this will lead to many GOING OUT OF BUSINESS!

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, we are live today. We're talking about how you can actually grow a business incorrectly. And this is a post I actually made on YouTube not too long ago. And it was in relation to the fact that during times when everything is going well and everything is going up in value and everything economically is going fantastic, you can get a lot of people that are just their boats are floating and everything is fine until they realize when the tide goes out, you realize that people don't wear any pants, they don't have anything on, they're completely naked. Because what we're seeing right now in the economy and the recession that is basically, as of last week, a technical recession, what we are seeing right now is the exposing of a lot of bad advice in the entrepreneurial community over the past, what has it been, 15 years since we last saw a real recession. And so I just encourage everyone out there to look at a few things. Number one, boring businesses that produce cash flow don't grow doubling and tripling every single year. Things that did go very fast tend to not go down very fast. And in the service based business, which is 98% of my audience, whether you're in plumbing, electrical, lawn care and landscaping, whatever it might be, our business is not sexy. It is not going to triple and quadruple year after year after year. You're not going to have a valuation that is 100 times earnings, let alone 100 times revenue. And furthermore, going into deep debt works fantastic. When interest rates are low, when we are having a massive bubble in terms of equipment and trucks going up in value instead of down in value like they have for the past hundred years.

But yet we get so wrapped up into 12, six, three month stints and somehow think the rest of our career is going to act that way. Let me be very clear. Inflation will not continue at 9% forever. Unemployment will not remain under 3, 4% forever. Interest rates, as we've seen over the past few months, will not stay at 0% forever.

Trucks and equipment will not go up in value forever. All of these things are cyclical and have an end to them. And so when you hear someone trying to build a business based upon these fundamentally inconsistencies in their economy, there's going to be a day of reckoning the same way that we've seen NFTs. OpenSea is this big NFT platform, massive layoffs. Right now they saw it's something like 80% decline in revenues and transactions in NFT land, okay? Stocks down 80, 90%, crashing like Voyager Digital by 99.9%. This is happening because people built their wealth and people built their, their revenues and their, their confidence was in something that was fundamentally not going to last forever. And because of two years of, you know, whether it be stimulus, economic easing, whether it be people getting free money, whatever it is, we're gonna somehow build our whole business and our entire family's future and our investment strategy and our entire way that we spend money inside our company. The way we hire, the way we market, the way we grow versus not growing. We're gonna build all of our business based upon a very short window of time when the economy was booming. Everyone Somehow forgets about 2007, 2008, and the hard times that we went through then and build it based upon debt. Let's just ramp up the debt. Like look at consumer debt over the past two years, once everyone adapted. Twelve months of free money. I don't have to pay rent, I don't have to pay my mortgage, don't have to pay my, any of my loans. I don't have to pay for my, my student debt. None of this. And so what did we do? We adjusted our lifestyle. People started spending more money, I. E. We have inflation now because people started buying everything at the same time that the supply was messed up, supply chain was messed up. That creates inflation. And so what's happened now as all that free money has dried up is guess what? People adapted to a very nice standard of living. Oh, they were so used to buying things and racking up their credit card. And guess what? Now the free money's not there. So what are they going to do? They're just going to rack up more debt. And you're seeing this now consistently with people going in more consumer debt. You saw in 2020, when the pandemic hit, literally in a couple months, cash, the AM of cash people are holding just jumped up, not only because of free money, but because people started realizing, oh, we could actually go into an economic contraction. And what that quick injection of the Fed jumping in and fixing our problems did is it lulled us all to sleep by thinking that we were never going to have a downturn or recession because it's federal to step in for a second or for a moment. And it looks like again, once again, the Fed is going to do something very similar when it comes to easing off of raising up interest rates. And so we very might well be kicking the can down the field yet again. But there will come a day of reckoning, and that's already started for many people. That got into all sorts of debt and got into variable interest rates and had a whole bunch of lines of credit and fancy trucks and equipment. And I've been talking about this for years and people have laughed at me for years. But the people who are struggling right now are the ones that went into tons of debt, started to live a business lifestyle that is buying trucks and equipment in front of their friends and family, not for the sake of the business needing it, but because their ego needed inflating during a time when inflation was high.

And so for everyone that's been buying trucks for the past 12 months and you've been buying them new and you've been buying them on debt, be prepared for that asset to go down 50 to 70% in value over the next couple of years. Because you're buying an asset in an asset bubble when everything was inflated massively. And you're also going to like normal economic times when a depreciating asset goes down in value. And so those two things converging are we're going to see mass amounts of people going out of business this year. I am literally building a business right now, building an online company to sell and buy lawn care businesses. Because this winter is going to be an absolute bloodbath of people going out of business. Why most of those people will be the ones that went into debt, that lived a lifestyle that was far beyond their means and started to apply that to their own business. We started buying, buying trucks for their ego, for their pride, because they wanted to look good in front of the other competition. They wanted their customers to think that they were a big, big shot because they got a brand new F350 that was $80,000 when two years ago it was $40,000. And guess what? In two years it's going to be $25,000 and they're going to owe $65,000 on an interest rate that is now going up. These are the problems that are facing small business owners. This is why I believe many will go out of business. That's why I want to have the show today. Feel free to call in. The number is 361-733-3333. You all know the drill. No one calls it first. And at the end I have to shut down the lines and all the lines get filled up. So if you have a question, call in today. But there is absolutely a wrong way to build your business. And if you're looking online, whether it be me or any other influencer, you must remember that most influencers, especially if they have above 20,000 subscribers are going to have a form of monetization. And it's not in the AdSense on Google. The AdSense on Google that I make from these YouTube videos doesn't even pay for one of the staff that is full time working on this channel. Not even one of them. And there's three full timers, it doesn't even pay for half of one.

What they make their money on is masterminds, courses and ancillary products. And this is not to say that those things are bad because I sell all of those things to pay for the media. But just keep in mind that those things are very high margin. When I sell a course. If someone goes to buy a course from landscapebusinesscourse.com right now they spend $599. It does not cost me a single penny to produce one more course. Now it does cost me a lot to produce the course, have the backend, the website, all that stuff costs money. That's a one time investment, takes a lot of my time, a lot of time in the media. They do a lot of the backend infrastructure and building the site and all the backend membership and all that good stuff, but it doesn't cost me a single penny more. And it's not like mowing a lawn where if you go get a new customer, 30%, 40% of your revenue is immediately going out to labor, then you got gas, then you got trucks and equipment. You're very happy to get 20, 30% margin on that. Where it comes to online sales, there is no incremental variable expense. There's a fixed expense of production of a website, of, you know, creating something, but there is no variable cost. So there's high margins. And the reason I say that because if someone's getting a sponsorship, if they are selling a course, if they are selling something like lawn caremedia.com there's very good margin in those. And that money, unless they're doing what like most people should not do, what I do, which is I just take all the money, I plow it back into hiring more people and plowing back into the content, I don't make a single penny. And literally every single month we're like right around zero. Because if I make more money, I hire another person. If I make more money, I improve the content, I get another camera like this one that costs $3,000 to make sure that the content is better. And I don't have a lag on this audio when I do a live stream. And investing on all this garbage. So if you're not going to do that, though, you, that money can go right into your pocket and subsidize a failing business. So when you see someone that is having a couple employees or even they're larger, they can absolutely give away equipment. They can write that equipment off as a business expense and they can do a section 179, hardly use the equipment, but then guess what? They're going to give the equipment away. So that way next year there is no use of having that piece of equipment if you've already section 179. If you've already taken that massive deduction against the very profitable online services that you are providing, there's no reason why not to give the piece of equipment away so you can go get debt on another piece of equipment and take the full value of that equipment in one year under section 179.

So you just got to remember that, that most people in influencer land when it comes to business owners don't make their money in their business. They make their money online. And I was interviewing an influencer not too long ago. The biggest, probably one of the largest in the lawn care landscaping community. And you watch the very first line, it said they said they were failing in their lawn care business and one of their friends told them they should go and start selling how to run a lawn care business. Very, very, very, very bad. In my opinion, this is why so many people fail in the lawn care industry is because things like that, like you're going to go tell someone how to build a, a business and you're going to sell online courses when literally the reason you started selling courses is because your actual lawn care business that you're telling people how to build actually is failing. That is not a good strategy. I understand you're not in the business of lawn care at that point, but don't sell how to build a lawn care business if you literally were failing in your lawn care business. All right, all of that to say. We are on the call show today. And today the first caller is coming from a 5, 6, 3 number. Welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on.

Hey, Mike. Hey, thanks for having me. Just got a question for you about systems and procedures.

Go for it.

Yeah. So I'm trying to implement this and I'm really struggling. It's difficult to train people, especially for the amount of people I go through. I'm still a smaller operation. But what my plan is to put together some kind of training videos that I can have on the website or have through, you know, through some type of system.

People and make it more of a systematic approach than me just running around, you know, all day trying to, you know, catch people and the mistakes they made. Do you think that's the best option? And then do you know of any of any sites online that offer landscape training videos that I could just basically tap into instead of having to do the whole thing from scratch?

Yeah, totally. So we've tested a whole bunch of stuff in terms of training and new hires. And I actually used to have videos exactly like you're talking about on landscapebusinesscourse.com. here's the thing. We've tested it several different ways. And when we did the video thing, because we had it all down, there was probably about six hours worth of video. It was all broken up into little sections about edging, blowing, you know, how to do two cycle engine oil, how to diagnose issues with the mower when you're out in the field, all these little things. We had it all down. We had it perfect. We had the system in place. But a system is only worth as much as it's being used. And the guys out in the field hated watching the videos, especially if their first day, it was like, okay, you're going to sit down, you're going to watch videos for even 30 minutes. Within 10 minutes of them sitting down, you could see the regret on their face, like they hated it. And so what we found to work the best, not videos, because we had it all done and we literally scrapped the whole thing. After about a year and a half, like two, two full seasons of guys coming, we scrapped it. It was horrible. I just saw the pain in their eyes. They're hardworking guys and gals that do not want to sit and watch this computer screen. They want to see it being done. They get their hands dirty as soon as possible. So what we've seen work much better in terms of creating a system around training, which I think you should, is take what they want, which is out in the field training, and systematize that. So instead of trying to teach them from A through Z on the first day, only teach them A, B and C. Then day two, teach them, what is it? B, A, B, C, D, E and F, whatever it is. And so what that might look like is if you're in the lawn care and landscaping industry, like the first day might be only the blower and the weed whacker. And that's all they touch. And until they get signed off on that, that's all they will do. They will not drive the truck. They will not enter in customer notes. They will not touch the invoicing. They will not back up the trailer. They will do nothing but those things until they get signed off on by a trainer. So that's how we do it. We basically have all the different skills that they need, and they're paired up with a trainer that's gonna walk them through those things. And the goal is that they have to get past the first skills. They're not hopping on a zero turn the first day. The only way that would ever happen is if they have tons of experience and they're able to adapt very quickly to our systems. Hop in, and they're good to go. But very rare, rarely does it happen. And our approach is much more. How do we create a system around, in person and out in the field training? The video thing was an absolute flop for us, and I've never seen it work super well. If you actually want to do video training, there's a couple. Are you in lawn care? Landscaping.

Yes. Yep, yep. Landscaping, lawn care.

So Greeniest is a pretty good training program. Online software videos. And I have talked to some people who enjoy and have liked using that software, but I think, honestly, a lot of times, us as owners, that's how we learn. We like that systematization, but the field workers themselves don't enjoy it. They just don't. And I've only seen it work well when it's paired without in the field training. And we just found that they picked it up so much faster. They enjoyed it a lot more, and literally five minutes in front of a screen, they were falling asleep. And so that's just kind of what we've experienced. Make sense?

Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. That makes a lot of sense. The more so just creating a system around the person doing the training rather than focusing so much on making a video about just getting the employees to know the groundwork.

Exactly. You got it, brother.

Got it. Thanks a lot, Mike. Really appreciate that.

Take care, brother. Have a good one. All right, so feel free to give us a call. 361-733-3333, and we'll have you on the show. Before I go to the next caller, let's go ahead and say hello. I always forget about the comments. You're welcome. For mowing and maintenance crews. How much annually, annual gross income per employee? Typically annual gross income per employee. I see ranging based upon the service, anywhere from, you know, 80 to 120,000 is a very good range, I would say, per year for maintenance. And if you're talking about projects, irrigation, spraying, anywhere from 110 to 180,000. It really just depends on what services you're offering. Because if you're, if you're looking at gross revenue, it's gonna be inflated if you have things like chemicals, plants, material costs, delivery expenses, dumping fees, all the rest of it. So.

Cool. All right, well, feel free to call. There's no one in the call queue. This always happens. And then I'm gonna have to turn the call queue off and it'll be full of people. So give us a call. 3617332. 3332. And if you're wondering, okay, well you talked about debt. What should we be doing instead of acquiring debt and buying a bunch of trucks and equipment? Just keep in mind the cost of all of your debt is going up at the same time that those assets that you purchased are going down in value. This is what happened in 2007, 2008, 2009 when we had the housing collapse is at the exact same time that all of the costs or sorry, all the values of real estate was diving down was the exact same moment that everyone had just purchased houses at 0% interest and I'm sorry, 0% down. They didn't have a job, they didn't have any sort of credit and they're now stuck with this massive mortgage. And so the same way that we saw what happened in the housing market, I truly believe is gonna happen, equipment, trucks and businesses because people completely over leveraged and we're gonna. There's always downside to having that anything out of equilibrium will eventually come back to bite you. Next caller is 708. Welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on.

Hey Mike, how's it going?

Good. How you doing brother?

Hey, I got a question. So I'm a solo operator and I was just running, driving around, running across the sign that was actually, was actually handwritten, nicely done on a white poster board for corporations for $15 for a thousand per thousand square feet. I mean and I went through, did the math in area at 5,000 square feet, that would be about 75 bucks a lawn. That's your average. I charge like 165 from that. If that guy checks out with insurance, should I consider subcontracting him? Because I do quite a bit in.

Correction the specific person. That's good question. So first off, how many corporation do you customers do you think you have?

I will usually do about 60 in a season.

Okay. And so do. Does that usually take you like three Days in the spring and three days in, in the fall.

No, that's usually throughout the entire season as they, as they come in. It's usually about three per week. But this week I've actually booked up more mowing for the season than I had in the past. So I don't know that's going to be quite doable.

Do you do them one time or twice a year?

One time.

Okay, so we're looking at somewhere in the neighborhood about 7 to $8,000 in annual revenue. And you're. You're thinking about trying to sub it out to this person because they would cost you about $3,000. Let's just round it 3, 3 to $4,000. So the question is, this is what people think about when it comes to subbing. Is it worth two or three thousand dollars in a year in profit to you to manage this person throughout the year? That's the question to be had. Right. Because theoretically, if you know that they are insured, everything checks out. They do a great job. Summing them is a great idea. But I think that this is the question I would have. Do you want to risk them taking your customers and just having to still manage them and coordinate your mowing schedule around them, corating and all the rest of it for just two or three thousand dollars a year in profit? That's the question you might want to think about too, because you aren't at a scale where we're talking about $50,000 a year in revenue and $25,000 in profit. If you sub this out, this is relatively small potatoes in the grand scheme of what you're trying to build. And so my question is, if you took that two or $3,000 in profit and instead of spending it managing this other person, if you just spent that time doing your own thing, would it lead to getting more of the customers? What are you leaning based upon that? What are you thinking?

What I'm thinking is that it's probably better for me not to manage that person. I know if push comes to shove that if I need them to pick up maybe one or two, maybe that that might be a possibility, I guess, to sub them out. But I wouldn't necessarily have him doing everything.

Yeah, I think the biggest thing would be trust too. Like, obviously if you trust this person, you work with them before. That's a big thing. But typically, typically if you haven't had that working relationship or you know them somehow, and there's a level of trust, I would be wary, just at your size, giving customers away, because let's say those 60 customers are corporation. But if you. Let's just assume you have like 80 or 100 mowing customers. Well, if you gave 60 of them just to contact this other person and. Or they're on their property, like, that person could potentially go walk up to their door and say, hey, by the way, yeah, the guy who's mowing your lawn for 50 bucks, I'll do it for 35. Because if he's cheaper than you in a corporation, really good chance he's cheaper than you a lot of other things. And so I would be wary of that. And I'm one. I'm not a huge fan of price comparison, but realize that someone can put on good show for one service, so they could come do a really good aeration job and then literally tell the customer, oh, hey, you were charged 120 for this. Yeah, I'm only doing this for 50 or 60. Why not? Next time you just do it through me or, you know, how much did he charge you for mowing? I could do that for you. What about your mulch? And now they're upselling you selling your customers. That would be my only apprehension. Especially if you're trying to stay at solo model and you have 80, 100 customers that you kind of need to keep. That'd be something. You really need to trust them over. And again, that risk, is it worth 2,000, $3,000 a month, a year in profit?

Okay, cool.

So I know I didn't really give you a direct answer, but those are the things that I would be balancing out because only you kind of know how much you trust him, how much you depend on those 60 customers staying with you for other services, things like that.

Right.

I mean, I did. It's obviously. I don't know the guy at all. It's obviously like kind of a Chuck in a truck. So that would be the first thing I would check is to make sure that I had proof of insurance before bringing him out.

Anyway, I think your idea of doing one or two would be a good idea. You know, give him a couple. See what happens. See if he talks to the customer and tries to do something stupid before you go and give him 60 of your customers that could potentially really, really hurt you and providing for your family.

Right. Okay, cool.

Awesome, brother. You have a good day.

All right, you too.

Bye. Bye. All right, next caller is coming in. It says from New York. It is a 716 number. Welcome to the live show. Thanks for coming on.

Hey, how you doing, brother?

Good, good. What's up?

Hey, I have a quick question. Kind of touching. Similar on to the last caller here. Been in business for about 14 years. Absolutely love the industry, love everything about it. However, this past year was unforeseen with everything with the labor to getting work, stuff like that. We have feels like we've been just plagued by the low ballers, you know, where people, our customers are going for projects from other contractors that just do absolutely horrendous. Excuse me, horrendous work. My question is to you, like, it seems like at least in our marketplace, quality of work does not exist anymore. People are just like kind of paying for it to get done, you know, I don't know. Have you ever experienced that? Do you. Are you seeing that or is that just. Am I just in a mental black fog right now, you know?

Yeah, I would say definitely the latter. We get so. We get so wrapped up in our industry. And honestly, I've seen time and time again where everyone has their own specific market. We get so wrapped up in it, in our, you know, local competition and everything. It's like, well, like ultimately everyone's struggling with labor, right? And at the end of the day, that means a bunch of Chuck and trucks coming into the market, which they will during a recession. You have to remember, every other competition that is not a Chuck in a truck is having problems like you are with labor, with inflation, with getting guys to come to work, all the rest of it. And so what that's going to do is if they compress, if they start laying people off or just downsizing to just themselves and they lay off four or five guys, there's gonna be a lot of work to be had. And chucking trucks are gonna come up everywhere. But there is absolutely a market that wants and does, sorry, does not want to chuck in a truck and is willing to pay for a premium service that has employees, has an office staff, answers their phone, has a great website, takes credit cards on file, is bonded and licensed and all the rest of it. And so the biggest goal you have to think about is how do I in my marketing and my branding have a perceived value to the customer that is so far beyond the Chuck and truck? There's no more comparison. Comparison. Like it is obvious to the consumer that the Chuck and a truck is gonna be cheaper. And they know that. And you're very confident in saying that. And you will literally blast if you need to on your website. And like we do in our automated sequence for follow up to our estimates, we literally tell them, here's the costs, we're not the cheapest. And here's why. Because we're confident in the brand, confident there's gonna be people that are willing to pay for that because they also most savvy consumers and people that have money and businesses and investors and the people who you actually want as customers for the long run, especially through a recession. And they're not gonna be wheeling and dealing and going for the next cheapest Chuck in a truck because there's always gonna be someone cheaper. That ideal customer knows that if they go for the cheapest person, there's a really good chance that person's not sticking around very long. And so they want like I personally am very happy to pay 15, 20, 30% more if I know my contractor is going to be around the next five or ten years versus I can't ever get a hold of him next season and all the rest of it. So I'd really be focusing on branding and your messaging and your marketing, your website to make sure to the customer there is no comparison. And when it comes to price, like, well, you have. Of course they're way more. They license their insurance, they're bonded, they come with uniforms. There's multiple employees. When I call, they pick up the phone. Like, there's no comparison of product. And that might mean you're going to get a 30%, 40% close ratio instead of 90% by cutting your prices. But you want those customers because those customers not only are going to say yes to a higher price, but they're going to stick with you through recession instead of just going to the next guy that's going to offer them a cheaper service.

Here's one more question that kind of circles into that. Right. So, like, obviously you can tell we're very focused on customer relationships. That's absolutely the most important aspect. Doing what you say you're going to do. Right. Building the brand. Right. So in a marketplace where, like it labor can be a question mark, your books are already pretty much to their capacity. How to. How do you position yourself in the marketplace with your advertising if you don't have any availability to really be sold? Right. But still want to keep your, you know, you still want to keep your brands, kind of like have brand awareness, so to speak. You know what I mean?

Yeah. Here's the deal. You want to make your price so high that people literally cannot compare services. For example, this is a battery charger. If I told you that this battery charger is almost $800, immediately you would think, well, there must be something crazy awesome about this charger. And that's just a bridge between price and value that we always draw as consumers.

Go ahead, don't turn it off.

Just keep lasting. Advertising. Advertising, no matter what.

It's more branding, not advertising as much as branding. I want, I want you to, to really raise your price to the point where people have to be like, okay, this person's charging a hundred dollars. This Chuck in a truck is charging 35. There's, there's got to be something different here. They both look at the same lawn and then that's when they literally call you and say you're, you're twice as much. You're like, yeah, here's why. And then you literally, that's your platform to share exactly all the things that make you different than Chuck in a truck. Now if you are exactly the same as chucking a truck and you raise your prices, you just won't get any work. But what you got to focus on is from a branding perspective, making it very clear to the consumer that my prices are going to be significantly higher because of these things. And if you have no capacity right now, the first thing I'd be doing is raising prices. I would literally go to all your customers and everyone always thinks you're going to lose a bunch of customers. You would literally raise your price. No one would leave, very few would. And the few people that would leave are the ones you already, you know, they're the most headache right now. And then that would give you the capacity to keep growing and getting higher value customers. But it comes down to branding and really just making sure that you are so different in terms of price and value that they can't compare you apples to apples. It's like obviously something is different and then when they dig into it, it's obvious what the differences are.

Awesome. I needed to hear that, my friend. Yeah, you're right. You kind of get in, you have those mo. You kind of go through all those different oceans. I think you get, go through the highs, the lows and you just kind of have a moment where you like start questioning your own self even though you've been doing it for so long and have found success with it, you kind of stray off the path from time to time. So I appreciate it. It's kind of nice to hear that, man.

You got, brother. Take care. Have a great day. Alright, our next caller is from Alder Grove. It says so and it is a 604 number. And so, you know, very close by, literally a stone's throw from where I'm at. Welcome to show 604. Welcome from Canada.

Yeah. Hi Mike, name is Fred. Just across the border from you.

Cool.

Thanks for taking my call.

My pleasure. What's up, brother?

Hey. I'm just at that critical point you've talked a lot about. I'm a dude, about half a million. I actually wrote my question out in the chat there too. Doing half a million dollars in revenue but having a hard time finding like reliable employees. There's another factor. There's a labor shortage, but there's a lot of people moving away from our area just because of the cost of housing in our part of Canada. So really having a hard time finding people. So I'm kind of in this point where if I keep hiring, I think I'm going to hire against the culture I want to create.

But obviously you can keep growing the revenue or if I just stay where I'm at for a while and kind of stack cash and make sure I'm protecting the culture that I'm trying to build in my company.

Based upon the way you said that, it seems like culture is important to you. So it might mean taking a year, slowing down growth, raising your prices. You might not grow to 800,000 next year, you might do 550, but you'll be really profitable. You'll stack that cash aside and then you'll probably go get like a manager type to grow to a million with you. And really that person will take a lot of the operational side of the business off your, off your plate so you can focus on hiring and training because that's what happens at your size. The reason that 500,000, it's hard to get past sometimes is because you need to really start focusing on hiring and training people. But you're not at the size yet where you can afford to be out of the field all day long. You're not there yet. Like for us at Augusta, at 500,000, I expect my GM to still be out in the field working three to four days a week because I cannot afford to have 30% of revenue, 25% of revenue going out the door to non revenue producing employees. And so that's the debacle you're in right now. You're not at 800,000 where typically it's like, makes a lot of sense to have a full time GM or that is potentially you working on the business all day long. But yet at 500,000 you have four or five, six employees like you almost like need to just to keep them all afloat and trained up and on the right road and so it's a weird spot to be in. I would if I was you, because it sounds like culture is so important. I would just slow growth down by raising your price and not like, what'd you do last year in revenue?

300,000.

Yeah.

So you're right.

Yeah. So you've had like 70% growth in the past year. Right. So maybe next year you do less than 600,000, but you're going to raise your prices in, increase your margins, pocket that money and then realize that you're probably going the year after grow really quickly by really focusing on investing that money into hiring and marketing. And you're probably going to need someone to take a lot of the operational side off of your plate, whether it be someone in the office or be someone actually like managing the crews throughout the day so you can focus on hiring, training them up. You know, if someone's not doing very well on a project, you go help them. If they are brand new, you're with them for the first week. That's probably the type of role you're going to look for. At least the clerical side, like office side, you'll need that off of your plate. But I would definitely, if culture is important to you, because otherwise, if you're still going to keep growing, you're going to keep burning through people. Like in one side of the equation too is you got to build the business in a way that can be profitable while still having a high churn. That that is the key, I believe in the next 12 to 24 months. On the flip side, if you really do want to keep people a little bit longer and have a great culture, you're probably going to want to slow down growth, pocket some of that money and then have the cash to deploy with a stronger team in a year or two years down the road.

Yeah. Awesome. I really appreciate that. That's raising the prices, I think is the key. That's a helpful piece of advice. Thanks, Mike.

You got it, brother. Take care.

Awesome. Well, thank you all for coming on the show today. I really appreciate this Sunday. And as of last week, like I stated, we are in a technical recession, regardless of what any news outlet wants to tell you. A technical recession that we've seen for decades, we've always told, and we've always been told, we've always defined a technical recession as 2/4 of negative GDP growth. Last quarter was, I believe was 1.8% last the quarter. The most recent quarter was 0.9% negative. Therefore, we are in a technical recession. I don't care if people want to explain away why the recession is. Just because you can explain why there was 2/4 of negative GDP growth does not mean that there's not a recession. We have a technical recession. It's like literally saying I was in a car accident. Oh, no, no, no, I wasn't in a car accident. I only smashed the back half of the car. Well, wasn't that an accident? No, no, no. I didn't total the car. I just crashed the back of it. And now I know I can't drive, but I didn't total it. So therefore it was not in an accident. No, no, it's still an accident. Even if it was a fender bender. And just because we had a slight is small 2/4 of negative GDPR growth, we are in a recession. Do not let anyone tell you otherwise. And I was talking about the franchisees. Something that's very, very interesting though. If you look over the past, I think it's like 40, 50 years I was looking at every single time we had a technical recession being issued, we were actually past the worst of the recession. So every single time that we. Every single time. Most of the time. There was one time I've seen at least where that was not the case. But most of the time we are not. When we are in a technical recession after 2, 2/4 of negative GDP growth is actually when we're already out of the trough and on our recovery. And I do not expect, I've said this very consistently for the past 12 months. I did not expect this recession to be very long. And there's a very good chance, especially if we see some sort of resolution inside of Russia and the Ukraine war as well as if China can figure out their debt crisis. If those two things happen, trust me, we are already out of the worst of the recession. Now all this could go worse. Inflation could still keep running. The Fed doesn't raise rates because they're trying to play political games like they are right now. That could all potentially get worse and worse. But I feel that we potentially have actually already seen the worst of the recession in terms of stock market, real estate and potentially even interest rates. So all that to say I nor anybody else knows what's to come. The fundamentals of business and how you structure and build your business will be tried and true based upon the ups and downs in the economy. When things are up, you usually want to be thinking more conservatively. When things are really down, when everything is horrible and everyone is running for the hills and closing down their shop, that's usually the Time you should be going all in on your business. Being a contrarian when it comes to investing and building businesses and growing your wealth is 100%. Where generational wealth is built and where billionaires and millionaires are made is in times of recession, they're going all in. And when everything is frothy and everything is going, you know, fantastic, everyone's printing money and just everything is fantastic. You got someone like a Warren Buffett telling everyone, like, I don't think we should be spending money on these tech companies last year and all Warren's, you know, he's all washed up. You know, Uncle Warren just, he's just a boomer. Well, yeah. Who's laughing now? One of the only stocks in terms of Berkshire Hathaway that was able to withstand because they bought a whole bunch of fuel, they bought a whole bunch of boring companies, a bunch of, you know, very low, low PE price to earnings ratio in the stock market. When everyone else was buying Google and Apple and all these fancy companies, he stuck to the boring stuff. And guess what? Over the past three months, he's been spending money like crazy when everyone else is, oh, no, sell everything. Get out. Oh, my word, we're going into recession. He's spending money like crazy right now. Just go look at how much cash they had six months ago versus today at Berkshire Hathaway. These are fun things. These are great, but contrarian investing and contrarian thinking always is hard because the herd mentality is to do what everyone else is doing. And when everyone else was buying NFTs and investing in the stock market last October, I made a video that I said, I'm selling more than half of my portfolio. And if you go to the comments, that video, people rake me over the coals. But I realized, and I said in the video, things are too frothy. This is not going to last forever. And 2022 will be a horrible year. And sure enough, that's what's happened. And at the exact same moment right now, as I stand here, sitting here, stand here, I'm sitting, I'm sitting here as I sit here when over the past month, people have been crying about inflation, you know, going to the moon, that the dollar is going to collapse, that our, our democracy is going, going to go crazy. The world is coming to an end. People have been saying that for hundreds of years and one day it'll probably happen. But for now, I'm not going to hinge my entire life on America no longer having democracy. I'm not going to hinge my entire life and my investing thesis on the dollar class.