This ONE Website Change Made an $8M Impact

In this video, I'm going to share with you exactly how at Augusta Lawn Care we had the best quarter we've ever had in business. And we did over $60 million in annual revenue last year. We're still growing by more than 30% annually in revenue, as well as the fact that we also increased the amount of estimates we sent out by more than 50% year over year. So I'm going to give you all the numbers, break it down, but tell you behind the scenes what what we actually did to make this possible so you can do the exact same thing in your business. So if you don't know who I am, my name is Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care and HomeWorks software, and my goal is to change the level of professionalism in the landscape industry with Augusta, as well as make home service business owners rich with all this content, and then use HomeWorks software to make sure that home service business owners can grow without breaking. Now I'm going to go over most recent Q1 2026 results at Augusta Lawn Care. So system-wide revenue was up 31.1% compared to Q1 2025. So we're just looking at the most recent quarter, Q1 2026, and we have a quarterly roundtable every single quarter and just have a live call with all our owners. So you're going over this, these numbers, I'm gonna share what the numbers are and then exactly how we did it. The average location revenue in Q1 was up 18.5% compared to the same quarter in 2025. Now I attribute this increase in revenue mostly to the owners focusing on the off-season, whether it be Christmas lights, winter services, whether it be snow services. That increase in revenue was largely attributed to work that's been going on for the past couple years around solving the off-season collapse and ensuring that we keep at least 50% of our best month's revenue during the off season. Q1 is notoriously actually our worst quarter because Q4, the last quarter of the year, we have Christmas lights. Q1, once that's over, is pretty difficult because you're kind of just gearing up for spring rush. And so the fact that the average revenue per location went up 18.5%, huge win. But this is the next part that really caught me off guard. I shouldn't say off guard because this was my goal. It was the biggest quarter we've ever had because of these numbers, and that is System-wide, the amount of estimates that we sent out from HomeWorks year over year from Q1 2025 compared to Q1 2026 went up by 67.3%. It's a huge jump. And the average location number of estimates that were sent went up 51.3%. Now the part that I didn't say to anyone was 14 months ago, So early 2025, I had the goal of being able to have this quarter's report be 50%. That was like the big Harry Audacious goal was that we could increase the amount of estimates that Augusta Nation received in the first quarter by 50%. So the fact that right before this call, literally 10 minutes before, I asked our owner success manager Nick for these numbers and it came back at 51.1% was crazy. I'm going to share exactly what I've done over the past 14 months to make sure this happened. Now, if you rewind 14 months ago, let's talk about why I knew this was gonna be a problem for 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023. A lot of the constraints was finding good employees. There was lots of leads coming in. There was so much revenue to be had, but just getting people to show up for interviews, just getting people to show up and stay at their job was very difficult, especially when earlier on in that process, there was a lot of money being pumped in from the government and stimulus checks, unemployment, et cetera. Now, as things have changed and now interest rates have gone up, the labor market has gotten a lot easier to find team members. And in the past, you might put up a job ad and get 5, 10 applications. That same job ad might get 50 or 60 applications in a matter of a day or two right now. And so we, we saw the shift from being supply constrained, not having enough employees, to being demand constrained. In other words, Now it's hard to find leads and we got plenty of workers, but we got to go find more customers. And so as the economy began to tighten into early 2025, as I saw what was happening with the housing market, the fact that high interest rates was causing a lot of people to have the lock-in effect where they don't want to sell. And a lot of home services is based on when transactions are happening in the real estate market. So when someone moves, they are usually prepping their house, they're making it look better. The new owner comes along and wants to have improvements. Modifications, renovations, etc. And so whenever there's a slowdown in the housing market, usually homeowners feel less rich. They have less money to spend. They can't go get a home equity line of credit to do improvements on their house. And what we tend to see is when they have a whole bunch of equity locked in at their residence, they do maintain the property, but they're less likely to do installations. They're less likely to, to add to the property or make big projects at their house. And because there's just a slowing down number of transactions, there's less of these property cleanups in the landscaping industry trying to prep the house for being— it being sold. And so we generally see when the housing market comes down across home services, there's downward pressure. And so I saw what was going on in the housing market. I saw what was going on in the economy. I saw the fact that with AI coming, there was layoffs. And we also had stubborn inflation where we could not get the inflation rate down to 2%. And like 2.5% and 3% still. And like, it's still floating too high for what the Federal Reserve is supposed to be trying to target. All of those things indicate a stagflationary economy, an economy that's going to be— it's going to be tough. And so most recently, we've gone through another oil shock and a whole bunch of gas prices going through the roof, which also causes inflationary pressure and hurts the economy even more. And so the fact that we went through probably one of the worst economic quarters in the year, but not just the year, but the past like 4 or 5 years. And we had this kind of quarter really proves that there was something structurally different with this quarter. And I want to share what those things are. But I saw the handwriting on the wall last year, early last year. I didn't know there was going to be a war. I didn't know that there was going to be price shock around oil and inflation around that. I did not know that. What I'm saying is I knew that the economy was going to struggle and I knew that we would shift to where the best operators, the best marketers, they would win. And this is why we made sure that we had Augusta Leads where we actually run advertising on Facebook and Google for the owners at like a ridiculously low price compared to other agencies. The reason it was so important to make sure that that process was in place and it was bulletproof was because we were going into a market now where only the best marketers would get the, the customer, only the best advertisements would get the leads. And so that was a big component of building out the Augusta Leads department and being able to run the ads for owners between like $300 to $500 a month on Google, Facebook, LSA, local service ads on Google. Uh, and that was a huge initiative, and we were able to launch that in January 2026. However, that was not the part that actually led to this massive increase in leads. That was a big chunk of it, the fact that now we are running ads for the owners and they are getting way more leads than before, and there's really good tracking in place, etc. Fantastic. But let's go over some of the other more structural things that you could do inside of your business. So 14 months ago, I saw the handwriting on the wall. I'm like, we've got to fix this lead constraint that's going to happen in 2026 if the economy slows down. I started just looking at first principles of like, what is considered a lead and why can't we get more of them? And everyone immediately jumps like, I need more jobs and more customers. But I'm like, well, precursor to that, how can we just get more leads in the top of the funnel that we can then upsell? Because I saw great adoption of mass text and mass email from inside of HomeWorks from Augusta Nation. And we were getting huge volumes of leads from just sending out text messages to customers. So the qu— what I actually boiled down to is how do we get more contacts that are qualified candidates to use our services just inside of our database that we can sell to instead of spending a whole bunch of money on advertising? And so that led me down to the fact that, well, instant quotes that we share on our website and sharing any sort of transparent pricing is going to scare away some people. The bottom line is, if a customer never submits the instant quote form and then you never get their information, you can never sell to them again. You can never put them in your database. And so the biggest thing that we've been working on over the past 14 months is building out what we call abandoned carts, which is if someone comes, sees the price, and bounces, we've collected their information and can still promote and still sell to them in the future, whether it be through text, whether it be through email, or whether it be just taking the instant quote they got and validating it and making sure it's actually correct. Against once we actually measure the property and spend some time on it. And we've been able to close, like, get accepted estimates for 30 to 40% of the people that came to the website, filled their information, saw the price, and left. And so we redesigned the website to where when people come to the site, while they're putting their contact information, we are able to capture that data to where even if they bounce and leave the page, we still have the data. Even if they just navigate to a different tab or they forget to click submit or whatever, that abandoned cart technology allows us to be able to remarket to them in the future, but also try to save the sale. And 30 to 40% of them, once we just reach out within a week or two, are accepting the estimate. Just by making touch with them, making that connection point, be like, hey, we're real people. And yes, you got this price. I'm verifying it. Would you like to have this quote? And a lot of times people are just like, oh wow, this company actually followed up with me. The price is legit. Let's just get this problem solved on the schedule. Let's go. The way that we had to make this work was we could not have payment on the same form. We had to move the card collection process to a different URL so that we could actually be compliant and still get all of the information they were entering onto the website. And then if they actually clicked accept, then they'd go to the card information page and be able to get that data. And we found it super important the words on the form. Just the way that we change the words slightly on the form. Like, for example, changing the button at the bottom from submit to accept. Super important, because when it was submit, customers would sometimes see the price, click submit, and they just think that like, oh, I see, now I gotta put my payment information on file and I'll bounce. By putting accept, it made sure they knew that they were accepting the estimate. Little verbiage like that, uh, making sure that before they click accept, it actually told them what was going to be the next step. Making sure we told them that, hey, the next page you're going to put your payment information on file. And then within 24 to 48 hours, we're going to reach out to you and confirm the quote and put you on the schedule. Little steps like that made a huge difference in conversion. And so we went through dozens and dozens of iterations of this, and the web team was just constantly figuring out like, how can we make this work? How can we change the button from submit when someone's asking for just a landscape estimate where we need to do an in-person estimate to accept if they've seen a price and they're actually accepting an estimate? Because it'd be weird to have that button say accept If they were just asking for a proposal for like, like a landscape project, we need to set up an in-person meeting. So all these little variables has been something we've just been focused on a ton over the past 14 months. Another thing is on the forms, we made sure that we were able to accept multiple services. In the past, when it came to instant quotes, they could choose one service, see the price, click accept, and then we would ask for upsells after they put their card information on file. The problem is only about 20% of people would ask for an upsell. Because they felt like they were kind of done the process. They— here's the service I need. Great. Here's the price. Accept. Here's my card information. Let's go. And then 20% of people would actually submit an upsell for a secondary service in addition to the one they primarily requested. Now, what we've done is now they can select multiple services on the initial form and be able to see the pricing for both and click accept and get both of them accepted on one form entry. This has increased from 20%, the amount of people that accepted a secondary service, to 60%. This is phenomenal. This is a 3x or a 200% increase in the amount of customers that asked for more than one service and got it accepted. And so now instead of having an upsell for bush trimming or upsell for mulch install, they just see mowing, treatments, mulch install, property clip. They'd be able to select multiple, see the prices for multiple, and then be able to accept right from one spot. This dramatically increased the annual customer value because no longer do we have to rely on the upsell process or texting or emailing them after 1 month or 2 months. Well, we can just get them to accept 2 or 3 services right from the initial form. Now, the reason I would recommend everyone do this, and the reason we did not do this in the past, is because if you have a long form, you're going to reduce conversion dramatically. And so if you're going to have a whole bunch of services on one form and it gets really long, 'cause now you're showing pricing and information and they got to choose between different packages. For example, with treatments, if you start making that really long and they leave the page, you've lost the lead. But by having the abandoned cart technology that is capturing all those keystrokes and making sure we get it all, even if they leave because the form is long, we still get the information and can reach out to them very quickly and usually save the lead even if they abandon the cart. And so we really had to make sure we had the abandoned cart technology. Then we allowed for multiple services, which increased the length of the form because the vast majority of people, when they do instant quotes, the The problem that they are actually experiencing when they have a decrease in number of leads is they are allowing for a big long form with a whole bunch of information and customers get confused. And when they bounce, you've lost the lead. And the money you spent to get them there with Facebook or Google Ads or whatever, all a waste. And so we had to make sure that if we were going to make a longer form, if we were gonna have multiple services and multiple prices and multiple packages inside of one form and it was gonna get long, we had to make sure that if they left, we'd capture the information. This was huge. Right now, this is averaging an additional 1 lead on average per location that has the instant quote update that we just released. On average, 1 per day across Augusta Nation. We believe this is going to add between $8 and $10 million of revenue this year, and that only assumes a $2,000 lifetime value. And for most of us, we keep customers for multiple years and it's $5,000, $6,000, $7,000 lifetime value. But just assuming they stay for 1 year, this year alone, it's going to add $8 to $10 million of revenue to Augusta Nation just by having this abandoned cart technology, multiple services on the form. And that is being extremely conservative because I'm not taking into account the fact that there are other services like mulch installs and other stuff that gets added on to the same form now. And that could very well lead to a $1,000 or a $2,000 project within the first 30 days. And this has been our huge focus over the past 12 months is how do we cover the customer acquisition cost as fast as possible? We can't just sell them a service like mowing where I mow the lawn for $50 a week. I make, let's just call it $10 or $15 in net profit. Well, that could very well take me 5, 10 cuts to recoup the cost of just acquiring the customer and the advertising. That's an inefficient way to scale. And so the reason we've leaned a lot into treatments and this upsell technology baked into the single form is because my objective is that by the time I pay, let's just call it $50 or $100 for a customer, I'm able to make that money back within a matter of a couple of weeks. And I can't do that usually with a small recurring service that might take a couple months to recoup the customer acquisition costs. That leads to bad cash flow and very hard to scale without a lot of capital injection. And so our objective has been how do we take that one customer, sell them a $500 treatment package, and be able to charge their card tomorrow before we've ever even offered any services, recoup the customer acquisition cost and get the money to be able to go buy the next customer. And so another thing that we've had to focus on is human agents answering the phone 24/7. Over the past couple of years, we've been able to use AI to get really efficient with our team. And we actually last year didn't hire any new human agents because our team fortunately has been really good with retention. We've been able to keep our team. We added a lot of benefits like dental, 401, health benefits, et cetera. We've been able to retain the team. Awesome. However, we saw a slight slip when it came to AI in terms of now people that would actually talk to AI and fully complete the transaction or the phone call. And it went, you know, if a human agent picks up the phone, I can get the lead 100% of the time. However, especially in the past couple of years, we've seen this, this tendency against AI, against any sort of robotic voice. And even though we spent a lot of time and, and money honing in the AI model, once the customer knew that it was AI and we would tell them it was a virtual agent so they didn't feel tricked, we didn't want that feeling. But because we told them that, only about 70 to 75% of leads went to completion once they hit the AI. And so we wanted to invest in having 24/7 humans answering the phone. That's really tough. And so we had to then figure out, okay, across different time zones, we have to have someone on the other side of the world. We have to have people across the United States. We have to have more local teams. So we, we now have 87 agents to be able to make sure that over the course of 9 shifts a day, because you have weekends, you got nights now, and you got, you know, if someone does an 8-hour shift, you're like, well, that's 3 shifts in the day, but then you got the weekend shift, and then they all have to overlap. And then the fact of the matter is you might get a couple calls you know, an hour in the middle of the night, and that could very well be 300 or 400 calls per hour in the middle of the day. And so they've got to have all these overlapping shifts. So a lot of complexity and doubling the size of the team was something we actually hadn't done last year. Last year we literally just used AI to get more efficient and how they did not have to hire anyone new, which led to much better quality control. But it also led to the fact that we were losing 20 to 25% of leads because they would hit the AI in the middle of the night or in the evening or during peak volume, and we lose some of those customers. And so we were able to also not only hire up dramatically, and there's certainly growing pains with that in terms of like making sure there's training and protocols. And this is something we're gonna be lasering in a lot over the next 12 months is making sure that when we scale up humans, that there's quality control throughout the entire process. One of the things though that we also focused on is If for some reason the AI agent has to be used because it's peak call volume, every single one of 87 agents is on the phone and someone calls in, which happens occasionally in the middle of the night. Someone calls and there's only 4 agents on and they're all on the phone again. It happens. It can happen. And if it happens, how can we prepare the customer for it? So we made sure that during the on-hold audio, we just explained to the customer how this was going to work. Like, hey, we really value you calling in. If we don't answer your call within 30 seconds, we're gonna transfer you to our AI agent. He, they're gonna, he's gonna take Max as his name. It's our mascot. We also call it Max AI. He's gonna take the call, he'll take your information, and as soon as possible we'll get back to you. And this led to a 0% hangup rate on Max, which is crazy cuz we were getting so many people hanging up when they hit the AI agent versus just setting the expectation on the on hold. Music to let them know that, hey, this is coming and here's how the process is gonna work. Once you hit them, we will get the information, we'll get right back to you. And it dramatically reduced the hangup. And by having the human agents, we were able to say that, hey, like literally 98% of the time we will get a human on the phone. But if the event that every line is busy or it's in the middle of the night and we only have a few agents and those, they're busy, if that happens and you hit the AI, we've created the expectation of what's gonna happen and what the next step in the journey is. And a lot of times, whether it be a web form whether it be scheduling an accepted job, whether it be a phone call. The reason a lot of times you're losing leads is simply because you're not telling the customer what's next in the step, what's the next step in the process. And so they get lost. And so this is one of the things that we really had to hone in to make sure we were getting every single lead, that we were maximizing conversion once they got to the website, that once they got to the form, we were getting as many services as possible. And if they bounced, we were able to capture those leads. And if they gave us a call, we got every single one of those leads. Well, this is really Mike Andes showed me over the past year is all of these little things I mentioned so far, and I'm not done yet. They were all like 2, 3, 4% improvements. And that's what added up to a 51% increase in the amount of leads that we got on average across locations. And by the way, we added a bunch of locations and that includes all the new locations. So even the new ones, like the average number of leads sent out increased in Q1 per location by 51%. It's unheard of in the middle of like what many is calling a recession. It's so hard to get leads and like just staying disciplined to where can I save 3%, 1%, half a percent. And I've just mentioned the one so far of like all the little improvements to the website, the web form. I didn't even mention the fact that we redesigned the website to make sure it's really AI-focused and making sure that has FAQs, making sure the backend schema is very easily read by ChatGPT, Gemini, etc., we're now getting 9 to 11% of our traffic to the website from AI sources. And we're getting real customers saying, oh yeah, I saw you on ChatGPT. The benefit of being able to show up on an AI platform where they're not sharing 20 blue links, they're sharing 1, 2, maybe 3 options for the customer when they ask for a contractor or for a landscaper, for a lawn care business, and the ability to show up there, super high value. And so we re-architected the entire website over the winter to make sure we'd be able to also take advantage of that. So again, The only reason I'm sharing all this is not— it's not to brag. It is to say all these little 2, 3, 4, 5, 6% improvements is what added up to the best quarter we've ever had. And many of these things were in the works for the past 14 months. If you're in a hurry to double the business, if you're in a hurry to improve your lead flow, usually that means spending a bunch of money on ads without tracking. It means hiring agencies that down the road you end up hating. They start hiding information or gatekeeping information from you. This is stuff that like most of the time is caused from being in a rush. And 14 months ago, to be able to say, hey, like, look, we know this is going and there's all these little things that need to be improved. And here's the thing, there's probably 100 other things that can be improved inside of Augusta Lawn Care that I would love to work on, but then being able to rank and prioritize in terms of what is the actual constraint. And I knew if we went into a bad economy that leads would be the constraint. Now here's the thing, we started to think about Okay, what happens if we remove all these bottlenecks and we get all these leads? Now we're going to have another problem. They're going to have so many leads coming in and we're going to shift to the fact that now labor becomes the problem again, because if you just have so much demand and you're supply constrained, it's just as bad as being able to have no, no, no demand whatsoever and having tons of employees. And so we've got to make sure that we don't just dump a bunch of leads on the owners and now they can't go get people to come work for them. The supply, the labor supply. Fortunately, we knew that, hey, the labor market would probably be fine. As unemployment ticked back up, we were seeing tremendous amounts of volume of applicants. But the problem is usually you get a bad sloppy hire when you're really busy. Leads are pouring in, tons of demand. Usually you reduce your qualifications for the supply or you just are really sloppy in your hiring process. And so this is why we made sure that we had video interview processes and software in place so that way instead of getting 60 applications from Indeed, you might get 4 or 5 people that apply and then submitted a video and then you're able to assess them very quickly. And we use AI to actually rank them and see which ones are strong candidates. And then I might reach out to 1 or 2 and I already know I basically want to hire them, but I offer them an in-person interview and I'm ready to, to literally give them a job on the spot. What we found is like, okay, if we get all these leads, awesome, we're going to solve the major constraint. But what is the downstream effect of solving that constraint and flooding the system with leads, it's that we're going to need more employees. And if when we go out and put job applications, we get hundreds of applications, it's going to lead to sloppy hiring processes. Or out of, let's call it, 100 applications that came in over the weekend, let's say 30 of them you offer an interview to and 10 of them show up because they just don't show up to the interview and you wasted 3 days of scheduling off on your calendar instead of doing sales or hiring more, you know, training your existing team. You just have all this slotted time for interviews. That's a waste. When if you could just get those 100 applications down to 10 or 15 solid video video applications that after they applied on Indeed automatically then are asked to, hey, submit these videos. Then from those 10 or 15 videos, I select the top 4 or 5 people to then offer an in-person interview. And from those, I get 2 or 3 solid candidates. And now what would otherwise have wasted 3 days trying to go through all these applicants, all these resumes and references and all this stuff, now I'm just go down to my 2 or 3 top candidates that I pretty much know I'm going to hire before they even walk in the That's what we did. We made sure we use the software and it was expensive and you can check it out. Spark Hire. All our owners got it for free because what we realized is like if we put even a— if it cost $20 immediately, that would reduce the amount of locations using it. And so we went out. The nice thing about being part of August Nation is we have buying power, so we didn't have to pay the premium $499 a month, but we're able to go out to Spark Hire and be like, hey, we want this for every single location and we want a deal, but we're going to cover it for owners. They're not going to pay a single penny because we want to make sure they actually use this software and we make sure that if we're going to dump leads on them, there's no excuse as to why you can't manage the supply aspect of hiring more employees. Those are just some of the things we've changed in the past 14 months. This was the first time I've ever really noticed something that Jeff Bezos talked about where he said a good quarter was baked 12 months ago. Right. It was already done. And it was interesting because all these things that we finally saw, the results of, the fruits of, was stuff I was working on 12, 14 months ago. And so for the first time ever, to be able to see 51% when my goal is 50% just boggles my mind. But it is an ode, it is a nod to constant improvement over the course of time. And at Augustination, our number one core value is constant improvement for that reason. And if you just keep adding and stacking, there's always problems in the business. I can tell you 10 things right now that I hate inside of our process, hate inside of our systems that needs to get better. And there's so much more runways. There's so many more improvements. And that's what's so exciting that we could have achieved 50% increase and still have so much more to improve and so many things that can be better. It's one of the things I love and hate about entrepreneurship the most is just the constant treadmill of all the improvements you could make in front of you and all the improvements behind you are now no longer relevant. You're only as good as your last at-bat. I wanted to take this moment though, because so many of my videos are sharing things that I've done wrong or mistakes. But this was one of the first times I've ever made a video where it's like, I saw this coming, we prepared for it, we made a ton of improvements, and this is the result of something that I've been working on for a very long time. And it's not just me, it's the entire team, whether it be command center, whether it be on the software and AI side, the web team. Um, it's just been like this huge effort. You know, as you grow, there are always going to be another problem created from the growth. We talk about the 4L framework. You know, once you get a bunch of enough leads, you have a problem. You need more labor. So when you get enough laborers, you need more leadership. So we're seeing the exact same thing happen inside the business. It's like, oh snap, when you double the amount of people at Command Center, for example, that's tough, especially in a seasonal business where it spikes like crazy. And so how do we make sure that there's quality control? How do we make sure there's better AI and better training and better process? We have to improve this. Those are the constraints now. And so many times I'll see in my career an oscillating between growth and, you know, growing the building taller and then building out infrastructure. And I think there's, there's always tension to do both. But I have found to be beneficial is you grow and then you slow down. This would be the equivalent of saying growth mode versus profit mode. You grow and then you build out infrastructure, you grow and you build infrastructure. And so now after all this growth and all these changes we've added over the next 6 to 12 months, a lot of it will be for me actually build out infrastructure, actually build out the leadership to be able to handle 87 phone agents instead of 40 or 50 like we had the year prior, being able to make sure that there's better quality control and better training and better systems and better process and AI is being used at all aspects of the business and making it more efficient. So just sharing, because so many of the times I think I do share where I've made mistakes, things that I have learned from, and hopefully you learn from those. But this is definitely one of those times where it was a huge team effort. It was a huge win. It was by far the best quarter Destination has ever had year over year. And it was in the worst quarter economically that our country's had for the past 4 or 5 years. And I am beyond proud of all of Augustanation making the pivots, making the changes, adopting constant improvement to be able to make this possible. And I wanted to share those wins. Sometimes it's just like they're few and far between. The big wins are 1 out of 10, and the 9 out of 10 times it's a loss. And so I want to get better at documenting the wins along the way and things that I've learned in those wins in addition to the losses.