies understanding their numbers and they get themselves into a whole ginormous mess because they think they have way more money. Same problem happens with projects and deposits. People are completely confused about how much money they actually have.. And they find themselves getting to the end of the year in a really bad spot. You can solve this problem by really understanding your business and the flow of cash in and out of your business and how much money you really have and how much of the money that's sitting in the bank is going to eventually be an expense in July, August, and September. And if you can get to that place, then that takes away one of my single biggest negatives about prepays. It's, it's kind of similar to my advice on you should probably just stay out of debt. It's because most people don't know their numbers and they can't use the debt without getting themselves in trouble. Same argument with prepays. It's not that the prepay is so bad. It's that for the majority of people that I've worked with and seen over the years, and I've just seen so many problems, it's another example of how they get themselves into a mess. Another one that I would say, and this is a minor one, if you're not forcing prepays, then a lot of the people that you might be— I don't know this for sure, but on, you've got two types of people you might be bringing in. Some people, they're a little more price sensitive because they want to get that discount. Uh, that's the only way they'll move forward. No, I just don't, I don't know if I'd bet a lot of money on that. That's just the theory I've had over time. If I'm not forcing it, I can't argue that one very strongly. The other one is a lot of the prepays, if you're not forcing it, go to the exact people that are not price sensitive whatsoever. So in other words, now you're giving a person a discount It's like me, if you give me a prepay option, I'm like, time value of money. Heck yeah. This is a better return than I'm getting in the stock market. I'll take it. So I ended up getting a lot of those people that's costing me money and it had no impact on them sticking with me. So that's the other reason I'm negative on it. Then my two single biggest ones. These are the two that make the entire decision for me. I despise anything around renewals. I despise it. And I think prepays recreate a renewal cadence. And so if I have to have a conversation with them, if I have to send an email, if I have to do anything that triggers them having to make a decision to keep going, or means my team has to be making calls and following up, and then we're in this situation where like they haven't responded to us, maybe they're just canceling. Do we move forward? Do we just drop them as a client? What do we do? And those people are just busy. They actually had no intent of canceling. Like, it just creates all that complication. I do not like that whatsoever. And then my next one is, for me personally, uh, if I'm giving a 5% discount and I know people give 10%, the time value of money is horrendous. It's not a 5% discount. And I have an old Lawn Care Millionaire video on this from a long, long time ago. I don't remember the numbers anymore. This was probably a decade ago I did this video. But if you're giving a 5% discount on, say, fertilization, weed control, so you sign up in March, let's say there's 8— we'll just say there's 6 applications. You sign up in March and I give you a 5% discount for the whole year. The first application happens 2 weeks later, and I just gave you a 5% discount on 2 weeks of your money. This, this really— to show this right, you have to— you— I actually didn't— I should have brought a slide to this to demonstrate it. But if you think about And this won't mean a lot to most people, the time value of money. It's not like I'm giving you a 5% discount today and then delivering the service in 12 months. I'm giving you a 5% discount on the first service I'm delivering in 2 weeks. Time value of money, that's way more than 5%. Then the next one in 8 weeks, time value of money, that's way more than 5%. Because I only— I gave you 5% to hold your money for 2 weeks. I gave you a 5% discount to hold it for 8 weeks. Then— and so it's very expensive money, is my argument. And so when you start to run the numbers on a 5%, even a 5% prepay, it's a better return for me as the consumer than investing my money almost anywhere else. So if somebody offers you a prepay and the service is being delivered in stages versus being delivered in one year, you should take the prepay if you don't have debt and you have money. And so for me as a business owner, I don't want to give up that money.. And I don't think that a prepay— our average client at CityTurk stays 7.2 years. I don't, I don't think a prepay is going to move the needle on our retention. It's only going to complicate our business. And so those are the reasons I don't do it.

Awesome. So here's the, the, the unhappy news. I don't do prepays at my locations.

So I thought you did. I thought, okay, you don't. Okay. I guess the way the question was set up was that you do.

Well, I, I, I will, uh, I give permission for people to do it, and there are members of my class that do it specifically for fertilization weed control. So I'm gonna play devil's advocate because I agree with everything you said, unfortunately, but I'm gonna play devil's advocate. So I, I will— don't let me forget this—

I am working on a concept that involves a prepay. I just slide that in there, but only for the purpose of an offer.

Yeah, yeah, only for an offer. Okay, okay.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, so go ahead though.

My thought is this: I agree with you on all premises. Especially if you have cash. Yes. You, you are not working capital deficient, meaning that giving them a discount is simply taking money out of your pocket. And for, for both of us, like when I'm starting this location, for example, I don't need to do prepaid because I would rather have the higher profit margin than the money today. Like there's, there's no difference in having the money today is going to make. I would say for someone in growth mode, especially getting started very small, if you're doubling and tripling the size of the business from $100,000 to $200,000 to $400,000, $800,000, cash today is worth so much more. And the alternative is going out and getting debt. And so I just look at prepay as debt. It's the same, same concept, especially when you look at a balance sheet. It's a liability. If I'm holding someone's money until I earn that cash over the course of a year. Yeah. I think for someone who has like really bad credit, they just got started their business. A prepay is a way to be able to get momentum that would otherwise come from debt and they might not have access to it and it might otherwise take them 4 years to build a business they could build in 1. And so just like that, it is a force multiplier. It can help get momentum, but there's risk. And the biggest risk why that person should not still do a prepay potentially is they don't know their numbers and they run out of money in month 10, 11, and 12 after doing all these annual pays. And so my, my big thing is if you don't know where to put the money when you get it early, If there's no use for it, there's no point having a prepay. If you're not going to go get more customers, if you're not going to use it to double the, the amount of trucks you have or the, the crew, if you need that capital to double the size of the business and the thing limiting you from getting more customers is expansion of assets, potentially using that money is useful. But again, you're putting at risk at month 10, 11, 12 running out of money. And so I see it much more as debt. I think the other thing is when it comes to what you mentioned is very key is if the average customer stays 7 years, pointless. There are some services where, for example, like pool cleaning, a couple others I've seen where the retention is significantly lower and a year might be the average size client. And so if you're doing a service, say monthly, and people are canceling after 6 to 8 services, getting them to commit to a year actually doubles your, your, the lifetime of the customer. Yeah, starts to make more sense. But again, if you're doing a good quality service, I would probably want to just fix the problems as to why they're churning instead of just like using the Band-Aid of billing to force it. I agree about the annual renewal thing. I do agree about that. In general, though, if I increase the number of billings, I'm going to typically increase my churn because they see it on their credit card statement more. Have you seen that not to be the case? Go ahead.

Uh, I don't, I don't, I haven't tested, but, but the thing that I—

it's, it's a— I see you're saying though, it's like a big decision.

Is it true though? It's like, because yeah, it's like the, the one of the best things that we ever did at City Turf is we stopped sell— this is back in the early days— we stopped talking about it's going to cost $3,800 a year because you're buying mowing, bush trimming, and fertilization, weed control. And we just started talking. It's $32 to mow your lawn. Yeah. And then we just charged your credit card for the $32. The $3,800 created a household conversation. So that little lesson does make me wonder, like, okay, like throughout the year, sure, they're not thinking about canceling, but when the next $3,800 charge comes up, do they think about it? So that's where I don't know if, if that argument holds up. I just don't know. I haven't tested it, but the $3,800 feels like a new decision. Whereas if you're just going to continue getting your $32 charge here and your $71 charge there and your periodic bush trimming charge for $400, do that each time those things happen. Does that really start a family conversation or is it the big expense that starts it? If you think about how they do it in software, Like, how do people do contracts in software? They have you sign contracts when— during your peak seasonality. Why? Because it's too hard to switch. You probably are thinking about, like, it's— maybe that wasn't clear. So let's use a Service Autopilot example. If you're Service Autopilot, I know that you are gonna be heads down, consumed, probably from, depending on what part of the country you live in, starting in March or April. Careful, careful, this is a sore topic for some people right now.

Are you—

do you do— am I—

no, Service Autopilot just raised prices. Oh really? Yeah.

Oh, okay. Well, but everybody does this. It's not just a Service Autopilot. I just own Service Autopilot, so I'm giving you my data. Yeah. Does Service Autopilot charge— do contracts on everybody?

Uh, no, but Clearant does. So the payment processor— to get out of the payment processing, you have to pay a fee now to get out.

Do most payment companies do that? Not like Stripe these days. Not like Stripe. Stripe's different. Stripe's not most payment companies.

Yeah. No, but like, yeah, they don't for the software side, but they do for the— Clearant does. Yeah.

Maybe I'm going down a road I shouldn't have. I'm not trying to pick on anybody, but I'm just trying to give an example. Like, let's say Jonathan owns Service Autopilot and Jonathan's instituting contracts. I will tell you exactly what I do from a logical standpoint. I know that you as the buyer is— you're really busy March, April, May, June, July. You're too busy to change your software. So I would want your contract renewal to happen during that time because you're gonna, you're gonna have to pre-plan way in advance to start replacing the software before your contract renews. And most people may not do that. And so when the contract renewal comes up, you're like, oh my gosh, it's $5,000 or whatever the number is. You're like, well, I'm too busy to do it now. I'll deal with it next year. That's how I would be thinking about it. And so, but in the lawn care business, like when is the, or the most of these trades, when is that moment where you have too much pain where you can't just cancel the thing. If— and so that's why I think the big bill definitely piques your attention and creates a family discussion. Again, I've not tested it, it's just my assumption knowing how I would have thought about contracts in the software business.

My only other pro, just to be devil's advocate, is less admin time for things like credit card bouncing, Oh, their, their email didn't go through. I can't get a hold of them. They're not putting a new card on file, all that sort of stuff. But again, I don't think it's necessarily worth 5 or 10%, but that would be my other devil's advocate is less billing cycles equals less admin time, less expense. But I think, I think the one thing that I, when I was thinking about this, is your average lifetime of the customer. If, if it's on average you're keeping a customer for 6 months, getting them to commit to a year is a big a big boost. Huge. But to your point, if you're keeping a customer for 7 years, what's the point of making, taking a big chunk of your margin and giving that to the customer when you know you can, because you do a good enough job to keep them for a long term. I think there are some services where the retention is not that long, and that's when maybe an annual contract can increase significantly how long people stay with you.

Like I could see door knocking, door knocking and selling. Yep. Probably not a bad idea because there's so many, so much turn, uh, wish I hadn't done that after the fact, or you felt a little pressured into it, or they, the spouse bought it and they go to the husband, the husband's, or the wife, and like, why did you buy that? You know, it's like, so the contract is a good thing there. You know, the one I thought was the most compelling argument that you made is the one where you're an individual that doesn't have good credit. And this is the only way you're going to build the business and you're going to figure out your numbers so you do this safely. That's the strongest argument of them to me, based on my experience. If you are a company that doesn't have the money but you have decent credit, I tell you, use a line of credit because it's way cheaper money before you use— but know your numbers before you do the prepay thing. But I thought that one was a pretty strong argument. That may be, for some people, the only way you're going to get the business off the ground. And I'd much rather you be in business than not be in business. Just understand the numbers and that, that I like that one.

And on that one too, I'd say the caveat or like the safety guard is like reduce, keep the amount of annual pays below what your net profit was last year in terms of percentage. So let's say your last year's percentage was 20% profit margin. Don't let more than 20% of your customers do prepay. But if you do it and you get 20% of your cash up front, you might very well be able to go get another truck, a second crew, and double the size of the business for that year. Same thing could be said about debt, but still potential option if you just do not have the ability to get any sort of credit whatsoever. Yep. Okay, well, we kind of agree, unfortunately, but I just have to be devil's advocate, so. Okay. All right. Okay, let's move on to the next question. We're talking about the middle class. Is it shrinking? If so, what does this mean for the ideal business model Should we go premium? Should we go volume or stay in the middle? I do have a couple images I want to show on this just to exemplify what's being said here. And that is, you know, it's very politically sound to say about the middle class disappearing. Um, yeah, but I feel like the data says it. Yeah, but let's go ahead and show a couple of these examples. Question 3 is— yeah, that's right there, Jason. So this is the percent of shares of U.S. households by total money income. It's in 2023 dollars, so it is adjusted.. And you can see just pretty— just by the blues, uh, the colors: high income, middle income, low income. And that the high income is making up more and more. The middle, the middle is getting— it's getting shrunk down. I didn't like this chart as much as the next one. So this is the share of total U.S. household income held by the middle class, and it basically says it's been falling every single decade since the '70s. So 62% was in 1970, it's down to 43%. And the upper income has gone from approximately, I'd say, 29 to 48% of income being held by the upper class. So when we take this information, and then we say, okay, how does this impact home services, service businesses at large, honestly, any business at large, What are your takeaways from this data?

I don't see how this data changes. I, I believe this data. It's been a— as you've just shown, it's been a story a lot that's been told for a long time now. The data's been supporting it, and I feel like COVID probably made it worse because the— I don't know what it— what you call it. Let's just say the families that are kind of $75,000 to $120,000, $150,000, I don't know, whatever. I don't know what that range should be, but They've been hit really hard because housing costs have gone way up. Everybody's been hit hard, but even that we'll call it, I don't know if that's a middle class, but I'm calling that the middle class, but they've been hit really hard too. Just like the, the people at the bottom of the ladder have been real, been hit really hard with fuel and groceries and housing costs, but so have that, that middle class. So I believe this data and I don't see what's going to change it, frankly. I think it's gonna continue. So I do think that the middle class is shrinking. And if you listen to economics or finance, you'll hear this term. Sometimes you'll hear it called a barbell, but oftentimes you'll hear it called a K-shaped economy, which means the upper, the high earners, the upper class, those with wealth, that number's just like picture a K. It's just going up. And then there's a whole bottom class that's just going down. That's just getting worse for them. And it's getting better for the people that have the money. And so there's multiple economies that we live in. And so it's easy for somebody to, that's living on the part of the K that's going up to feel like everything's going great in society and going great in the country and everything's just fine, but they're living in a completely different world than a huge part of the population. And so that's, that's what they call a K-shaped economy. And so the middle class is shrinking in that more people are moving up or more people are moving down. That's, that's the gist of it. I believe that, uh, from a strategic standpoint, I think if you can build a business on the pre— a premium offering, I think that is a very fantastic place to be. That's not the business City Turf has built or is even trying to build right now. But I think any business you can build serving the ultra affluent, um, the wealthy is just the place to be. That I've mentioned before, there's this guy I used to listen to named Bruce Williams. Uh, when I was in high school, he had his talk radio show. I remember his statements like, um, sell to the masses, live with the classes, sell to the classes, live with the masses. It's the exact opposite of where we are today. I, I, if you're going to sell to the masses, um, you have to sell an incredible amount. Like you have to build a really, really big business. So most of the people that we're talking to here that want to build a smaller business, you might think about just getting into the market, however you can get into the market to learn your business, learn how to deliver the service, learn how to sell. I'm less concerned about anybody doing everything perfect and right. I'm more concerned about you just getting started and learning, kind of going back to our earlier conversation in your 20s, just learn everything you can learn, get all the experience you can learn, build. It's kind of the same thing here. When you're early in business, it's that same thing. Just learn everything. And then once you start to learn and you start to get good at a few things and you start to be confident in the service you're delivering and you start to I'll use the example when I started out City Turf. I didn't even know how to keep weeds from growing back in a flower bed. I didn't know the names of my bushes. I didn't know the names of my trees. I didn't know any of those things. I was in no place to be selling a premium service to the highest-end client. But over time, like our company as we are today, we could be full premium. We are perfectly positioned in expertise and knowledge to be full premium, but we weren't in the early days. As a business owner, I'm most concerned about you getting into business, getting good, and then considering how you might move up the food chain. My point here is that if for those that really desire building a smaller business, to you, I would say it's absolutely imperative. You know who you're going after. It's absolutely imperative that you try to move a little more premium. And that because of what's happening in the economy, what's happening in the world that I don't believe is gonna reverse. The way City Turf approaches this is we are more middle class to upper. That's kind of where we're at. I personally think the middle class, the middle part of the market, is still a really good part of the market. And so the way I think about the business is— and Mike, you've alluded several times to my love of postcards. I, I'll use— I don't actually like postcards because they're the fastest way to blow money. But I like postcards because they let me go get my exact client.

That's why we want hot air balloons instead of SpaceX.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Go, go, go. I'm going knocking on a door, door hangers, postcards. Those let me go get the, the best client. So the way I see the world in terms of the business I want to build, if I'm going to build big, so we're talking about now building big, not building a smaller business, building smaller, I encourage you to try to go premium as your skill set. Allows it. If you're building small, I'm sorry, big, then I think you can, then the approach I'm taking is middle to upper, because I think there's going to be a strong middle class for a long time. It's just that it's getting smaller. So I'm not trying to run from that. I'm not trying to, and all premium is a harder business, in my opinion. It's a more demanding business. It's, uh, you know, there's a, people have higher expectations. Uh, my example is they call you on Thursday about the pride party they're having on Friday, and then they're mad that you can't get out there. It's just, there's different kinds of problems that come with the premium business. Now, also, I should say, if you're going premium, I'm imagining that you're charging at premium rates. If you haven't adjusted your pricing accordingly to be one of the most expensive, that, and you're keeping your business small, you've become quite expensive, you're high touch. High-service premium, that's a really interesting business. And I, but for the City Turf, that's not the business we're building. We're building middle class up. And the reason I brought up the postcard thing is because the best way for me to go, if I look at my data, I might see inside my data that 10% of my clients or 5% of my clients deliver 30% of my revenue, even in the type of business we have. So if I want to grow my business faster, then I go get more of the 5% type of clients. It's the fastest way to grow the business. That's why I like offline marketing. I go get the best client. So that's how I'm thinking about that. But I do not want to be at the budget end of this market. I don't want to be there now. I didn't want to be there a decade ago, and I absolutely do not want to be there in the future. I think that is the worst kind of business to own.

Yeah, I agree. And I think some people fall into the trap on this is they think premium is only premium pricing. But if your value does not match the price, You're gonna lose customers. And so that's where you'll get the people that say, I, I raised prices and everyone left, or everyone's so cheap. It's like, no, if the value is not high enough, I don't care how premium you want to be, you're gonna lose customers. If value is higher than price, people leave. And so I would be pushing people before they think about, oh, I wanna go premium. Okay, great. I wanna build a million dollar business. It's smaller business, be very premium, high margin, high touch, et cetera. Okay, great. We've all gotta improve your customer experience to the point where that's premium. And the reason it's so easy to say, I want to go premium and raise your prices, because that's an email away from being premium in the market. But what's a lot harder to do is change your UI of your website. You're making sure you're tech-enabled, make sure that people can easily set up services, that there's so many— all the friction in the sales process, the renewal process, whatever communication loops you have with the customer is all super streamlined. Like, is your communication actually premium compared to your competition, or do you still just answer the phone when you feel like it or the next day. And so before someone says, I want to be a premium brand because like that makes sense to me, I'm going to raise my prices, be very careful because you might have a very hard time now getting new customers. You might keep your existing customers, but you have a very hard time keeping new— getting new customers at your higher prices if your customer experience at every single facet of the customer journey is not really locked tight. I agree.

What would you say is the single worst and hardest part about owning a business?

The worst part about owning a business?

Yeah, the hardest. Well, let's say the hardest part of a business. What's the hardest part of building a business and owning and managing a business for the long term? I'm going to see if you say what I think it is. The hardest part about owning a business and building it.

Probably the team. Attracting a great team.

Exactly. Okay. Yes. That's, I, I was hoping you were gonna answer this that way. Okay.

So I was like, is he trying to go marketing project? I need to have a different answer. I'm like, I'm just gonna answer what I think is true.

That's what, yeah, that's what I thought too. I think the team and the people are the hardest thing. What do we all say? We can't find any good people. My people don't stick around. These, they don't do it. Like what? I can't get 'em. I like, there's a million complaints. That problem never resolves itself when you're selling budget because you don't have any money to hire the best people. The way you solve almost everything you hate about owning a company is by solving the people problem. And if you aren't— if you're down too far down market, you just can't afford— you can't pay the best employees the highest rates and sell work at the cheapest price. You have to sell work Upper market so that you can afford upper market people who will— so if you want to get away from everything that's horrible about a business, which is not great people and not being able to attract good people to your company, the only solution is going up market from a pricing standpoint and going up. And then everything you said, Mike Andes, supports being able to go up market. That's my single simplest argument for why you want to do this, because if you don't, you will forever have a painful business.

Yeah. And never be able to afford to go get the next customer using acquisition. You'll always be at the mercy of word of mouth. Right, right. 100%. Because it's the only thing you can afford. Which is so slow. Yeah.

And it's so slow, so you can't grow outta your problems very quick. You have the problems for a very long time.

Speaking of a very long time, the next question is about, is it better to sell or build and hold forever? So when it comes to your business now, I did a little bit of research and I'll tee this one up. This is probably a biased, uh, source because it's from the Exit Planning Institute, but they said that 76% of owners who sell regret it within 1 year. And I have my opinions on selling versus keeping it forever and who should and who should not, but given that you have had a business like Sage for that's owned for decades and then you've sold one like Service Autopilot, from your perspective, where do you land on this? But then also, what would be your more generalized opinion for the masses?

Uh, for me personally, I'm, I'm— while we sold Service Autopilot and it was an amazing experience because I learned a lot doing it, um, it's cool to get a nice big check. I mean, all that's cool. I, I would, I would hope everybody gets to have a chance to do something like that, but it didn't change my mind. My— I still feel that I'm in the camp of I want to build and hold, but whatever I'm building, I want to build it in a way that it could be sold at any moment. But I'll use City Turf as an example. I, Frank, it's like something I give almost no thought to. I could not care less about serving that business. In my perfect world, that business is still around in 40 years, and we are— we have a killer team. Their life is good. We, we, the owners have a lot of freedom. Uh, we make a lot of money. Our clients love us in the market, and we don't live in fear that something bad's going to happen to our business. If I could build that, I just want to own that. Uh, I use the example that you're a— let's say that you have a business that's making you $400,000 a year. And I know that's a lot of money, but it's making you $400,000 a year. You can live a great life. And, but to take enough money off the table, pay taxes to be able to earn $400,000 a year in return. That you can spend without running, running out of money. That is a very different, that's different. That's hard. And that's mentally hard for somebody to go from. I had a paycheck, it felt stable to I'm having to spend down my money every month, or I'm having, or man, I, I'm having to spend money to live in the stock market's down 25% right now. Like though, that is a, the psychology is so different. And I've talked to so many people that are incredibly wealthy. And living off investments, no matter how much money you have, for most people does not feel comfortable. It's just universal. Losing that steady paycheck as a business owner felt so much better than living on investments. And so the psychology here is difficult. Um, I'm comfortable with it, but I, but it's still weird because, and I do get paid because I get paid from City Turf, but Um, but in my mind, I, I'm living off investments because I've always thought of City Turf as just an investment. Um, so I think for most people, the whole sell would be way more uncomfortable than they think it would be. It would be really cool for a short period of time, and afterwards it's a whole new world. It creates a lot of discomfort. And I suspect that's where whatever the big number is that say says people, um, were disappointed, they wouldn't have done it again. The other reason I think a lot of people are disappointed is because who they sell to probably disappoints them. I think a lot of people sell with an earnout and they don't get their earnout. I think a lot of people sell with the expectation that where they kept some equity in the business, that one day they'd get a big paycheck and it just doesn't ever happen. And so most of the money they got was in the early sale. Those are all the ways you could be disappointed. And this idea that you just build this really great company, it takes really great care of you. I love that idea. So I'm firmly in the camp of I want to build something that lasts and persists for a really long time, but I want it to be built in such a way it could be sold.

Yeah, I think when I think about home services specifically, actually any business— I was talking to a coffee shop owner the other day, selling it to his general manager, and I was trying to convince him, like, I don't think this is going to solve your problem. But all that being said, I think a lot of times it's we're looking for liquidity after putting money back into the business for so long. And the, the idea of having the liquidity is so appealing, even though we know maybe from a stock, from a tax perspective, it's not efficient. From a even personal gratification perspective, we might lose out. But it's like, I just wanna have some breathing room. And I think I would encourage a lot of people if they're wanting to buy and hold, but have liquidity is like step back for a minute and realize you can create liquidity in the business. It just might mean, okay, instead of growing every single year, let's Dial it back a bit. Let's increase our prices. Let's go into profit mode. Uh, raising prices a little bit, just up by a little bit, optimizing could very well create the liquidity you're looking for in a much more tax-efficient way without having to sell the business. Or even potentially at, at a bigger size, even if you had a minority stake ownership, someone to buy in so you can create liquidity, feel like you had that event of the cash injection and have the adjustment in your personal lifestyle if needs be., but then still stay owning and operating and controlling the business. And I'd say that's the more viable approach for most people is just like build the business slightly different, change the horizon from the next 5 years to 50, and you'll slow down a little bit and create the liquidity to keep your head in the game instead of constantly thinking about sell. I'm gonna sell this thing, I'm gonna sell this thing, and then you start making bad decisions in the meantime.

Yep. Yeah, I would, I would not discourage anyone from selling. But I would often— I've, I've had a lot of conversations where people have asked me about selling. I, so I usually don't hear myself saying, oh, you shouldn't sell. What I usually hear myself saying is it's way too early. You're worried about the future economy, or you're worried about something. So that's creating fear, which is leading you to want to sell early, but you're not going to take enough money off the table to be safe. And if you're worried about, oh, something bad's going to happen in the future in the economy, I should get my money now. Who's going to buy it? Where are you going to put your money? Oh yeah. Yeah. Where are you going to put your money? You can't keep it in cash. You'll get destroyed. You will lose badly if you're in cash. And so you've got to invest it elsewhere. So that's at risk too. And so most people, I would say, here's the other thing that gets tough. If you got a big business and it's in a really popular trade and you're getting offered 10 or 15 times profits right now, my gosh, it is kind of hard to say you're willing to pay me for 15 years into the future of all the work I'm going to do right now. That to be assuming your business doesn't keep growing, that starts to get kind of crazy. Like, where you— but, but even for a lot of those people, the very person that could get 15 times, their business is exceptional. It's growing really fast. So that's 15 times this year. But next year it might be the equivalent of you got paid 8 times profits because of just the speed of growth. And so again, for most people, I usually say, hey, yeah, maybe you should sell it. But based on the speed your business is growing and how good it is, I'd keep building for at least 3 more years. Most— so it's usually people are thinking about selling, in my opinion, too early.

I like the idea of what would be— what's the multiple? And basically, it's the multiple of future cash flows. But, you know, in 5 years, what's the multiple if you continue at your current rate of growth? Yeah, exactly. After you've just shaved a third of it off in taxes, they gave you in one lump sum. Now it also changes the multiple very quickly. It's 10. Okay, now it's actually 7 based on taxes. And then based upon in 3, 4 years, based on our current rate of growth, this is actually a 2 or 3. Not— it starts to look less appealing. And as someone who has never had the sale from the outside, I have never talked to someone that sold and was like, oh, I want exactly what they felt like the day after. I've always been— I always ask them like, how do you feel right after? And did it change anything? Did it accomplish? And it's like, well, no, I had money before. Assuming you can have some liquidity from the business, like, what do you— what's going to change right after? I'm just gonna like wake up and not have a team. I'm gonna wake up, I'm not gonna have any— I would purpose— I would lose some purpose. Um, and, and that feeling, I feel, I see people make weird decisions sometimes because of that, that loss of purpose or not having a plan for after the sale. And that leads me to my last, my last question of the day, if you don't mind, about the sabbatical. Sure. Okay. Okay. So I, I kind of like hinged in there of like, what's after a sale? You, after you did a sale, went on a sabbatical. Now I want you to talk about that, and then I wanna, I wanna bring it to people that are still in business and how they could use this potentially even before they make a big sale or they exit or don't have anything to work on necessarily in the immediate. Uh, but what did you learn taking a sabbatical? Maybe define that for those that have not heard you talk about in the past of what you did after selling the business and what you learned from that process.

Yeah, that's a pretty good tie into the last question because In my example, when I sold my business, nothing changed. I did. I already had my house. I, the only two things I can come up with that I really did differently immediately is I bought a racing simulator, like for racing, and I bought a new— and Tiffany and I bought a $10,000 mattress, which I wouldn't have spent before. And I had the money. That's all I could come up with. It's like, it's like, so in my world, I don't know if it was worth it, but, uh, it actually, I don't think either one of them were actually worth it, but So, but the sabbatical, that was the difference. So that's why this was a nice little tie-in. But from a money standpoint, like the person that can get a really big exit already had money probably. And so we already, like, we already were living the life we wanted. So the big ginormous change for us, for me, was the sabbatical. And John and I, a little backup here, context on this, uh, John and I had, it was probably more me than John that was already talking about this idea of like taking a break. So this is, I had already been thinking about this idea. Before we sold the business and maybe even before we thought about selling the business. And I was wondering if we could get to a place where every few years we took 90 days and I thought that would be really cool. And so I wanted to be able to go take these long vacations and not work at all. And I felt like the business was completely to a place where that would have been no problem. And so I had already started this conversation and then after we sold the business,, and I stuck around till like April or May of '21. But frankly, my job was quite easy because everything had been pretty much handed off. I stuck around, uh, we were completely remote. I mean, it felt like by the time we got to in 2021, I felt like I was barely working even though I was still there a bit. So as soon as my time was done, I basically started the sabbatical. That would not have happened had I not— not what I did. That there's no way in the world. A 3-year sabbatical would have happened had I not sold the business. So that's probably the single biggest thing. And City Turf was in a place and had been for a long time. I didn't have to do anything there, so I had no complications. Um, and then Academy, my coaching thing, got sold with the Service Autopilot business. So that would have— had that not happened, then it would have been harder for me to take the sabbatical because I had to be part of that coaching business. So anyway, the setup was the sale actually made this possible. And I think you were asking, what did I— were you saying, what did I learn? Can you remind me what the question was? Yeah.

Like, what did you learn about either yourself or even for someone that, let's just say for a moment, they've made a sale or they're between businesses, would you recommend it? But more importantly, how would you structure it?

Yeah. So, uh, I'll just tell you what I did first, man. I 100% recommend it and I would 100% recommend it without a sale, but you've gotta build the business to a place where the business can support it. And I, I don't know how to— I think, try to think of what it did for me. So I, what I see most business owners do is they sell their companies and they immediately jump into something. They become angel investors investing in other people's businesses. You get pulled in, you're busy, you sell your business, you immediately start another business. That's what I see every single person do. And that would have been the easy and natural thing for me to do. In fact, The whole idea of taking a long sabbatical made me feel a little guilty. Like I should, I'm losing momentum or I should be, uh, I'm getting older. I should go do this thing now. Uh, that kind of thinking and taking the sabbatical kind of wiped all that stuff away. It, it may, it also, it's your identity is so much in your business. I think there's no way to not have that be the case. Um, And I really loved my business. I love Service Autopilot. I love the clients. I love the team. I loved Academy. I loved all that stuff. Taking the break completely separated me from that identity. I don't know that I could have been— if I just jumped into the next business and started building a new software company or built a new coaching business, I would have never had the chance to part with the identity. And I think taking the long sabbatical legitimately got me to a place where I was completely separated from that identity and I don't feel like I need it. I really feel, and I only think I could get there by taking the long break. And I think that was super valuable. It also gave me this really fresh perspective to say, to look back on some of the things I got wrong over the years, building my stuff, the lessons I've learned, the things I would do different. You can't get that lesson. And this is a buildup to eventually talking about, hey, how might you think about this? You know, anybody listening to this. I don't think that I could have ever got that perspective had I not taken the sabbatical. I don't— for most of us, let's say you eventually get to a place where you take a 2 or 3 week vacation. So you leave your business, you're still kind of checking your email. You're still like, let's just say you're not doing much work, but you're still kind of checking on the business. That's not a sabbatical because it probably will take you 3 weeks just to decompress. From everything you normally have to do running the business, but you haven't even got to the phase yet to thinking about the business as an outsider looking down on your business and being completely out of the weeds, completely disconnected and looking at it in a way and saying, what did I get right? What did I get wrong? What are we as a team and a company getting right and wrong? You don't get that on a vacation. You have to get, you have to go through these phases, I think, where you sort of decompress. Then you get to a place where you're not even really tempted to pay it, to get involved in the business, to a place where you start to get bored, where then you start to think about the business in a completely different way. And that's what I think a longer period of time, a stretch of time gives you. And that's what a sabbatical gives you. And so for me, it allowed me to kind of decompress from everything I did, which took quite a while, frankly. Like the selling process was such a beatdown and exhausting.. And then coming into a new world and going through that whole transition and eventually leaving the business I built was such a beatdown in transition. I didn't just get over it in 2 months. And by get over, I mean, just completely decompress. It took me quite a long time to do that. And then I got to a place where I was like, hey, I could be happy not ever running that business again. I don't need that business again. I'm good. I could be happy doing something completely different. And then around that time is when I started to really look back on all that I had done and like, man, if I could do it again, you got to a clear mind. That's the word. It took a while to get to the clear mind. And so it's one of the greatest things I've ever done. I am so thankful I didn't start another business. So my learnings— and Mike, you can ask me additional questions— but what I would tell somebody that is dedicated to owning and building a business for the long term, it all starts with building your leadership team that can run the business. That's— you can't ever do a long sabbatical unless you've got operations dialed in and all the different— if you're bigger, finance, marketing, sales leaders, you've got to eventually get to a place where you have these. I, for somebody building a small business, I don't know how you're ever going to do a sabbatical because you've got to build a team of people that can run this thing while you're away. If you're just leaving the business, but you're still checking email. Multiple times a week, if you're still having to hop on a team call, if you're still having to make sure things are happening and moving, if you're still having to look at the KPIs, that's not a sabbatical. A sabbatical is a full-on do no work period. None. That's a sabbatical because that's the only way in my mind you 100% disconnect and stop thinking about the business and start thinking about other things and have some of the experiences I've described. So for somebody that's building a bigger business and it's gonna be in a, the long term, my suggestion would be you first do a 30-day test. Like, first you just do a 2-week vacation, then eventually you do a 30-day test. And I think the sweet spot— I mean, if you could— I just don't think a year is realistic for almost anybody, even if you're running a business. So I would— what I had always thought, and I still believe this, could I have engineered 90 days, periodic 90-day sabbaticals? Um, I think because I just don't think anybody's gonna do a year. I just don't believe it. I wouldn't have done it. No matter how good my business was going, I couldn't have left for a year. I wouldn't have let myself do it. So that's kind of where I stand on it. 90 days, I think, is probably the sweet spot.

Okay. All right. I see, when I go on vacation, I get within 3 to 4 days, I feel like I'm unplugged. I feel like— that's great. I feel like bored after 3 days. But I don't know if that's just because I've never actually fully disengaged.

See, I think you have to get past that bored part. Yeah, I've never done that. Yeah, I mean, I've always been the same way. I, I was able to go on vacations and I mean, we'd go to Europe for 3 weeks with the boys. I did— I didn't do anything work, none. I didn't check in. I still think, ah, I mean, I, I'd be a liar if I said I didn't check my email sometimes. It's like I needed my dopamine hit going back to the beginning of the conversation. So, but I don't feel like I— if I go to the beach, okay, I am bored in like a day and a half. I am not— the beach is unbelievably boring to me. But if I'm snowboarding or if I'm going, like, doing— if I'm in Europe and we've— we're doing— we're moving around quite a bit, I don't get that bored. So I don't know, maybe that's different. You might be going to the wrong place. You said you're more beach house than mountain house. That may be your problem. Okay. You need to go ski or snowboard. Okay. You need to do something highly active. Okay. Okay. Yeah.

Like I feel, I, so I've thought about this cuz I saw this on the doc and I was thinking about it and right now it seems like torture. That would, it seems torturous to me cuz I, again, to your point, my identity is wrapped up in it. I would feel immense amounts of, uh, guilt. And third, I don't think the business is in a place yet. I think I'm probably a solid year away from it. And I, I feel like I got the businesses, like from my, my, my personal business past $10 million, I had to restructure everything. I feel like the same thing is true at 30, but indeed to a million, I feel like I have a bit of a gap there. And I feel like that's when it could be useful is around that 30 to like get away and then look at the business a little bit differently, knowing that it's gonna be a very different way to scale up to the 100. So I'm definitely, it's definitely like in my thought, 'cause I agree with like the premise of stepping away and seeing it from afar. I just, I, The guilt and the identity part. Like, I have always been the person that just works all the time. I work a lot.

That's what I did. And so my 20s were all work. Yeah. And my 30s— when I look back, my 30s were more fun than my 20s. I just worked in my 20s. I'm counting on that.

Although, yeah, I— it couldn't be much worse than my 20s. I have to be— I'd have to really do something really stupid to make it worse than my 20s. But, um, okay, so 6 weeks is what you said to start? 90 days. 90 days. That would be a good one. 90. Someone's business.

I would just do it. I would do a 30-day first break away from the business and then with the goal of getting to 90 days someday. But this, this is a what I'd call a luxury conversation. You have to have your business in a really good place. And I don't think the number matters. It's, it's more like you gave the example of 30. I don't think somebody needs to have their business to 30. They need to have their business to a place where they have the right leaders running the business, right? And to me, it's, it's heavily operational. You have to have an incredibly good COO kind of person. I think as a business, usually in my world, the way I run things, the business largely, a lot of the lifting gets done by the COO as the business gets big. They are to me the single most important person in the whole business. And so you have to have an incredibly good leader there.

If you, if you, if you're running the business though, like from my perspective, I have to see a return on this time in terms of like, it has to be beneficial to me long term, whether it be getting new perspective, having a set new set of fresh eyes on the business, coming up with a new strategy. For me, it would be like, what's the thing that gets us from 30 to 100? Um, but in a way that's transactional in and of itself and not really stepping away from the business. And like, I don't even know how I justify it to my team. Because I don't, I don't know what the return is.

Well, I think, okay, I think the return is that you get to this place of clarity where you see the business differently. Okay. I think I can articulate this better. Two areas that I think you might see if you take a break. Phase— in the beginning of the phase, it's just about— it's not about getting a return. It's not about doing anything. It's not about getting clarity. It's about— it's only about getting to a place where you've engaged your brain in something completely different. This is why I don't think sitting on the beach works. It's so unbelievably boring. And then what do most people do? They drink.

So terrible choice. Play video games.

So you like, you find something else that you're doing and, and you engage your brain in a different way. Like, and then getting to the bored phase, I think is really important. Finding that— this was another thing I discovered during my sabbatical, was that there's all these other things I could— I love that I could spend more time doing that I wasn't spending much time on. And you— I gained that discovery from taking the break. Like what? I— more mountain biking, more snowboarding, more racing cars, more traveling. I found that I actually enjoyed— I always liked those things, but I found that I could be really happy doing a lot more of this stuff.

I have not figured that out. I basically either want to spend time with Brianna or work. That's, that's essentially all.

That's, that's where you're at right now. I, I think, you know, when you were talking earlier, I was thinking, when I was 30, would I have cared? And I don't think so. I, I think that some of this for me might have to, have to do with being a little— as I got a little bit older.

Yeah, but I'm trying to get that wisdom now. That's why I'm wondering, is this a 30—

I can tell you why this is beneficial official even now. Okay. I, my theory is that you just have to go through this phase though of sort of disconnecting, getting bored, doing that whole thing and doing other things. And then you've gotta clear your mind. And then the two things I think you get towards the end of the process, this is where the value is at. If you want this to be an ROI, which I think it is. Okay. My sabbatical was an ROI for me. I got very clear on what I wanted and didn't want, what I What the stuff I thought I wanted that I actually don't care about as much as I thought. Okay. The two things I got super clear on, I looked back and realized how many things in Service Autopilot I was doing simply because I always did them. I didn't need to be doing them. So after 90 days, if you came back into this business, you'd be like, why am I involved in this part of the business this much?

You might give me examples. Like when you said that, what was it in your mind there?

I was way more involved in marketing, and I had a great marketing leader than I needed to be. I was in more meetings than I needed to be in the meetings.

All your strengths, things you're good at.

Yes. Yeah, I was a lot of the things because I had the leaders in place. I was, I was more involved. So I was, I could have been, I was doing things. I'm trying to remember all the lessons. Most of it was me being in meetings and having more meetings with my team than I needed to, or giving more input than I needed to give and letting them just make— I was, I was letting people make a lot of decisions, but there were still more decisions or a lot of decisions where I should have just let them make the decision and own it. And I, they were still getting approval from me. I noticed that quite a bit. That's probably the biggest one because again, the thing you have to remember with Service Alpi, I had a whole leadership team running the business. I spent, I, I was okay with this, but I, because I enjoyed it, but I was spending more time with the team on personal things that had nothing to do with the business. I realized how much of my time was spent on that. Another thing I realized is Academy, while I loved it, would have— was time that was taking away from making the business, Service All Pilot business, go faster. Or what I was talking to you about a week or two ago, where I should have spent more time bouncing in and out of customer service just to work, like do a little more coaching there. So in some areas I was too involved, in other areas I was not enough involved. It was those types of observations that I had.

Gaining clarity almost on which areas of the business actually required or needed your time. Where my time was spent.

Yeah, I loved marketing. I had a great marketing leader, but I still dabbled in marketing more than needed. I, um, didn't love customer service, I didn't spend as much time in customer service. It's that kind of thing. I love teaching and coaching. Maybe I should have brought that into software more, software more for everybody and not just for 128 people. Yeah, this, it's those. I think I talked to you about that one time at the Service All By Conference. Like, that was one of my big— after I'd been gone from business, I think I was talking to you because you were talking about if you were to build software again, what would you do? And that was one of my big observations that came from my sabbatical was I should have just made this for everybody and not just made this for a small group of people. There's lots of little lessons like that. I have a, I have a whole list of things. I noted a lot of these things that I had learned.

For someone that might have like a partner, for example, because I can see the benefits. Let's say someone else is like, hey, I built the business, it's doing $2-3 million in revenue, it's very profitable. Specifically during the offseason, I could definitely take these at least the first 30 days, maybe 90 days, and kind of take this time aside, unplug. But now I have a partner that is potentially the more operational driver of the business that I need to still stay engaged with daily operations. How is this going to make them feel? Do I feel guilty not being there supporting the business with them? And I say this from— as I'm saying this, This is how I feel to the franchisees at Augusta Lawn Care. When I don't work, that's actually the first thing that pops in my mind is like, these are people that betted on me. These are people that I look at as partners in the business, and I'm not actively with them working and hustling while they're also trying to do that. And so for someone that might be thinking about this but has an operational partner in the business, what would you say to them, or what should they say to the partner to make sure they can get this time to unplug?

Well, if I'm talking about a partner, Let's not, not talk about the franchisees at the moment who are partners. I think that actually makes it easier because the partner, if you have a good partner, that actually makes it feel even safer to take the sabbatical because somebody is highly invested, is now still present in the business. And the reason why I believe in a sabbatical is I think it's good for if you're going to be in this game for the long term. I think it's really, really good. For you as an owner, as a leader to get mental clarity. There are actually companies and corporations that make their people take sabbaticals. This is not a— this is a unique idea. It's not a radical idea. I remember going up to see The Motley Fool, the founders of Motley Fool in Washington years and years ago. Those guys were taking sabbaticals. They built them into their— to take sabbaticals. I got this idea from somewhere. I didn't just come up with this.. And I've seen other businesses where they are in these businesses for the long term. They're not interested in selling. They've engineered this into their business. So back to the partner thing, if I have a partner, I'm not just doing this so I can go to Europe for 3 months. Like, cool. I, that's a cool thing to do. I'm, or, or you stay home. It doesn't matter what you do. I'm not doing this just purely for the vacation. I'm doing this to become a better version of me and a better leader of the business. And to have real clarity on where I'm taking the business. This is where this advice is coming from. And so the partner is not complicated because I want my partner to do the very same thing because I want them to get the exact same benefits. Like, how much have we been doing? This is a— I don't feel like I've done a great job articulating this. So as we have the conversation, you're pulling more out of me. How much was I doing at service autopilot? That we didn't need to do that we had been doing because that's how we'd been doing it for the last 9 years since we had started the business. Why were we running certain things the way we ran them? Like, why, why did I still have certain people on the team? This wasn't necessarily one. Well, I did have a kind of a learning on this, but why, why were people, some people still on the team? When I got away and I started thinking about the business differently, I realized where I had some gaps. It's— I can't tell you exactly what it would be for you or what it would be for somebody else listening to this, but you're going to get away from this thing, disconnect. You're no longer in the weeds. You didn't, you didn't get off a support call 4 hours ago. You didn't get off. You didn't get out of a design meeting last week where everything's behind. Like, all these things are off your brain and now you're not dealing with the problems of the business. Now you're looking down on the business and saying, What is the right strategy? Are we even going after the most important stuff? Are we spending our money in the most important places, the resources in the most important places? Have I built the right people? Do I have a gap? Like, it's that kind of a clarity that I think is almost impossible for an owner to have when every day you're showing up and as soon as you walk through the door, here's a problem. Here's the thing you got to deal with. Here's an email you got to respond to. Here's another department. Here's another employee. It's like, we can't get rid of them. I need to get rid of them. But it will, it'll take us 6 months to find the replacement and they're still not bad. They're just not like, that's that your brain is full. That's the simplest way I can say, how do you clear your brain? So you're not thinking you're, it's signal versus noise. Like how can you clear your brain where you're not just bombarded by noise constantly? You're living above the business and you're looking down on it. How do you get to a place? Okay. Uh, Dr. Kashi, is that the guy that you work with? Yeah. What's his advantage? What's the advantage you have coaching somebody else? What's the advantage he has when he's talking to you? He is not in the weeds. When you're working with somebody else, you're not in the weeds. You are able to look at their business at a high level and you're able to say, I just make this decision, like fire this person, uh, cut this client, this group of clients and go get these clients, raise the prices. You don't have the noise in your head of the 20 reasons why that won't work. You have in your brain the example that I have coached 400 companies to raise their prices and never has it gone badly. I have coached 200 people to get rid of a toxic person in their organization, and everybody has thanked me. That's the— as the consultant and the advisor, that's what's going on when you give somebody else advice. For the person receiving the advice, they're like, oh, but that employee, That's my brother-in-law's wife. I, I, oh, I can't fire them because they like, man, if they lose their job, they're not going to have enough. They only have one month's worth of savings. Oh, they just had a baby. Like, you're good. They have all the noise. I can't raise prices because you're picturing Miss Smith, who was your first client when you started the business. And she's so kind. You have all this noise. The advantage of you or I or someone else giving us advice is we have none of the noise. We can just say, this is the best thing to do. And I have data and proof. When you get a sabbatical from your business and the noise is gone, you look down on your business like a consultant and you make more clear-headed, rational decisions. That's maybe the best way to say this. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. And so I see the 90 days as a— it's— I think it can be phenomenal. Like, there's Tiffany and I traveling and being together, like me taking a break for 3 years. That was not bad for our relationship. I mean, it's also good for your personal life. And, and so you can— I just think in all these different places of life, you look at things differently. You come back energized, excited. Like, that's another one. If you could come back to your business super excited and energized and feeling super healthy with a clear game plan for the next 5 years, like, that's worth big, big money. And it's worth money to the franchisees. It's worth money to your business partner. And then you want— so when I was talking to it with John about it, I was not thinking just for me. I want John to do the same thing. He's got all the same noise stuck in all this, the weeds. I know John, like if John had done this, he would have come back. Now this would be the downside. John would come back with a whole new plan and we'd be taking the company in a whole new direction.

We're starting Service Autopilot 4.0. Exactly.

While I was gone, I got bored. I coded a new system. Like, oh no, no, no, no, no. So, you know, I guess that could be the negative of this thing. You know, you gotta, you can't come back and disrupt your whole team's life, but those are some of the ways I think about it. And so yeah, maybe you're not excited about now. Maybe you're not ready for it now. Maybe you have some more building to do. Cool. Do it.

But I see logically why it should be something I do. I see all the benefits on like the logical side. I also know. That would be like hard for me.

Like in a lot of ways it's hard for everybody. Yeah, it was hard for me and I didn't have to work. It was hard for me at first. Yeah. And at the beginning of my break, I felt like something was wrong. I felt like almost like something was wrong with me. I just felt frustrated. Yeah. Something was off. I mean, to the point, it's like, am I— something wrong with me? Am I— I just couldn't put my finger on it. And I came up with all kinds of scenarios like, oh, it's because I'm not in office anymore. I'm not around people and I like being around people. Is that it? I'm stuck in the house. I'm not getting out enough. Is it COVID? Because I'm stuck in the house. I, I had all these reasons and I think I just had to kind of go through this disconnect from this. I mean, my whole life I have been going since I was 14 years old, all in. I mean, my all, I mean, all in. Mm-hmm. And so it was unbelievably valuable. There's a point where And I mean, for me, it's kind of like, do you— this is— if I hadn't taken the break, I would just start the next thing and go as fast as I could on that thing. And taking the break made me kind of ask, is that necessary? And get super clear on what I wanted to be doing versus just trying to build something bigger or make more money. I, I don't know. I got that clarity from it. Do you feel like I'm rambling at this point?

Do you think if you would have done a 90-day sabbatical, would you would have prevent— like you would have put off the sale? I'm not—

huh, that's a great question. I'm not really sure why we sold the business. I don't think we were sure why we were selling the business. Um, I think a little bit of why we sold the business was because we thought we could do it all over again and make it way better. And so I don't know if 90 days would have done that for us, but I think there's a— you really got me thinking here. I think there's a chance But we weren't— I don't think we— but I wasn't burned out. I was not unhappy. And John wasn't either. We loved Service Autopilot. John, I mean, I remember when we were selling the business at one point, John's like, I don't know if we should be doing this. And then he gave the example of, I'm going to really miss our user conferences. And he gave all— I'm going to miss all these things. So there was never a moment we were like, where we felt this complete burnout where we needed to. But I think if somebody feels a lot of burnout or frustration, then yes, I think it could very much keep you in the game.

Okay, well, I'm gonna commit by the end of 2028 to take one.

Not— I think you should. I think it'd be great.

Not this year, not 2027, but I can commit to the end of 2028. All right, I'll take 30 days.

That's great. I think, I think it would be fantastic. I would— and I can't wait till the day I can ask you what'd you get out of it, or if it was a big giant waste of your time.

Then I can blame you. It's okay. You can blame that consultant, you know. Yeah. All right, let's wrap this thing up. Uh, any non-financial advice for the, for the, uh, the audience? I got one, I'll kick it off. Uh, okay, this is Bum Energy. It's from Cbum, who's a Mr. Olympian. He's now retired, but okay, this is actually not why I'm promoting this. So this is actually a long story. So I'll try to make this short. Sam Gaudette is Dan Martell's media director. He started making content, he talked, he made a short about silent supporters. Versus active supporters. Okay, so I'm usually a silent supporter. I don't usually comment a lot. I'm not really that type of person on social media. Uh, however, there is a new, uh, creator in the past year or so. His name is Dom Aya Kovan. I'm probably saying it wrong, but he's the one who actually manufactures Sebum, and then Sebum put his name on it, um, because he's the Olympian, uh, Mr. Olympian, uh But his new channel is great, YouTube channel. And so I'm trying to be an active supporter. And, uh, Dom is a, is a, a great entrepreneur, new creator, creates all behind the scenes of building like a $500 million. They do energy drinks for Bum Energy, Raw Energy, several other stuff like that. So more of a different, uh, industry. It's a direct-to-consumer, DTC, but, uh, interesting nonetheless. So Bum Energy, so it's pretty good.

If you're talking about it, you must really like it. Yeah, it's really good.

It's like a, it's only a hundred count, uh, mg of caffeine instead of like 200, uh, which is like Celsius and the other stuff. And really clean ingredients, doesn't have, um, a lot of stuff that I try to keep out of drinking. Uh, but yeah, very good tasting. I don't really like sweet, sweet energy drinks or anything like that, so I like it.

It's good. What's in a, uh, how much caffeine's in a cup of coffee?

Uh, about, about 90 to 100 mg.

Oh, so it's similar to a cup of coffee?

Yep. Yep. That's like Jocko's. I have those too. Those are not— those are 95 mg. There's a little bit less. Okay.

I don't know anything about energy drinks, so—

It's okay. Just stay out of it. It's okay. I didn't take caffeine for years. Like, up until 3 years ago, I didn't have ever— never had any energy drinks. And then I started doing Jocko's. It has monk fruit. Okay. Sweetened with monk fruit. Yep. And now I, you know, I use it mostly as kind of like a warm-up for my workouts. So I'll usually drink it during my workouts.

Do you work out in the morning or at night?

Usually in the morning. Okay. Yeah. Do you—

and you don't drink caffeine during the day, just before, at the very beginning?

Well, given the fact that it's 1 PM—

okay, never mind.

I try not to. I try to keep it before like 12 o'clock just to make sure I don't have trouble sleeping.

But all right, so my non-financial advice is around AI. For those that are trying to use it more, I would tell you every single idea you have Everything you're trying to solve, anything you're trying to think through, always take it, always go to AI. Even if you're like, hey, I don't know how it would help me, this thing can't help me, just go to an AI model and say, I understand you may not be able to help me with this, but if you could, how would you do it? Because even sometimes the feedback that comes back, it may be useless to you, but it takes no time to ask or to prompt it. Sometimes even when you're trying to work on something that you think AI couldn't help you with in any possible way, it'll at least give you some ideas to look at it in a different way. And so the way I think you use AI more is literally every single thing you do, start with AI, even if you think it's dumb.

I love it. There you have it, folks. Another podcast in the books. We broke the 2-hour barrier. Let's go. We broke that opening, that very first one.

We were on that for a long time.

You know, now we know, we now established that the SpaceX has city turf right on the top there. $5 million to the moon. As long as it's going to the moon. As long as it's going to the moon. All right, that's it.

Thank you everyone. All right. Good seeing everyone. Bye.