Turning Around a LUXURY TRANSPORT Service

Everyone, my name is Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care. We have over 150 locations around the world. We do over $50 million in annual revenue. For us, we mostly do home services.

Right?

So, like, plumbers, electricians, landscapers. Today we are in Cleveland, Ohio, with Obi. He has a chauffeuring business.

When I first started this, I didn't know where it was going to work out, and it was brutal. It was brutal work. It was. It was really hard work.

I had the Firestone last week before you guys came.

You feel like you're juggling 50 things, right?

Yes. It's a lot of hours. 18 hours a day, 22 hours a day. Just moving people things around it. He doesn't stop.

He's competing with Uber.

Even last night, like, we showed up and Obi picked us up.

Well, he picked up Terrell Operation Chauffeur.

We did a little secret shopping.

Why would someone pay $140 for Obi's services when you can get an Uber for 24 bucks and go the same distance?

I was like, this guy stopped in at Ohio.

I knew you.

I knew you were on to me.

The challenge is, how do we scale this thing up and make it profitable? How can we keep the trucks moving all day? You can make good money for an.

Hour or two, but if the rest.

Of the day we don't have any, then you're sitting around. Cause right now, he's spending $5,000 a month on marketing. That's how most of your leads are coming from.

Most of my leads are coming from.

My ads to make just $30,000 in revenue.

Let's see if we can figure out how to way to scale this across.

The country and make this a national franchise.

Oh, my God.

Look at this guy.

Thank you, Ad. I appreciate you coming here, man.

Thank you. Looking sharp, dude.

That's what we do as part of the business.

Yeah, man. That's awesome.

How many suits do you own now, man?

I can't. You got to. Oh. Like, I have. When I started doing this, I didn't have any, but when I have five of this exact shirt.

So sometimes people look at me, I'm like, it's not. Promise you it's not the same one. There's five of.

I have five of the same exact shirts. I have six pairs of these kind of shoes. I have boots. I like wearing boots. But sometimes this was just worked better. But that's part of the job. Like, somebody comes sometimes we do some jobs with some people, and they come to walk.

The CIA people walk with me like.

I've done with the mayor sometimes. And they walk up to me like.

Are you with us?

They look at me, they give me the double. Looks like, okay, like.

I'm private. I'm private.

Here's something for you.

Okay.

Do you notice?

Do you recognize him?

I recognize him. I was like, ohio theater with a bag. I was like, it's weird, but I don't know, he might be the people. So I was like, okay, it's all good. I used to be giving water. We treated him nice, texted him, did all the things we were supposed to do. So I was like, thank God I did it.

It's like, whoo. Once you get in our car, want you to feel a level of peace. And if we can make that happen.

We'Ll make that happen.

And how did you, like, get started?

Cause obviously most people are just going straigh. Did you already have some connections?

I did. School, couldn't pay, dropped out, came back in, paid my way, got a football scholarship, learned how to play football from watching YouTube.

Really?

Literally.

Let's go right tackle.

I've lost 170 pounds now, so I look better. It did to me. I'm a middle figure. So I went to Kentucky State University, hbcu, go to Rober Brit, long story.

Short, got recruited to Kentucky State University, which. Where I played football, D2 football as an athlete.

Then after I did that for a little bit, took a sabbatical that went to Nigeria to see my dad, which thank God I did, because later, two years later, he passed on my work.

Ethic from my dad. I believe my dad was in the army. He passed on, but all I'd known him for was just being a really hard worker that just passed on to me.

So when I got back, I was trying to get my job back, couldn't get my job back. But I didn't sell my truck when I left. So I got my truck. I was like, what should I do to make money now? So I was like, uber.

If you're going to be an Uber driver, the risk that you have is very, very low. Why? Because every single day you just open up the app and immediately you get customers. And there's lots of jobs and lots of people needing to be traveled around.

I was the top 1% of Uber drivers. I was making six figures Uber, I was making 110.

And people just saw that, you know, hey, I'd rather just call you. So they kept calling me and I don't want to shit on Uber because When Uber started, they were really good. They were paying drivers 80, 20. They lost money for a while where they were really, really good drivers could make money.

You could make six figures easy.

Back in the day, I was doing 3, 400 a day in six. I did it right.

I did it corporately. Like, I'm dressed up, I wake up 6am in the morning, people text me. When I was driving Uber, I did, you know, I did. I came in with it with a corporate sense that I gotta do professional service, dress up.

You're professional. That's what. That's one thing I see about the Uber drivers. It's like, hey, I want to work for you, I want to do this, I want to, blah, blah, blah.

But I'm like, bro, you're wearing shorts.

Like, how you going to command a decent price?

So people just kept asking for my cards and grew that way.

You can't live on Uber pay. And I saw that four years ago.

That's why I started this, because I saw that what Uber was going to.

Nobody. You can even make $200 a day.

You have to go 12 hours to.

Make $200 a day.

The reward, in other words, the money is not as good. The average Uber driver makes about $20 per hour on a good day after they take into account the cost of their fuel as well as the wear and tear on their vehicle. Low risk, but low reward when it comes to express or if you start a chauffeuring business, all of a sudden, our risk is much higher.

I think I put it in my mind to do it and I was like, you know what? I've been delaying, delaying, delaying. Let me do it full time. So I 2022, February 14, as a love gift to myself, even the government.

Pays you more than what Uber is paying you. If you look at the maths and how much it takes to fix your car, everything else you need, plus the taxes they take and the huge tax they take, it's not, not worth it.

Higher risk.

You might have days where you might.

Not get any work. That's a risk. But the positive part is, or the part I need to figure out is what are we charging and is it worth the extra risk of owning this business? Or should we just go back to doing Uber drivers? Because if there's high risk, there better be a return. We'll see what Obi's actually charging later on in the episode. So are these the four of your vehicles?

Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, this is our not so, you know, people just want basic transportation. Older people, we do mainly black car service. This is a little upscale for the Cadillac. Then the Suburban is the basic what we do. Every time my uncle has a black.

Car service in California, he gave me some jobs because for some reason he told me, you know, do I want to do some jobs? He's getting some jobs in Ohio. I'm like, oh, yeah, I'll do them.

And I got into it and I loved it, and I just kept doing it.

You start with one vehicle then.

Yeah, I started with one vehicle.

Two years, I started with one. I started with my Lexus. Then I learned more, bought the Tahoe, learned more. I was like, oh, they didn't have enough room. Bought the Suburban, learned more, got a better one. So we got to this point where we have this.

I traveled to California in a backpack, Slept literally in the living room for six weeks. Learning everything about this business before in California, before coming back here and buying the car and not even listening to my uncle. He's like, buy a Suburban. I was like, no, I can buy a cheaper Tahoe. And I bought a cheaper one. And later I was like, oh, yeah, you bought the wrong car. You need room for luggage. You see? So it's a lot of things people don't think about.

And how often are these going out? Like basically all day, or is it kind of like what percentage?

So took your advice, raised the prices. They don't go out every day, but when they go out, they make good money. The more I watch you guys video.

When you come in, the more I.

Watch the video, the more I learn.

More, the more I don't do crazy.

Stuff and I adjust my business. At least I have a job every year, every day, a couple of hours. But I mean, the goal is for you here so we can blow it up and we have 100% utility.

I prayed for this. I was looking for mentorship. So I wanted someone that was grounded, that was doing it the right way. Because you can see this, he didn't start over. This is a 10 year process for him. I'm watching, I'm learning, I'm watching other videos. I'm like, oh, my God, that makes sense. Okay, let's implement this. Oh, my God, this makes sense. Let's implement this.

We have another Cadillac over there, a couple of our drivers over there.

My name is Amir Salem. I work with the company. We are considered independent contractors. Most of the jobs that we get are from Express Elite.

Are you all local and then just kind of like hop in whenever there's a job that we pops up.

Yeah, for the most part for me. I was born in Cincinnati and now I'm here. I'll be honest, people aren't hiring us for our entertainment per se, but some days we're just having a good day and everyone's laughing in the car. It's a good experience overall.

What's kind of like the breakdown of.

What actually would go to a driver? I guess it would probably depend a.

Lot on whether they have their own.

Car versus your own. Yes.

Because we actually used OB services last night and one of the team actually jumped in a car and ordered a ride. And I know exactly how much Obi is charging.

Typical.

Industry wise, it's 20%. So whatever. 20% is 100 bucks. 20 bucks. But that's just a one way. What I do, I guarantee my drivers for one way is minimum two hours. So that's 40 bucks. They do a trip as 140, they get 40 bucks, we keep 100.

Yeah.

So that's about the individual. And then they get to keep their tips.

So we paid 140. 20 of that was a tip. 10 of that was tacit.

So basically $110 was for the trip.

Now, on even short, the shortest drive, the minimum that Obi is giving his drivers is $40. This was a very short ride, five minutes or so. We already know that he's gonna pay wages to one of his drivers, $40. So I now have $70. Now, this $70 has to cover a lot of things on the marketing side.

I know you have the agency now and they're running the ads. Do you know your customer acquisition cost is on those?

It's high, but it's about 20, $25.

So when we take out the customer acquisition cost per lead, now all of a sudden he's only making $45 on this trip. And this $45, that has to cover his liability, his insurance, the cost of the vehicles themselves, the lease payments and loan payments that he has on these brand new, nice vehicles. It also has to cover all his overhead. So the cost of his office, Internet, utilities, all that has to be covered with $45.

I think the real money in this game is the recurring customer is just going to call you once a month, once a week, whatever.

Two, three times a week. Yes, those kind of guys. Yes.

And so then it's a matter of.

Like, first off, how do we get.

Those customers without spending the ads? And secondly, how do we keep them.

Coming back when Uber and all these other people do it wrong? They mess up my name, they mess it up for Me, because if you call me, I charge you a price. And you go see a driver that doesn't know what he's doing and he charges you for cheap. Now you have a bad taste in your mouth of what the expectation is.

Because an ad is going to show up. If someone is just short, you know, quickly trying to find you. And if we're spending, spending 30, 40, $50 on 150, that's a huge chunk of that revenue just going to a one off job.

Well, most of our jobs are like average spend is about six, seven hundred bucks. You know, I've gotten fifteen hundred dollar tips. A thousand dollar tips, five hundred tips.

Seven hundred bucks.

But when you truly serve somebody, open the door, do everything right, the water is right, the time is right. Fifteen minutes before time, you show up, you check in, you help open the doors, take them up to the stairs to their doorstep, make sure they're good.

We want to make that little added touch part of the experience. You know, I'll get water for people that come in from the airport. Obviously we don't have a fridge in the car, but I'll go out of my way, stop at a gas station if I need to.

When I see their faces when they.

Light up, this guy really thought about.

Me, he really thinks about this stuff. That's what makes it special.

Just to make sure that when they get in the car, they have everything they need and everything that I kind of figured they might need.

There's a lot of things when you do that, right. They'll pay $500, they pay a thousand. They don't care the prices, the money is not the thing because the company's paying for it anyway. The money's not the thing for them at that point. It's just we want to pay people that know what they do and they do it right.

Okay, so with this new info, it's starting to make a little more sense. The short rides from the airport to wherever they're going in town are not very profitable. They're small trips, they're not super luxurious, they're more out of necessity and they're high, low ticket items.

How do we then nurture those leads.

To make sure that in the future.

They'Re not even searching for us, they're just coming straight to us. Like, are we any sort of lead nurturing or like your database I would assume is probably a thousand plus contacts?

Yes.

Is there any sort of nurturing we're doing now?

Okay, okay, I need to learn how to do that.

A lot of times we throw the baby out with the dishwater. And what that means is we think, oh like they're low value clients. When reality, if you just follow up with those customers, you'd be able to upsell them into other services or more expensive services. OB has been following up with these low ticket items. He could potentially increase the lifetime value of the customer. That's the ltv. You could even just take like Stripe.

Because you're using Stripe. Integrate that with my mailchimp. And so that way every single time someone books it already is going into your email database in your list. And then I would just really focus on the fact that like, because you serve this market, every time there's a big event in this city, you're sending out an email blast.

Mike is an awesome guy, man, he.

Speaks it real and he's a man.

Of faith like I am and he just wants to do a good job like I to do and make sure I can take care of people and be an example to guys out here and just be an example the next generation of black kids that they can do business and do it right.

The 2.0 version of that is when they're booking, you figure out, okay, what segment of my customers is this a corporate event, Is this a professional athlete, is this an executive, whatever it might be. And then you start having, okay, this is going to be for corporate. And I send an email up to all the corporations, corporate level people. This one's going to be for events, right? So weddings, funerals, proms, etc and then you could target them separately. The high executive does not care about the football game, right?

So we don't, we aren't gonna, we're.

Gonna market to them differently.

That's why we wouldn't need to segment.

Them eventually in the beginning just did.

Everyone, I don't care because for all you know, the executive like sports, right?

This, this advice and what he told me, he is so precious. Because where else will I have met someone that's worth over billions millions, multimillion dollar entrepreneur, high level player like him to get one on one with him, to see the background and say, oh, this is what your problem is? Because I have an undergraduate in business. But that could only take me so far because now I'm really doing business and I'm like, oh my God, there's a lot more to this.

If they have any sort of connection.

To this city, they've come here before, you've already got their contact, which means they've come here for something, whether it be family event, something or their event planner. Like I would be looking at 20, 30 event planners in this area and I'd just be going all in on that because no matter what they're playing, there's usually a VIP if it's of size or there's an event like a prom or a wedding where they're gonna want this sort of service.

He needs to think about how does he talk to executive teams and like get locked in with these businesses.

Because only the business is willing to pay a premium. Only the business with these higher executives have more money. VIPs, weddings. People love spending money at weddings and funerals. It's the one time when the budget just goes out the door. So hook up with those people.

I think we can create a lot.

Of this lead flow without spending money because we already have the capacity. We have the cars, we have the drivers. We just need to fill their schedule.

I really need OBI to focus on growing top line revenue because right now he has what I call excess capacity.

Even with the cars we currently have, we could probably be 5, 600,000 easily.

Okay, I know that. Especially in this market. Columbus. Yeah, yeah, we can easily do that. We can easily do a million here.

If we look at his revenue right now, this would be zero. He's saying he can get all the way to a million dollars in annual revenue without buying any more vehicles. But this is the problem. Right now he's only doing about $300,000 in annual revenue. So he's doing all of this revenue. But all of this right here is what I call excess capacity. It means, means we have all the assets with everything we need to grow the business of this size. We're only here, here's what's crazy. All of this revenue in here. If he doesn't have to buy another vehicle, it's going to be much more profitable than the revenue over here where we have to cover all of our fixed expenses. We already are paying for the vehicles, we're already paying for the office expense, we're already paying for the website. And so over here we've already covered our fixed expenses. Now this can be very profitable.

And setting up mailchimp and emailing everybody and getting their, all their text message blasts set up isn't gonna cost you much.

Main thing is leads, problem, lead, solve leads. And customers will, sales will solve the problem that I'm having right now of utility of getting full utility of every, all the vehicles and what kind of.

Business you wanna build. Because if you wanna build a business of leads like your goal is getting Leads, then you're probably gonna try to minimize the constraint of, of finding vehicles and all that asset structure.

Right?

And having to buy vehicles and lease them and fix them, like that's a whole other headache. But it only, that would only work if you're, you have tons of leads coming in and, but that can literally double the business.

I need to get a professional that.

Knows how to do that.

Right?

Well, I gotta learn it.

YouTube, like literally.

I genuinely believe this is a day project. Yeah, I know it seems daunting, but like, but this one thing I think could double the business without any spending, any marketing, having any more vehicles.

The whole goal of a business is to create the systems and procedures required to be able to put $1 into your marketing spend and acquire a customer. And the other end of your little black box that you've built, that is your business, you get a return on that $1. So you put the $1 into marketing, you get a customer, and on the other side, $10 pops out as profit. Now we're in business.

This would just be a matter of, of getting the leads much more smoother because you already have their contacts. It makes the setup way easier. You don't have to set the expectations of what's happening. They already know.

The amount of admin work for a.

Customer that's already in the database is lower than a new customer that's never used your service. And so I'd rather go up to that warm customer database. These are people that have already bought from you. They already like you, they already trust you.

Go after them.

I love what I do. I enjoy it. They're talking to clients, they're fulfilling their clients. They're making sure they're taking care of them, they're answering the calls, making sure they're taking care of, sending them the text, responding immediately, all those little stuff. I love it. I enjoy it. So it's not work to me.

When Obi was doing Uber for his full time gig, he basically capped out at around $100,000 in his actual amount of money he could earn every year by having a business. He has a lot more debts, he has a lot more employees, a lot more liabilities, a lot of problems. But what allowed him to do is increase his capacity currently to a million dollars in potential revenue he could earn. Now he's in what I called the wilderness. The wilderness is usually between 200,000 and $500,000 in annual revenue. In the wilderness, most the time, people go back to being solo. A lot of people give up and do that. Because in the wilderness, you don't make a whole lot more profit than you did back here. Why? Because here you didn't have employees. Here you just work for Uber. You had one car. You didn't have to worry about Fleet. You didn't have to worry about leases and loans and liability insurance and a website and processing fees and everything else that comes along with the business. And so as you grow into the wilderness, realize you might not make as much profit as you did back here. And that's why my recommendation is to grow past the wilderness. Usually at that size of business, you can delegate advice, you can start to get some help on the management side of things, and you can start to grow past the wilderness and closer to your capacity where all of your profits lie.

So I can do this 24 hours, 365. Only time I know I like, I just feel like, man, I don't have no energy. I'm not. When life did, I eat, you know, but other than that, I love. I love the game. That's why I'm in it.

You sent out one email a weekend before or a big event, you get 5, 6 extra. Like that is worth to you. Just an ad. Spend a couple hundred bucks and probably literally could double the revenue. Instead of thinking about new customers, we think about more and better. Take our existing customers and do more with them and then get higher lifetime value from them.

Now, if you don't have the dollar to put in and you're like, I don't have very much money, you probably have time to be able to reach out to other customers and ask for their business. Because if you don't have money to put in the black box, you could potentially have time. And one thing Obi could do is take advantage advantage of resources that are not money. And that is the time of his current drivers. What Obi could do is incentivize his drivers to bring in new customers to the business. That way he can give them a little bit of extra on the incentive, but then also reduce the amount of money he's having to put into customer acquisition and spending money on ads. Even.

Even the drivers that you currently have. If it was like, hey, if you guys find more clients, you can get a 40% or 50% of revenue versus 20%.

Yeah, I mean, for them, I help.

Them out in a way where I'm like, some jobs that are just not standard for us. Like some. I can't do some jobs and I'm like, hey, I can't do this. They call me, they want a Cheaper rate. If you want to do it, go.

Ahead and handle it.

Because some of these guys, they're already independent. They have their own cars. They work for Uber before. If I'm giving them a good lead, I break it down, usually 60, 40, 70, 30s, because I'm doing all the work. I'm calling, I'm answering the call, paying for their ads, doing all this, giving it to you. So obviously, we got to figure out a way that makes it make sense for me and makes it make sense for them.

At the end of the day, I just want honest drivers that do a good job to respect the profession and be able to go home and, you know, take care of their family.

I try my best to work as professional as I can to the best of my ability, just because I know that at the end of the day, I'm getting paid fairly. I get a good kick out the of of, you know, serving people. Everything, to me is an incentive for this job.

And it's like, how do you package? In a way, the customer, like, knows what they're getting. Other way compare you as a commodity.

Exactly.

And that's.

That's why I don't want.

That's why, you know, that's why we are. I say we are chauffeurs. It's a different level of service. It's more than just driving when I first started and people that want to compete, they're like, it's just to drive here and there. But I'm like, no, it's more than that. I get people that call me to go pick up their mom, take them shopping. They don't live here, but they just call me.

We do that all the time on.

Hospital visits, different little things like that. Hey, go take my dog.

I'm leaving.

So it's like, stuff like that we get calls for.

And I love being outside. I love talking with people. I love the service, providing the service part of it, the driving, not knowing where you're going to be at.

You know, getting to see and go around town is just something that I enjoy on a daily basis.

You know, you go to a concert, you go to the middle of nowhere. You go New York, you go Jersey, Chicago.

I think that's one thing that we enjoy. We see a lot of people and we see. We see a lot of good things about the city. We're in cities that we're not from.

There's a difference between an Uber driver and a chauffeur. We are chauffeur now. You have to know the city.

We know where to go and where to avoid.

Now you have to know the people in the city. You have to know where to go in the city. You have to know the restaurants in the city.

Your best tour guide is maybe your typical chauffeur or taxi driver. I mean, you can't go wrong with any of those.

You're meeting really, really high level people. You have to know the airports, the private airports, the exit ways of how to get VIP clients in and out. VIPs don't go to the front.

We get to see all kinds of people. I'd say the one to ones are just the best part of it. And it's a really good experience.

My biggest thing is like, we don't want to compete with Uber, who's like.

Very B2C business to consumer.

They're gonna nail us on the app. The website price way less. I think his website's pretty clunky, but if you're doing B2B, it doesn't matter as much. I think the, the big opportunity is B2B. As much as I think he should.

Fix his website, that will fix the B2C issue.

Like consumers care about an app like Uber. They care about like the UI user interface. A B2B customer just wants a contract. Really trying to get you to network with, with the chamber of commerce, with hotels that are high end, the restaurants.

That are high end.

Because like every night there's people going to some of these restaurants in town. They're spending a couple thousand dollars on a meal.

They need the connection with the restaurant to know who to.

Who can pick me up. And they're not going Uber. Uber is a B2C play. Like business to consumer, going after the consumer market. I think he needs to focus on B2B figuring out event planners for like weddings. He needs to think about how does he talk to executive teams. And I get locked in with the these businesses. I think the real opportunity is how do we take his time to go.

Out and network with all these individuals so we can double or triple the.

Amount of trips every day.

Right.

Instead of him doing the actual work, his time and energy I think should be mostly focused on networking. And then forget spending $5,000 a month in marketing.

Ideally, it's like we really focus on the B2B customer. These are like event planners, like people for weddings. Right. People for funerals, people for VIP meetings.

And big gatherings and conventions.

For example, we're doing an event. We need John Taff brought in with an exact service like Europe.

Hi, Jon Taffer here. I am really Excited. I'm giving the keynote address at the upcoming Blue Collar Summit in Seattle on January 16, 2025. If you've got a home services business, come to Seattle. We'll see you there at the Blue Collar Summit.

And so right now, is there just not enough profit in the business for you? Okay, I'm going to remove myself from driving and just do the actual networking and driving.

Well, it's not that there's not enough profit, it's I'm good at the closing part. I took away from the driver only driving, maybe VIPs or special request people that request me. But while doing that, I can't answer calls.

He needs to switch to manager mode. Like if he's going to scale this past 200, 300,000 where he's at now, he's going to focus on being a great manager. And that's going to mean getting out of the quote unquote field, out of the driving role and actually going out and shaking hands and kissing babies.

I used to get all the calls.

Hey, I need this and blah, blah, blah, something changed, blah, blah, blah. I called, then I have to call the driver and hey, hey, this just changed last minute, let's fix this. And while I'm looking at all that stuff, other calls are coming in. And when you're sitting down, you're also doing the books payment, making sure they're getting paid. Yeah, that's kind of what the job is. The biggest thing that gets me job is that I respond, I talk to, I try to get everybody within an hour.

In general, if someone can do your job at 80% of your effectiveness and your quality, you want to delegate that role. Which one is the easiest for me to delegate and then do a decent job at. I personally believe that Obi's a great salesperson. And yeah, he's probably a good driver too. But it's probably easier to find someone that can do 80 to 90% of his task quality driving than is his salesmanship. And so right now, when it comes to delegating in the past business, as he grows, I'd be looking at how do I find another driver so he spends less time on the road and more time selling.

Yeah, the challenging part, managing the phone with this business is like, is so wide at hours and you're only going to get a few calls a day, like five, six calls a day. Yeah, it would be ideal to have an answering service, but like that person's going to have to be in your caliber in terms of sales. Otherwise it's a waste of time.

Exactly.

As the business grows even more then he can find someone to do admin and sales over the phone. But currently that's his strongest role. And the business can't really even afford for someone just to be sitting around the office all day long. But as the business grows past 500,000 in annual revenue, maybe that role can also be delegated.

You know, if there's only five or six calls a day, I'm not opposed at this point to still you handling the call. I do think, are you now like especially the high value clients, they're going to want to talk to you.

Even if it was like a phone.

Like the way that you, you do the voicemail can be really, really important. Like hey, this is your personal driver. I'm currently driving.

Leave me a message, I'll get right back.

They actually feel like they're connecting directly with you and then, but then they'll still leave the message. It's not like you've reached this company. Leave us a message. It's like, hey, I'm your personal driver. I can't wait to be of service to you. Leave me a message, I'll get back to you within 60 minutes, guaranteed. Like that gives you an hour of flexibility to be able to be in a meeting or being doing dispatch and not be always two phones ringing at the same time.

Tell me about it. Tell me about it.

It's happening.

So the goal is how do you.

Get them to leave a message? And you don't want to be losing 40, 50% of your customers.

Yes.

Because only 37% of people leave voice messages. Yes. But if you can get them to 80% by leaving a very specialized voicemail answer, it could be helpful.

When it comes to having someone in your office to answer phones and do admin work, there's really two major tasks they're gonna do. If they're the only person in the office office and in a smaller business they're going to answer phones and they're going to do other admin related tasks to fill in the gaps for you as the owner. Now if you're only getting a few calls a day and you don't have a ton of admin work to do.

Like payroll and being able to go.

Through email and voicemails, then they're going to be extremely inefficient and they're going to be twiddling their thumbs most of the day, you're essentially throwing money away by hiring that person full time. And the whole objective to make them more efficient is how do we go from one task to the next task to the next task with as little downtime as possible in between.

If you ended up actually being able to do over 500,000, I'd probably say get an in person admin. Like you have the office.

Yeah, I want to do it.

I always prefer the in person.

Yeah.

And then if you have them in person, you can train them with some other stuff.

Yes.

Right.

Some of these text messages could go to your dispatcher.

Yes.

But it just comes down to like.

We need, we probably need at least.

10 to 15 leads a day to accommodate having someone here all day.

Like, I think there's two big opportunities.

I look in the business. One is like lead generation and two is lead nurturing. Lead generation is we want to switch from a B2C company to a B2B company. And that's going to come in the form of instead of relying on the ads where a lot of it's one off, it's people just finding one time you transacting with you. It's like we need to go build relationships with all the middlemen to all the customers. Because the most valuable customers have middlemen.

Yes.

So that's like the lead generation side, the lead nurturing side is how to take our existing customers and double their lifetime value.

Because if we just do our existing.

Customers without sending any more on ads, we just took what's coming in and we took our existing database and we could double them from, you know, a value of $2,000 a year to 4,000 because we do a better job of booking them when they do come in. And we're creating offers specifically based upon events. Like we double the business without having to do anything extra. And so that that lead nurturing comes in the form of email and text messages. And that's all through mailchimp. You're getting text and email. And so it's like it is a lead problem. Like if you Tomorrow I have 50.

Leads, you're like, yeah, we go find someone tomorrow.

Yeah, that's why I generally the lowest hanging fruit is putting them into something like mailchimp and emailing people and getting them.

If you just set them a more.

Generic connecting with them. You get so many responses of people being like, oh yeah, I got someone called in two weeks.

Oh yeah, I totally forgot about you. I'm coming next month.

Can I book something like, you just.

Gotta stay top of mind.

We changing a whole lot of how we operate, bringing in the team. I'm doing more trainings with my team, training them on what the standards are where we want to be at and just how I want to operate because Mike opened up the eyes to what it has to be. So I was like, I have to train them to the level where I can trust them to do the job. Most of them can do it. But I was at like 70, sure about their work. 70, 80.

I was at about 80.

So the last 20 is what I wanted to cover. And just make sure that, hey, this is what happens when you do this. This is what happens is just make sure I'm getting everybody right to standard of how I want to do it. That way when I send them out on jobs and I'm in the office doing the sales stuff, I can become comfortable that I don't have to, you know, double check. You know, it's like, hey, are they really living above and beyond? And that's, that's come through with, you know, even just the reviews we've gotten, you know, so they're doing a good job. I'm switching database right now, switching software systems just be more smoother. Also what I did, I got a. I got a social media person that knows better than I do, stated what I needed, what I wanted from her and what the team, what I wanted to do. And she gave me a good price estimate on what she could do and how she can help us get that done. And so we start working on stuff right now.

If you check in with me three to four weeks down the road again, then I promise you this is going to be a whole different ball game. It's just been such a short period.

Of time where it's like in between.

Doing all the things, moving to the new office.

Really, really aggressive. That's something that we hand a new office business. Then finishing up big. One of the biggest job we did North Carolina, huge job we did eight, nine vehicles out there for the US Open and stuff like that.

So I mean, we got, we got some people.

We got.

I mean, we did Nas when he came in here.

This weekend actually.

So.

Yeah, and we did Detroit.

So it was like a crazy busy week.

You know, you don't stop messing up with systems when. In between, when you're really, really busy. But now we've been going after like, okay, when I go to jobs, I go to the hotel, talk to the manager, talk to the brokers, talk to who, who is bringing it, bringing out the artist. Because usually the artist people usually reach out to me. Then those guys pay. So now it's like, okay, who's really bringing these people up? So that it's a smoother connection, a smoother intersection where they just say, hey, this is the guy we use over here. And then boom.

Yeah, we got this now we have an office person. We got calls going on. We have all the stuff going on right now. So, I mean. I mean, main thing, I'm happy that Mike came through because it just gave me where I needed to sit, what I needed to think on, and movements I needed to make.

So.

I'm not.

Scared anymore or I'm not losing sleep over anything right now, because I know we can knock stuff over, we can do good work.