UNDERCOVER BOSS visits Lowest Revenue Location!

Today we're in Michigan and we're doing a turnaround of one of our lowest performing owners inside of Augusta Nation.

I'm useless. My kids would be better off without me.

This owner's been a franchisee for two years.

I had somebody say, you don't deserve to be in business. And I'm going to do everything I can to get to close you down over grass.

You join what's called the solo operator model, which is really cheap to get started and you got to grind and hustle, but that hasn't been happening. What are we doing with our time now? Right now we don't have a lot of work.

Nothing.

It's not going to just fall in our lap. What are we waiting on? There's other solo operators that have gone on to build businesses that do over $100,000 in monthly revenue. Is this distraction preventing us from building a $500,000 business?

He's a big dumb idiot, just like me.

Something's certainly wrong. And the first thing is start kind of 10:00am this is the latest turnaround start time we've ever had. What are we doing for the first few hours of the day?

Ken, Good morning, buddy.

What's up, brother?

Doing all right? Cool.

Maybe you show me around.

Can I.

Show me what you got going on?

Yeah. I don't know. It's pretty simple. This is P1. I had this thing for like seven or eight years.

Okay.

And then this was actually my personal truck that I got new bed and doors on and whatnot. And it will be P2 once it's painted. And that's the prototype railgate that I was telling you about.

Okay. How long you been in Fenton?

Since joining.

Really? I got you just a few years.

Yeah.

Okay, cool. So basically, year one, based on the numbers I saw, you did about 60,000 in revenue.

Yeah.

Year two, which was last year, did about 95, 96,000 revenue. So this year, what are you projecting to kind of do?

I don't know. Winter was so bad. I'm. I'm in such a mental emotional slump right now. I think I've let my failures in my goals affect my relationship with my. With my family, with my wife and my kids. And basically it's, hey, if you make enough money, you'll be able to buy this house or buy this land or whatever. I haven't done that. It's an entire winter long pity party. There were times when I would look at the weather report and be thankful that the snow that was coming was not going to be enough to go Plow. Because I was afraid that I was going to fail pay. That my equipment would fail. I didn't have enough money to fix it.

So how much longer till you start spring rush? Like, start mowing and things like that? Like, a couple weeks.

Couple weeks.

But your plan is to kind of run with that.

Yep.

On P1, when I.

When I sell that, I can get a smaller mower. So I had to turn down too many people. There's some people in that direction.

Right.

That are the cookie cutter.

Right.

Neighborhoods. Half of the. The residents of those neighborhoods have gated, fenced in yards. Got it.

So, yeah, get smaller. And then this big bad boy.

So I bought that last year, year before, something like that. I had. I had quite a few customers that were paying $240 per cut. So I would. I would sell them on the whole. The whole season?

Yeah.

Like, hey, you know, 50, $400 or whatever. And they're like, sure. And they stroke a check and just give it to me. And that would. That would at least start me off for the season. So, like, on Wednesdays, is. Is everything south, which is really rural, so you're not finding anyone with less than an acre. And so it was taking me two hours on the green one.

Yeah.

And I'm just like, you know, my mentality is if I get the tool to do the job, it will fix the problem. It ain't fixing it.

Well, ultimately, like, yes, there are. There are going to be lawns that need this.

Yeah.

But the bottom line is there's thousands that don't. And so it's a matter of, can we take what we actually have and. And still build the business around that? Like, I happen to believe there's more than $100,000 of revenue that this mower is not required.

No.

I got a feeling that Ken is a bit of a gearhead, and his desire to get the next shiny toy and piece of equipment might actually be a distraction from him growing his business. And when I say growing a business, I mean getting more customers and getting more money, not getting more toys. Not every single problem in the business is solved with just more equipment or inventions.

So right now, like, this year, what do you think is kind of holding you back? Cause I know, like you told the team, it's more like, mental stuff that's blocking. Like, why is that?

I asked for a bunch of work. I prayed for a bunch of work. I prayed to max out my schedule, and then when I did, I mismanaged that work, and I felt like I couldn't handle it and therefore, like, there was people that accepted my quotes and I never actually went to go do the job because I just couldn't. So when I had depression a couple years ago, like, I don't deserve to live, I'm useless, my kids would be better off without me, that sort of thing, I had to ask myself, did I give 100%?

Because you got two more weeks. You got spring rush coming up. Like, what's the plan for the next couple weeks?

Oh, just door hangers. SEO is working fine. I have plenty of people requesting SEO estimates. Most of them are spring cleanups.

But in terms of getting new customers, like right now you probably have what, 30, 40 mowing customers?

40. 40 to 50.

Okay. And so what are we doing right now over the next couple weeks to get more?

I'll just be doing door hangers. Got it. And then I'll be doing one click estimates for people that didn't sign up.

And so how many door hangers are we doing currently? Like, for like, do you have a.

I'll be starting this week.

One click estimates is a feature inside of Copilot where you're able to send all of your customers an email that, that has a call to action to click on a button. And if they click on that button, you know they want whatever service you're pitching. It's a very fast way to be able to sell more things to the customers you already have. Now this is the thing. It's spring rush. We're just about to start with a couple weeks left and he hasn't put a single door hanger out. We haven't knocked on anyone's door. We aren't. I don't see any action towards actually getting more customers. The worst business decision is to not do anything.

So that was actually the door. The door mailer that didn't do as well as I thought it was gonna do. Last year I still got customers from it, you know, so I'd have to send out 10,000 of them. And I didn't. I think I spent $5,000. And that was including print. And I can't remember how many customers I got from it, but it was enough to. To see me through.

Right.

I was fine. Not quite capacity, but it was comfortable.

The same way that growing your body gets uncomfortable, you get growing pains. If you're gonna grow your business, it's going to become uncomfortable. You have to do uncomfortable things and you have to put yourself in uncom situations.

How many mowing customers do you think you could take on right now?

60 to 80. Okay. If they're close enough to be 60 to 80, if they're out in those rural areas where it should be a $90 or $120 cut, some of them are like, okay. I mean, most of those people, they'd rather spend $3,000 on a brand new residential zero turn and do it themselves.

Right now I just feel like you keep hitting like 90, 100,000 in annual revenue. And my concern is not a matter of like, can we get more leads? It's a matter of like, your personal capacity. Is it above, like, leadership wise? I don't know. Like, what do you feel is like kind of like that cap? Because if you've been doing it for 10 years. Yeah, 15 years, whatever it is, like, what do you feel? Is that, is it a matter like you default to equipment all the time? Like, what the distraction, do you think?

No, I, I, I don't spend a lot on equipment. It's probably the people that I've hired in the past trying to get to that point where I'm like, okay, can you go out on your own? Well, then I never got enough customer to facilitate. All right, you take P2. Last year I hired a kid part time, and he helped me trim on the days that I needed it two days a week. The rest of it was all by myself and it didn't matter. I was still home in time for dinner. So that's when I was like, I can fit more in. Other people in Augusta Nation that are doing better than me, they're doing $20,000 in revenue per month are going, man, I'm getting home at like 6, 7 o'. Clock. It's been a rough day, but it's good. You know, I'm growing. And then all of a sudden I read their feeds later on and it'll say something like, hey, we just added another 50 customers or something. Like, like 50 customers, another truck? I'm not doing that. I don't know what, I don't know.

I really think that Ken's personal capacity is probably around $100,000 in annual revenue right now, and that's preventing him from growing the business, getting employees, and taking the business to the next level.

So do you not want the 50 customers? Like, what, what do you want from the business? Because, like, right now we have like, say, 40, 50 customers. Do you want to have a second truck with an employee?

Yeah, yeah. My goal is to max out and then, you know, hit capacity.

Yeah.

And then raise the prices so that either new customers don't sign on or when they do, it's more profitable.

120. Mowing customers is sort of the goal.

Yeah.

So you. So do you want to get the extra 50 or not? Like, do you want the other employee and like, growing to that size?

Yeah, because I want to be able to duplicate each truck individually. My issue, Well, I don't exactly know what it is, but I haven't filled the capacity of the one to then facilitate another.

In my opinion, a business is in one of two different categories. Either a, you are in profit mode or second, you are in growth mode. And in my opinion, you've got to choose one or the other. A lot of us as business owners, myself included, will sometimes say, I want to grow my business and I want it to make more profit. The reason that's so difficult is when you grow your business, it requires more trucks, more equipment, more employees. And so you're asking, am I in profit mode or am I in growth mode? Here's how you measure that. When you hit capacity and you're completely maxed, maxed out, and you have absolutely no more time in your day, if you increase your capacity by buying more trucks and equipment, you are in growth mode and you're trying to grow the business. But if you hit capacity and instead of going out and getting more equipment, you just raise prices, now you are in profit mode.

What has been the bottleneck? Has it been getting, like enough customers? Has it been getting the employee? What has it been?

It'd probably be the customers.

So over the next six weeks, we have, we have spring rush. Right. The goal is like, can we get 50 customers in that time frame, which is essentially one per day. What are we doing right now? Like the door hangers. Great. How many of those do we have? And like, how many are we doing?

Pretty much you've seen them all. That's what I keep in the truck.

Got it. And so how many do you have for spring rush though? Just in there.

Yeah, that was left over from last year.

Okay.

So I could order some more.

So what, what sort of, what sort of other advertising we're doing to get the customers? Nothing.

SEO. I like, I like how the SEO works.

Well, it's ranked number one. Like that was. I was first looking at. You got the 30 Google reviews. You have a 4.8 stars. When I put Fenton, Michigan Lawn Care, we show up first natively.

Yep.

It's on Google Maps, etc. So it really comes down to, like, what are we doing to drive leads? Like, I think going into the spring rush, have an instant quote you might hit that just organically in terms of the number of customers. But more importantly, it's like, what are we doing with our time now? Right now we don't have a lot of work.

No.

What are we filling our time with.

Now to get the work?

Yeah.

Nothing. One of those hurdles that I've been stumbling over was not apparent until recently, and that was myself.

Okay, so what are we doing on a daily basis?

Waiting for spring to hit.

That's like, the recurring theme I'm hearing. Like, waiting.

Yep.

Like, waiting is a horrible strategy.

Oh, it is. I mean, I'm. I'm going nuts. Like, I've been. I owe in my area. I went out three times to plow last year.

What do you think? Okay. If waiting, it gets us no customers, what's one level above that doing something. And what is that?

Yeah. I don't know.

Ken, I love you.

You're part of Augusta Nation.

We bleed yellow, baby.

But you gotta do something in your business if you want to see improvement.

Because my old strategy was just physically actually going to do something, going out to the houses. And there are some areas that I know I could and probably. Probably do really good. But you have to have a permit to solicit in that neighborhood. And the problem is because all those residents know you're not allowed to solicit first thing, if they don't want your business, first thing they're going to say is, you're not allowed to do that. It's illegal. I've done it before.

And I'm like, you don't even have to knock. Like, if you just canvas put the door hanger on, it's not soliciting.

Yeah.

You knock on the door.

I know.

So, like, it's just a matter of, like, what's keeping us from doing something. Because, like, waiting isn't. Is literally, we're waiting on the sun to come up for space Spring, and in two weeks, that's going to happen. I do believe you're going to get a lot of customers just going into the spring rush with instant quotes, etc.

Yeah.

But if we're doing absolutely nothing and waiting, it's a horrible strategy.

It is where I'm at.

Like, okay, let's say. Let's say whatever we're doing is illegal. Right. Which it's not. It's not soliciting, it's canvassing. If you're doing door hangers only.

Okay.

Like, but let's assume it is illegal.

All right.

The alternative to being someone yelling at you and calling you doing something illegal Is that we do nothing.

Yeah, yeah. You can't not do nothing because you're afraid that something bad might happen.

Anytime you do any sort of action and push, push anyways, you're gonna have pushback, right? Like whether it be from customers, the market, the economy, like there's going to be adversity.

I had somebody say, you don't deserve to be in business. And I'm gonna do everything I can to get to close you down over grass. Later on I thought to myself, alright, let me, let me bring my kids over, bring my one year old and my three year old over. Go ahead and tell me that to my face, that my business deserves to be shut down. Because out of the 60 people that I mow, your grass is more important than these children. And so I had to disconnect myself from that and be like.

Mrs. Smith, whatever, that's just your grass.

Why are we not taking those steps? Is it like, hey, I don't really need the money, I don't really need to grow the business, or is it a matter of like just inaction? Like why, why is it that we aren't doing anything?

It'd probably be just the inaction.

These next two weeks, three weeks, we are still just waiting. That's going to be the difference between this year doing 120 and this year doing 200. And so if right now, if what I saw in there is all we're doing for door hangers is like 100 door hangers, we should be doing 100 a day.

Mike's right about that. I can control if I go out to all those neighborhoods and start passing out door hangers. 100 a day. 100 days, not a lot, by the way. I've done, I've done like three or four hundred a day. Just walked all day long, you know, So a hundred days, not that big of a deal. Especially when you're not doing anything.

You know, I happen to think if you do a hundred per day, you'll probably get almost a customer a day. And if you get a customer per day over the next six weeks, we'll have 50 new customers.

Yes.

And if you have 50 new customers, we'll fill both of these trucks.

Because, because in the past, my best work has always been in spring and summer. And then once I get to that point, I'm like, oh, I'm comfortable right here. And before I joined Augusta, that that's the way, the way that it was. And I was happy with that. It just happened naturally. I mean, I still had plenty of snow Customers. I've been plowing this thing the whole time. It's probably why she keeps breaking down.

So how much in revenue you think this year we didn't snow a couple thousand. So it's such a small percentage. Like, assume you want to cut it out.

I do.

Okay.

I'd prefer to. Yeah.

And they just a matter of, like, depresses me. Here's the thing. If we don't have money, we don't need money to advertise. We don't need money to get more customers. We just don't like the fallacy of, like, I will just like, throw money at this money at this marketing machine and customers will be printed on the other side.

Kind of what I was thinking.

We don't need money to get customers. We need the will to. Because right now we could literally be knocking on doors. We could be doing door hangers. We could be in Facebook groups. We could be on next door. We could be talking to people we know. We could send them one click estimate emails.

Okay, so I only know how to do two of those. And that's part of my problem. I know how to knock on doors and door hangers, and I know how to one click estimate Facebook groups.

Locally, you're on Facebook groups for lawn care guys. I guess there's a ton of Facebook groups for the local area. All right, Fenton, There is, you know, you know people at church.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. I've got a couple customers.

We can get more Google reviews. We can get referrals. None of these things cost money. Like, the idea to wait is simply a matter of inaction or distraction.

If you're gonna grow your business, you're gonna need new skills. And if you don't have those skills innately born to you, gifted to you by God, you're gonna have to go learn and you're gonna read books, you're gonna have to read posts. You're going to have to figure things out. The YouTube gods, the YouTube university, will bless you with knowledge. And using that knowledge, you'll be able to overcome the roadblocks that are inevitably going to be in your path as a business owner.

I've heard that. I've heard that saying that people are like water. They always sink to their lowest point, if not under pressure. But under pressure, water can cut steel.

So, like, what? What is creating pressure for you look like is it is a matter. We need less money to feel the discomfort.

Oh, I've got less money right now. I'm good.

Right. So, like, what? What? Define that. So, like, what's right. Now, are we from like a balance sheet perspective, how much money is in the bank?

About four in the bank, the business account and three in the personal account.

Got it. And I assume that that's relatively similar to what current pass springs have been.

Yeah, yeah, that's nothing, that's nothing unusual.

Like is there enough pain for you to actually get another 50 customers and get the second truck up and running?

Yeah.

Or is it like just like we've done it for 10 or 15 years this way and like we'll just keep doing it this way?

No, I don't like that because the pain is my kids are growing up. I have a 4 year old and a 2 year old and a 22 year old. But he, he, he lives on his own somewhere over there. Yeah, we, we rent this house. It's pretty cheap and that's not gonna last forever. And I'm gonna have to, I'm gonna have to grow at some point. Our ultimate goal was to buy some property and start a homestead and then raise our children in a homesteading farming environment. I used to be one of those crazy preppers, you know, like if they're treating dehydrated food, that's good for 20 years, that sort of thing. It's like, listen man, if the world goes that bad where you have to live in a bomb shelter eating dehydrated food, I'm good, go to heaven anyways.

I'm not okay to stick around, I'm going to heaven when I die, that's fine. I snapped out of that and said, it's gotta be sustainable. So the homesteading is where I started to gravitate towards. And I just realized my grandpa, my mom grew up on a small seven acre farm and she's been preaching it for years and it finally sunk in. And to be able to say, yeah, I don't worry about the price of milk or the fact that there's hormones in all our food or preservatives and I eat like crap right now anyways. But to be able to say, I'm not feeding that to my kids.

So what size does the business have to be to get to that point? Do you need to do about double like 200,000 in revenue?

No, it'd be way more than that.

Okay, so what do you need to make for revenue wise for the business.

To be able to buy a house and start a homestead? Probably the 500 plus mark.

So four or five employees, three or four trucks.

Correct.

Got it.

Okay. That's why I was like, well if I know how to do one truck. If I can learn how to do one truck, then. Then number two truck isn't going to be a problem, because I'll just do the exact same thing over and over, just a copy and paste.

But what are we waiting on? Like. Like, it's not going to just fall in our laps?

No.

Like, what is Like. And this is a rhetorical question, like, what are we doing to make that happen? Because right now, sitting at home just waiting, we are not going to build a $500,000 business. Like, natural entropy to the universe is not. Is against us. Is going to take a force of will to build something. A house doesn't just appear. We have to build the thing.

You got to build it.

We get them. We've got to get materials. We got to put effort and labor into it. And so I'm going to go out on a limb and say that what you've been filling your time with instead of going on getting more customers to do that has been that project with the. With the ramp we're at.

How did you know?

I'm just gonna go out on a limb.

That's my baby.

All right, there it is.

Ken wants to grow a $500,000 business that will sustain his family and contribute to these goals that he has. Being clear on that is a huge win for you as a business owner, just to know where directionally you're trying to go. But to achieve these goals, Ken's gonna need to commit in the short term, the next few years to really work in the business a lot more, because it sounds like he's getting distracted with something that. That's taking up all of his time.

So walk me to your baby. Cause I have a feeling this baby is preventing other babies from being born.

I birthed it over the winter.

I know, but, like, you know, so. Okay, walk me through this. Like, what is this all about?

All right, so this is called the rail gate.

The rail gate.

Yep.

Okay.

It's four common sections. It has rails inside. Eventually, I'll have a rail that goes along the side as well. Okay. This thing turns into five different things.

Okay.

So it's not just a dovetail ramp.

Okay.

It could be a double dovetail ramp, which means you can fit a 60 inch mower on it.

What's the difference between this and then the ramp rack? It's just cheaper.

Really. It's going to be less expensive. And then it's like I said, one man operable. Okay. So you. So one person can take out these pins.

Yeah.

And Grab this piece. It's only about £80.

Yeah.

And then move it off to the side and then do the next piece.

Why would you do that?

I had such a hard time. Most of my inventions, I got like, five to eight of them, depending on what type of invention you're talking about. They're all ideas. They're all in my head. I have not come up with any of them. None exists but that one. Three of them are snowplows. One of them is a fancy trailer hitch. I could talk about all eight of them, and I just. It wouldn't get me anywhere.

Is this distraction preventing us from building a $500,000 business? Yeah. And the likelihood of this succeeding versus getting more mowing customers. I know the grass will grow.

Yes.

I know that customers need it cut. I'm not so certain that this has enough differentiation.

Yeah, you're right.

To be able to get over the hump.

The main goal was that it was going to work for what I needed it to work for and that. Can I take that apart, one man, you know, blah, blah, blah. The. The point is that I wanted to create something that was going to solve a problem for some guys.

Well, there's three ways to grow business, right? You got. You can do things more, more of what you're doing. You can do what you're doing better, or you can do something new. And everyone defaults to new. Is that you have a very low chance of actually being successful.

Whereas if you keep just doing more.

And better of what you're currently doing, you usually make a lot more money. And there's a lot of problems in the world to solve and a lot of inventions that could be made. But doing more and better has a much greater likelihood of making profit than doing things that are new.

Ultimately, I was like, hey, I just want to invent it for myself. If nobody else buys it, I don't care. I have one that works.

Hey, I don't mind tinkering. I don't mind building, like scratching your itch and making a solution. But when it's distracting you from building the main thing. Yeah, that's where you want to cut it.

Everyone's always looking for the new. The shiny, the exciting, the cool, the fascinating, the bright and shiny awesome thing that's brand new. When reality, the. The vast majority of profits and great businesses are built on just doing more of what you're already doing and doing it better. If your business is sort of like the ramp rat, needs a hammer, needs a chisel, needs a little bit of work, it's falling apart, give me a call. Oh, you know what better way? Go to the link down below. Mikeannies.com turnaround. I'll bring out my hammer, baby. Let's go to work.

All you need for business is a product to sell and a customer willing to pay you. As long as I can send them an estimate and collect on the invoice, we're in business.

Yeah.

And then what happens is, as you begin to nail that, you'll then have time to figure out the other 5, 10% of things. Okay, how do I automate this? How do I do the ads? All this other fancy stuff?

In other words, they're past the point where they've got the customers that I want. They're at the point where they need to know how to operate, optimize, optimize in the CRM to then be better at the customers they are right now.

You are the CRM, Right? You know where everything is here. You know where every truck goes? You know every single customer?

Yes, I do.

So there's really no point in trying to optimize and save 5% or 10% here. When you start scaling, it does make a lot of sense to do that right now. The method is get more customers. How do I do that? I don't have money. Okay, what can we do to get more customers?

I don't have more if I don't have money. I got time.

And that's the part that right now is being sucked up into things like that. And the other thing I would say is that's probably not serving you well. The social media side of things, like time spent doing that and even feeling inadequate when you see those things, which, yeah, like, kudos to you for recognizing the fact you feel that way and, like, you feel inadequate. That's awesome. Like, the fact that you even just acknowledge it. The thing is this. You don't need those skills to be successful.

Okay?

You don't. You. If you go get 300 customers tomorrow to just kick butt and knocking on doors, and it's taking action after action, after action. There's other people that can figure out Google Ads for you. There's other people that can do Facebook ads. There's other people that can walk you through all the copilot stuff.

My problem there was. I was like, there was all these things that I don't know how to do, and all these locations in Augusta are successful, and that's what they're worried about. They're worried about X, Y, and Z.

But the problems you're gonna have when you have 10 trucks and doing 150,000amonth in revenue. Very different than we're currently at now.

Yeah, I think that's what I'm starting to realize is what you're seeing saying.

Like, if your goal this year is get 50 more customers, we do not need to figure out any of that other stuff.

Yeah, I would love to max out this truck, but if I can max out the one, I need to max out the other two.

And to do that, to get 50 customers, you don't need any of that other stuff. You simply need to figure out doing one action, one channel of marketing over and over and over and over again, and nothing else matters. Racks, painting trucks.

Right.

Copilot Facebook ads. There's a million things we can be doing in the business. There's usually only one thing that we should be focused on. And right now, it's getting more customers without spending money on ads.

Right.

So therefore, it's like, what channel is that going to be? If door hangers, we know we can get like, half a percent of people. That means that I need to put out 200 door hangers to get one customer. Great. I'm gonna do 200 door hangers per day. I happen to believe you. 100 per day. You'll probably get a new customer every.

Single day, especially in the spring.

And so it's like, great. Right now, that is the only thing to focus on. And, like, I see the. The amount of time spent on social media, whether it be Facebook or YouTube.

Or whatever, trying to learn, and that's why I'm there. I mean, some of it's on board.

The only reason to learn is because you don't know what the next step is. I'm telling you what the next step is. To get 50 customers and is do door hangers and door hangers only. Everything else is a distraction.

Seeing other people on social media that are crushing it and winning and super successful and ahead of you can be super inspiring. But be careful not to let it get you so down in the dumps, and you're so much lower than them that you'll never be able to achieve, or you're somehow less than them.

As an entrepreneur, there's gonna be somebody that's in my situation and they're trying to do something different or whatever it is, and they're gonna see this video and they're gonna say, yeah, yeah, I relate to that guy. He's a big dumb idiot, just like me. I thought I could just quit my job and start a business and I'll just cut grass and there you go. They're gonna have to admit the same way I did. If you're gonna be successful in your goals and actually achieve them, you gotta stay focused.

Look, I know some people will say that I'm being hard on Ken and pushing him pretty hard on some of these topics. Sometimes as a coach, you gotta push your player because you care about them and their success. It's not necessarily free. You don't enjoy it, but you want to see them succeed. But the bottom line is when someone joins Augusta Nation, I want them to win. And when they come, I tell them, look, if you're just trying to build $100,000 annual revenue business, you shouldn't join Augusta if you're willing to scale and use systems. That's why you join. So for to see someone like Ken, after a couple years, still hitting his head up against this. That's why I'm so passionate and I'm pushing him so hard.

Hanging in there, trying to, trying to stay sane. 10% of the customers are just absolute crazy. Have the dumbest complaints. One guy claimed he was, he, he said, I'm a self proclaimed yard nazi. Everything has to be perfect. And I was like, hey, I understand. You know, we can, based on time, we can only give you a B plus, a minus job. So, you know, you're used to doing your own lawn. It's gonna look best if you do it. So you want a better, a better quality job, then you're probably going to do it yourself. And he said, hey, thanks for being honest with me. And then I just dropped him like that. Everyone else, either they don't say anything at all so you know you're doing all right, or they actually thank you for your service and that sort of thing. So, yeah, only 10% are the bad ones. The rest of them are fine.

We were cooped up for three, four months and there was nothing to do. And I had snow accounts, so I couldn't go out and get another job, which is what I originally originally planned on doing. And I wanted to get more snow accounts. And that didn't happen. I mean, in here, in Michigan, in my area, there was only three major events. The rest of them are all little tiny events. So like if you were doing commercial and you had to do salt, you would consider that an event and you go out and do ice management. But as for residential, for plowing the driveway, there was only three. I only wanted to cut it out necessarily because it was so stressful. I had to fix a couple of the trucks when they would break down in the snow. And then I was spending all the revenue that I was getting from the snow on the repair of the truck. So it's like, that's. No, you're just spinning your tires. No pun intended. And I really can imagine in the future so many people cutting out snow because it doesn't pay. And then everyone is like, oh, my word, we need snow removal. And nobody does it anymore. Yeah, nobody does it because it's not profitable. So if you want me to get back into the game, you're going to literally have to pay three to four times as much.

Honestly, I get more work from just the SEO website every day. When I log on or when I open up my copilot app, I have a new customer. It just pops up. I have done a lot of door hangers trying to stick to the 100 per day rule. I bought a electric scooter. Kid said it was almost brand new and he wanted money for some video game or something like that. And you go, so I'm selling my scooter and I'm like, I'll give you 200 bucks. And then he goes, okay. And so I bought scooter. And this, this stupid scooter does 18 miles an hour and has a weight limit of 275. I'm like, yes, that's. I'm not quite 275 pounds. So I'm scooting around on the scooter with like 50 to 100 door hangers in my, my vest pocket and I'm just putting them on every door. And I'm talking to people and I'm getting chased by dogs. Dogs are chasing me down the driveway. Take off, try to catch me, pooch. The rule is always the same. Yeah. For every 100 door hangers that I hang up, I'll get about one customer. One to two customers.

One guy starting on the 15, somebody already started, and he's just part time. He's basically just with me. And I had another person that I just sent him to the address and say, clean this mess up. And he goes, great. And that's it. So it's. I have to get at least one person, maybe two to actually help me with mowing, that actually knows how to mow. So the people that I've hired already don't know how to mow. They barely know how to trim. And I have to take a long time to explain to them, this is how I want you to trim. So I actually need to hire somebody that knows what they're doing is appreciative of the hourly rate, that sort of thing. And then I'll be able to move them onto like full time mowing where I can give them the second truck and the second mower to mop up all the stuff that I couldn't handle on the full mowing days.

I have put the Railgate on hold. I mean, I'm using it, it's on, it's on one of my trucks. But my fabricator hasn't finished the truck bed rails yet and the mechanism that'll hold it all together. So as soon as he finishes that, it will be ready with all the holes and all the welding and everything that will be ready to then get galvanized. And once it gets galvanized, I'll tell all of Augusta, hey, here's the railgate. I'm not in any position to manufacture it and, and sell it out to you, so I would encourage you to do what I did and get a local fabricator and I will give you the plans, the, the, the CAD program for it and then see how much your local fabricator will make this for. Because I guarantee it's still going with materials and labor. It's still going to be less than, than the name brands and more versatile. That's obviously the idea. I've got a friend right now.

Who keeps taking his, his ramp off his truck every week. Puts it on and takes it off every week. And he says it takes him 45 minutes. And I'm like, if you had my, you had my invention, it would probably take you 10 minutes. I get upset when I had to pay $5,000 for an item that should cost 2500. So I invent them. I invented 2500. $1.

Rule the world.