Mike Andes recounts an anecdote about a business owner deciding between scaling a fast-growing coaching program and running a larger but slower-growing painting/home-service company. The coaching program was doing about $100,000/month (~$1.2M annual) while the painting company was doing about $4M in revenue. The owner worried that the coaching business produced less sellable enterprise value because it required ongoing content and hands-on coaching, and asked which business to prioritize; a mentor responded nonverbally, implying a lesson about focus and trade-offs.
Questions this video answers
About $100,000 per month.
Approximately $1.2 million per year.
About $4 million in revenue.
Chapters
So often the times it's easy to get distracted with other business opportunities when we're building our home service business. Recently, I was hearing from a mentor and someone else asked a question about whether they should continue their painting business or if they should focus on their coaching business. That was online and starting to take off very quickly. Now let's just go ahead and chart out exactly what was going on. First and foremost, we had a new coaching program that was doing about $100,000 per month, so we can just call it $1.2 million in annual revenue. Conversely, we had a painting company that actually put paint on walls, painted houses, etc. And they were doing about $4 million.
In revenue. Now they weren't growing as quickly. The 4 million dollar painting business, this one was brand new and it was booming. And so this person asked a question, they said, hey, look, I got this coaching business, it's taking off, it's making really good profits. But I also know I can't really like sell the coaching program. There's no value really. And I'll always have to be creating new content and coaching people one on one and adding all of this new videos and masterminds and all this other stuff. And it's not a value like an enterprise value. You can't sell, sell the business. And so he asked, which one should I focus more of my time on? He said, right now if I try to do both, I don't think either one's going to do well. And so I need to kind of let one of them die. And so the person that was on the stage, my mentor, basically kind of put his head down and then he didn't say any words. This is all he did.
That's all he did for his answer. And that is over here on the coaching program, creating content. You could fill in the blank. Fill in the blank for your business. It's gonna be drop shipping, crypto, whatever you want to call it. For him, this was his coaching program over here.
Online, high profit margins. And that is you can very quickly make really good money. And very quickly, if this is time, you can very quickly start to see results. And here's the thing over here, when it comes to your home service business, it gets boring. Because look at this, this might be four or five years. You're like, okay, five years in, I'm right here. Five years in over here. I'm like, already up top here. It's like, well, yeah, this is why we get distracted. This is why so many of us will go into a different Industry when reality, if we just stay focused on our home service business in the course of time, the value of that business, as you create more systems, have general managers, have a leadership team, continue to scale, go into new markets, start new locations, you don't have to be there all the time, you don't have key man risk where you have to keep creating content and keep doing the same thing or juggling drop shipping different things on Amazon or crypto like, oh, this one's hot, this was day trading stuff. These are the flash in the pan stuff that yes, you can get more money faster, but in the long term, if we start to zoom out like say 15 or 20 years, all of a sudden now if you follow this out, this person's up here and in 20 years this one's petered out and it's down here. And so really the question just becomes not a matter of which business is better, it's a matter of what is your time horizon if you're planning to put 5, 10, 15, 20 years into the business that you're currently building. Home service is a great industry. If you continue to scale, continue to grow, add levels of management, implement systems, have a better website, have better marketing, and just constantly keep tweaking it and make it better. I was talking to one of the owners of Augusta Nation today, he already has three locations and he's like, hey, I'm start maybe one next year, another one the next year after that. That's not fun, that's not sexy, that's not looking like this, where you're gonna have this massive jump in a matter of one or two years, a bunch of revenue that is simply over the course of time, over the years, growing the business, and then all of a sudden you're like, whoa, you're massive. You're just growing year over year by huge. No, success is not linear. If success was linear, it would look like this. And that is as I put more time and energy into the business, I simply kept growing. That's not how success works. Success is exponential, which means as time goes on, I start to get bigger and bigger gains. And at the beginning, this is why so many people quit in the first five years, is because you don't see a lot of progress. You look at all the people on social media, look at all your friends, you look at other industries and how much progress they made so quickly, and we failed to realize that over the course of time, plugging in systems and procedures and management and having all of the information infrastructure ready for a large scale business start to really add up. And for those of you might have watched my content over the past several years, keep in mind, 10 years ago, this year, 20, 24, 10 years ago, I started Augusta Lawn Care with no employees and working by myself. And so what that looks like is all of you have seen me in the past couple years up here. It was really lonely and hard and difficult in the first five years when it was. I'm comparing myself against what I was going to do in medical school. And I'm seeing the people that graduate with me in my MBA making more money, it can be really difficult. And this is where some of you might be now. And the reason I'm making this video is to do two things. Number one, if you're in this first five years, you're at the beginning of this curve and it's going to be discouraging when you compare yourself against other opportunities, other options and other people. And the other thing is to keep in mind that in the long run, the commitment to your skill and constantly honing it and making it better, that's what I think make home service so great. Because what doesn't change with home services is the fact that walls need painted, bushes need trimming, H vac systems need repair. The actual underlining business and what we do doesn't change a whole lot. It's not like crypto, it's not like software, it's not like all these dropshipping and these schemes and these coaching things. It's not that way. And so really what gets rewarded is just simply commitment to creating the system and making it better and improving it and tweaking it and making a better compensation plan and figuring out a way to have better branding and having a better website, converting your ads better. These are the things that get rewarded and then in the long term are worth more than the flash in the pan. So I hope it was helpful because I remember my first five years back here, there wasn't a lot of evidence for me to look back and say I made a good decision and started my business. It was lonely and I certainly didn't ever want to even dream of getting to where I'm at now because I didn't have any evidence or track record of seeing any profit, any sort of success, et cetera. And really, I just want you to be able to get to the other side of the pain and the struggle that you're currently facing, because not easy. And I hope that this message simply keeps you in the game.
