Watch This if You Want to QUIT Business

I spent nearly every waking minute of my 20s building a business. I'm now 30 years old and the founder of Augusta Lawn Care. We'll do over $75 million in revenue this year, and we were valued at $43 million this year by a private evaluator. And I'm going to share with you today the 6 lowest moments of my career during those 20s when I wanted to quit. When I first got started, I saw so many influencers share their wins and the 30 seconds that I shared at the very beginning of this video, they share that part, but they did not share everything that went into it. And the truth of it is it's been over 12 years now since I started Augusta Lawn Care. We now have the media side. We now have HomeWorks, the software, and everyone sees the locations. Everyone sees the $75 million in revenue. Everyone sees the $43 million valuation. Which will probably be over $60 to $70 million valuation in 2027. And they don't see the 6 things I'm about to share with you all today. And you might have seen snippets of this in the past, but I wanted to really share what working in your 20s for, no joke, 60 to 100 hours per week looks like. And along that journey, feeling like I was a loser many, many times. And you're like, oh, that must have been years ago. No, it still happens. And if you're going to keep growing the business, you're going to— there's going to be times where you feel like you are in a huge deficit in terms of the skills that you need to be able to grow the business and be the leader that is required to continue to grow. So I was 18 years old. I was the Doogie Howser in my school. I went to Western Washington University. I started college when I was 13 years old, and I thought I was going to become a medical doctor. And I fully intended on doing something either in brain surgery, spinal surgery, maybe heart surgery. I went to Africa between my bachelor's degree and then moving, getting my, my MD, medical doctorate. And I would have had another like 6, 7, 8 years of residency and fellowship trying to become a surgeon. So I wasn't like close to becoming a surgeon. However, When you, from 13 years old, believe that that's what you're gonna do. And I had like skeletons on my wall and all the muscle groups, and I studied like crazy. And for as much as I put into business now, I put all that energy into school and education and reading textbooks. And it wasn't like I just would walk into tests and ace them. That was not how it was. Everyone just assumed that was. I worked my face off in college. The last year, once I kind of started thinking that this might not be for me, that it was really evident that I couldn't just walk into a test because no longer did I have the passion to work days and nights reading over textbooks and going over exam, getting ready for exams. And so my, my, my scores went from a 4.0 to a lower score because it was just my passion wasn't there anymore. And what happened is I went to Africa, I was there for 6 weeks, And I volunteered in orphanages and hospitals, and I loved every single minute of it. We did everything from surgeries, amputations, injections. I worked a lot in the burn unit in the pediatric side of things. I was able to go to orphanages where there was over 70 kids between newborn and 18 years old in a 3-bedroom house with one lady. Her name was Margaret, caring for all of them, and she housed, fed, and schooled all of them. And so that's where I was volunteering, usually on the weekends, and then during the week I was at the clinics. And I saw all sorts of cool stuff— birthing, just the craziest stuff you'd never be able to see in the US. So I was like, let's go! I was amped up and ready to rock and roll, finish out my bachelor's degree, the whole nine yards. So then I came back, kept shadowing over in the US, and realized like, oh, this is a very different medical system. And it's a lot about pharmaceutical stuff, it's a lot about insurance, there's a lot of paperwork, it's a lot of Policies and political things I don't really agree with. And with the way the technology is going, I might not be able to cut people open soon. It might be all laparoscopic and AI or robot doing it. So am I really going to spend all this time, pour all this debt into becoming a surgeon, and really have to commit my life to this? Because you can't do that for 10 years in school, go into a bunch of debt, and then not do it for the rest of your career. And I didn't want to do that. So I dropped out and did the only thing I knew how to do, and that was lawn care. That was mowing grass. And that was when I started Andes Lawn Care. I was 18 years old. I was working part-time at the gym, Anytime Fitness, which now I own. But at the time I was just a personal trainer and started Augusta Lawn Care. There was no evidence of what it is today back then. Zero. In my mind, I thought, okay, the only thing I knew how to do was make money. To make money was mow grass. So I'll just do that. That's why I started Augusta Lawn Care. Not because I had this passion for the industry, not because I cared about lawns, not because I was passionate about mowing. No, it's the only thing I knew how to make money, and I had been doing it since I was 11 years old, and that's how I paid my way through college. And since I was able to make $10,000-$15,000 a year to pay for my tuition, I was like, maybe I can make this into a business. In my mind, I was fully expecting, to be perfectly honest, I wanted to build a million-dollar business, be able to make $150,000 to $200,000 in profit, which to me was like earth-shattering money at the time. And I wanted to travel the world being a missionary. I wanted to— my dad was a pastor, still is a pastor. My grandfather was a pastor on both sides. And that's what I thought I was going to do. And I had already been speaking a lot to youth groups and youth camps and all the rest of it. And I thought that's where my life was headed. And so that's how Andes Lawn Care became Augusta Lawn Care. 18 years old, I just— it's the only way I knew how to make money. I just knew I didn't want to do medicine and there was really nothing else to do. Now, when I dropped out, I didn't get any pressure from my family or my close friends, really. It was mostly my peers and professors from college, especially when it came to research. I enjoyed the lab a lot and doing research, whether it be multiple sclerosis and different diseases that I was doing a lot of research around. I enjoyed it. I poured myself into it. I would work late at the lab. And those are the people that were like, felt like I was throwing away my career and throwing away what I should have been focused on, which was medicine. So that was the first low moment, is a whole bunch of people you respected and looked up to telling you, you're throwing this away, this is a waste of talent. And I very distinctly remember the emails, the professors having discussions with me and being like, I think you're wasting this, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The truth is that they wanted probably to be able to see me succeed and then be able to say, I taught him everything he knows. That's probably what the truth was. in hindsight, to be able to say like, oh yeah, I taught him that. All that to say though, 18 years old, dropped out of medical school when that was my entire identity. That was like lawn care was not my thing. It was medicine. I would, I would just watch surgeries. That was my, my, my play was watching surgeries. I played golf when I was younger because we grew up next to this little par 3 municipal course. And that's where we started mowing grass when I was 11 years old. So I started I started playing golf once I got through my first couple years of pre-med. I realized I'm gonna have to go all in on this medicine thing. And so I just poured myself into school and education and medicine, and I just would watch 3 or 4-hour surgeries. That was my thing. So my entire identity shift where I'm dropping out of this thing and I'm going towards business, and my backup plan was to do my master's in business administration at night. So I'm like, if this lawn care thing doesn't work out, I can at least get a job like Amazon or Microsoft or Boeing. Those are like the 3 biggest employers from the master's in business administration program from our college. And so I'm like, at the very least, I can do that. Now, a couple— I did that at night. So I started Augusta Lawn Care and I was doing personal training on the weekends, evenings. And then the evenings that I was not doing personal training, I was at the college. And from 6 p.m. till 10 p.m. was classes. And then usually from 10 to 11 or 10 to 12, we would do projects, like class projects that we were working on. And what was cool with the evening MBA, as it's called, is there's a lot of professionals or executives from big companies that, you know, their company's paying for them to get through the program. So I was able to learn a lot. I think that there was some degree of things that I learned, and I ended up making a free course called MBA for Entrepreneurs, which is I took everything from those 2 years and tried to distill it down for small businesses. 'Cause a lot of it was like very, very heady. For S&P 500 companies and big publicly traded firms. It wasn't for small businesses. And so that was my backup plan though. I was like, look, I'm 18 years old, I'm dropping out of medicals. You know, my professors are saying I'm a loser and this is a dumb decision. So maybe I should have a backup plan, which at the time was evening MBA while I started Augusta Lawn Care. So that's the first low moment, is just doubting everything that you had believed to be true about yourself and and your passions and your identity and people telling you you're wrong and that you're throwing away talent. All right, fast forward a couple of years. Low moment number 2. So now there's some evidence of success. The business is growing. I am pouring myself into this thing. I have gone through the MBA program and now I'm like, okay, this Augusta Lawn Care thing, I'm going to scale it up. That leads to my accident. And that's low moment number 2. So a couple of years into starting Augusta Lawn Care, we were probably doing on a run rate basis about $800,000 that year. And I was growing quickly, pouring every dollar back into new trucks, new, new trailers. We got some shop space. I hired Liz as my office manager and just a couple of months into her working for me, I got in this workplace accident. What happened was I went, I took a dump truck, I was going to drive to the job site, show the crew the job, and then dump about 3 yards of cobble rock and then come back to the office. From the office, I was going to do estimates the rest of the day and then meet them in the afternoon at their next job site. Because at the time I didn't have systems, so we didn't do videos like we do now, and I would have to show them what the job was and what they needed to do. So we went to Birch Bay Village. I still remember the exact house and I've driven by it a couple times since, and every time it just like flashbacks to that day. I backed in the dump truck into the driveway and was fully intending to dump the material, 3 yards of cobble rock. I showed the crew the project. The truck that we had was an L7000, 1990, old dump truck. And it was it was quite scary to drive. I'll be honest, and there was absolutely many times we went over the gross vehicle weight that was required for that the brakes and for that truck 100%. And so I backed the truck up, showed the crew the job. Now the PTO had broken the line that goes down from the cab where you engage the PTO down and where actually. Engages the PTO. That's the power takeoff. That's the thing that spins underneath the dump truck, powers the entire thing to dump. And the cable had broke, so you couldn't pull from inside the cab. And for about the past 2 weeks, I'd just been going underneath the dump truck and engaging the PTO manually. Well, when you'd engage it manually, you're kind of hunched over down underneath and you engage it extra with this hand, engage it, and then I'd come back out of the dump truck. But right here, was the spinning PTO because the driveshaft was right here. You'd engage the PTO and then come back out. Well, on my way back out, my hoodie got caught in the PTO. And to not have to describe in too much graphic detail, just look up PTO accidents on YouTube and you'll very quickly see people losing arms, legs, and just getting sucked into PTOs. And so everything around my neck, so my shirt, And my hoodie in an immediate instant was wrapped up around my neck and I was getting cinched up against this driveshaft. And I remember looking out underneath the dump truck and just, I wasn't like panicking. I was just like, oh, this is how it's gonna end. I was like very much calm, very peace. I wasn't like panicking or anything. I was just like, oh, this is how it's gonna end. Again, there's like a probably happening in less than 1 second, but it seemed like maybe 10 seconds to me, 8 seconds, because I very much like I remember looking, looking down. I was seeing down the road because, like, this is the driveway, this is the road. I am looking down the street underneath the dump truck and pinned up against this thing. And then the next split second is all that had cinched around my neck so tight, around, like, so my hoodie, all my shirt that was underneath it, right around my neck, and then cinched so tight it just ripped. It just, like, blew up into smithereens. It's crazy. So I'm very thankful. I do believe that was the hand of God. And I think about that day often when I'm in low moments because I'm like, okay, obviously there's something I needed to do in this life. And whenever I get super stressed or there's software bugs or people are mad at me or I feel like I'm a failure, I just look back and I'm like, there's a reason why I didn't die. And if it was just chance, then I should definitely consider myself a very lucky person. And if it was the hand of God and providence, I should absolutely lean into whatever I have in this life and give as much as I can to other people. And the rest of my career has really been trying to solve the problems in many businesses that I see that got me to that point, which is underneath a dump truck without any systems, with super old equipment. I shouldn't have been there. Like, as the estimator, Once you've been at a property, you should make a video, you should have estimate notes, and you shouldn't have to show up. The fact that I was even doing these type of projects where there was one-off stuff that we had never done before, like simplify your services. And so all the things I preach today is speaking to that version of me and trying to prevent the pain that I had to go through. And so in that second, I dropped out of the PTO and I couldn't catch my breath for some time. And I thought I had paralyzed— not paralyzed myself. I thought I had broke my neck. And because I couldn't move, like, it was not good. So Josh, who was one of my first team members at Augusta, piled me in the truck, drove me back to the shop. Liz comes out of the office. She's freaking out. She thought there was a chainsaw accident because my neck— there was like lacerations everywhere and like there was like this weird oozing stuff. I don't know if it was like grease or if my skin had gotten compressed so much, like just like this oozing orange and like bloody, like all over. And then like, see this? Yeah. This is actually why I wore— you can kind of see still scars here, but this is where the puncture wound from— I don't know if you can see it— from the gearbox was. It's what prevented me from flipping around the PTO. So as it cinched me up here, it was trying to suck me in and the gearbox was right here and it just penetrated deep into my bicep. And so Yeah. Realizing that I'd built a business over the course of 3 years, dropped outta medical school, and now I'm being taken to the hospital in an ambulance. And yeah, just looking up and like, oh my word, you know, maybe they're right. Maybe I should have just stayed in medical school 'cause this lawn care thing's obviously put me in a bad spot and I didn't know what I'm doing. And at that time I was working crazy hours out in the field, on the field. And then like trying to help Liz get set up in the office 'cause she was new. And doing like billing on the weekends, like just crazy amounts of work. And so I wasn't really profitable either, to be honest. Maybe like 3 to 5% profit after like putting, you know, buying— I was just buying stuff, trucks, equipment. I was— we were offering more and more services, the whole nine. Okay. So that's a low moment. I'm going to the hospital. I'm going into this, you know, getting all the X-rays and scans. It just seems like Hours you're sitting in these things, and they put the neck brace on, so I don't even know, like, can I even feel? Is there pain? I don't know. That same day, one of my best friends was going through bone marrow transplant, so I asked them to not give me, uh, pain meds for the first few hours until I just couldn't— I couldn't take the pain anymore. But it was that day he was going through his bone marrow transplant, and like, I was remembering that, and I was like, I know that he's going through like one of the most painful procedures possible to humankind. And I want to kind of out of solidarity, maybe that was stupid, but like I was just thinking about him. And so I refused pain meds for the first 4 hours, kind of just to experience what he was experiencing that day, I guess. But it was painful. It was brutal. I did take pain meds eventually after the adrenaline wears out. My goodness, you need some pain meds. Knock me up. Hook me up, baby. Let's go. And so But that was a low moment because it was just like everything I'd been building for the last few years. And you really question your decision. Like, I should have stayed in medical school. You know, 3 years in, I would've finished my MD by now or close to it. Getting around 22, 21, 22. So that was the next low moment, my accident. All right. So then everyone's like, oh, that was the end of it. No, like if you're growing a business and you're trying to grow yourself as a human, as a leader, you're just gonna constantly have these moments. Where you feel like you're in deficit. And these are all— this is all my 20s now. So turn around the business, implement pay for performance, implement systems, implement software, like everything I talk about. Turn the business around, it starts making really good money. I'm able to get management in place. I simplify the business. All of the things that I talk about on this channel, I did. And when I go out and do turnaround shows, I am constantly looking at the owner through the eyes of what I was then. And over the course of 12 to 24 months, I was able to turn the business from a business that didn't make money and I worked crazy hours to a business that was doing over $300,000 in profits. Well, distributions. It was more in profits, but like me taking money out of the business, over $300,000 and me working a couple meetings a week at the first location. By the way, this is, this is The headquarter building, we're building it out. I'm sitting in the spot where that shop will eventually be. So it's cool. So getting really profitable and I was like, okay, I started making videos. I started making videos in my bedroom right up against the wall, a little whiteboard behind me, and just sharing everything that I had to change in my business to turn it around. But people don't really listen. Like, realistically, they don't. It's like, Entertainment almost, or like good ideas but no execution. I was like, okay, I really care about these owners and I really want to see them improve. I really would hate to see someone go through what I did and have a family and dependents and have to declare bankruptcy. And I didn't want to see people go through that pain. And I really cared about the lawn care and landscape industry because it had given me so much. It gave me more money than I ever thought. It had given me so much experience in life and communication. And so I was like, I hate making this content and talking about things that I care so deeply about. I'm, I'm so convicted about them working because I saw it for myself and people don't listen. And so I determined that's when we would franchise Augusta, and that would be so that way I would be wearing the same uniform as the people in the franchise, and that when I would say something, it would be for my best interest and their best interest. There would be no like, oh, they're competing with me. It's just like, They would know that I have aligned interests with them and they would execute. And then by competing with every other landscaper, they would all then change their behavior and we'd raise the level of professionalism. That's the goal. So like when we answer our phones, they answer their phones. When we have a great website, they get a good website. When we start paying our team members more and using pay for performance, they have to start doing it too because there's pressure on them through competition. Okay, great. So we franchised. Well, I did a flat fee model, which means I don't take a royalty. And that sounds great in theory. Every single legal person and advisor I talked to told me not to do it. I was like, oh snap. By this time I was happy I dropped out of medical school. Like the business was making more money than I would make as a doctor. And I was like, well, they told me back then I was making the wrong decision when I dropped outta medical school. Maybe these legal people and all these franchise consultants are also wrong. Maybe. Or maybe I'm stupid. But I just like, by this time I was a franchisee at Anytime Fitness. 'Cause once the Augusta became really profitable, I used some of those funds. I'm like, hey, we're gonna franchise. I'm gonna go buy a franchise. Anytime Fitness, the gym I used to work as a trainer. I'm gonna buy that. I'm gonna learn all their systems, how they do training, how they do their conference, how they do everything, and just like be able to use all of that in Augusta. And that's what I did. And so we franchised flat fee model. You can leave at any time. You can take your customers if you want. And I just tried to make the franchise legal documents as pro-owner as possible using everything that I knew at Anytime Fitness and literally almost 100 other franchisees I had talked to across other industries and other franchises and said like, what do you like and what do you not like about franchise? And I just tried my very best to do everything as owner-focused as possible and put it in legal writing. So if I got hit by a bus, no one could undo it. Things like a franchise advisor council, I got that from Anytime Fitness. Things like an academy, the way we do training, the way we do conference, all of it came from Anytime Fitness that we do now inside Augusta Longcare. And then back at that time, 2013, 2014, before— back when I was a trainer, that was when Anytime Fitness was at its peak. They had both their founders still involved. It was before they got bought out by private equity, and they were ranked number 1 on the Entrepreneur 500 for ranking of franchises. And since then, they've declined, and it's because private equity got involved, the founders left, the whole— we all know the story. So definitely left a sour taste in my mouth around private equity. I think all of us can kind of agree that 95% of the time, private equity does a pretty lousy job for the customers and people they're supposed to be serving once they take over a business. But now we franchise, and this is the lowest— next low moment is I took all the profits from my first location and from the gym and from whatever I was doing with real estate, and I just poured it all into the franchise because you've got to build the infrastructure and the coaching and the software and have everything set up to be able to attract new people to join. But yet you don't have any money because you're charging such a low amount. per location. And we started our initial territory fee at $10,000. It's now $35,000. So like people that bought in early, their territory license is worth 3.5 times more now. But when we started, it was $10,000. That barely covered the legal fees and setting them up. And so we would also then give them $1,200 a month. Now it's $1,600 a month for a territory. But back then it was $1,200. And those people still got grandfathered into the $1,200. They keep that for life. But that's not a lot of money. You can do the math very quickly of how many locations I needed just to be able to equate like $1 million in revenue. But yet, yeah, it was not a lot of money. So what did I do? I slept in the office closet. So next door to the gym, there was this little office place where we would train all the owners of Augusta Lawn Care. It was inside of a strip mall and there was no hot water. There was no shower. There was no kitchen. And so I would walk around the building and go to Anytime Fitness to shower at the gym. I slept in this 6 by 6, 6 feet by 6 feet little space in a closet. And once a month we'd have owners to Augusta. They'd be right next to it, like in the office space. And then I have my studio there. So that's where I started making videos. Hired a media team, but I needed every single dollar to go back into scaling the franchise. There was just, we lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in those first few years. So another low moment, it's like, okay, here I'm sleeping inside of this. This is the, no, this is COVID era, right? 'Cause we franchised at the very end of 2019. Within a matter of few, we had 10, 11 owners inside of Augusta Lawn Care and COVID hits. So I'm stuck in this office closet. My gym gets closed down 'cause we live in Washington State. It was horrible. And I'm in this office just sleeping on the floor. Anytime fitness, we had to stop all of our billing, but yet our landlord was still demanding rent. It was crazy. Anyways, low moment. Like, oh my word, what are we doing here? I'm sleeping here. Like, why didn't I just stay at the first location? We was making such good money. Now I'm pouring all this money back in. I'm sleeping inside of this tiny closet. Tiny. Yeah, it was horrible. Anyways, little moment. And I did that for 2 and a half years, sleeping inside the office closet, going around to Anytime Fitness to take a shower. My mom and dad lived like 10 minutes away, so I'd go there for dinner sometimes. But like most time I was just eating out of the little mini fridge I had there and a little microwave. And we made it work. In hindsight, crazy. Back then, it seemed like super normal. Also, with COVID you couldn't really go anywhere for those two years in Washington State. Like everything closed down, and for solid two years, essentially, it was like masks and the whole nine yards. So you really couldn't go anywhere. So that kind of went in my favor. It wasn't like I was having people over and people were getting together a lot around here. So then I decided, as the franchise grew past 100 locations and became profitable. I realized that all of the software in home services were getting bought out by private equity and venture capital. And the same thing that I saw with Anytime Fitness was starting to happen with software. And again, you look at like pretty much any business, whether Toys R Us, you just go down the list of private equity-owned businesses, 9 out of 10 of them get ran into the ground within 10 to 15 years. Once the founder leaves, they cut support, they cut product development, etc. And I realized that We were so vulnerable at Augusta Lawn Care and the home service in general, but like Augusta Lawn Care specifically to the software that we were running on every single day. And I said like, okay, we'll be fine for a few years, but what about in 10 years? And when we started looking, okay, what we wanna get to 1,000 locations, we wanna be able to, you know, do all these change level professional industry. How am I gonna happen do that if the software is 10, 15 years behind the likes of HubSpot or Salesforce or other industries. So starting a software company. And at the time it was called Copilot. It's now called Homeworks. And I owned 60% of the business at the time. I had a co-founder and we scaled very quickly and we had a lot of bugs because we scaled way too fast. on a platform in terms of code base, we used PHP that was not built for the kind of scale what we were doing. And so even the past year, it's been all the switching from PHP to React and Next.js, which is a much better platform to be able to code on, much more stable and reliable. But we scaled really fast and we entered what we call bug hell. There was literally hundreds of reported bugs and they were coming in faster than we could fix them. And that's when I made this— like, we made the decision we have to switch code bases because like, it was just— are we going to keep firefighting forever or are we going to just like do the very hard work for a couple years of just like tearing this thing apart and building it correctly? During bug hell, I had to buy out my co-founder. During the time when we were losing hundreds of thousands, multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars every single month, To get the correct engineers, the right designers, the right team in place, attract the right talent. Like I was focused on like recruiting while this thing is just melting. Like the everything was melting. Thing there's just downtime. Like emails wouldn't go through, texts wouldn't go through, payments messed up. Like they were just everything was going wrong. Ah, and this thing that I had built to help owners, whether being Augusta or home services in general, and people I cared so much about, I was supposed to help their business, now I was hurting them. And this, like, everything was just melting. At the same time, I gotta go out and like recruit, and I gotta be like super positive about the future and the vision of the business to be able to recruit really, really good engineers to solve these problems. And at the same moment, I had to then go buy out my co-founder and take every dollar I had to buy him out because I knew I was gonna have to invest millions of dollars to get the business back to the place where it needed to be at from the software side. But he wasn't really in that mode. He was much more later in his career. Nothing against him, by the way. Awesome. Love him to death. It was just he's in a different phase of his career and wasn't ready to like pour millions of dollars into the business or get diluted or anything like that. I'm like, okay, I will buy you out. Well, now I'm putting a whole bunch of money into this burning dumpster fire that I'm also spending more and more money on every single month to try to attract the best talent from the best companies to come join the team. Like, Oh man, it was painful. And I was like, again, just down on yourself. You're like, why didn't I just stick with the original location? Why didn't I just stick with the franchise? Like, we were finally starting to make good money. We were starting to make 7 figures in profit. And here I got to go mess this thing up. So yeah, it was bug hell. Put all the chips on the table and went all in and I will not say that everything is resolved 'cause we are still refactoring a lot of that code base, but it's a lot better now. And being able to get back to where we are, I believe even the week that I'm recording this, releasing MCP and API access, which allows you to connect all of your AI assistants, all of your custom coded, Vibe coded stuff to HomeWorks and be able to pull that data, like read access, but also write access where you can like go create estimates, create payments, create invoices for you. I believe this is the future with AI. Yeah. This is the type of software that I believe the home service industry needs. And we went all in on it this year and just continue to invest more in building the teams required to do this because I believe the home service industry needs this. I believe it's the thing that allows you to be able to know your cost of goods sold, your net profit, your net margins, your net— your gross margins. What are your costs? Like, no one knows their numbers. And the reason is because it is so difficult in so many softwares, like export reports Figure out spreadsheets. And so I'm just like, we've gotta make use of the most powerful technology that almost all of us have ever seen, which is AI, but make it useful and tangible for the owners. And so like this week that I am recording this, we are, have for the very first time for all of Augusta Nation, be able to use the MCP and API access from HomeWorks and pull the data from all of our 200 locations and be able to show them exactly, 'cause it also connects to QuickBooks. So it connects to their QuickBooks, it connects to HomeWorks, and then it just tells them, Here's your 90-day churn. Here's your annual churn. Here's your cost of goods sold. Here's your net margin. Here's exactly the customers that you're undercharging. And it just tells them that using the AI. It's incredible. And I believe that's what home service business owners need. And instead of me giving a 3-hour presentation on figuring out your cost of goods sold and your net margins, I should just be able to plug it in with the login information for my HomeWorks account and it tells me that. That's what I believe the future is. And I am so glad that we made that decision. And it's been a rocky few years of questioning myself about the software. I believe in 3 years, it'll be undeniably the right path for every home service business to be able to join it. And it will continue in that trajectory because private equity and venture capital have come in. They have bought out most founders. in home service software. They have depleted the support. They have reduced product development. They only care about the next 3 to 5 years to be able to raise the next fund, raise the next round, flip the business, sell it to someone else. The founders, if they're still around, own 3, 5, maybe 10% of the business. So they lost all voting control. Like, it's not good. And so I'm very glad We did what we did, and I think it'll just continue to get better. But that was the 4th low, was the bug hell and putting— going all in at the moment of like the worst moment of the business and be able to attract the talent that was required to get us out. All right. That brings us to this year. So that was all my 20s, all the down, the low moments, hard moments, the times, multiple times I had to put all chips on the table when basically there wasn't really any evidence that I was going to make it or that I was going to be successful. And I say all of this because for 2 reasons. Number one, if you're in your 20s, go all in. Spend those 10 years. I do not regret a single minute that I spent working on the businesses. I'm now married. I have a beautiful wife, and I'm very thankful that I spent 10 years, over 10 years, just pouring myself into the business. And if that to you seems like you're wasting the best years of your life, I would say it is, you were able to take those 10 years and the investments and the seeds that you sowed and have a much larger return for the next 40, 50 years of your life and for your family, for your community, for your children, and be able to give back. And like, I would never have been able to do HomeWorks and pour that money in if I had not done the years leading up to it. And I believe if you're in your 20s, first off, this is the reason I'm making this video. First off, if you're in your 20s and you're in the grind phase, stick with it. It will take longer than you ever would've hoped. It will. It's not gonna be a year. It's not gonna be 2 years of pain. It's going to be 5 to 10 years of grinding and putting everything back into the business. Time, energy, money, everything. Like, that's all I did 7 days a week. And I don't regret it at all. I would tell anyone to do it. And everyone in the comments, oh, you're gonna regret it when you're 60. No, I don't believe that. I have talked to enough people that have actually done it, and they do not regret the sacrifice required and the time and energy put in. Me being able to spend time with my wife now, me being able to build this building, me being able to invest in the software, all because I put years of pain and suffering into the business at the beginning. And that grind phase, If you're in it, just— I encourage you to continue gaining skills and focusing on skill acquisition during your 20s. The second reason I'm making this is because if you want to keep growing your business, you're going to constantly have to keep evolving yourself as a leader, as an entrepreneur. The business will have to continue to change the way you've thought about business, your ideas of marketing. You'll have to adapt to new technology, you have to adapt to the market, you'll have to adapt to what's coming down the pipe in terms of labor legislation, etc. There is no linear path to success. And so there will be a day that I will take the company public and there will be a bunch of news articles about how Lawn Boy took— makes a billion-dollar business. And I will then have a link to this video and all the other proof of all these stories that have happened. And I will just say, the reason most people will not build a billion-dollar business is because they quit at $100,000, they quit at $1 million, and they quit at $10 million, they quit at $100 million because of all of these pain points. And to every person that quit at those stages, there's a really good reason why. There's a really good reason why I could've quit and just gone back to school after the accident. There's a really good reason why I would've just given up on the software thing because it was just like, it's really, really hard. And it's hard to get talent. And it's really difficult when you start adding soft— People trying to break into the software and the security. Like, it's hard. And the ability to be able to make some excuse as to why it makes sense for your personal life or your lifestyle to be able to get out of that pain— most people will not push through the pain. They will use it as an excuse. They'll make up some excuse as to why they're retreating from the pain, when in reality it's just pain. They're quitting. It's because it's my lifestyle. I want to move. You know, there's a life event. And a lot of times it's like, no, you have not been able to push through the 5 or 10 years of pain that is required to get to your goals. That's just the hard truth. And I know some people won't like it, but if you're 37 minutes deep in this video, you probably agree with some of the things I'm talking about. And I just encourage you, it is so worth it if you're in that grind phase. I don't care if you're in your 20s, if you're in your 30s, in your 40s. Like, there will be moments you will question yourself, and if you're continuing to grow the business, there'll be Constant times of low moments. All right. This year, me realizing that everything I just talked about and the care that I had for the 18-year-old version of myself that dropped out of medical school, the 21, 22-year-old version of myself that hadn't had the accident and had to reinvent the business, that care and passion for that person was the thing that was keeping Augusta Lawn Care and my business from growing. This is a painful realization, is that I was constantly speaking to the broke, young version of myself instead of the person that needed to have a successful business and take it to the next level, be able to have multiple locations, have general managers, have people running the business without them. And I realized that I had kept talking to getting your first 10 customers, getting started, doing door hangers, doing whatever it takes. And that's fine. That grind and hustle gets the business off the ground, but it is not the thing that attracts great talent. And going through bug hell and having to attract really good engineers and product people from really big companies that had really great pay packages and be able to convince them to go lower and make the bet on me, it made me realize that the only thing that keeps a million-dollar business from a $10 million business is their leadership skills and the ability to be able to get great talent to be able to come work for them. And it was the unlock for me at the lowest point in my career when everything was against me and there was days, like multiple days where I would not sleep. Not because I was grinding and hustling, 'cause I couldn't sleep, I was stressed out of my mind. I felt the pressure from my members, from the owners of Augusta Lawn Care, from people saying really bad stuff about me online, people legally threatening, legally, all sorts of stuff. I couldn't sleep for days. And the thing that got me out of that was being able to attract an incredible team. But I had to change as an entrepreneur. I had to change as a leader. And so this year, I have recognized over the past 12 months that that same skill that I acquired that got me to build an 8-figure business, And the success that I've seen is because of leadership skills. And I would have to train the owners of Augusta Lawn Care as if they were not new owners. This is a completely different skill from grinding, hustling, marketing, getting more customers, getting your first technicians and training them how to do the work. Very different skill from I need to be able to become the leader that attracts incredible talent into my organization to where those A-players solve the problems of the business without me. And the amount of very humbling thought processes and changing of your personality and the way that you communicate, the things I had to go through, I want to be able to teach that. And that's why I started the school community, Home Service Boardroom, because I realized I had made a fatal error. And that as I was training everyone to grind and hustle, and that was fine to get them to a million, but then when they get to a million and a half, 2 million, they're just struggling and hitting their head up. Against this wall, and it was the same wall that I was hitting when I was in Bug Hell, which is I didn't have talented people, and I needed to change myself as a leader to be able to attract those people into the organization. And the greatest gift I've ever been given is the fact that my leadership team has always stuck with me, and there's always been great tenor there. None of them have left of their own will, whether it be Augusta, the media team, or the franchise, and I'm very thankful for that. I could not have done, I could not do what I'm doing or I'm going to do without them. And I wish for every entrepreneur the gift of having incredible people inside their organization. I wish that more than anything. It has changed my life and I can get emotional just if I really thought about it for a second. I'd just, I'd probably start choking up. 'Cause like, I am so grateful for the effort and the energy and the sacrifice that they put into the businesses to be able to get it out of its hardest moments. And I wish that for every entrepreneur. Every home service business owner, everyone that is currently beating their head up against the wall in the grind phase, I wish that one day you'd be able to pay enough, be able to become the leader sufficient to be able to attract that kind of talent in your organization, to be able to create a ramp for your technicians to become managers, managers to become owners, the ability for them to gain more talent and skills and compensation inside your organization. I wish that for every small business owner. And so I started the school community. To be able to teach the owners of Augusta Lawn Care and owners in home services that were struggling to get past $1 million, $2 million, $3 million, $4 million. And what was working in the past was no longer working. You can't out-market bad leadership. You can't out-advertise the fact that no one wants to become a 3, 4, 5-year tenured leader inside your organization. And to get to $10 million, you will need great leaders. And so the low moment of the past 12 years— 12 months has been realizing that. And what you're going to see over the next few years from Augusta is going to be this, this transformation of not just $1 million, $2 million operators, but how do we get to $10 million? How do we do multiple locations? How do we scale to the point where we have operations, admin, sales, leadership teams inside the organization? To do that, the entrepreneur has to change fundamentally the way they communicate, the way that they talk to people, The way that they discuss their goals, the vivid vision that they have for the company, be able to create stages of success for the organization, for people to move up and stay inside the organization instead of having churn and constantly losing your best people. And so those are some of the lowest moments. And I hope that some of it resonated with you if you're going through a low moment and those 6 different times that I have shared with you that something you're like, okay, I see myself in that because every single one of the low moments you have gone through, There is a solution and you can get out of it. And I encourage you not to give up during that moment. The only way to lose is to quit. I do not regret the 10 years of incredible hours every day, every night, every weekend working on the business. What I have and what Brianna, my wife, has and what we will continue to do for the community in the future is because of those 10 years. And so I encourage you to push past anyone that's telling you otherwise. If your goals are of size enough, it is required. And most people will give up and they will quit because the realization of what is required is too great for them. And yet they will still say they want to reach certain goals. And I encourage you not to be that person. Love you all.