They Stole EVERYTHING from This Lawn Care Business

$240,000 of debt. Hey, everyone. My name is Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care. We have over 150 locations. Today we're in St. Louis with Dalton's Lawn Care. We're still gonna be around 500,000 than you think this year.

And that's kind of where we're at.

Well, he's been saving up for his second truck. He bought the truck, but he had to put 80,000 down.

Yeah.

Made that decision over the winter. And there's been nothing but stressful since.

The thing that's killing us is the fact that February and March we lost $60,000. But the thing that's really bad is recently they've had a whole bunch of break ins at their shop.

That we can easily steal and sell. Is in that trailer.

Look how thin this is. Stuck in. Knife cut this thing right out. Not that I have any experience whatsoever doing that. And a brand new dump truck they just purchased got stolen off the lot.

The dump truck's gone. I said that's what they plowed through the fence with.

Heart started beating like, are you kidding me?

And that's. That's when he kind of kind of lost it.

No matter how much I want to say no way, it was my employees. Like, you can't cancel that out.

I'm going to need a significant raise.

For my one employee, Josiah. I would probably sell the business or.

Try and get out.

I just need help.

Let's see if we can turn this thing around.

Sup, brother?

Morning. How are you?

Good, man. How you doing?

Good.

Great, now that you're here.

Nice little spot you got out here.

Yep.

I say it's a nifty little spot. But location is largely what led to the break ins. Tucked behind, out of sight. Almost everything that's been there has been there for over a year. No issues. And it's more secure now than it initially was.

My own.

Between like pretty much right up to where I cleared, but down the corner. Good. 30ft down.

Oh, you own this?

Yeah. Or well have a loan on it.

Okay.

So they basically went around the ends of the fence, came in. Yep. Oh, they got a little getaway road. It's like it was built for being stolen from. Oh, yeah. Dude, this is too easy. You gotta go another 20ft.

Somehow someone noticed our shop with equipment. Secluded in the corner, back behind a warehouse.

Back up the truck. You can actually drive a truck in here? Yeah. You guys go right around this stuff Mercy.

Our dump truck was parked actually right where we're standing. The Equipment trailer was where the dump trailer is. I scoped it out. We're able to pinpoint that. Okay, all the equipment that we want and are able to steal and sell is in the trailer. And they knew everything was in there. Not sure how, but that was their target. That's what blows my mind still is that. And they didn't try breaking into any of the other trucks or anything.

Yeah, that was a fun day. Yeah. I pulled up to the shop, first thing I noticed was the fire hydrant was taken out because it was just spewing water everywhere.

Called Josiah at like 6:30 or something. I was like, oh, I'm not gonna come in this morning. About five minutes later, I called him.

Back, told him, you know, the gate's been ran through. Something happened.

At that point, I'm like, oh gosh, what happened? Heart started beating, stomach turned a little bit.

And I asked him, I said, hey.

Is the dump truck still supposed to be here?

And he, you mean it's not there?

I said, well, the dump truck's gone. I said, that's what they plowed through the fence with.

And then I just kind of froze. I'm like, no, no. All right, check everything else.

So I went up to look at.

The trailer, started gathering my stuff to head up there, and about two minutes later, he calls back and tells me.

All the stuff was gone out of the trailer.

Like, are you kidding me?

And that's when he kind of kind of lost it.

All the equipment from our trail trailer was gone. Threw it all in the dump truck, backed the dump truck around, rammed through the gate, and then got stuck on the fire hydrant. And I just kind of lost it.

You know, rightfully so. I would have too, you know, like.

But already kind of having a bunch of hiccups this year. Like, this cannot be real. I can't believe it.

Yeah, he wasn't real thrilled.

Last week I was planning on doing a handful of changes. Kind of our coping mechanism. Post break in each camera was $200. The lights slowly going to transition to all those proven industry locks, which are $300 a pop.

Look how thin this is. If you just have. You could just cut open and walk right in. That's the problem with these things, dude. Even if you have a lock on the back, there's nothing preventing it from. Like, it's like thin, thin metal. Like, yeah, great locks. But between these beams, just stuck a knife. Cut this out. Not that I have any experience whatsoever doing that, just to be honest.

You say a prayer before you open the gate. Every day to miss. Everything's here.

And what was your name?

Josiah.

Josiah. Good to meet you, man.

Good to meet you.

He's pretty much the right hand man. Only one that stepped up. Well all year, all winter, but especially post break in.

I am pretty much the lawn care manager at Dalton's. Pretty much do everything. I do landscaping, I do estimates, lawn care, fix equipment, pretty much there's not much I don't do here.

The problem he's facing today are gonna be different than a month ago when he applied. So in the past month, kinda like since the break in and everything. Cause that's when you first originally contacted us.

Yep.

What's it been like?

Quite a bit. In past dues, transitioning from element into co pilot, out of the blue, their auto charge stopped. Actually auto charging. And we were unaware. So for like two months thought everything was still being auto charged and it wasn't. So then we just had giant mess and cleanup and everything.

How receivables do we still have? Do you know?

As of now there's about 30,000.

Dalton has over $30,000 in accounts receivable. In other words, just work that he's already completed and sent the invoice and the customer hasn't paid. It's super important to be able to actually collect the money once you've earned it from the customer. There's profitable businesses that can go out of business because they never actually collect on the work they've done. In fact, the $30,000 in receivables that Dalton has could have for all the security measures he needed around the shop.

So I knew that that was an absolute must do. Get someone answering the phones because I've been using Jill's office.

Jill's office, this is Jill speaking, which.

Is $500 a week. Does absolutely nothing other than give me an absurdly long list of to dos.

And they were just doing phones. They weren't doing like other admin stuff?

Yes, exclusively phones, just a phone. So I was like, need someone even if they can't do everything I want or need right now, having more than just an machine that costs 500 a week is going to help tremendously. So our new office admin last week was pretty much her first full week.

Is she working like part time? Full time?

So I say she's part time. Which I actually do have a handful of questions to ask you about that. With her being remote, it is brutally.

Difficult to have an admin person working for you remotely.

I never personally met Lisa. I talked to her on the phone. We Actually had a joke going between me and the guys that Lisa never existed for a long time. Like I made her up. I talked to her a few times. She wasn't too bad of a gal.

So I'm kind of just now at the point of navigating that change, trying to create a system and figure out everything with employees. So two of them that are working right now have some issues. If it wasn't for the break in, potentially will have been demoted and or fired. Was always leery about hiring friends, but actually my first ever employee was a that I was extremely skeptical about.

Dalton hired people into positions when they didn't have the experience to do those positions, I guess you'd say.

And it ended in a very strange and not so good way. He pretty much lied about everything he was doing all of 2023. He was amazing, stepped it up, did all sorts of stuff. I never asked him to. I'm like, you are just absolutely killing.

It with this company being such a small company. Dalton trying to run it like it's, you know, a massive operation. I guess Dylan kind of got a little overwhelmed with stuff.

It was always saying, oh yeah, I want to be your right hand man. Which having known him since 2014 was very believable. And then since he's got a kid, I knew I'd probably lose him over winter if I couldn't keep him employed. So I was like, I'll put you on salary over the winter to help him out, make sure that he came back the following year with the expectations that you help me get all of the co pilot stuff set up and then that's going to give you the knowledge and everything.

And he just dropped off during the winter.

And then I guess he just decided since he was getting a paycheck that he didn't need to do as much work. So Dalton ended up overpaying him and.

Then that was kind of the start of the decline. He said he was doing everything, didn't really oversight him. I go do something like what the heck, this ain't done. He would say things would get done. I would just take his word at it. There wasn't really any overlap in what I was doing and he was doing.

And with Dalton not being in the field to help out, it kind of pushed him into being lazy and kind of, I guess brought his morale down.

And then I really started looking, I'm like, what the? Nothing's done. And then I unfortunately learned the hard way that almost everything that I told him he needed to do over the winter hadn't been done. Had us go back to the same one yard mulch job three different times. Everything was bad.

That was pretty much, I think that was pretty much the line of when it was like, okay, like it's time.

To let him go, show up. Everything stolen. Like, all right, well, now you're with us.

Still putting frontline team members on salary is a tempting proposition to retain them over the winter or off season. The problem with this is that if your revenue goes way down and yet you're still paying everyone the same amount, you're going to burn through all your cash reserves during the off season. The goal to be able to fix this problem is to create season specific offers with season specific services and try to be able to produce more revenue during the off season. If you can't do that, you might have to lay some people off, give them a guaranteed start time and even give them a bonus in order to get them to come back when the spring rush begins.

So, like this, this land, what was the total value on that?

Listed at 310. So from a value standpoint, I'd say that's the range.

But you have to put 80,000 down.

Yeah.

So that's really what kind of like crippled us from the cash perspective. Then all this happened and we didn't have the cash to buffer it. So how much debt is total in the business now? Like equipment and everything else?

Yeah. So minus the land, I want to say probably 25,000 would be my guess for the fence loan.

And that's all there's really debt.

Right. And then like three or four grand on one of the. Or no, on the second plow through Sheffield and then that's all of it excluding the repurchase of equipment about a month ago, which was six grand.

My mindset is like right now we're operating the business still in growth mode, which. Which is like get an admin person, get more trucks hire. When? Like now, because of what's happened, unfortunately, I think we'll have to switch it into profit mode.

Honestly. Really, it wasn't till last night that really hit me and started to feel very surreal. Oh my gosh, he's actually coming. Well, he's coming because I'm dealing with some pretty big issues, but given the circumstances, this is probably the best outcome anyone could ask for is having Mike come in. Hello. I love the crib down.

This is my little man cave, stress relief, work office, you name it. I was looking at making a just one hour call with them early April. I checked. I'm like, wow, it's $1,800 an hour. Yep. Nope, that's out of the picture. I'm like, all right, well, let me try turnaround video so I don't have to pay for it. I just left that page open for like two weeks. I'm like, no, no, I can power through closed out of it. And like the Tuesday prior to the break in that following Friday, I'm just like, all right, yep, time to submit a video.

My main thing is, okay, like short term, it's the crunch is just getting enough cash to get by. Then it's like, long term, how do we actually make the business profitable and sustainable? Do you wanna pull up last month in terms of either QuickBooks or even just a report? In April, when you did 70,000, was there a couple big projects in there or you were collecting on projects?

Our biggest job was 4,500 or something last year. For reference, we multiple 20,000, 30,000. So in comparison, very small. But I've came to the realization sub $10,000 jobs is what.

Yes.

Doing large projects that are worth tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue is exciting, but they can also take a lot more skill and management from you as the owner.

That's where we. So we did up to like $100,000 jobs.

Right.

And it would take forever to get estimates out. Cause you really do have to think the whole thing through. Every single aspect.

Prep equipment, transport, accessibility, and how that affects it. Who's gonna be on the job, which.

Is usually gonna be you.

Yeah.

I'm not necessarily saying that everyone should do mowing or basic services, but if you're gonna get into these big projects, just know that it will take a lot more time and attention from you to make sure the job goes smoothly.

Part of the thing I did want to address is that I actually have a weekend warrior crew. They are absolutely phenomenal with hardscaping. And they're harassing me to work today.

Just want to work Thursday, Friday, Saturdays and Tuesday.

They're just pretty much all Saturdays. But the accountant said since I pay the weekend crew really well, that I'm basically losing all profits.

My biggest concern with projects, and it's not a matter of whether or not they're profitable. It's actually a matter of the time of the owner is spent all on that.

Again, I'm not saying that projects or large jobs are bad. You can make a lot of money, especially in very skilled niches of the industry. You can make a lot of profit.

I do know I spend way too much Time, Time on it. But as a trade off, I have, I don't know the exact percentage, but I know my close ratio on big projects is exceptionally high.

Yeah, like typically when we look at labor, we want to be making it look, I call it the rule of 25%, which is if I'm paying them $35 an hour, I need to be charging the customer four times that, which is $140 an hour.

Yeah, right.

It's going to make that, make that sense of 25%, which I'm guessing we're not at 140.

No.

Right.

So that's why like we got to raise on the projects. 70% of revenue is going to cost of goods sold, which is direct cost on every project. That is labor, materials and subcontractors, no overhead. That'd be no insurance, no fuel, no truck payments, no equipment, nothing. Usually that's around 20 to 30% of your revenue anyways. So high likelihood we're not making a lot of money.

So defaulting back to that same system is going to upkeep the top line revenue, but pretty much doesn't add any profit.

Like, I think you can make good money with the current setup in terms of having the weekend crew, you've to raise prices on it. But I am leery to build the whole business model around temporary labor like that because if all of a sudden they all like, hey, they find something full time and they're gone and they started their own thing, then we're in a bad spot.

I'm always trying to create systems in the business and one of the easiest ways to think about systems is just.

That you're trying to create a repeatable.

Outcome over and over and over again. And how do you do that? How do you create systems? You simplify and standardize every single part of the job.

Yeah. So I just like raise prices dramatically.

Projects.

If you're, especially if you're passionate about, like if that's what you love, just make sure it's a profitable part of the business and then that extra money will be able to pay for someone like Josiah to be able to manage the mowing better. Because right now the mowing crew is like just kind of like side dish because you're spending so much of your time on the big projects.

So yeah, this year that's exactly what's happened. So it's going to definitely be a learning curve. And then adjusting because that's the landscaping and really investing into the customers for a premium experience is kind of what I've really grown the most passionate about. Over the last two years, several things.

Number one, raise prices dramatically on projects, the big ones. We know that first off, we're kind of it's a temporary situation because we don't have the manpower. We're bringing this kind of temporary labor in. Secondly is right now we're not profitable on it. And if your accountant's saying that usually accountants are like pretty conservative. So like if he's saying like, hey, you're not making money because you're paying them so much to do this, jack the prices up, you know, your close ratio is really high. Then it's a matter of, well, if we're going to bring our close ratio down, we don't want to be spending a whole bunch of time on these estimates that we aren't going to close because we have raised prices. Because if your close ratio is going to drop from 80% to 40 or 50%, that means half the estimates we're doing, we are essentially spending time on and not getting any return, then it might be okay, well, why don't we charge for the estimate? So I would feel much better about saying yes, spend all the time on these projects, estimate estimates and project proposals. If you're making $300 on every single one. Right. It is a non refundable deposit. If you accept the job, it'll go towards the project, but it's non refundable. Otherwise I think you cut the amount of estimates down massively. So you don't. You save a bunch of time on tire kickers and then you actually have time to focus on the people who actually want the jobs. And the whole reason I think we should do that is because like right now, if I just look at gross revenue of 500,000, we cannot afford a admin person, you being out in the field, field or out of the field. And then consider even having someone like Josiah being able to do things throughout the day that are not revenue producing. Like it's just too much overhead. So it's like, hey, we can reduce the number of quotes so you have to spend less time putting stuff together. Then it's a matter of like I truly believe the ad per and admin person. You already have like a couple weeks into it red flags.

Yeah, I understand that you might not enjoy doing the admin work and answering the phones and answering emails.

I get it.

However, you got to make sure that the business can actually afford to hire an office person.

I thought admin hires would be easy than field labors. And I was so wrong. It's so wrong.

Way hard. I thought the same thing. Now, like, I'm a big believer. It's the exact same thing. You're still gonna have churn. They still need management, they still need metrics, they still need one on one calls, they still need retraining, quality control, all of that.

There's a lot of expenses that go into an admin person that's working for you. I usually see home service businesses spending between 10 and 15% of their revenue on the cost of having an admin person. That includes the rent, the util utilities, the Internet, their wages, the taxes, everything that goes into having an actual office space can get very, very expensive.

You're spending most of your time on admin.

Yeah.

And so at a $500,000 business, which.

Last year I will say was not the case, but that's the issue.

I think you're spending more time managing her than just doing the work yourself.

So that's kind of why I was starting to question having done it before. So I think you're probably right.

Some people, if they don't want to.

Do it, they would rather lose money but just not not do it. And some owners are successful doing that. It's just like, I hate it so much. Even if I'm going to lose more.

Money, I will delegate it off.

What we could do potentially say, okay, Wednesday is going to be your admin day. The whole day. All you're doing is catching up on email, phone calls, voicemail, etc. Sending invoices, sending estimates, all that good stuff. It's a matter of looking at every single one of these tasks and say, how can I just create a system around it? So for example, the phone calls. Okay, which ones need to be addressed right away? Probably emergency customer service service stuff. Does a lead need to be today? Well, in the perfect world, yes. But it doesn't need to be done in the next five minutes. Like, do I need to pick up the phone? No, I could have it like push one for customer service, press two for sales. The sales one goes to like, hey, leave a message and within 24 hours we'll have an estimate to you.

Is that like a software I need or what?

What phone service do you have now?

T mobile.

And is. Is it like just a cell phone number? Basically, so you probably could contact them and just be like, hey, I want to create a VoIP, it's voiceover IP. So where it's basically going to split people based upon customer service. Ve that's just one system though. For phone calls, for example, with email, you can Create all sorts of filters. If you create a filter that says any email has the word unsubscribe and just put it in my spam folder, you will cut out 80% of your email like that.

For emails, I actually built what's called the Client Writer Pro GPT where it writes almost identically to me so I can bang out emails really fast.

I think Dalton is a little distracted when he's trying to create all these very complex systems in the business.

He overthinks a lot of stuff. He makes a lot of stuff a lot more complicated than it needs to be.

Honestly, the best way to create systems, as I've already stated, is simplify and standardize.

There's probably realistically five to ten emails a day that you actually need to address. It's the other 50 that are like random vendor stuff, receipts, spam, people trying to contact you for marketing, all this other garbage. You can filter tons of that out.

Most of that is right now. But yeah, so I would say 5 to 10. You are spot on about of daily emails.

By having all these moving parts when it comes to every aspect of the business, we actually fail to do the simple and basic things that actually move the business forward. All of his time and energy being spent on all these complex things he's building could actually hurt the business.

And so that's why I think, like, if you literally had one day a week where everyone just knew that that's the day they get their estimates from you, that's the day they can contact you, that's the day you respond back to emails and estimates and phone calls. And in the voicemail you literally tell them like, hey, if you want a new estimate, fantastic, we'll get that to you within 24 hours. And then if it's a longer project, I'll make sure I'll get you on the schedule for next Wednesday. We're going to eliminate probably one out of two people that even want an estimate for projects because we're asking for the fee up front, right? Then it's a matter of, okay, if we can reduce your admin time by half because you're getting less estimates, can we then create systems around these other things so we don't have to have that person.

I know she put in two weeks to come here and everything. So it just makes me feel even worse. That's kind of where forcing personal feelings aside is going to be mandatory and able to actually follow through and not make it an even worse situation.

Then you could say, okay, Saturday is, I'm with the weekend crew.

Yeah.

I'm going to make sure the projects are done correctly. I'm going to make sure they're managed because now these are high ticket items. I'm making a bunch of profit on them. I can afford to spend that Saturday working with just them.

Friday, I'm also going to have to because that's our prep day. So they're not doing all the grunt labor.

Got it.

Okay. So Wednesday, admin day. Friday and Saturday we got project management. So that's what the big crew. Then we got Monday, Tuesday and Thursday that now you can actually be out in the field. Now what's going to happen is this. We're going to save $2,500 a month on her wages. We're going to save half of your admin time. I think over the next month you could cut out half your admin time, getting you to be able to work in the field for two days a week. I believe that alone will bring in $5,000 extra revenue to the business. Now we're talking about $7,500 a month that we are difference.

And now because I'm doing the high.

Jobs and everything, you're gonna raise prices on those too. And you're gonna collect $300 per estimate. So let's just say we do 10 estimates a month. That's three grand. Now we're at 10 grand extra a month. Then let's say we're raise prices on these projects, let's say by 15 or 20%. Okay. We're literally gonna add 15,000amonth in revenue to the business just by doing those things.

Yeah. So I need someone that I trusted and would listen to to kind of reaffirm and show that in a different light for me, which is kind of exactly what Mike did.

Cause like right now you already know that two of your team members are weak enough to her. You'd probably let them go if it wasn't for all the other stuff.

Also. Yeah. Say the one is Sean. He's the longest lasting employee, but he. It's like. What'd you say? Just like just the effort and all around care Isn't there most time he knows what to do.

Just he's just streaky.

Like it's sometimes good. Sometimes. Yeah, yeah.

It's just like sometimes he's right on point and then other times it's like he don't.

He don't care and just. Are you mostly managing the mowing crew right now then like where they're at, what jobs? Okay, got it.

I'm watching Them right now kind of been the workhorse in every company I've worked for. So I kind of do everything, put in about 50 to 70 hours a week, kind of just do what I need to do. You know, if I stayed hourly right now, I, I'm underpaid about four grand at the moment.

So the key thing with him I won was anything kind of mowing related and then like Hierarchy wise at 500,000.

Annual revenue, there's no hierarchy. You are the boss and then you have team members, right? And if you're gonna, if you're going to try to grow past like a million plus, yes, you're gonna have a mowing department manager, you're gonna have an office manager, you're gonna have a projects manager and an estimator, etc. But right now they still need to look to you as the owner and the boss and you as the manager. Which means you're still there every morning. You're still the one that they're going to come to if they have question about their paycheck and things like that.

But when it's still anything mowing related as Josiah, you're going to hold him responsible for that.

But like he is not their boss, right? When you grow a lot larger, you can put hierarchy in place. But right now we can't afford it right now. We need to, if they have a problem, they're still going to come to you. And you're there every morning for team meetings, et cetera. At 800,000 plus we can start have a conversation around, okay, the mowing team, they start at a certain time and Josiah's going to handle that. But right now at 500,000, we, we need to be a manager. We got to keep our hands in the business. We need to understand where everyone's at, what's going on. And then on Josiah's end, like going into dispatch board at the end of each day, click, show stats, see the budget hours from each crew, divide that by how many clocked hours. There's your efficiency score.

And like I said, I don't like right now. I don't mind biting the bullet to try to get this company going to where it needs to be and headed in the right direction. But I also can't go into debt while I'm working 70 hours a week.

You know, just with how stretched I've been and overwhelmed he's kind of been. I guess the grounding part to a certain extent.

I've thought about starting my own business many times. I don't want the Headache. I'd rather just be kind of the second guy in, you know what I mean? Leave the headache to the owner.

But, yeah, having Mike kind of shed light on it from a different angle, it's like, oh, yeah. What I've started doing a little bit is exactly what he's saying needs to kind of become the default. So I am confident in that working out well.

But at the same time, I've been doing this 12 years, and. And this will be. If this doesn't work out, this will be my last lawn and landscaping job before I move on. So, yeah, I'm. I'm everywhere doing everything.

The big thing is, like, I believe when you take a crew of, say, five, and you take out the two lowest performers, the other three get just as much work done. They move faster. They don't have to have three guys in one truck. You put one or two, and all of a sudden, instead of getting 25 jobs done with a crew of three, they get 20 done with. With a crew of two. In my opinion, like, I would say the Josiah could probably take the entire mowing, everything, including even, like, now. Do you handle estimates at all for mowing? Yeah, like I just say, all mowing is all relegated to him.

That's what. Yeah, we're basically prepping, doing the computer stuff.

If the first hour of his day is maintenance and prep, the last hour of his day is estimates and scheduling.

Right.

With a crew of three guys, I think that's doable. Right. So if there's a mower that needs redone, blaze redone in the morning, whatever, great. If there's one or two leaves that came in the day, he's got to go drive, buy them, knock those out at the end of the day, and then schedule and dispatch everyone before he finishes up. So if we know, okay, all mowing is being handled by him, everything to do, everything that rhymes with mowing, from a lead coming in to the time that they're paying invoices, like, that's his responsibility. It's his responsibility at the end of the week to say, hey, what's our efficiency score? Budget hours divided by clocked hours. I happen to believe that if you take five guys that are currently working 200 hours a week in terms of clocked, I believe if you take that down to three guys and they're working 140 or 150 hours in the week, I believe you get all the same amount of budget hours done, immediately increasing your efficiency score by 20 to 30%.

So I'm now 20% admin. 20% sales, 60% in the field.

So anytime he's in the field, that's just money in the bank. If Dalton can figure out his admin side and get in the field more, I think it's not only going to.

Help the company by revenue standpoint, but by morale standpoint as well.

Then where would you say in my admin or I guess how much weight should creating systems hold? Because I say like the phone calls. Getting that voiceover IP gonna take some time. Getting the lead forms that really streamline everything, integrate with Zapier. Take some time. Time. Should I now try and prioritize that or make that My Tuesday focus is Tuesday's like systems and whatnot. Trying to streamline forward thinking.

Honestly, I think you're overthinking.

Okay, okay.

Does he just generally kind of think overthinking is.

Oh, he, he overthinking.

I'm an overthinker on that.

Okay. Okay, great. So we're on the same page. I don't like saying that.

That's a universal fact.

Okay, so this is the thing. You're overthinking it. Here's why. In one hour we could figure out the VoIP thing. Grassh would literally allow you to have a phone number and you split it to your existing phone line. We have to change anything with T Mobile. Right. And you literally just exist there. In order to be able to split phone calls based on sales and customer service. Instead of saying, okay, here's the 50 systems I need to create to make this better, just be like, okay, I know I'm going to let her go. And immediately you're going to find out where all the bottlenecks are. Like, okay, the phone calls, I can't actually be picking up five of them in a day. It's too reactive. Okay, great. I'm going to create the VoIP thing. It is literally a one hour operation. And then it's a matter of like, okay, data entry, like, example. I agree. There's a ton of products you're going to create a spreadsheet on. That is a one day. I'm going to lock in and just do this, knowing that as the business grows, your role will change.

Yeah.

So if someone's stuck at being a laborer, they'll never get out of the field. They'll never go out and do focus on estimates and then the business will stall up against 3, 400,000. On the other hand, when you're needing to be a manager from 200,000, 800,000, if you're over Here in architect land, you'll never actually get through 5, 600,000 annual revenue because they need a, a manager. They need someone to actually think about these things. And no admin person is going to actually create the systems for you. This is going to require a manager to step in and take all the skills you have around training systems on these operational tasks. That will get you to 800,000 and at that point you'll hire a great admin person to cover your butt there so you can focus on architecting the business.

Would you say it's worth adding calendarly to the website or keeping that like us being able kind of filter, assess and then send it? Or with the deposit requirement, they kind of weed themselves out on the website.

This is the part where you're going to overthink a little bit. But I like your headset. Because what I like is like on the form you say choose what services you want and they click something like retaining wall and you have it. Then it says, okay, here's the calendar link and you know you're going to charge for it. That's down the road though. I don't want to say that because I literally know that will be a month long project.

I just thinking, yeah, with the calendar.

Don'T worry about it. Have the form, you know, within 24 hours you're going to look at the scope of work and determine whether or not you're emailing them a L to calendly to pay and schedule an appointment. Or is this something I can literally drive by tomorrow, Monday or Wednesday and knock this out in ten seconds. Okay, yeah. Like I think in general, I'd run this if I was you is like run things by Josiah when you think you're overthinking something. Because if he can't understand it, I think we nix it. We're running a $500,000 business and you have the brain of a $4 million company.

Exactly.

Which is great. It means you can probably run a business that size and be okay. But right now we're is that it needs an operator. It does not need an architect. Someone's like literally thinking about these massive systems, like genius stuff, like all the forms, like I'm going to link it all together and subcontract. We're running a $500,000 business.

Yeah, we'll get there, but we need.

To right now we need an operator. Right. So I've always said like from 0 to 200,000 you need a laborer. Somebody just goes out and works hard. From 200,000 to 800,000. You need a manager.

Yeah.

Someone who can manage people. Well.

Literally what I've been saying I am horrible at, honestly, I can paint a picture.

I can do 800,000 is architect. Architect. That's why I believe if you fall back into the role of a manager, you'll get to 800,000, be able to hire a full time admin and then you will be able to focus on what you're probably really good at, which is the architect stuff like building the business and the systems and all, we're just not there. And a lot of times it's like, well, I want to be working on the business. I want to be an architect. Great. You will be just if you do it out of order, the business will get messed up. Yep.

And that's what's happening.

And so you're overthinking like the architecture of the. It's like, no, no, we just need to move the rock. We don't need to think about a crane and all this other architectural stuff. Like just focus on moving the rock. Being a great manager right now, trusting Josiah on things, taking the admin stuff yourself, having these systems like a manager has systems. They look at each of these things like, oh, I can make this better, I can make this better. Oh, I can make this better. Like every single aspect. That's what a manager does. And I know it's like, man, I thought next this year was the year to jump to that. I'd say if you take one year and just focus on being a great manager on all these tasks, you'll be able to get to the 800,000 and then you'll be able to focus on that, that stuff.

Okay.

So Josiah's still doing the mowing. That's kind of where we're trying to work out the fine details. And basically how can we take stuff off of his plate currently to put him in a position to handle 100% of the lawn mowing, because before it was him doing like 70, maybe 80% percent of it. But like any new leads that would come in, the admin would take would pretty much get all the information set up to where. When P gets out of the field, he's basically just looking at the calendar. Cool. I need to go look at these three houses, adjust the price and send it out. And then he was doing all of the maintenance. So trying to make it to where. If he does get out of the field at 6pm or something. Something. By the time he showers and eats, he's actually in a position to be able to call the customers back at a reasonable time. Because I've noticed usually around 7 o', clock, that's when the odds of someone answering start to decrease. And then by 8 o' clock you're basically not getting anyone to answer unless you've pre planned that phone call. This week we've tried making it to where basically the mowing crew is in charge of doing all of their maintenance that Josiah's previous been doing and trying to separate it out to where on Monday they might have tasks 1, 2 and 3 and then Tuesday it's 4, 5, 6 and just kind of breaking it apart. So the mowing crew has five to ten minutes of morning maintenance and checks. And then the two days that Josiah mows, he basically does those same five days worth of tasks just split amongst two, which should remove about an hour and a half or so per week from Josiah's schedule. And that would put him at pretty much 95% of everything lawn mowing related and then 5% I intentionally want to keep just so I'm in the loop and know what's going on.

General labor rate went from 85 to $100. And then our landscape labor rate went from 100 to 120. And then on the jobs that I know that I am going to be on full force doing, then I basically do whatever the percentage is. If I know that four guys going to be on the job, then a quarter of those labor hours are going to be $140 an hour. So across the board, 15 to $20. And then my personal labor rate went up an extra $40 per hour. Proved to myself why I'm worth that. When I ripped out six shrubs in five minutes and it took another guy the same five minutes to rip two out, I'm like, okay, yep, I'm definitely worth 140 an hour if I'm here the entire day. So far, haven't had any issues with those increased rates, but still very new. So time will tell on that. But either which way, 120 for landscape labor rate will not be changing.

I pretty much gave her the opportunity to to choose if she wanted to just cut ties completely or pretty much I would be willing to pay her $200 a week and pretty much cap it at that and then use her as just kind of like an aid to whatever I might need that week, whether it's making 20 phone calls, coordinating the logistics of landscape jobs. If we get a big surplus of calls. The biggest underlying issue with that was the not being able to truly like monitor what's being done? Overinflated hours, just a lack of all round supervision. So that's kind of where I kept the focus of trying to remove her outright that Mike had recommended but not seeing that being the most feasible solution without hindering different aspects of the business. So I kind of looked as to okay, what was the underlying reason which Mike proposed this option and that all kind of came down to the financial side and then the added, I guess, difficulties to properly manage a remote administrative position. So this was kind of the best of both worlds in my opinion to where I'm controlling the amount of pay that she's receiving, but I'm also not being left entirely on my own. Say know that probably six weeks into doing the three days in the field, two days office, my body would get adjusted to the point point to where I could pretty much work 10 hours in the field followed by 4, 6 hours of admin work. But starting off I know that just the handful of full days in the field this year I am whooped by the time I get home, eat, shower and everything. So then to mentally turn my brain on and have to basically do a half day of office admin would be doable, but I didn't feel is the best decision and client retention and trying to just all around optimize everything. So that was pretty much her proposal and the mindset behind it kind of meeting a middle ground on what I thought would be the most practical and outright implementing exactly how Mike had said to.

The two employees are still with us. The week that Mike had came came out. The one that we're a little concerned about has started doing extremely good. Me and Josiah talked about multiple different times. We're like not really sure what happened, but if he was at like a seven or eight leading up to when my kid showed up and then the week prior he had dropped to a 4 out of 10. He's been steadily riding at like a 9 out of 10. So we're like all right, well he knows kind of where we stand with everything. So just kind of making sure that he knows what had happened basically. In short, letting emotions or more so taking out emotions on customer yards aren't isn't acceptable. No tolerance whatsoever and just yeah, I say so far no complaints really whatsoever. So kind of riding with that. And then the other employee has become significantly more consistent. Consistent with showing up. That was the other side of things with me. Going out of town wasn't really in a position to lose two people with three days left to try and replace that position. So it's kind of all right. We have to bite the bullet until we get back. So that gave was that eight working days where they both did extremely good. So we're like, all right, well, there's significant improvements over over the last eight days. Now we're in a position to get rid of you. We're just going to kind of bright it out. A real similar concept with the first employee where here's the line in the sand. You've been riding really close to it all year. If I hadn't gone out of town and we did as Mike said, you would be gone right now. But see a lot of potential, want to keep you. But here's the line in the sand. Know what, fans or butts and just kind of wait and see how it goes. But so far really good. Can't complain about anything. So really hoping that stays that way.