they are trying to BUY ME OUT...

Well, well, well, what do we have here? Three, two, one.

Here we go.

It is early Tuesday morning. I'm headed down to Mount Vernon because the general manager actually has Covid, so he's out next few days. This is why I'm getting a regional manager, because I just really don't have the time to be jumping in on the general managers when things like this happen. So I'm headed down there, help out, might do a couple extra trips for the vlog and we'll see how the day.

Last week at Augusta Nation, we were talking specifically about being an owner and how I really feel it's almost the obligation of an owner to be the last one to leave and the first one to show up each morning and just be that. That kind of familiar face for the crew to be able to connect with. Like, especially if you're doing lawn care, landscaping, hard type labor positions, it's very difficult to come back at the end of a 10, 11 hour day and there's like no one there. And immediately people are going to start thinking like, oh, the boss is just like on the, on the boat on the lake all day long. And they might not know you're doing estimates or doing something else. But you've got to communicate as a leader to your team what you're doing. Otherwise they can start to just assume the worst.

So right now I'm actually down here.

At Mount Vernon at the tiny house. I'm going to go ahead and mark out exactly what this area is going to look like because all of this soil is what was dug up when we put in the septic tank.

But now what we're going to do.

Over the next couple months is install a gravel pad and then probably put like a hot tub and a fire pit. So I'm just going to mark that out with the paint right now.

All right, finished for the morning. Did the mastermind actually here at the shop.

Quick update.

Shop is looking good. Starting to get a little more organized. Getting the whiteboard set up in terms of what is broken and communicating with the team. The trenches are now filled in here at the tiny house. So the water, the sewer is installed. The electrician is coming this afternoon to hook things up. And so, yeah, starting to take shape. The fence just needs the panels on them.

Now.

The sheeting all around the bottom of the tiny house has to be done. We also got to insulate the pipes just so that the pipes don't burst during the winter time. You can see here conduit is pooled and the electrician will get that all finished up today. But we switch around here. We got the septic system installed, we got our water installed. There's a water heater inside in the back area here. This is where we buried the 500 gallon septic septic tank. And then you got the orange outline. You can kind of see I sprayed.

This is where it's gonna be.

We're gonna eventually have a concrete pad with a hot tub and a fire pit. Again, I truly believe this will increase the value of the tiny house in terms of short term rental. Airbnb at least 40 or 50 a night. So we'll recoup that money really quickly. That's eventually. Not right away. Right now what we gotta do is clean this place up. So Augusta's gonna come in here, rake this all out, put some grass seed down, put some mulch along the perimeter, make this look good. And yeah, so we gotta build a little porch for the front to get into the door. This place clean. Like all the windows still have all their new stickers on, stuff like that. So a lot of work still to be done. This bad boy. I don't know if you're ever gonna see it until it's actually completed though, because I'm actually flying to the other side of the world in a couple days. Stay tuned.

Well, well, well, what do we have here? So this is all Amazon packages for the tiny house. Last Saturday, I came down with Liz, my property manager, and basically in about 15 or 20 minutes, we ordered everything off of Amazon for the entire tiny house. What I do for the Airbnbs is I essentially have a list inside Amazon that when I want to create a new Airbnb rental, we just buy everything on the list. The exact same stuff every single time. Really, really simple. So to furnish that entire place with two beds and all the mirrors and light fixtures and couches and everything was $2990. So not too bad. It is a tiny house, but we did really go all out, get high quality stuff for specific things like beds, couches. You don't skimp on that stuff. You. You spend good money, get good quality. But it is nice as a small square footage, a small footprint, so not too much money to have to spend on the furnishing.

Okay, so this is the first property I'm doing an estimate for, and it's pretty funky because check this out. This back sloped area, this is what we call Kinnickinnik. And it's like a very woody ground cover. The problem with that is that you can't use a weed whacker, or you can't spray around it, really. And so they want all of the BlackBerry bushes and starters and weeds and all the stuff that's coming through the kinnickinnit pulled out, which is gonna be a very manual process because you can see here the kinnickinic kind of acts like a web. And so what you have to do is literally just peel this all back to get to the weeds, actually pull them out by the roots. So that's gonna be a lot of work. This side, not so bad. Just basically have to pull the weeds out, spray. It won't be that bad. We got horsetail. It's like literally the co. The corona virus of the Pacific Northwest is the horsetail. It's horrible. So cleaning this out is gonna be an ankle breaker. I'll make sure the guys have plenty of budget hours because it's not going to be easy work, by no means.

All right, so we're out here, and we're gonna be doing weeding of the flower beds at our second property here for another estimate. And it's literally just for. For weeding. So we do all the mowing over the phone via square footage. But flower beds for weeding service, we still come and visit because the same square footage could literally take 10 times longer with the weeds if they are maintained versus not. So just have to drop by the house really quick and take a look, and then we're off to the next one. Hopefully get three of these knocked out in 45 minutes or an hour.

Okay, we're at our third. Third and final estimate. This one is for sale. Remember what I say about houses that are for sale. When you're doing estimates, make sure you collect on them before do a prepayment. Because if they sell this house and walk away, you have no leverage to be able to put a lien on the property. So this person just needs some. Just a really quick cleanup. Like the grass plants, they don't want them overgrown onto the sidewalk. Obviously, some weeds popping through over here. Same thing, dandelions popping up. And this does not look great. So we'll take off some of these lower branches. Our minimum charge is usually around 3, $400. So by the time we get here, we might as well do a few extra things for them. The only thing they really asked for was trimming these grass. This grass off the sidewalk. This would literally take us five to 10 minutes. So our goal is just to try to add some more value while we're here. And with our minimum charge.

I Honestly, didn't really need a smoothie, but I.

Just feel bad stopping at, like, a coffee shop, going to their bathroom and.

Not buying any thing.

It's like they gotta pay for utilities. They gotta pay for people to clean the bathroom.

It's kinda like my rent.

My rent is just buying one smoothie.

I'm in a bit of a rush right now because I'm running a little bit late for a meeting with a private equity firm. I've been very clear that I'm never gonna sell out majority stake ownership in Augusta. However, every two to three months, there's another private equity firm or venture capital firm that wants to buy a piece of Augusta. And so I used to take a lot of the calls, really just for my own and learning, but now I just don't have the time. So what I've been doing is just saying, hey, if you're interested in a call, I appreciate that you're interested in Augusta. I appreciate you doing your due diligence and, you know, about what we're doing and what my goals are, et cetera, because a lot of them have a very good pitch to try to get me on the phone. And I said, I appreciate all that. However, you have to, before this call, realize I have no interest, zero interest in selling majority stake ownership. And that weeds out like 80 to 90% of investors because they want to buy majority stake ownership, control the business, jack up prices, and control, like, the.

Direction of the company.

And I just have no interest in doing that. But this specific private equity firm was totally fine with that and still interested in a phone call. So I'm like, you know what? I'm willing to take the phone call as long as that condition is adhered to and something that they know up front, I have no interest in doing. Yeah, I don't. I really don't want to get venture capital or investors or anyone like that involved because we move very quickly, we're growing very quickly, and it would just slow us down massively if I had to run everything by a board. And so I really have zero interest in even selling. But I do believe it's my obligation as the CEO for the interest of the business to understand and educate myself on what our options are, what our valuation looks like to an outside party and just have that in my head. I really don't want to get involved with equity partners right now. It's very, very complicated to do that. And I've seen time and time again when companies that are growing very quickly and have a really good founder and A vision. Let someone buy out a majority stake ownership and the business just gets complet diluted, washed out. And it's a money grab instead of a long term, 10, 20, 30 year play. In fact, a lot of people will sometimes criticize me the way I'm growing Augusta, and that is pretty scrappy. Not using a lot of debt. I'm not using any outside equity or outside money. And I point to companies like ge, General Electric. General Electric used to be the biggest company in the world literally less than 20 years ago. General Electric, not Facebook, not Amazon, not Google, not Apple, none of those companies. Twenty years ago, GE was the largest company in the world. And today it has way more debt than it does assets. It sold off basically every single part of its business. The three remaining sectors that it has, which is healthcare, energy, and aviation, they're actually breaking up into different segments and different entity structures. And the stock price has gone down like 90%. It's ridiculous. 80 or 90%. What happened is Jack Welch came in and started buying up companies by the drove. Literally bought 600 companies in the matter of like 20 years, which is like every three weeks. Buying a new company out. Massive amounts of acquisition led to a massive amount of growth. And then they get a bailout of like $130 billion to the United States government. And ever since they took that money, ever since they took $130 billion of taxpayer money and a bailout from the government, that stock price has plummeted. And a lot of times I feel like when a company has a bunch of cash and a bunch of money just floating around because of investors, they start doing stupid stuff. They start spending money on things that don't actually improve the customer experience. Don't actually move the needle for. Because they just have cash. They have, they have to spend it. So we got to spend money on marketing, and we got to spend money on a fancier building and fancier amenities and nicer cars. Stupid doesn't move the needle for the business. So in one way, I am actually happy that we're pretty scrappy in Augusta. We don't have a lot of money, and every single day is a battle.

For retaining the equity without having to sell out.

Yeah, I think we should fire Stephen.

After that Facebook, after that Facebook ad, like top of the funnel awareness, I.

Think 100% we, we have to be in shorts.

That's why, like the vlog, when it.

Went off like that, I'm thrilled. I don't mind, because that is worth probably 50 million views on TikTok.

You know what gets me is like.

Sometimes you get a TikTok that has like 7 million views and someone just talking inside of a car. And so like in one regarding, like in my hand, like we got lots of those. Yeah. Why don't I just shoot for that though? And just again, just verbal diarrhea. It's like one out of a hundred will probably take off. Other ones will do five or six hundred views. It won't do nothing. I don't know, does that do better? I just think, what's the risk? What is the return on your time is what I'm asking. Like now that we were talking about firing Steven now.

Well, yeah.

All right, well, that's a good point.

All right.

I'm out of here. Are you really worth your wait?

Just come on.

I know, dude.

It's okay.

I'll take work implements comp on this chair and I'll.

Peace out. Look at this. Oh, yeah, he got screwed.

From what?

The chair. I already cut it off.

There's like a piece of plastic that attacked me. I think I'm about to retire, dude.

Totally.

And those are like, that's why I keep. I literally keep turning to Stephen and I'm like, dude, like I have this short. But like, if I could just like reword it or say it in like two seconds differently. So I think it would pop off immediately.

I think if we go after like.

The hot topic that are being mentioned in the comments.

Why do you fire employees if they show up late?

Yeah. Or why would you not hire someone that smokes pot in a state where it's legal? Yeah. That is controversial. But then I can add business context to it, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. People always have an opinion on the pot thing. People always have opinion on like employee related stuff.

Related night. I am working on several different things and trying to wrap up some stuff. One of them right now is, as of today, there's a federal law that when you are setting up someone in Payroll, things like QuickBooks or Gusto, you have to put in the gender of the employee. So we've got to make sure that on the new hire submission for Command center, when a franchisee is hiring someone, they can put their information in that we get that information so we can input it into the payroll processor. So you got to love it. I'm not a huge fan of the government getting involved in any of this stuff, to be perfectly honest with you. I don't care if you're left right what your opinion is of gender. I don't really care. I Just don't think the government should be getting involved in that sort of thing. Just my opinion. So I've actually never said this publicly in terms of what is the goal for Augusta Long here in like 20 years. And I actually do want to take it public. And what I think about is a company like Amazon and I've told this internally inside of our teams, but never really publicly. Amazon, when you look at it, you got Amazon prime, you got everything from like robotics for example. They just bought Roomba, they got, they actually got Amazon Air. They actually have an airline that is cargo and all the rest of it. But they also have aws, Amazon Web Services, which makes the majority of their profit. And their enterprise value is actually actually Amazon Web Services. They got Kindle, they actually build physical products. Kindle, they have, There's a whole bunch like I could literally fill this entire page. Just different parts of Amazon, but they trade under one company on the stock market. But again, most of their profit actually comes from aws and the majority, like more than half of their enterprise value, their valuation comes from this Amazon Prime. Selling stuff online, very low margin. Business doesn't make a lot of money. So when I look at Augusta down the road, when we go public, you know, I think, I think our ticker symbol will probably be like Max for our mascot. But when I look at what we're trying to do with Augusta, the thing that we will be known for is the franchise. You know, a thousand plus locations. People will see us, know about us and that's what they'll identify as Augusta Lawn Care. But in terms of what makes up the company we, we already have and what will be continuing to grow is things like web design, the media arm of the business in terms of marketing, etc. The education side of the business in terms of building out a platform for landscapers, we have lawn care bookkeeper. We have got to scroll down here. We also have P4P pay for performance, which is something that is IP to Augusta. So this is kind of how I think about it down the road. When we combine all these entities together, that's when we create something special that we will probably take to the public market. And that's probably the time when I'll be able to reward the people that have been with me for so long and kind of take some chips off the table in terms of giving back to them. And is this happening in 2025? No, it's probably gonna happen in at least 20 years from now. I'm in no massive rush to take it public. And in order for you to have a great valuation that is sustainable and conservative, all of these entities need to be making profit. And furthermore, I want to have stock options. Stock options for employees as well as franchisees. The ability to be able to let them participate in that IPO is going to be one of the most rewarding parts of building investor lawn care.