Warren Buffett Tips for Small Businesses, Headquarters Update, 12 Month Business Plan Maker

Welcome back to the Mike Andys podcast, where we discuss the ins and outs of owning a small business. If you're new here, the Mike Andes podcast is all about taking your business to the next level. We have some great content for you. These are all things that you can start using today to help grow your business. Plus some updates on the current status of the new Augusta headquarters. No, not the temporary one, the real one. First, how can you apply stock trading techniques to running a small business? Mike breaks down how using Warren Buffett as an inspiration. Then at the end, Mike has a new tool to that you can use to get started on building your own business plan. And it's completely free. As always, you can find all this and more over at the MikeAndYs YouTube channel. But without further ado, here's Mike with Warren Buffett success tips for small business owners.

Today, I'm going to share with you four different things that you can use in your small business that made the likes of Warren Buffett billions of dollars trading stocks on the stock market. And I have invested up to a million dollars in the stock market. And these are the lessons I learned. The bad and the ugly. Number one, every single stock investor tries to do this, and that is buy.

Low and sell high.

In other words, this is a kind of what a graph might look like in the stock market. You got ups and downs, highs and lows. The goal is always to sell when everything is going well and then buy when everyone's running for the hills and saying, we're going into recession and we're all going to die because of a disease like Covid. That's the time to buy. That's the time to go all in and commit to your investment. And in your small business, you, you might not necessarily have these fancy charts and dinging bells and green and red and people talking about stocks and, you know, going up and down. You might not have that in your small business, but what you do have is the highs and lows of emotion, the financial pressures in your business. Sometimes employees love you, sometimes they hate you. Sometimes customers love you. Sometimes you create reviews online, sometimes they don't. That's the highs and lows that you're going to experience in your small business. But the same is true that you need to go all in when the times are against you, when everything is going wrong, when the employee just walked off the and the customer yell at you in the face, when the markets and the economy is not doing very well and your competition is starting to give up, that's the moment that you should go all into your small business. That's when you commit 100%. It's not fun, it's not exciting, it's not easy to do. Now, I was very, very lucky because in 2021, October of 2021, I made a video about how I was selling the majority of my stock portfolio to get into a real estate deal. I was very fortunate because in just a few months later, the stock market took a massive tumble. And through all of 2022, it was down and going down, down, down, down. But the thing is, during that low moment during when interest rates are going up and there's a war in Ukraine and all these crazy things, that's the time to actually buy stocks. Not when it's crazy high in 2020 and 2021, when there's meme stocks and doubling and tripling day over day. That's not when to buy stocks. The time to buy stocks is when everyone's in the. Everything's in the gutter and we're all going to recess time to buy stocks. And so I went from having a, almost a million dollars, actually just over just over a million dollars in stocks all the way down to about $250,000. And then throughout 2022, I just kind of kept buying because everything's low, low, low. And now, as I saw in January 2023, I kind of see, like, hey, we're kind of out of the trough. A lot of the pain of interest rates has already been taking effect. And over the past few months, the stock market's done pretty well. Now, the bottom line of this is that's the goal. And that's very, very difficult, whether it be stock investing or your small business, is to buy. When everyone says you're the best and you're amazing and you're winning local awards in your community for the best business of the year, small business of the year, entrepreneur of the year, you've got to sell off your stock in yourself. And the emotion of all that happening and not like, oh, now we're going to expand and do all. And then you do stupid stuff and you buy trucks and you buy too many houses and you buy a bigger boat. Don't do that. At the same token, when you're really everything's against you, that's the time to really commit to the company. Now that's the goal of every investor. The vast majority of people will lose money trying to day trade or buy in and buy out of the market. The vast majority of investors when it comes to stocks will make more money trying to dollar cost average. What that means is you have a plan in place of how much you're going to spend every day or every single week or every single month. And you invest that money into the market no matter what. You have a plan and you execute against it. And for the vast majority of small business owners, instead of trying to time the market of your emotions and the financials and the economics and what your employees are doing, what you should do is have a plan in place for what you're going to do in the business, how much you're going to spend on marketing, how quickly you're going to grow, when you're going to hire employees, when you're going to get the next crew and the next truck and the next piece of equipment. That is dollar cost averaging. Committing to the plan in place, instead of trying to buy low and sell high, the vast majority, more than 90% of investors in the stock market would be better off just committing to a plan and executing against it consistently, regardless of the market and not getting involved in the emotion of investing. And the same is true for small business owners. Have a plan in place and execute against it. Don't do it based upon the economy or what your family thinks about you or how you're feeling that day, or what your customers or employees think about you that day. You've got to consistently have action and execution towards the plan that you have in place. And that's in my opinion, the definition of dollar cost averaging when it a small business. Now, number three is buy and hold. Because as much as I like to say buy low, sell high, as much as I like to say dollar cost average and some people will sell occasionally when they. The thing is, the vast majority of really wealthy people never sell. They just keep consistently buying more and more and more. You look at like someone like Warren Buffett for example, he hardly ever sells businesses, he hardly ever sells any stocks that he buys. The vast majority of wealthy people when it comes to real estate and their businesses, they buy and they hold. And for small business owners reason I say this is a trait that you can also use in your small business is don't get involved in the next shiny thing. Oh, if I got to buy this and then sell this and I'm going to go to this business venture in this industry and oh, I got to add this service and I should add this different type of marketing campaign. It's like buy, commit and then just hold on to it, hold on to your business. I feel like so many small business owners like the shiny object syndrome of like, oh my goodness, this service added my business would just make it so much better. Oh, I saw this video and someone made so much money and profit on this specific type of truck. I'm going to go buy this. And they're going in Sony in different directions. When the vast majority of investors in the stock market realize just buy it and hold it. And for the vast majority of people that try to buy in and buy out and buy in and buy out, they lose more than the person who just buys and holds it for the long term. And for most small business owners, instead of trying to build it to like, move on to the next thing, just build your business as if you're never.

Going to sell it.

The way that you'll run your business is so different when you have this mentality, I'm never going to sell this thing. This is going to be a business I want to build for generations. I want to build this thing for hundreds of years. You'll be more conservative, you'll make sure that you're more profitable and you won't take short term actions that lead to massive downside results in the form of debt and dumb decision making that a lot of small business owners get them all tangled up when it comes to a recession. All right, now the fourth thing you've got to learn is stay away from the hype when it comes to investing in stocks. Personally, in my portfolio, if any of the companies I was invested in started to get in the hype cycle and people started really hyping it up and there was like memes about it and people on Reddit started talking about it and it jumped up like 20, 30, 30, 40% a day. I was out, out like a trout. There was one specific drug that got passed by the fda and because of that, the stock that I was in jumped 170% and only had a very small percent of my portfolio in it, less than 3%. But at the time I saw that and immediately sold because sure enough, that's the highest it has ever been. And now it's like 5 or 10% of that value because people buy into hype. Oh my goodness, the news, it's like that has nothing to do with the fundamentals of the profitability of the business. And so I always try to stay away from hype in stocks. And if something goes up 30, 40% and then does it again and again and now everyone else is talking about it, and now it's super popular to invest in meme stocks and now it's really popular to invest in NFTs and crypto. When things get popular, the riches have been made. The bulk of the riches have been made when things get into the mainstream and they're really, really popular. So what does that mean? Stay away from the hype in your industry. So when you go to a trade show or a conference and everyone's hyping up a certain type of technology or hyping a certain piece of equipment or hyping up a certain type of market, it's like I'm very cautious of the fact that the majority of the riches have already been made from that specific technology or that specific, you know, stock, which in this case is just something that's really popular. And I've seen it time and time again in industries like electric. We're all going to go electric. And everyone hypes up electric and is like, it doesn't necessarily move the needle for my business to have an electric mower or an electric weed whacker. Like there's some benefits to it, but just the hype of marketing in your industry can fog the the direction and really cloud your decision making framework for what's right for the business. The same way that hype in the stock market clouds the judgment of someone that is like diligently trying to invest in good companies that are solid that might be making 1, 2, 3, 4% gains and they're like man, that other company made 40% in one day and then 120% gains then jump the next day 400%. It can be very difficult to just stay in your lane and stay focused like a racehorse blinders on, focused on the goal. When there's all this hype action happening around you in stocks and in your small business. Stop looking at all the different services and products you could sell and different businesses you could start and ventures and possibilities and oh my goodness, I should go into sales. And I saw this one video and someone mentioned you've got to stay focused. Now not too long ago, even in my business I was distracted by a lot of different opportunities and different additions. I could do my business. And I go over those specifically in this video here. The four things I wish I would have known and it took me five years to figure out and if I would have known them, I probably would have made millions of dollars more just by figuring this out sooner, at least cutting out time. So watch this video here of four different things that I wish I knew.

Before starting my lawn care business.

The CRM industry has been riddled with hidden fees Buggy features and an overall lack of innovation for years. A CRM can be a make or break piece of software for your business. So it's important that you choose the right one. Here at Augusta, we've actually gone through most of them. But with outdated features and difficult usability, we found ourselves just needing more. So, of course, Mike decided to make his own. Introducing Copilot CRM. Get all the ratios and numbers you need to make data driven decisions in your business. Not only does Cockpit allow you to see all the efficiency and business metrics, but it also gives you meaningful suggestions on how to improve your business. We can use the data inside your account to help you improve your close ratio, labor efficiency, customer acquisition costs, and many other key performance indicators in your business. So step into the cockpit of your business and get started for free today@copilotcrm.com Next up, Mike's going to give us some updates on the progress of the brand new Augusta headquarters.

Hey, everyone.

Mike Annings here. Here at the Honda Civic, showing you the headquarter property. This is the property that we purchased almost three years ago. And the plan was and is to have the headquarters for Augusta Lawn Care here. You can see here coming soon, Augusta Lawn Care Services. That's what the building is going to look like, hopefully eventually. But it's been almost three years since we purchased the property. It's five acres, it's industrial land. It's gonna be perfect once we have it done. But this is what really slowed us down and it's been extremely annoying. Check this out right here. You can see this fresh gravel. You can see that new hydrant down there. This was just put in last month.

Okay.

And this is literally the water supply. Water and sewer from Ferndale to Bellingham. Okay. They connect the two in the event that if something would go really, really bad, there'd be water connected between the two cities. Here's the thing. We are not allowed to connect to that water supply. It makes absolutely no sense. But that's what we were trying to figure out over the past little while. Is, is there any way for us just to connect to the water supply?

Because.

Because we're not doing that. We are having to put a well in. We're having to put like a. I forget how many tens of thousands of gallons worth of water tank for fire suppression. We have to put sprinklers in our entire building because we can't hook up to the water. So we were trying to get around that expense, which is going to cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars. Just because we can't connect to the water supply for the city.

And so that's not fun.

And we also have to, because of that, do a, a big, what's it called? Storm water retention pond. So that's where the building is going to be at that where you see those little markers over there, that's the back of the building and it basically runs the front of the property. And then what we're going to have is the sewer water or whatever it's called, the storm water goes over there, the retention pond. But what I'm walking on right now is eight dump truck loads, no, 11. 11 dump truck loads of hog heat. Because we need to install the, the water well thing, whatever it's called. So yeah, this will be the back of the building. Then where over there those trees is going to be the big water tower. And then this is probably actually where the road is going to be for us to be able to bring back debris. So the reason that we needed this property and everyone's like, why don't you just buy something? And yes, it's like pretty expensive per square foot, etc. Why don't you just, you know, buy something that's existing instead of trying to build?

So expensive. Yes, you're right.

It's stupid decision. However, finding a property where we can check this out. Finding a property where we can dump debris as a contract like construction and have heavy machinery, etc. Also have an office, also have tons of parking and have the ability to do training for our franchisees on that site is very difficult to find an existing building. Like, trust me, I looked. So this is the well. So I think we went down like 150, 120ft they said. And we got 20 gallons a minute as the flow rate. But this property goes back quite a ways. We have five acres and so this goes back a couple hundred feet more. And having five acres, although right now we aren't going to use probably but maybe three acres of it. My goal is that hopefully we'd keep building on this property. We need a lot of space for parking because of command center.

Already having 50 plus people there, plus the local shop, plus when we have our franchisees, there's 30, 40 plus people that could potentially be here every month. So we need a lot of space. And because this property has taken literally like that, well, I think is about the halfway marker. So you can see how far we are from the road where that shed's at over on the road. We're about that. That well's about Halfway through. So it goes way back. And I don't know what's over there. Let's go try to find out. I don't even know what that is. They put some blue thing. I wonder if that's the. I haven't been here in months.

Months.

I wonder if that's the start of where they're putting the. What's it called, the big water tank thing. Okay, we'll go check that out. But because this has taken literally almost three years and it was a pain in the butt, there's pros and cons that the cons stinks because we're gonna move in and from day one, I'm basically gonna be at max capacities for this building. I thought it was going to be nice and big and good for the office. Turns out it's probably going to be too small for us by the time we move in here next year. And so because this one's taking so long, I have to already start thinking about the second building. And so what I'm considering doing is having a second building in the back that's just massive. And that'd be Command center. Only because right now the building that's going in is going to be Command center franchisee training the media team, and then a space for me to live.

My.

My plan is to start the second building just for Command center at the back of the property and then just leave the front one for just the franchise. Like the more the corporate side, the coaching sales and the media side of things. And then we obviously like home service, cpa, things like that.

Okay.

It's an absolute mud fest. One day I'll show you guys back there what's going on. But it poured rain yesterday and it's super muddy. Got a bunch of the materials up front here. Check this out. Now, there's always good to every bad. Now the good is that we're gonna pay for all this with cash. Very fortunate, very lucky because interest rates being so high. My monthly payment on three and a three and a quarter million or whatever it's gonna cost, but probably about 3.3. That's my goal. I think I'll probably end up, you know, how things go. Probably 3.4.

We'll see.

Very fortunate.

We all pay with the cash. And that's the. The positive thing about taking so long is because the past three years, I think we'll have enough cash flow and we'll be able to pay for 99 of this, if not 100 by the time we move in with cash. It's like the property, this, this property like the land is already paid for. I've sold off about half my real estate portfolio which should pay for the rest of the of it. So that's the plan.

That's the update.

Any day now we could get a building permit. Now that we had the, the well put in a couple weeks ago. We have all the material. We have windows sitting in storage containers, we have doors, we have what else we got. We got a whole bunch of stuff ready to go, all the materials because we've been waiting and my hands are freezing cold. It's frigid right now. But anyways, that's the update on the headquarters building. Thanks so much. We'll see you tomorrow.

Payroll, bookkeeping and taxes. Juggling all of these by yourself can be a huge challenge, especially if your business is growing. A good CPA can make all the difference. And that's why Mike founded Home Service CPA. Our certified QuickBooks team is supercharged with industry specific knowledge to make sure that your books are in order. This unique combination allows us to give you the information necessary to make well informed financial and strategic decisions in your business. Knowing your numbers is an important gauge of how fast you can, how much you can spend on marketing and when you need to start hiring new employees. We make sure that you have the data needed to regain control of your business and take it to the next level with confidence. You can learn more by going to homeservicecpa.com alright, last thing. Mike has a new tool that you can use to build a 12 month business plan completely for free. Let's go check it out.

Today I'm going to be sharing with.

You the exact tool and strategy that I use to plan for my businesses 12 months in advance and make sure I'm hitting my goals focused on the key objectives. And I have a marketing plan and a budget in place. Now this tool is going to be completely free. You can go to mikeannies.com plan and download the template or go to lawn caremedia.com and also see it there.

So once you download the template, it's going to show you a 12 month business plan where for every single month of the year you're going to have a key objective. One goal that you focus on. I find so oftentimes with entrepreneurs they're trying to do five different things in their business and because of that they get nothing done. So I want you to focus on one specific key objective. The only goal for that month that might be setting up new clients. For example, here we got set up mowing recurring schedules inside of my CRM. But there's a dropdown on this document that I've created for you of a whole bunch of different key objectives that you could have one goal for each month. So if that's my goal, setting up the mowing recurring schedules, it's going to give me a print marking objective, online strategy and business development. Tip. So if we jump down to February, my specific goal, my key objective is to pre sell spring cleanups. I don't want to have to wait till spring rush to sell all my existing customers spring cleanups. I want them to get done before the spring rush. So what am I going to do? My focus is going to be pre selling my existing customers spring cleanups. This is going to tell you based upon this dropdown. This all just gets pre populated based upon your goal. It's going to tell you the specific cleanup every door direct mail campaigns you can run, how to run Facebook ads. Three different ways to run Facebook ads around property cleanups as well is actually walk you through a specific property client we did that was $104 per hour and the crew actually shows you what they were doing. Not myself, actually the actual crew themselves. Now as we head into say the spring rush, my focus becomes increasing the density of my mower outs and I really want to focus all of my marketing on mowing. So what's it going to do? It's going to give you instant quote door hangers. It's going to tell you exactly what you should be doing to get obsessed about route density, including videos I've made walking you through this process. So the goal in having this document is that you have laser like focus on one specific thing for every single. Now in addition to having a goal, you also need the financial, the budgeting, planning side of things. And that really is going to hinge on what is your gross revenue going to be. Now obviously we focus on top line revenue, but I'm also mostly concerned in this document about your cash position. How much money do you have on hand? Because you can have a profitable growing business that runs out of cash and dies. And it's like oxygen. If you run out of cash, if you run out of oxygen, you die. And you can be very profitable making a lot of money. Big jobs growing from 20,000amonth, month to 40,000amonth to $80,000 a month. But you can still run out of cash. And so that's why on the bottom here when the it has the yellow cells, that's where you're going to put a dollar amount in, and that dollar amount is going to correlate with how much money you have on hand. So, for example, I'm gonna have $20,000 in the bank account today. Okay? Now, I'm going to require certain purchases because I'm planning growth this year, right? It's January, $20,000 cash on hand. I need to go out and buy a new mower. I'm going to spend $8,000 on a new mower. Now, my monthly revenue goal for this month is probably going to be pretty low, simply due to the fact that, you know, it's not busy during the winter. So $10,000 is going to be my monthly revenue goal. Now, I have a low risk analysis, and based upon the numbers you punch in here, we're going to give you a risk analysis based upon your cash statement. How much money do you have on hand? Is it enough to be able to sustain the business? Now, as we get into February, I just spent 8,000 of my $20,000 on a mower. I might only have, say, $10,000 left in my bank because I got other fixed expenses. And I just know that, hey, I'm going to spring rush. I'm not going to have a lot of work. I'm not going to. Therefore, I'm going to have to burn through some cash as I bought a mower, and I'm burning to my cash reserves. Okay, great. Well, if I do purchases required, I'm just going to buy a couple trimmers, maybe a backpack blower. So $1,000 going to be my purchases required. Well, my monthly revenue goal for this month is, you know, still not as bad as January, but it's still the winter, right? It's like, it's still not super busy. So $12,000, still low risk assessment. But again, I'm going through every single month these months. I'm figuring out my goal and then figuring out my numbers. Now into March, I'm planning to start growing. I actually think that, you know, in terms of my monthly revenue goal, I think I should be able to do like $40,000. We're really trying to grow this specific month, but because I've just finished going through the off season, my cash position is all the way down to $8,000, $8,000 in the bank. Now, if I do that and my purchase required, you know, I'm not going to buy anything. I'm not gonna buy any trucks. I don't need anything. But still, my. I have a high risk analysis because I only have $8,000 in the bank, and I have a business doing $40,000 a month in revenue. That's very scary. You have literally less than a week's worth of revenue in the bank account. And remember, you might be growing. Like, I'm really excited that you went from 12,000 to 40,000amonth in revenue. But your cash position is gonna be very, very scary when you only have $8,000 in the bank account. But you know what? In April, I expect we'll get some of that. Those deposits in, we're getting up to $15,000 back into the bank account. But you know what? Now we need a truck because we're growing so fast. I need a $10,000 truck, and that's like a cheap one. Let's do a $12,000 truck. Okay. You know, we're growing so fast that we need another truck. $12,000 at least for that truck. My monthly revenue goal. You know, we're just kicking butt. I'm gonna do 55,000. We're growing, like, hand over fist.

Again, high risk.

You only have 15,000 do, and you're gonna go spend 12,000 of that on a truck, and you're doing $50,000 a month in business. But you know what? Hey, we're still growing. We're kicking butt, and we are still continuing to grow. Next month, we're gonna do $60,000 in May, and we're not gonna buy any trucks or equipment. We've already got that under our belt. And so now we got $20,000 underneath our belt in terms of cash on hand. Well, now we have medium risk. It's a little bit better because at least you have 20 grand in the bank now. Even though the business is growing, we're doing better. But the reason that this is so important to do this, typ projections, is because you can actually track when you potentially might need to stop growing. Because if you only have $15,000 in the bank and yet you'll need another truck to keep growing the business, you might want to stop growing at that level, get some more cash underneath your belt before you keep continuing to grow. Not only do you have an actual goal, a key objective, one thing that you focus on the month to give you clarity around what you should focus on, and then gives you marketing strategies and business development around that key objective. But also we are going to track what our cash position is and make sure we don't run out of cash as we continue to grow the business. Now, when it comes to marketing, at the very top, I want you to put your annual marketing spend and Say, hey, we're going to spend $20,000 in marketing this year. Every single month you're going to go into put what your marketing spend percentage is. So for example, if I'm spending 5% of my total budget for the year, I'm going to spend $1,000 in marketing in January. And the reason I do this is because I want you to see that, hey, if I actually really focus on spending 20%, 25, 30% of my marketing budget during the spring rush, yeah, that's gonna be like four or $5,000, $6,000 a month. If I spend 30% of my marketing budget in April and $6,000 a month, that's what, $200 a day that I've got to spend on marketing. This is gonna tell you how to do it. This one specifically gives you three actionable ways to use Facebook to run ads and get more. What is this? We're trying to do marketing for mowing. We're trying to get mowing customers. This gives you the strategies to do that. So I highly recommend you check out this document. It's completely free. There's no cost whatsoever. Go to.complan. and what's really cool is at the end of every single month, it gives you a reminder of what you're needing to focus on. And just kind of a note from myself, for example, at the end of September, it says the majority of profits are realized in the second half of the year. Make sure you have you are saving enough for the slow season and don't go and blow all the cash reserves on fancy equipment. These are the type of reminders you need to know. Also things like tax time. You know, this one here says, hey, you got to have a tax strategy in place. It's December. I know you're busy, I know you're tired, I know it's holidays. But you've got to have a tax strategy in place. You got to know your estimated payments are going to be and potentially go buy some equipment or trucks earlier. So that way you can have a section 179, deduct those in this calendar year and reduce your tax liability. This is the way that I plan in my businesses. I don't like to project way out into the future, five, 10 years. You're basically just guessing. I just want to have a very clear, actionable, step by step for every single month and have one key thing that I focus on. If I can just do one thing a month, I will crush it and probably take massive market share from my competition. Now, if you're building your business and you're under $500,000 in annual revenue. Watch this video here because there's only really one thing you need to know when it comes to marketing. If you just know this one metric in your business, you'll grow your business to $500,000 in a flash. Check this video out right here.

This has been the Mike Gandies podcast. Now you have some ideas on how to take your business to the next level level. And if you like what you heard, we have tons of lectures, interviews, and more over at the MyCandy's YouTube channel that'll be right up your alley. But that's all we have for you today. We'll see you next time.

Sam.