This Is Why Your Business Will Never Scale

Today we're talking to 10 home service millionaires that have scaled their business and they're trying to take it to the next level, and they're having some troubles and issues, and there's a bunch of questions about how do I scale, how do I hire employees, how do I train the right general manager? There's a lot of really good information from a whole bunch of different services from the green industry. Tree services, lawn care, landscaping, snow plowing. It's packed with information. It's one of my favorite Q and A sessions and ever. Let's go ahead and run the tape. Raise up.

Hey, Mike, how's it going?

Good, brother. How you doing?

Not too bad. So I'm. I run a tree service company, so I'm just curious what your take is on. You talk a lot about recurring customers. Obviously, tree service, if we're doing. Our focus is a lot on the tree care side of things, so tree trimming, however, the reality of it is if we're trimming your tree, we don't have to come back for about two years. So do you have any other guys you work with that. That you build some sort of recurring something out or. Not really.

I'm assuming when you say tree care, this is more like over a house, over a power line, etc.

Correct.

Okay. And what's your hourly rate for your team? Like, technicians paying them right now, on average? Like, I know that there's arborists and all this about.

On average, It'd be about 30 bucks an hour.

Of the. Of the projects that you do, do how many of them do you think have other trees on the property that need to be trimmed more than once a year?

So that what we're focusing on is strictly mature trees, so not shrubs. So we're strictly focusing on the big trees that really don't need to be trimmed more than once every couple of years. So that's. That's the challenge.

Got it. So what I would recommend doing is trying to still convert them to a recurring annual tree trim. And the thing is. That's nice. Ray is on your first service with them, they're paying, I would imagine, on average, 1500 to $2,000. Yeah, like, they just paid you that. So it's the easiest downsell say, hey, by the way, if you just get on the schedule with us and pay for your first visit, and you do this on an annual basis, you can save 30% and it's 4.99 per year. You pay for the first one. Now, we'll be back in 12 months. But that prevents you from doing this every two or three years for 1500 or 2000. Right. And more importantly, you get priority into rescheduling because you know how it is. Everyone calls you when it's windy and branches are all over the place, et cetera. And so I would, I would bake in, you know the math better than I just did it there. But I would figure out what's the, what's the reduction of revenue you're willing to take in order to get them on an annual basis. And I would make sure that you're collecting at least a deposit on that first service. Don't be like, yeah, we'll put you on next year. Like, I'm, I need the money now. Because the whole advantage is you lock them in and you can't have that moving around. And then that gives you the flexibility around scheduling because you could do it whenever you don't have other jobs coming in.

Right. Yep. Yeah, no, that, that's actually a good idea. I never really thought of it that way. That makes a lot of sense. The only downside, obviously, is if we're coming out every year, if we're doing a smaller prune about 30% of the time, there's a certain level of that that makes it less efficient than if we do it every two or three years. Right. But the value of the known recurring work definitely adds value, for sure.

So the real value, Ray, is that you're able to schedule that recurring service whenever you want. And so you would not schedule it during the period of time when you can get other jobs for 3x the price. Because everyone's in the service after a storm.

Yeah.

Right. Because those customers are going to call you if there's a storm. Now, they're not because you just pruned their thing, their tree, two months ago, and they're taken care of. You now increase the capacity during peak season, that is after a storm, to make max dollars.

Yeah, that, that makes sense. Now, just a question on your. So on my quoting, I go out and look at each individual tree because every tree is different. Right. So you talk about systemizing your quoting and your quick quotes. That's really not possible in my case.

I.

Or at least in my head it is. Do you agree with that?

I agree. Specifically when it comes to emergency hazardous stuff, literally the angle of a tree could 3x the cost and it's high hazard. Right. So I'm a big fan of it. I think your pricing presentation, though, could really lean into the recurring side. So, for example, you say hey, to get this fixed, here's the. Here's the solution. On average, this tree is going to be trimmed every two years. So you're looking around $3,000 every two years. Now we do have this extra price. Extra. Another option. We come out annually. This reduces the work for us. We don't have as large limbs. Our cleanup is faster and therefore the price is faster. 33%. Not 50%, but 33% of what it would otherwise be. You increase total revenue. You're sorry, you decrease total revenue, but you increase lifetime value of the customer. Because right now you're just depending on them calling you back 100%.

And then the other question I have is I just got onto your P4P. I just heard about that end of the year, trying to figure out how to improve profits and so on. And I really think that pay for performance is. Is an awesome concept. I've never heard about it before. So I'm. I'm trying to implement that into. Into this coming season, starting March. Trying to, Trying to implement, implement that. The question is, this is not recurring work as in you're doing the same lawn every, every week. So I guess it's really. It just comes down to my quoting being extremely accurate and my time estimate and so on that. That's. Everything's custom, but there's really no way around that.

Yeah. First thing I would say when it comes to the trees that we see with P4P is I would probably use simple mode on the software. If you use it, because then they're just getting a percentage of revenue. Because budget hours are not as important when it comes to your work. Like you're quoting. Revenue is very much attributed to how long the jobs can take. You have tree chipping, et cetera. But like. And then also you just change the percentage based upon the level of the arborist or the person on the ground, etc. Because you can just. It can. The software will make do all the math on the back end. I apologize, what was your actual question? Just summarize it real quick.

I was.

Yeah, just asking how P4P would work. Like, basically it's, it's. It's. My. My quoting is all custom. So. So the P4P accuracy. My quoting just needs to be extremely accurate. That's basically what it comes down to.

What you could do, Ray. Like on simple mode, they're just getting a percentage of revenue, right? So like, yeah, there's gonna be jobs they crush. There's gonna be jobs that take longer. I would probably pad the ones that Go way longer. Assuming I'll ask you this question, are there times jobs go like three times longer than you expect?

There's like two of those per year. Like that's very rare. Typically at. Right in the ballpark.

Yeah. Yeah. So then I would just probably, if you really wanted to put a cap for them, like hey, if it goes twice as long or like literally it goes way and it's my fault, I'll step in. But I can count on one hand how many times I've ever stepped in on projects that went rad. And usually those are projects we had no business doing. Like, honestly. Because if I can't accurately bid it, I shouldn't be doing the job. Yeah, yeah, but, but that stuff goes wrong. And so you, you could just honestly tell them like hey guys, if it's an estimator problem and we're double anything above that, I'll step in and I'll like, you know, do a different percentage or something like that.

Yeah, no that's, that's, that's perfect. Yeah. Then I had another question in regards to. So we do tree surface from, from March through through to Christmas. Then what we've, what we do in the winter is land clearing for new development. Complete different set of equipment. In hindsight, not the best, possibly not the best setup. However, five years ago when we got into that as winter work, it was great and, and the market was, market was great. We did, we did well at it. However, the, the market has completely died off. Just for example, we, and two years ago we did 1.2 million in the land clearing over the winter and 400, 400 grand in tree service the, the rest of the year. Now this, this past season we did 600 grand in tree, 500 grand in the land clearing over, over the winter. So that market has completely tanked. And obviously you can imagine my equipment overhead and so on. It's kind of putting me in a really bad spot at the moment. So I'm just curious what your take is on that.

Yeah, my take is that I never want to tie myself to new developments because that's a boom and bust cycle.

Right.

So you had 20, 21, 2022 free money coming along. People are just land clearing like crazy. I want to be tied to be able to serve a high net worth individual because they're going to be insulated from those events. And so that's where the tree care, why it's been more steady because everyone needs a tree trimmed. They don't need them removed unless they're building right So I would say the challenging part is now you have all the equipment and the assets. And I will also say this, Ray, I think that if you spent a year focusing on the recurring side and were able to start figuring out how do I get 30, 40, 50% of my one time jobs to convert into this recurring service? You, you use that as a way to sell enough work to fill January and February over the course of time. That might take a year or two, but then you give you the comps to pull the plug out on the land clearing.

I, I, and that's kind of, actually I'm kind of making steps to go that direction as well as I sold out some equipment, bought another bucket truck to get a second crew going. So I'm projecting doing a million in tree service this year versus, versus the 1.1 I did total last year, including both, which the headache of both if I can just focus on one, so much better.

Yeah, yeah. And that's, that's the part that never shows up on a piano and that is like focus and attention. And I think that the part that, you know, I can't quantify for you is that if you did just rip out the cord even without having the back end, I bet you do 1.3 million in tree service if you just didn't even think about that this year. Right. And so there's this margin of cost of just attention. And I don't want you to do that because like I know you have fixed expenses, et cetera. But I think if I was you, as I head into this season, the upcoming one, I would convince myself that I don't need to do it again next year by starting to sell the recurring services. And you're gonna sneak it at first, like it's gonna be so awkward. You're gonna 10 to 15% of the conversion. But over the course of time, I think you can get that to 30, 40%. And if you do that all year, that's, that's where you do the work. January and February, you do all the people that signed up for the recurring service then and you have that confidence, pull the plug on that bad boy. Think that alone will give you so much more mental during January, February, let's say it slows down. Great. That's when you're planning for the year. That's when you're doing acquisitions of, of, of equipment. That's when you're focusing on marketing. Like the business will do better.

Yeah. And I shouldn't be running around like a chicken with my head chopped off. Trying to find lantern work that doesn't exist. Competitors going out of business, it's that bad. So. 100, 100 agree. I think that's the, that's the right move. And my focus on, my focus has been on unreasonable hospitality the last couple years which has really grown the tree service side, I think the recurring work would really blend into that. I just never really considered that. But I think that could be, I think that could be a really great model if we can build that out.

Yeah. The reason that model works so well for one time projects and it's very common for people not to think about it is because you don't have to sell it because they just paid 2,000 or $3,000. Would you like this done again for 500? Like why would you not say yes? They just. If you sell it to people who've already said yes. So I will say this real quick. I would do it on the initial estimate. That's the easiest way because you're already making the estimate. Get really good at doing after the job is done. Because when they just paid you 3,000 and you tell them why don't you just do it for 500 bucks a year? And you say in the estimate this is a service that is required every 24 months. So in their brain they're already doing the math. Okay, that's about, let's call it 1500 bucks a year. Oh, you can do it for significantly less. So I would do it in two different spots. And whether or not you're on the job site, I would incentivize your crew on the upsell rate if they do it. If you're, if you're doing all sales on the upfront. I'd push hard there though. I'd do both. I think you'll crash.

Excellent. I will. I'll have to put a lot of thought into that, how I'm going to do that. But I think that's, I think that's a fantastic idea.

Cool. Yeah. One, one quick thing on the estimate I would put in the line item, which service tree software do you use?

Arbor Gold.

Cool. Yep. Okay. So in the estimate line description I'd get in the habit of putting how often services are required, estimating so every one year, two years, three years, et cetera. To your point, most of the time it's two years. Great. That becomes part of your estimate description so that in the next line item you have your pitch. Because now it comes something like people, people take it as truth because everything else in that estimate is what you've stated is on their property and they know that to be true. So when you state all the type of, the type of tree, the hazard it's causing, what you're going to be doing to solve the problem and then you say this service is required every 24 months for this specific situation, they will assume that is true and then they will do the math in their head on the price that you then given the next line item, that's a significant discount.

Now just a question that. Because obviously my competition isn't doing that. What's a client's perception on that? I see that. I look at.

I know what you're saying. It's the same reason, it's the same reason you go to the store though and it's buy two get one free. Do you think the third one didn't cost them anything? Yeah, it's a, it's a volume discount. Right now I'm not going to tell the customer that. I'm going to tell the customer, hey, when we first come to a property and leading it to unreasonable hospitality, get this one, we take a video of the property, we make sure it's up to our standards, we do a risk analysis of the tree, we make sure everything is put into your account. That takes us a lot more time than in the future. We come back and we don't have to do those things. We have the video and we knock it out. We don't have to do a risk assessment, I don't have to come out and be an estimator. All of that is so much more cost effective for us. And we can send our crew out whenever instead of at a certain time when you need to be home.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good point.

Thank you.

You got it. I would love to hear Ray, how that turns out. I know it'll be a little bumpy at the beginning to kind of figure out your processes but I really believe you can nail that one down. I've seen this happen even at H Vac and like electrical and like what typically is seen as one time jobs, they're able to figure that out. So good job man. It's time to lock in before the spring rush. And when it comes to locking in, you want to be able to rely on something to hold your business strong. Just like this chain. That's why at Homeworks we have the logo of the chain because it's a three. Three links in every home service business, sales operations and admin. So before the spring rush gets super hot and you have leads coming in like crazy, make sure you're set up inside of a software like Homeworks that can take your business to the next level and allow you to scale. This spring, go check out today. Go to home. DOT works. VAL is up.

So here in the Central Valley we don't really have a fourth quarter collapse. It just work all year round.

There's pros and cons. That's why you also have so much demand. Right. Or so much competition. That's why everyone has a mower. Right?

So yeah, exactly. So I mean and that's kind of where I was heading. Is that so my brother here, he, he focused on horticulture, he majored in horticulture plant science. So we were able to kind of offer more of a premium service. So the issue is that you know, we have two owners and so we're trying to define our roles. Up to this point I've been more of the sales GM more so to speak. And so there used to be three of us. So now he's, he's kind of taking more of the operations role. However, with background and a couple of other trainings we've done, our market continues to pull us back in for projects. And because we've been doing recurring for this whole time and last year due to some inefficiencies we didn't hit our projections cuz we're, we were on pace to hit about 750, 800 and we topped out at 670. We're trying to figure out what's the best approach for him that likes the horticulture side. I even watch your Max Floyd stuff since he's kind of the same mentality about hey I'm a horticulturist type of deal. So the mentality is like what would you suggest? Because he wants to stay in the field doing construction projects. We did Aquascape, you know, training, same message you do system simplify, don't change the system. So, so it kind of goes in correlation with what you know, we hear from you. But as far as like how would you kind of do that role? As far as like the stage that we're at as far as him continuing to do operations, operation managing management and possibly even like, but not have to worry about like the crews out and kind of all that set up, you know, because he wants to stay out doing projects.

Yeah, like I think that it sets up for a good full time GM size. Right. So you can easily get to 750 to 1.5 using your model and usually I don't like people in that size but because you're both your brothers and you're. I'm assuming you're co owners. Yeah, yeah. Like neither of you are going anywhere. So that's where I'm a little okay with having someone being fully over your operations. And you know they're not going to take your team against you or do something crazy. What you could do is you could be sales, give you operations and then as you grow, like, who's doing your admin right now?

We actually, I've been doing it for the last few years. We. We have college student that's going to start up in a week. In a week she's going to like, we've been doing ChatGPT to create SOPs, taking what's in your book, the MIC AI and all that stuff, converging it into something we can hand over to her and then have her do that and then the bookkeeping. Actually, I was going to schedule a call with your firm to see if we can kind of just hand that off. So that way it's not on here either.

Yeah, like, I think just keep in mind, if you said you're going to 6:70, I wouldn't be saying, hey, operations manager, you hopping in as sales full time and then having like an assistant person, that. That gets very unprofitable very, very fast. However, you are setting yourself up to get past a million. And so I would just set the expectation for both of you that, hey, for a season, like maybe the first three to six months of this year, we are sold out in the field and we're doing labor, revenue. But the goal is that over the course of time we've delineated what sales is, what operations is and what admin is. I would focus a lot of your time right now and this need is an hour. What are the tasks that both of you are doing right now that are sales, operations and admin? And the eventual goal it might be a year away from now is that Val only does sales, brother only does operations and then admin. We've delegated all of that and it's going to take you a bit of a time time, Val, because you're not ready for that, like tomorrow. Yeah. But as long as you know that's the direction and then what you can do is you could just put like if you put on a whiteboard, you can put your name next to the things that you guys are doing. Because right now I guarantee you it's kind of you doing everything right sometimes sales and you are up in operation doing equipment, like, but you Want to list off every single thing, like training the team, hiring, interviewing, moving equipment, moving materials, ordering materials. Like that's all operations. Boom. Right now you're doing some of those tasks. But the goal is to eventually get it to where there's more clarity. Like Val, Val, Val, Val, Val. Under sales. Right. Under operations. Brother, brother, brother, brother, brother. Like that's eventually the goal, but for now you can just delineate what those tasks are and then move in that direction. Okay.

Yeah. Because right now, like we're both on the field still. We still do the recurring stuff. And so the other, the other thing too is that like we kind of took your model as far as like doing a recurring in a small town of 10,000 people. That's been our kind of bread and butter. However, this is where it becomes the other thing too is that we work with property management companies that pull us about, maybe about 20 miles away from where our locations at. That's where like in the grand scheme of things, we're kind of thinking like, would it make sense to have satellite locations? Kind of like you explained, just because there are markets for us there, because we know what the competition is there, where we know what's here. But that's kind of been the challenge is that sometimes we're like, like we had one customer that they didn't take no for an answer. We like drove up the price, you know, the commercial site, and we ended up charging about 40% of what we would typically charge for here because the drive time and, and so, so we know there's a market. But the thing is that we kind of appreciate what the fact that you're saying that you can't like jump the gun and skip steps. We kind of want to make sure that this is viable for us to copy here, you know, so right now that's the, that's the goal is to, for us to try to figure out how if in the long run, is it worth it? Because now we're at like you honestly, you answered all our questions right now because of the like real estate. He's looking into buying a three acre lot, you know, where he's going to build a house. And so we figured we can have a hub instead of our little central location here. And so a lot of stuff made sense.

Quick question. How much of your revenue is recurring right now?

Probably 95%.

Oh, cool. Because the alternative, based upon your market, you could technically make him a working GM at your current location, throw the thing into profit mode, and maybe next year does 750 or 780,000. But you don't buy more trucks, you don't hire more people. You just throw that thing into profit mode and then you go start another location 30 minutes, 40 minutes away. Because you're the sales guy. That's alternative. And I happen to believe that many times that will make more profit than you'd be like, okay, I'm going to be full time sales. He's going to be full time operations manager. I'm going to go get a big admin person and we're going to go to 1.5. Right. Like, do I think that's possible? Yes. And I told you that originally because it's going to be in a way easier because you're both together. I will also say next year you would make more profit if you just said, hey, you're throwing this thing into profit mode and we're raising prices on 95% of our revenue by 20%.

Right. And because, because, yeah, because we actually just raised our prices about a month ago. So we just did like. Yeah, we did that. And so how much percentage the goal, how much?

Raised it by 10%.

Across. Yeah, across the board.

It just could have done more. We could have done more, my friend.

You know what? We didn't have any pushback. So that's the thing, I'm telling you. Well, you know what's funny though is that like, so we took over our business from our dad, so we have the brand here that's been around for almost 40 years. So my dad got sick, we took over for him. And the issue is that, you know, like, stubborn older Mexican people, like, they don't like change. And so to kind of pull him out or push him away and not hurt his feelings, like, he kind of still had some say. And so we had never really started raising prices until maybe a couple of years ago. But now it's kind of getting to the point where like, yeah, we've just kind of put standard on our contracts too. Like we're raising our price yearly. Like, no if there. But. But the percentage is kind of like where we're trying to figure out what we can get away with and whatnot.

More is better. More is better, my friend. You know, it's funny. So I just left this turnaround, right? And. And they just raised prices last month too, by 10%. So you know what I had them do? We made a video together. They raised the prices again by another 10%, sent it to all their customers.

Well, you know what, the thing is that following you, the thing that we've learned is the math doesn't lie. Like that's kind of been like thing that's blown my mind. It's kind of like, you know, like when you're close minded to, oh man, you know I'm going to lose customers. Whatever our commercial stuff because they're a little bit more price sensitive. You know, we try to be a little more careful. But honestly like here in our area, the cost of living is, is pretty comparable to you guys up in Pacific Northwest. Yeah. There's hardly any pushback. You know, like I kind of send a notice saying hey, we're effective immediately. The QuickBooks thing, like hey, we're going, we're raising our prices. I didn't give an explanation. This is what it is. And they all like accepted it. And they're like, all right, you know, like we understand, you know, like our, our, our general. No, our auto insurance just went 200 times up like percent. And so like so I'm like, so, so I kind of explained to them like afterwards like, yeah, like it's this cost of living in California. Like you know, we're getting priced out of being here. Yeah. So I kind of figured that we'll probably have to look into raising prices in the near future also like just to kind of push it.

Yeah. If, if you can raise prices by 15% twice over the next few years, that business will do $900,000 in annual revenue without buying more truck turner or having more equipment. Right. So that makes that, that's why I talk so much about doing the multiple locations. Because Val, you staying at that location in a way pushes it past that size of business because you're a salesperson. So you staying there and focusing exclusively on sales, you will need to go into the GM plus size. Okay. And that, that will keep many people from raising prices because you're just funneling more revenue. You're buying more trucks, you're hiring more people and you stay in this growth engine. So regardless of whether you do multiple locations, I don't care, just raise your prices and make more money. And it's easier to do that when you are also trying to grow the business. That's why everyone says like I'm trying to grow and I'm trying to raise prices. Like no, no, no. You're either raising prices in profit mode and you're bringing down your close ratio or you're optimizing for more closes, higher close rates by not raising your prices and buying more trucks and getting more equipment.

Yeah, well, and then the last thing just so just So I. So we understand. Is that so, like, you know, and that's. We actually just had a conversation yesterday about like defining our roles a little bit more and trying to kind of have that. But I know that like, because we've invested in the construction aspect. We've. I mean we went to Chicago last year just to do the Aquascape training. I'm not as passionate about that as he is. And so I know that that's his kind of forte and that's what he wants to do. So we're both on the field, but he wants to stay in the field doing the construction part of it. We'll have to get like a GM though at some point, right. When we're ready to kind of take over the. Am I understanding that right? What you kind of suggested, the model

I pitch is that the working GM is the only person that is managing. There's not like a secondary person unless you go higher, which is the GM plus or the full time GM route. I will say this. 95% of your revenue is recurring. Yeah, yeah. So this is a new thing you're doing realistic.

We've been contractors, licensed contractors for four years. We've done projects before, but when we kind of started understanding the fact that the recurring was safer, especially with all the, you know, recession stuff and all that, we kind of doubled down on that and grew all of our recurring stuff. We would do on and off projects for our commercial customers, you know, so we always had stuff like that that they would call us in, doing upsells and doing all that stuff. But we've never really marketed into the construction part of it. But it is something that, you know, like, like I said, that's why I

thought this is a brand new business pretty much. So I'm okay with doing that. But like, hey, I just want to enjoy life and I want to scratch the itch of doing projects and Aquascapes. Cool. I am not going to stand the way of that. But let me be very clear. You will make less money. And so I'm okay with that as long as you know, you are, you are sacrificing money by taking something that's working that's 95% of your revenue. And you're going to go focus on where 5% of your revenues at, actually 0% of your revenue is from. You're building a new business.

Okay, that makes sense.

And I'm not against it. Right. I just, I want to be very clear. Like I'm just trying to think about the financial side. And if you have plenty of cash set aside, and you feel very protected. And you're like, hey, we're going to raise price and all the recurring, and then we're also going to do the project side separately and because we really love it. Awesome. There's no one that's going to build aquascapes like you. And finding general managers for like that down the road or replacing you in the business is going to be very, very difficult. And I see a lot of people build the 3, 4, 5 million dollars business doing things like that, realizing it's the golden handcuffs because no one else can replace them. Whereas right now, I can almost guarantee you, if you guys bailed for the weekend, your crew could probably run the maintenance pretty easily. Yeah. And so you just raised prices by 10% of that on all your customers and no one left.

Right? Yeah, I know. So we have people that seem like we're waiting for that.

You just pushed a button. You just pushed a button and you made $60,000. You can't do that with projects. Right. So I would only do it if you're like, hey, I love this, and I want to build this for me and for what I enjoy doing. And if that's the case, what I would say is, let's not make it a business. Let's actually keep it a passion by only doing it during the off season. Now, you don't have much of an off season, but there's certainly months where it gets slower. And so if I would give you permission to keep your crew busy using projects that organically come your way. So you're not spending much money marketing, you're not building a new website, you're not retraining your team. You're just going to do those type of jobs when you're slow.

Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, that's why we're here.

Let's go. Good job, man. Crush it real quick. Before we continue with the episode, I want to introduce you to home service web design. If you are a home service business owner and trying to get more leads and drive more traffic to your website with great search engine optimization, you'll definitely want to check it out. It's flat monthly fee will allow you to grow your business and most of our clients within 12 months, double the amount of lead they get from their website. All right, next up is Bo G. Gowering. Go ahead.

Yep, sounds good. Hey, how's it going, Mike? I love watching your videos. Unfortunately, you're my 1 2am in the morning bedtime guy, so don't take it the Wrong way. But, you know, my mind doesn't stop. It's just. I think everybody here knows what I'm talking about, so. But yeah, so my biggest thing is I've got unique situations, like we all do. Right. My problem that I have a bottleneck is I have three steps I need to figure out. How do you transition to the next step? Because my father just retired, you know, air quotation. He wants to retire with, you know, dealing with the same thing that Val was talking about, old ways versus new ways. So we've got, I think most of that squashed. My problem is, is that we're right at that stage in the last five years or so that we've grown from essentially 90,080, 90,000 a year to 1.4, and we're just like stuck right there. And the primary problem behind it is it's just two. It's me and Ray, my dad. And with the two of us, we're able to do it. But if I'm losing one, how am I going to keep that momentum? How am I going to keep that steam going? The reality is, is that labor pools suck. And so the best way to deal with that is benefits. Things you can offer, whatever it is, you can attract people to come in. But I mean, it's 2150 is the average in Washington state for a tech to come in. My problem is I say, okay, I need to bring people in. I need to bring them in at 1850 till I get them to 2150 worth of production. My margins are so thin, and they're not so thin that I can't weather higher wages. I just have to worry about bucking the current people I have and somebody else coming in at their wage or higher. And now they're gonna be like, well, wait a second, why aren't we getting that? I've tried to do a multitude of facet of things and how do I attract the right talent? How do I get the right people? There just isn't a age range between 25 and 40 of people that really just want to actually work. I'm not able to get new talent in. I'm not able to get people retained. I've wanted to offer 401k. I figured out how to get my system to do that. I'm just one person. And I feel like just being one person, being able to do like, I feel like six or seven people's job isn't enough anymore to keep up the business and keep up with it. So I almost feel like I naturally need to contract Find some new people and then try and reintegrate back into what I'm doing. But I don't want to lose my 95% of my recurring income that I have on contract. So if I shake the tree too hard, I can't produce the quality I've been producing, I'll start losing my recurring revenue. And if I don't shake the tree hard enough, I can't get to the next level. I can't get to where I'm trying to get, which I'm doing the systemizing, I'm doing the automating, trying to simplify and do just specific services. I'm trying to put parameters and frame it down. I'm really looking for some sort of guidance. But that's just one half of the business, right? And that's the business that I'm running. So the other story at the end of it is the construction side. We have a construction side that makes up the other part of the 1.3 mil. And then while there's projects going, that's doing a great job. But when there aren't projects going, the grounds care side is literally footing the bill to handle those jobs, get those jobs started. And they're in that vicious 90 to 180 cycle of payment, you know, because of prevailing wage and all these other things, right? So I'm really in like three vortexes spiraling each other. Which one's going to take us down the hole first? Right. Prices is there. I'm making 35%, bare minimum on everything I do. That's my margin. I don't try and target 10, 20, 30. I do 35% on everything I buy and I supply. I try to make sure that all of my wages that I make, I'm making three and a half times whatever my wage cost is for every job I do. So that's my parameters and I try to run on. So if it cost me $40 in labor, then it's 40 times 3.5. That's what my pricing is on the job is. Right. And so that gives for, you know, the one for paying the person not out of my pocket, one for going in my pocket for profit and the other for fudge factor issues. Problems have to give a discount because something gets damaged. Whatever. It's all factored into the math, you know, because the math doesn't lie. So cool.

So first off, I think just by the way, if you wanted me to drop by, feel free to reach out for turnaround show because I think we're going to be in your area next month. I will say this. You have a very inefficient labor source right now. The reason I know that is because the amount of revenue you're producing minus materials is probably about 70 to $80,000 per year per employee. Once you take out materials and you just look at direct labor. And so I don't think it's a pricing problem because you said you're charging essentially about 25 to 30% of every dollar you make is going to direct labor. But that can get completely skewed if only 50% of their day is actually producing revenue.

Yep.

And so I would. I would be looking very heavily at your budget hours and versus your actual hours and tracking that. Like, do you track budget hours right now? I know commercials, more difficult budgeted hours.

We are targeting that and doing that. I actually started using a software called Connecteam to try to help us track that. The clocking and clocking out and getting people used to that here recently.

So do you know what your efficiency score is by chance?

Bo?

So I don't have the efficiency score set up. I do have your book here, actually. You're good here. All of your books here, actually.

So, yeah, the thing that I would be tracking is efficiency score. The reason for that is because just based upon the math, if you're charging that per hour and you have that many employees, we should be doing more revenue. Especially because you have materials on the construction side. I would imagine you have about 55 to 60% efficiency score. If I had to like, just quickly do the math in my brain, I would imagine that's what you're at. And for doing commercial maintenance, I see those companies being over 90 pretty frequently because you're not stopping 20 times a day. You're stopping at probably two or three or four sites.

Right.

And so I would first track that and then I would the second. So I'll asterisk this. Second more important thing is the stance on the team. I do believe the way we talk about the team and we say words mean something. And I agree it can seem like there's no one out there. The fact is there are. It's just a matter of they're not coming to you. So the question becomes, so we can control this, what do we need to do to become the place they want to work? And so the immediate thing that all of us think of is money. And yes, that's the easy thing. Kind of like money when it comes to price for the customers. I guess if you move price, it's going to adjust if you move how much you pay the the team, it is going to change who the type and the quality of person you're attracting. So if we could somehow fix magically the efficiency and the profitability of the business, yes, we would be able to afford now 24 or $25 an hour and probably attract a different candidate to in the labor pool. The other side of it is, even if you offer 24 or 5, 24 or $25 an hour, would people want to work there? And this is the intangible part that becomes very difficult to detach from all of us personally is, do people want to work for you? Now, we will always clam onto the people that have worked for us for 10, 15 years, myself included, and we'll say, oh, because those people stuck with me, therefore I have the skill of a leader, when in reality that person might stick with you because they like it the way it's always been and they somehow jive with you, but they're not like 95% of other people that might not. And so sometimes it does mean adjusting our skillset as a leader and our temperament, the way that we are with the team and the way that we communicate with them to be able to attract a new, quote, unquote, new generation of workers that we have to adjust to. I will say once you figure out budget hours and efficiency score, that's where the money side gets solved, because you can now incentivize higher efficiency. Whether you do pay for performance, as I call it, or you simply just say, we are tracking budget hours versus clocked hours and your efficiency score at the end of the pay period is over this, you get this amount. If it's under this, you get this amount and you can create tiered structure. So that way the people have been with you for a long time. If they're so efficient and so good and so awesome at their job and they can make more. If someone new coming in is also incredible, has tons of skill, they don't have to feel bad because everyone knows what the pay scale is and it's a percentage of how quickly am I moving, how efficient am I without getting yellow slips, callbacks.

Exactly.

So I would really push in that direction. Like, what can we control? We can control paying them more. How do we pay them more? We do it based upon how efficient they are. How do I make sure that I can actually know how efficient they are? I got to figure out budget hours and clocked hours in every single site. And I think you're really close to that. It's just a function of probably doing a little bit of math and spreadsheet work. And if you do it on the back end, BO, without even telling them, I can guarantee you you will very quickly. It'll probably just reconfirm the thing you already. The suspicions you have in your brain of which crew members are crushing it and which ones are like doing half as much revenue as the others.

Right, okay. No, I appreciate that. Yeah. I actually created a tool called total cost of labor versus total cost of value. And so I actually have a tool that we've been using to track that. So when we take the amount of time what the person's PA and then we actually look at what the bill is versus what we actually can absorb and allow for. And so we actually do all of our billing that way now. So. So while I'm tracking efficiency, it's only done when we're creating the bill. That's why for now it's hard to track that because I don't know if you're familiar with it. We use Sage 50 software. It's a double entry system. It is extremely cumbersome and issue prone, but it's backable and defensible in court better than QuickBooks is. And since we have a multitude of pay scales that go from prevailing wage, non prevailing wage, we have to use that instead. So it makes it very difficult because it doesn't schedule any. So we have an outside scheduler and then so we have a disjointed set of working systems that make it very hard to pull the correct efficiency out except simply like you say, budgeted hours versus the actual hours done.

So how much rev, how much of your revenue, percentage wise, does prevailing wage play play into it?

So I would say on the construction side, it's approximately 70% of what construction brings in overall. The years tip one way to the other. Usually it's in the years when it's heavier on construction, It'll be like 60% of all of our revenue construction. And then 40% of it would be like contract revenue. But that's when we have 600 to 700,000 coming in just from construction. But we've had years where only 300,000 came in from construction. Then it was more 50, 50. And then of that 50%, probably 80% of it was prevailing wage. A lot of it. The prevailing wage is actually minimum wage and our guys make more than minimum wage already. So it all depends if it's, you know, like on an Indian reservation or it just depends on what construction we're Doing because we do a very unique installation of basically playground structures that is done essentially nationwide. And we're all. We're certified. Ray and myself are CPSI certified. And so therefore we get reached out by the producers of the playgrounds to come in and actually install it. Being certified and doing all that already. We've been doing that since 2005. So.

Yeah, so like, you already sound like you're tracking up numbers. If you're doing it billing, it's not necessarily a bad thing. You could do this. I'm not a huge fan of this, but like you could do where their pay scale changes monthly or quarterly based upon their last month or quarter of performance. I like it being immediate. That's why we do budget hours versus actual on every visit. But if you're doing large projects, like it's very difficult to do it to your point, because you're doing at the end of a big project. So you could do that. I have seen some large construction companies using P4P to do this. And that is essentially they just track it all at the end of the job they say, okay, great, that's done. And the quarter, we look at your entire quarter performance and next quarter your pay scale is based upon that performance. So that might be an easier method for you as well.

Okay, perfect. That sounds like a good opportunity. Thank you.

Chris is up.

Little background. Emerald Edge lawns. We just do lawn treatments, lawn fertilizations, weed control, aeration, OCD and that kind of stuff. In 23 going to 24, we went from a single operator to a GM model. Brought on an employee. She was a great employee, Great lawn care technician. Had some background on her. She worked for us through almost to the end of the season. At the end of the season, she took a job as a union electrician, which was her background 10 years previous before she got into trouble legally. So can't blame her for having to take on a better position. So going and we had a Great year in 24, going 25. We had a bad hire in the spring and it really wrecked us. We had about two, two and a half months. Finally had to let that employee go after he couldn't pass a pesticide test. Went for another two months looking for somebody, couldn't find anybody. Finally found somebody in August. Our season ends in November. So the last three or four months, this technician was great. We he came with no experience. He was a roofer, gutter guy. So used to working outdoors, but came on, he was great. So we labor has always been our. As we've grown. Labor has always been our, our hang up.

Attracting it, Chris, or retaining it? Which of the two?

But okay, so first attracting. So kind of my first question is, whenever we advertise, our compensation is on point, if not a little bit more premium than when we do it. So taking compensation out of it, what's the biggest factor actually determines to get high quality technicians apply in the first place? So we get indeed ads, we'll get 40, 50, 60 responses. And really almost nobody's qualified. You know, I think I did 30 or 40 interviews in person interviews last year. I took some of your advice about pre qualifying them and even pre qualifying, you know, we were getting nothing of, of any kind of value, of any kind of experience or really the gentleman I did hire was kind of the, he was reliable, great guy. Just did not have the smarts to pass the pesticide test, the state test.

Right. So you're saying you're, you're, you're getting a whole bunch of applications and they're not even, this is honestly probably a job.

I mean, worried about them driving my trucks. Like the people that came out, interviewed showing up and beat up pieces of, you know, equipment, you know, in their vehicles. You know, sometimes they say, you know, if you want to know how a guy's going to take care of your piece equipment, look at his personal piece of equipment. Do you want to know how he's going to take care of his, your yards? How's he take care of his yards? You know, these were, these are some rough characters that we were able to even get applications from.

Yep. So I do think there's a job ad problem, like the actual job posting, mostly because there's no reason to someone apply if it's clear that you are not going to be hired if you don't have a pesticide license. Now I'm assuming though, correct me if I'm wrong here, Chris, did you essentially put that as a preferred thing eventually?

Oh, no.

First 90 days you have to be licensed. If you don't have existing license, first 90 days on the ad, you have to get licensed within the first 90 days.

Got it.

That's why the other gentleman lasted three months.

Yeah, he only missed 30 questions.

The first time he took a test, he missed 34. I told him, take it again, take it again right away. You just know what the test was. Take the study material, do the zoom meeting again, go through the four hour online thing, take test again while he dragged on, drag it on. And I finally went like, Brad, you gotta pass it this week. Yeah, Take it online now. And he missed like 42 questions. He got worse the second time.

Oh, man.

And I'm like, hey, you know, your 90 days is Thursday. I'll keep you on a week after that. So I actually can. A little bit longer.

You're.

But you have to find something, you know, a week from Friday, 10 days from now is you're going to be a last day.

So to get the 50 or 60 applications, how much did you spend on Indeed?

Maybe 200 bucks. 300 bucks?

Yeah. So right now you're. Let's call it cost per lead for a minute, right? Your cost per lead is about three bucks. I want that to be 50. But we're going to reduce the amount of people getting through. What you have done is the equivalent of putting out a Facebook ad that says, like, hey, I will give your first lawn for free lawn service for free. Yeah, you get a ton of customers. Not great candidates. They're all customers. Yeah, exactly Right. And so the same thing is happening around your job ad. And so when you're spending three to five dollars per quote lead applicant from Indeed, I almost can guarantee they're not going to be good quality. The same way if I told you, if you're in three to five dollar customer acquisition cost or cost cost per lead, you'd be like, probably not great quality. I can assume that with Indeed. And so what I would do, Chris, is make it much more stringent in terms of your requirements. It's not like a recommendation. It's not within you required to have it. And if you really want to, you've required to have it for the past year. Now, is that going to be reduced 95% of people? Yes. So let's assume then that we have to pay 20 times as much. 20 times five bucks is what, $200, right. $100 cost plead. That's where I'd be looking. And I will also say this, Chris, if you. Excuse me, sorry, if, if, if labor is the actual problem of the business and getting 60 candidates cost us 200 bucks, I would just be asking, is it worth 2,000 to solve this problem? And the answer is yes.

Yeah.

And I believe that if you would increase the requirements on the application and then you spent 500 to a thousand and you increase the cost per applicant to 100 or 150 or 200, you'd get better quality candidates to work with and then you'd feel better about interviewing them, et cetera.

So how's that increasing the cost per lead on Indeed? Does that then as recruiting or just gets in front of more people, you

just make a requirement. So like when they do the do the job ad, in the job ad I'm saying like you are required but also I'm making it where they have to actually answer a question that says how many years have you been a passive license? And if it's not above one, I don't even see it. It gets screened out.

Okay.

And so right now by saying hey, you have to get get applications license within 90 days, what you're saying is I will teach you anything. Just be green and show up. That's what they hear and that's why you get all kind of the everything. The same way if you said put a customer's ad out there and said it's a dollar 99 cents for your mowing service, you'd get a bunch of customers.

So along those similar lines is the one good employee that we did have left for a union electrician job. I mean you know, pension, everything that the green industry is not set up yet. That would be nice someday if we could actually figure that out.

Get that one.

So what's one recruiting retention lever completely unrelated to composition that you think the green industry is underestimating? So outside of compensation, what are we missing out on in the industry to keep our people in our companies?

A ladder to move up. So like the stages of success inside of the book is the key and that is you think about why do I stay at a job. I either want to make money today to provide for my family, think hourly wages or I'm trying to move up in the role and I'm willing to take a lower paying job for now. But I have a place I'm going and so I'm willing to hold my breath a little longer. You know, I put, I give the example of the seven stages in the book but I would take out every business, take those as a starting point and then just go make your own. What are the seven stages? Do you want to tie comp to it? Maybe we don't. We just give them a certificate, we clap it up, we take a picture, you put on social media and we tag them like that to most people is the non compensation that they're living for because no one else has ever tagged them on their social media in their, in a business setting with them in their uniform. All their friends are going to like it, they're going to share it, they get pride around it and now they get known as the person who works at XYZ lawn care business and they don't want to split with that brand. And so now you've created social hooks and you've created a culture where people want to stay and they want to grow inside the organization and then all the pride and I'm a stage one tech, I'm a stage two tech, I'm a stage five tech, I'm a stage seven tech. Oh, I unlocked a one time vacation for me and someone else to go to Mexico. That's cost you like maybe two grand. But that stage seven tech might take two years to get there. But now you start putting on your wall pictures of all the families have gone to, to Mexico because they hit stage seven.

Yeah. And we're already talking about a return bonus. I think that's one thing. We kind of talked about some other things seasonal is, you know, bringing people back and spending 1500 $2000 as a return bonus, you know, on that. So there's, there's that kind of thing. So last thing, kind of similar of all this kind of stuff. You've been out with a lot of other service industries, not only the green industry, but you know, H Vac and it's like that where do long companies lose the best candidates and our employees like along those same kind of lines of the retention where you see that we lose some that other industries don't.

Most of those two things either money today or promise a future tomorrow. So if we can do that, which is we have higher margins and we use pay for performance to pay them more today and then we give them a ladder and a place to move up into in the future. That's how we can retain them.

Thank you.

You got it everyone. Inside of the book, copy and paste millionaire. I Talk about the P4P system being so instrumental to be able to have the business run without you. Where your employees are paid based on how hard they're working. If this is something you're interested in, this is the perfect time of year during the off season to figure out the software that makes this possible automatically, within a matter of a minute per employee per day. You can pay your employees based on how hard they work and not based on how many hours they worked. So go check it out. P4psoftware.com the first 30 days are completely free, so you can make sure it's working for your business. Set up a call with lael, our support system here to be able to make sure it's implemented in your business correctly. Last but not least.

Hey Mike. Yeah, so we're kind of in a. I guess I'm Curious of. We're in two different stages at once sometimes. So our winter side is so unpredictable. Being in Alaska, it's much lower on the income, but it's also much lower on expenses. So it's actually more profitable by percentages, but it's just much less money. And So I do 90% of the work. So I'm definitely working GM in that side. Vice versa, in the summertime, we are, I think, well, set up in almost a 90% recurring service for lawn care. And it kind of. We're almost in a full time GM situation there. And so I'm curious if I need to. I kind of like where we're at. I want to grow both sides just a little bit more before I fully go into full profit mode and then start expanding because we're also in like a village setup where every 20 miles you have like a little sinker. So it's perfect for this model. It's just hard because we get so many calls from these people. They're like, well, you're just 20 minutes away. It's like, that's forever though, you know? So I guess I'm curious is, is it okay to start thinking about a next location that's pretty close while we're in this kind of dual process, if that makes sense. So in the winter side, I guess I want to expand on that. The guy that helps me is who I would use as a GM at one of the two locations. So we would both essentially have a working GM mode for each locations in the wintertime and then vice versa in the summer. He would run the one and I would be growing the second.

My first question is, what's your service during the winter? Is it snow?

90%. Yeah. We are going to expand into Christmas lights, per your suggestion on our last one, but we were a little late to it this season.

You're good. Yeah, like, so I think the main thing I'd be thinking about is making sure that there is no quarter of the year where you lose money. So when we talk about profit mode, kind of the subtones of that is I have solved the off season. I would put every marketing dollar possible, assuming your CAC isn't incredibly higher than your summer, into making sure that the revenue during the slower season is increased. And just so I'm clear, Reggie, is it the summer that's actually your slow season? Is that correct? Like the mowing side?

No, the summer is a lot more money. It's just, I guess less profit percentage wise.

Got it. Okay. So I'd be doing two Things. One, I'd be trying to increase the revenue during your snow season, mostly because you have capacity for it. You're way below capacity. And then on the other side, when you have the peak and the spike in all the leads coming in and the revenue for the mowing side, that's where I would be looking at going into quote, unquote, profit mode on those. Because I don't want you to extend capacity to the height of summer. I want you to be able to bring that capacity down and not need so much excess capacity during the winter when those. All those trucks aren't being deployed.

Makes sense.

Yeah. So, like, there are. There are times when you have these big swings like you guys do in Alaska, where I will say, hey, we actually want to raise prices only on this one service, because if we don't, it's going to run away and drive all of our asset capacity higher by buying more trucks, hiring more people. And now what you just said happens, you're like, I literally need all hands on deck on this. During six months of the year, it's very difficult to scale that. It might work for two locations, but you'll never do three. Because now you're bouncing between three locations trying to sales during the busy season. I would really recommend actually bringing capacity down during the summer by raising prices. And that will either. They'll do two things. One, you'll make more profit because you'll raise prices on the services during the business time. Two, it'll bring your capacity down so you have less excess capacity during the winter.

Okay. And just to be clear, we're using three trucks in the summer and two trucks in the winter. So is that still fitting in that. Or is that maybe not as bad as what you were thinking in your mind?

What's your total annual revenue, Reggie?

We're at, I think this week about 6 to 6:50. And I would say 120 of that is the winter, with the rest being the summer and it almost exclusively recurring. I don't really do landscaping.

Got it. And how many employees do you have in summer versus winter?

In the summer, we can sometimes squeeze away with four. So it's four to five. In the winter, it's just me and a helper.

Got it. So you don't actually have a lot of asset capacity. Because if I was you, I'd also get the extra. Keep the extra truck. It's more of a backup to. Asset capacity is not what you have a problem with, it's labor capacity. Because during the summer you're filling both you're filling those trucks up with people during the winter, you're not right. And so I still think in terms of like I'm always looking for excess capacity and you have a lot of excess capacity in the winter. So either a, you go really focus on selling more snow service. And that's where like when I mentioned the cac, if you can make sense of it, I would potentially raise prices on your mowing, take that profit and go dump it into getting more customers for snow so that you can level out these two equilibriums of demand throughout the year.

Okay. Something that we've been looking to do like a call center setup. We have a local one here. They charge like 150 bucks a month and it gets us, you know, like an X amount of minutes, which I think it'll be sufficient. So it's definitely cheaper than hiring someone. I'm just curious at what point does they. I guess I should clarify. They do not access copilot. So they would essentially be like create ticket. And so at what point should I look at, I guess the more personalization of having an actual person in the office or when I make the transition from working GM to full time gm, should I take that back under my wing or leave the call center in place until such a time that I need a full time administration?

Yeah. Assuming you have a full route where you can work as many hours as you want in the field, there's never a reason to admin because it's always a lower leverage task than just going out in the field making 80 to 100 bucks an hour. I'm assuming that's where you're at. So like there's never a reason to do admin. I want to get off your place as soon as you get past solo operator. What was your revenue? What's your revenue this year?

You think Reggie going to be about 6 to 650.

Got it. So we were admin off your plate. Why do you think you're only going to need 150? Like how many minutes does that include?

It's like 200 minutes. We honestly don't get very many phone calls. Most of our stuff's online through the website and so they just kind of apply and then we email them or text them. So a lot of it kind of happens automatically through copilot which I manage personally. So I see that as, you know, part of the job as the. And I don't know exactly managing them that part of it off would be.

Got it all the other that's. That's where the juice is right there, Reggie. So, like, I. I would be looking for someone that can work part time, either virtually or in person. But like, usually the answer you're looking for is like 800,000 annual revenue is usually a good point where it's like a. It's starting to make sense to hire someone and pay a little extra and get them in person, local, et cetera. I would not be opposed to someone working for you like four hours a day, like part time. Because then what they can do is they can stack all the things that need to get done, for example, send out the estimates and the invoices, do the scheduling for the next day, order materials. You'd have like a massive checklist. And at your size, even at 600,000, they could probably fill three to four hours a day, pretty solid. You can't afford eight hours yet. So what I would probably do is do reactive tasks with something like the answering service. Fine. They only get it though, if the person who's at the office for, let's call it 10 to 2 every day doesn't answer the phone. Now, you don't have a lot of phone calls. Very few. Those four hours need to be filled with something. That's when you're going to make sure that everything you're doing, I'm talking payroll, email, text messages, every single aspect, like creating text blasts and emails in. So I copa. Everything is needing to have a system so that you can give them something to do for three to four hours a day.

Okay.

Because that will cost you. That will cost you. About what market are you in? Sorry, Reggie.

Where we're located. Alaska.

Right, Got it. Yeah. So if you did part time, like someone four hours a day, I think it would get 80 to 90% of your admin done. And I think you'd probably spend between 30 and $40,000 to do that. Even if it's someone local, right? Like, yes, you can go cheaper and go somewhere remote. You could do that. But I think if you have a shop, like a space where they could be. Reggie. Right now. Or not.

Yeah. We have a little deal with the local storage yard. So they took out an old building and so we kind of have a little bit of an indoor office. It just doesn't have water, so no bathroom, but it's in a grocery store parking lot. So if I did have someone locally there, they could walk, I guess.

Yeah, yeah. Hey, this is part of the job description. You say it up so they don't have bad expectations. But like, I think that's the move I think 30 to 40 grand, you spending that. But again, everything in admin needs to be delegated them because like if you hire someone part time now, but you're still kind of doing the email, you're still doing payroll, you're still doing all these admin tasks. That's when it doesn't make sense. But I do think at your size, I would get someone for four hours a day. Any overflow in terms of phone calls, like reactive stuff can go to the call center, but it does, it's not a lot. But right now you're doing a lot of the admin tasks and you could otherwise just be in the field working. But I think you spending your time on the actual sales of things, that starts to look a lot more interesting.

Okay. And then in that same aspect, we've kind of grown nothing but organically and it has slowed down as we get a little bit old, I guess, bigger. In that same aspect, should that type of person be doing things like social media and stuff? Like, would you consider that all the same task or should I hire that out to an agency?

Totally. So I would be working at the top of the list, the bottom list, every single day. For my admin person, first thing is going to be highest priority, lowest, lowest priority. Do I want them to do social media? Yes, but that's at the lowest priority because I'm not going to have them not send out the invoices to go make a social media post. And so what you got to figure out is what's that checklist? What's that order of operations for them to go through on a daily basis and realize that during the peak season they might only get through a half of it or the first one. If they walk into 10 voicemails and five estimates and you go out. Right. It's all about order of operations. So for example, at command center, we like what every single department needs to do every day. So for example, we don't. We're not sitting in the email waiting for their emails. We go in there three times a day at specific times and we check the email. And so you're going to create a checklist similar to that for every single thing needs to get done. And then you need to say, hey, at the end of the day, here's the checklist. I want to picture the end of the day. Before you leave at 2 o', clock, just send a picture of what you got to do. That way, I know, did everything get done and if not, what didn't get done?

Okay, now you say Sending out estimates. And I just want to clarify, that person would not actually be doing the estimates. They would just be taking possibly notes from the estimator. Or would you include that in there?

I guess, yeah. I'm assuming like the estimator is making notes. I'm assuming also that like there's requests for estimates that come in and they're doing measurements. I'm assuming any sort of facilitation of like number crunching, putting the quotes together, attaching a video to the quote, all that should be the admin person.

Okay with us having the six month and six month season so hard here in Alaska, would you say the best time would be to raise prices kind of as you're trying to sell along everyone else? Or would you go into the season normally and then kind of once you get past the spring rush, then send out a notice, you know, kind of like everything else does or do you feel like that's maybe a little bait and switchy, as it were?

Yeah, I always, in the perfect world, I want always hit capacity. Right. So that's why it's like welcome to capacity. And then I have the decision if you're not at capacity, you don't want to be raising prices because now you're creating excess capacity if you lose customers. I want to be raising prices to the point where I need to be losing customers because I'm at capacity. And so in the perfect world, you grow in the spring rush, you hit capacity and you're like, I must do this immediately. I don't care if people leave, I need them to leave, otherwise I have to turn away new customers. That's the perfect case scenario. Now if you're going into the spring rush and you know you're going to hit capacity in four to six weeks, then it's usually the most civil thing to do is let them know, hey, this season this is your price and let some people filter out. Then I will say if we're going to do that, go higher on our pricing because now it won't look be looked at the price increase. Most people won't even notice the price increase because they haven't done service for six months.

Right? Yeah, I guess that's just my concern is to lose them to the, you know, the cheaper guys who are going to be running around because a lot of the guys here, they really don't have anything. It's like guys with residential mowers charging way under price. And so we always have to try to compete with those guys. And so I agree that once they are our customer. We don't have any problem anytime we try to raise prices. But my concern is that we kind of don't have true recurring customers. I mean, I have customers that I've had for 10 years, but they don't, you know, they go away for six months of the year. So you are kind of selling them again every single year. There's. I've tried to kind of switch it to, like, you know, hey, we're just turning your service back on. But then people get confused, and there's always a couple of customers who are like, oh, well, you didn't service my lawn, because I never responded to anything because you just said you were going to do it. And then vice versa. You get people who are like, well, I didn't respond to this. Why did you service my lawn? You know? And we kind of got caught between those two, looking for a way forward, as it were.

Yeah. So two things I would definitely say the good news about trucking a truck is that they aren't going to answer their phone when they get busy. So in your case, I would probably wait until you hit capacity in the middle of spring rush. Because when that happens, customers won't leave because when they try to call Chuck on a truck, he doesn't answer his phone. The second thing I will say is, when it comes to renewals and coming back, it's how you prime at the end of last season. And so at the end of last season, if you say, hey, Mr. Jones, thank you so much for your season, we are wrapping up next week. This is the last week. Snow's flying. Let's go. By the way, we're going to be starting mowing on this date. We'll remind you beforehand. But just so you know, we are going to be starting on this date. If you prime them, then your retention on the uptick will be way better.

Do you still require them to, I guess, have a call to action where they at least still have to confirm it, or do you literally just make it automatic?

I. We just say, hey, like, first off, we're going to see you next year. If they're mowing their lawn, they're thinking, I'm going to come back next spring. Great. I'm going to say that. And then when I send them the reminder, I'm just like, hey, just a reminder. Like we said on March 1, we're coming back. So we'll be there next week. If anything changed, let us know.

Okay, perfect. I appreciate it.

Absolutely. And then they can always look in the customer portal, too. And, like, see their upcoming visits if you allow them to see that. And, like, if they wanted to check it out early. Sometimes customers call early. Like, are you guys gonna come out? Nice thing about your area is, like, very cut and dry. It's like, snow stops, lawn starts, lawn stops, mowing starts. Right. Snow. So I would just get in the habit of priming them at the end of the season. And then when you send them the email prior, it just like, hey, as we said before, we're starting on March 1st. That's the season. And you could even, like, call it mowing season and snow season. Like, it's. I just really use that a lot so that they just, in their mind, know you're coming March 1st unless you tell me otherwise.

And that sounds kind of similar to the way where I am. It just feels so it sounds like, like, basically, let us know, otherwise, we will show up. But how do you combine that with a price increase? Because I do feel like they need to agree to a price increase. You can't.

Or.

Or are you basically saying, like, hey, we're raising the price and you're on automatic service, so let us know if that changes it?

No, I would just in the reminder email the week before, like, hey, we're Getting started. It's March 1st. Here's your prices for the upcoming 2026 season. Mowing season. Okay, I wouldn't say new. I wouldn't say prices are going up. I wouldn't say price increase. Those are all scary words. Here's your prices for the upcoming2026 season.

All right.

Yeah, you'll get like 97, 98% will be okay with it, right?

Awesome.

Thank you. Really do appreciate it. I hope you have a fantastic rest of your week. An awesome 2026ahead, and we will certainly stay in touch. Take care, everyone.