Webinar: Growing Your Business PAST $500K

Hey everyone, this is Mike Andes and you're listening to the Landscape business course podcast. I have a very, very, very special.

Audio only episode for you all today. And that is the webinar that we recorded a couple months ago. It was actually the webinar that was. It is on video format. It was a couple months ago and it was about how to grow your business from zero to $500,000 and what you need to get there. And I had recorded one with on a different, using a different microphone later on about getting to a million. But I was just at GIE and so many of you asked, at least six or seven of you asked, could you put the first one on? And the reason I didn't, and I told you this is that the audio quality is not as good. So prepare yourselves today for an episode that the audio is not that great. And this is why I did not put the webinar video into audio format for the podcast. But after so many of you asked, a couple of you had emailed and then at gie, literally six or seven of you asked me. I'm going to go ahead and post this entire webinar. This is the audio only, so if you want to go onto YouTube or on Facebook, you can watch the entire webinar with video, see my slides, see the pictures I show the diagrams. All of that's available in the full video format when I do my screen share. So feel free to watch it. But I know most of you that are listening to this podcast are listening.

To this while you're working.

So I'm gonna try to turn the volume up. So even though the audio quality isn't super good, you can hear me clear enough to be able to mow and hear the podcast. So without any further delay, let's jump right into it and hopefully if you have not been able to watch the webinar, you can now listen to it. And if you've watched the webinar now, you can listen to it again and probably get something more out of it. It's pretty long, lots of content in here and I really look forward to.

Sharing it with you here. We go ahead and get our slide presentation rolling here. You should be able to see me down here in the bottom right hand corner still and up here in my slides. So let's go ahead and get started. Like I said, post those questions. I'll get to every single one at the end of the webinar. So what are we going to be covering today? The title of today is growing to $500,000 and so growing your lawn care, growing your landscaping business to this point, what needs to be done and going to try to give some more depth and detail than I usually would say a podcast where I have to kind of speak to everyone that is just starting out, just starting their lawn care business right up into the point where people are, you know, and they're doing two, three million dollar businesses. And, you know, I got a range of people that are happy with where they're at and just kind of maintaining their existing size of business. And then I have other people that on the podcast that are wanting to grow and expand and keep growing their business. And so today I'm able to specifically talk to you all as business owners who are willing to grow your business. And you're under $500,000 in revenue. And so today's webinar, if you're over 500,000, might seem a little bit elementary or like I've already done those things, but I think it's a good recap and a good checkup, even if you are beyond 500,000 in revenue. But definitely this is the webinar to get you thinking the way you need to be thinking to break that half million dollar marker in revenue annually. So when I say $500,000, I'm talking about that much revenue in one year. For the majority of everyone listening today, you're probably doing two, $300,000. Maybe you've plateaued and just kind of, you seem like you're kind of stalling out there. Maybe you just started the past year or two and you're already growing really fast. You just want to make sure you have everything in place to make sure you can continue to scale regardless of the position you're in today. I really look forward to sharing some of the things that I've gone through and I've learned. And this by no means is an exhaustive list. Every single one of the points I'm going to talk about today, I could probably do a whole webinar on or a whole podcast, which by the way, that's where we do podcasts back there, you might recognize that. But so like I said, this is not a comprehensive, like super in detail, but I want to kind of give you the roadmap from my experience of growing our business and Augusta Lawn Care. So I'm going to go ahead and give you a little bit of an agenda of what we're going to talk about. First, we're going to talk about a little bit of quick history. Most of you all know me from the Podcast Mike Andes and kind of what I've done with landscape business course and everything. But I want to give you a quick history and kind of the numbers behind when I started my business and scaled up to 500,000. I'm going to talk about the three stages of growth. There's really four, but we're really going to focus on the first three stages of growth in your business. We're going to talk a lot about the myths about $500,000 in revenue and getting to that point. A lot of the myths I see kind of propagated on YouTube, Instagram and different channels that a lot of us are aware of, even, you know, just in this industry, myths about growing your business to that point. And I want to debunk a few of those. We're also going to look at a little bit deeper in a couple things. Number one, our lead conversion system that we use at Augusta Lawn Care and discussing what that is, the PSP system, that way of taking that prospect all the way through to becoming a paying customer. We're going to go ahead and look at a systems toolbox. And so spoiler alert, a big reason a way for you to get through 500,000 in revenue is systems and procedures. We're going to Talk about specific 8 specific systems that we use Augusta that will be really beneficial to you if you're wanting to grow past 500,000. And in my opinion that is imperative to grow past that point. At the end of today's webinar, I am going to share about Augusta Lawn Care, which is which if you haven't listened to me for a while, we had recently franchised the company. All the systems we talk about today is what we do at Augusta. And so I want to share that opportunity that we are presenting to the first 10 franchisees at Augusta Lawn Care.

So quick history on Augusta Lawn Care. Kind of me starting out the business. Most of you know, I started way back when I was 11 years old mowing lawns to save up for college. But When I was 18 I started Augusta Lawn Care. And so that would have been year one is when I was 18 years old. And so that year I was like part time. I was working as a part time trainer Anytime Fitness. In that year we did 29,000 revenue. You can see here on the screen year two, 180,000. Year three, 470,000 year four, 890 last year was one and a quarter. This year we'll probably do 1.5, 1.6. And if you listen to the podcast, you know, now I'm not in the day to day operations anymore. This is basically where I work a lot now for the franchisees gonna be creating systems and creating their backend support and all the academy for them, the store, everything for them. That's really all I'm doing right now. So I'm not there anymore. We do not want to grow Augusta locally more than like $3 million. So we had a management meeting last night just talking about where locally the business is going. And so I expect this year like 2019, we'll probably do one and a half, 1.6, maybe next year 2 million. But I don't see it ever really. We don't ever really want to scale it beyond 3 million just because the model is built for high profit margin. And as we get to 3 million, we would just increase prices and increase profitability. But essentially these are the first few years and these year one, two and three, as you can see here on the screen, that's really what we're going to be talking about today. It's like, what did I do to get it from 0 to $500,000 in revenue? And then more importantly, this is really what I want to share about today is like, what if I would have had the systems and procedures that I know now, if I would have, if I had those back when I started, like if I had those way back when I started, how much faster and more efficient could I have been if I would have known what systems I need to implement, known what I know now, and being able to implement those back on year one, because year one and year two and year three, like, especially in the year one and two, I was working 80 hours a week. I was doing all the office work, I was working out in the field. Like that was a lot of hard work, Long, long hours. And now looking back, it's like, okay, if I could do a dust again, like if I could do it a second time, build my business differently, knowing what I know now, how much faster could I build it and how much more scalable and efficient and product profitable could the business be from the beginning instead of taking three, four, five years to really figure out the systems that worked. And so that's why we franchise is to be able to give people the opportunity to do that right from the beginning, have those systems in place.

All right, so now let's talk about the three stages of growth that I feel. This is my opinion. There's different ranges, I'm sure, but these are kind of round numbers that I found as a very much of Common theme throughout the industry. As I talk to other landscapers, as I listen to other people, business owners on landscape, business course.

These are kind of the different categories or stages of growth that I see. The first one here you can see on the left, 0 to $250,000 in revenue. Most of the time in this instance, you as the business owner are out in the field working. A lot of times this is you out with one crew and then having one or two other crews or, or you kind of bopping around between crews. But you are in the field all day long and then at night doing everything in the office and estimates and things like that. As the business grows, you get like two, three crews and you get four or five employees. You really slip into this office manager role. And that's really some of the things we'll be talking about today. This role of you really doing everything besides the actual work. And this is really, you really become this full time more on the $500,000 marker. But you start doing more and more of it. Like you can no longer do all the estimates after working hours. You can no longer do all the emails and phone calls after hours. And you start becoming more of the office person and taking in customer calls, taking new leads, setting up the estimates, doing all the sales aspect, doing the project management. If you're doing landscaping jobs like selling everything that you do, that's your role as the owner. Usually that I find between that $250,000 to $500,000 marker, I do see some owners still out in the field all the way up to about 4 or 500,000. But once hit $500,000, usually they're starting to get out of the, like actual mowing, actually landscaping in terms of the labor part, maybe jumping in once and again here and there, help a guy or help a job out. But mostly they're focused on the operational, administration, sales aspect of the business. The part we're not going to talk a whole lot about today is when you actually get an office staff and now you become the estimator from 500,000 to a million. That's another stage of growth, growth that we'll talk about in another webinar that is different because now you will like literally never mow a lawn. You will literally never do any work in the field. You literally, you don't even do the office work. You don't take calls, you don't answer the emails. You're growing and you are the estimator only. And so I see this 3/4 of a million is really a Place where you must have an office manager and you must be like out of answering the phone all the time. And so again, these are the three stages. I see the fourth stage that we're not even going to touch on today at all is really kind of 2 million and beyond. Sort of where I'm at now, where you don't have to be there, I don't have to be. At Augusta, they hired two people in the past week, and I wasn't even the person who interviewed them originally. So, like, the business can move on to that stage of growth down the road. But today we're really going to be talking about how to get in the field. As you can see on the left hand side, 0 to 250,000. How do you become an office manager? How do you get through that part where you're always out in the field and you're just doing the work instead of doing the work? How can you work on the systems? How can you work on building the business to do the work more efficiently, more profitably, and continue to grow the business? That's what we're going to be talking about today.

All right, so I want to talk about a few of the myths that I see about getting to this $500,000 marker in revenue in this industry of lawn care landscaping. Number one, this is an interesting concept because I just talked about working in the field. There's a myth that you have to get out of the field in order to get to $500,000. I don't believe that. The reason I don't believe that. And I don't want you to read all these. I know it's tempting to keep reading all my. The rest of my slide here, but don't do that. Let's stick on the. This one on the left. Like, I truly believe that if you want to work really, really hard and you love working on the field, I truly believe that you can build your business to half a million in revenue without getting out of the field. And you still being on the truck, you still mowing the lawns, you still trimming the trees. I actually have seen landscapers do that and make a really profitable business doing that. I'm going to talk about why that's not the best. You know, you should not do that. And if you listen to podcasts, you know why? I wouldn't recommend someone doing that working out in the field all the time. And most of us don't want to, especially as we grow older or more experienced. We don't want to be out mowing the lawns or raking the leaves every single day all the time. So there is a myth that if you're going to get to 500,000, you need to get out of the field. My response to that is you do not need to get out of the field to get to 500,000. But most of the time, based on what I see, if you want to get beyond 500,000 in revenue, you need to get out of the field. You need to start working on the admin side and then eventually the estimating side and sales and building the business and from bringing in new revenue. So I don't feel like someone has to get out of the field to get to 500,000. But if you want to continue to scale your business and for it to be not reliant on you as the owner being there all the time, you're going to absolutely have to get out of the field. But to get to $500,000. And the reason I'm saying this is because I'm tired of seeing landscapers seeing my work, my videos. Jonathan Patosnik's at Volunteer Millionaire and we talk a lot about the business side and sometimes we're talking like people who are making like a million plus in revenue and we're talking about office staff and admins and people that answer the phones. And so the guy who's making like 100, 200,000 revenue thinks that he needs to have an office manager and he needs to have an estimator, needs to have project managers. And that's just not the case. Your business cannot function and pay for all of those admin support, it can't pay for all those non revenue producing people. I literally met a landscaper that's local here and they do 95,000, they did last year, $95,000 in revenue. And yet he has a full time video person and a full time website person and then it's him and three guys in the field. So literally two out of the five people that he's hired are non producing income, doing website and photography and video all day long.

In my opinion, that's not needed. Like you need to generate a lot of revenue before you start getting office staff and admin and start thinking about like photography and video people. You need to get out in the field and do the work. And so the reason I push people away from office staff and getting out of the field is a lot of them sometimes are doing it too soon. All right. I still want to see the systems and procedures being built for that down the road and that we're going to talk about that, but I do not think that you have to be out of the field when you're making 100,000 in growth revenue. That's just not necessary and not economically feasible. Second myth I see about people that are wanting to scale their business past half a million in revenue is that people think they have to diversify the services. In other words, if you're doing lawn care and mowing, you have to do landscaping. And if you're doing landscaping, you have to do hardscaping. And if you're doing all these other services, you need tree work. And then you hear snow plowing makes a bunch of money, and so we're going to do that. And then spraying trees makes a lot of money. And so you do that, and all of a sudden, you know, your lawn care business was maybe making 150,000, and you're like, you know what? The way that I am going to, the only way I can get to $500,000 is I got to diversify. I got to add landscaping, I've got to add tree service, I got to add snow plowing. And that's one way to do it. You will get to 500,000 revenue. But I would highly recommend that you don't use diversification of services to get to 500,000 in revenue. I would keep it very simple, very basic, and limit your service offering. And once you're like 500 plus a million revenue, then you can diversify services to continue your growth. But there's just any one service you could literally make into a $500,000 revenue business. In my opinion, like, you do not need to have a. If you're doing a mowing and you're doing $100,000 worth of mowing, the adding landscaping, you're probably gonna get to 250. Now, then you add tree service and treatments and ponds and maybe artificial turf, and then do snow plowing, and then you do treatments for the lawn aeration and dethatching. And all of a sudden you do have a $500,000 business. It's just not making any profit because you're so diversified. You have to hire very skilled people. You have a whole bunch of equipment. You have so many services. I've gone to landscapers, businesses where they're making less than 250,000 in revenue, and they have like a $70,000 track loader and a $50,000 excavator and a $10,000 snow plow. And it's just like you're trying to do too many things. And grow too many services when you need to focus on a few, make them efficient, make them really good, get past half a million and then start to use the addition of services to build the business and revenue. So I do feel like people diversify in services too fast because it's easy to go from lawn care into mulch and then from mulch into landscaping and from landscaping. Like the pavers. Like everyone loves the big paver jobs and the retaining walls and those are what gets all the likes on Instagram and YouTube. Like we should do that. They look really cool. They like the before and after pictures. But like, are you making money? Are you actually generating a profit from those services? I would bring that into question if you don't have the scale in the business to support having all those different types of services. All right, so I do not believe that to get to $500,000 you have to have a whole bunch of services. I would highly recommend that you focus on one or two core competencies. Maybe that's mowing and lawn treatments, maybe that's tree service and spraying trees. Whatever it is, focus on the core competencies, be really good at those things. And then as you begin to scale and you get out of the field, you can start adding more services to keep your crew busy to, you know, during the slow times. So you retain them to generate more revenue to do upsell additional services and make more profit. So that's just my opinion, but I do not feel you need to diversify services to get to 500,000 in revenue. Next thing a myth about getting to $500,000 in revenue is that you don't need systems. Alright? So some of you are gonna be like, well, you said you don't have to get out of the field to get to 500,000. You don't if you want to get to 500, but if you want to go through 500, you're gonna have to create systems. And even if you are working in the field and you love to do that, you've got to create systems in place. Because to get to 500,000 revenue, you are not going to be able to be at every single job and with every single crew and with every single new employee, you're going to have to create systems and procedures. They're going to still run those other crews and make sure the jobs are being done. The customer service has a system. The way that you deal with callbacks, like you have to have those systems in place even if you're not going to get out of the field. Like I Said in the far left there. All right, so the biggest myth, this is, the one we're going to talk about the most today, is people think they don't need systems and procedures because I only want to get to 5, 600,000. Or they see someone on YouTube as nice equipment, a really successful business, and they're working by themselves, or they're just making stuff on the fly. They're answering phone calls on their cell phone in their truck. And at the end of the day, if you don't have systems and procedures in place, not only are you not going to get to $500,000 if you do, because you're out in the field and working 100 hours a week, it's not going to be super profitable, and it's definitely not sustainable without you. So systems is what we're going to be talking a lot about today. Last thing I want to say is that a myth about getting to $500,000, I see this a lot of times in smaller businesses that are under 500,000 in revenue, and they just think that their business is going to grow forever based on word of mouth marketing. And word of mouth is fantastic. I love word of mouth. It's cheap, it's free. But this is the problem with word of mouth marketing is you don't control it. I don't get to control which neighbors tell which other neighbors about our services. I can control where my postcards go. I can control who sees my Facebook ads. You know, word of mouth is great, but I can't control it. I can't. If I want more business, I can't deploy more word of mouth. I can have a referral system. I can have an email newsletter system. Those are different things. But just focusing on word of mouth, like, oh, I do good work. It's good. It's cheap marketing. It's the best form of lowest cost customer acquisition costs. But it is not something that's scalable because you cannot dictate the flow of leads because you cannot control word of mouth. So I would much rather have systems in place to know that when I need more work, these are the systems I deploy. These are the ads I deploy. These are the creative that I deploy. This is the door hanger that I deploy in order to drive more business and be able to control the scalability of my business. The biggest reason is companies don't get to $500,000 is because they can't control their lead flow. And when things get slow and no one's thinking about landscaping and they're depending on Word of mouth. And that's the best way to do it because it's free. That's all fine and good, but now they don't have any system, they have any advertising, they don't have any way to get more leads when times are slow and when times get really, really busy and everyone's talking to their friend about landscaping because it's the middle of spring, they're overloaded with work and therefore have to start pushing people away because. Because they know that in the summer or when times get slow, they're not gonna be able to put more fuel on the fire. Marketing and advertising is fuel on the fire. Word of mouth is like the ignition. That's how I look at it. Word of mouth is the ignition and advertising, marketing is the fuel for the fire. I wanna have lots and lots of fuel. I wanna have lots of ammunition for marketing and advertising and then allow word of mouth to be the thing that ignites that. But I better have fuel so that when someone talks about it, I give the opportunity to share it. I give them the opportunity to see it time and time again on Facebook, on Google, on the print, on their door, wherever it is. Word of mouth is not king because it's not as controllable as marketing and advertising. All right, again, real quick, we're going to go ahead and jump into some stuff here, but if you have questions throughout any of the webinar, post it in the chat. I'll answer every question at the end, but do type that question up now as you have the question, so you don't forget. All right, so let's talk about a system centric business. Because one of those reasons that I talked about the myths behind 500,000 in revenue businesses is they think they don't need to have systems. Oh well, I only have a few crews and I don't really want to take the time to build systems and make procedures for our business. So let's talk about why it's important. Alright? Number one, it's absolutely needed prior to getting out of the field. So some people think, well, I need to get out of the field in order to create systems for my business. And then they get out of the field and everything starts falling apart. And then they jump back into the field as a recovery mechanism because they didn't create the system, that when they left the field, the people in the field could still operate and be efficient and make money and be profitable and have great customer service. There was no system in place. So if you're working in the field now, this Is not. I'm not slamming you, I'm glad you're on this webinar so you can continue to grow. But when you're in the field, you want to create the systems while you're in the field so that when you leave the field, you don't leave your guys just stranded. You don't leave them just like at their own whim and making stuff up. And, you know, they're all of a sudden creating their own SOP Standard operating procedures. They're doing things differently than you would do them. You want to create systems now. When you're out in the field working out with your crew, create systems now. Excuse me. So when you do leave the field and you do start working the office and you do become more of an estimator role, that everything doesn't just fall apart. Because when that happens, then what causes you to do is like, you know, what they can't do without me, I'm going to jump back in. And that's what I find so many business owners doing. They get some.

Employees, they start growing their business and then like, okay, great, I can get out of the field. And they leave the field without creating systems. And then everything falls apart because they're not there anymore out in the field. So what do they do? They jump back in. They're like, you know what? You know, forget all these employees. I'm going to do it myself. And now they're right back to where they started.

System centric business. Another positive of this is it's not personality dependent. That really leads into the third thing, which is because it's not personality dependent, it's not depending on you and your strong personality and you knowing everything about the business and you knowing every customer and every single lawn and every single account. And you've done it all before. No longer is it dependent on you as a personality because you create the systems that run the business. And so that's one of the reasons why you can sell the business. I had someone approach me recently. It would have been February and March of this year. A local competitor of ours came. He was doing like 400,000 in revenue.

He wanted to sell his business and he listened to podcasts and things. And so we wanted to go over some, you know, maybe we could buy it. And so when I came back with the. My proposed value for the business, my offer, it was a lot lower than he was hoping for. And the reason for that was because I knew that he had built everything around him. All the customers knew him, everything revolved around him. As I'm talking to him in one of our negotiation meetings, he gets a phone call and like he's trying to put out a fire and the crew stops and waits for his advice and they don't know what to do. In certain scenarios he hasn't created systems that run the business and therefore it's a personality dependent company that cannot be sold. Or if it is sold, it's much less valuable because the person buying it has to create all the systems, has to get everyone back on board, is gonna definitely lose customers and lose employees who are used to just making stuff up on the fly and they're trying to create systems. So that's the number one reason why like Anytime Fitness, a franchise that I bought, that's the reason they're so easily sold, is because they have so many systems and procedures that everything's based on the system. Like if I sell it tomorrow, that person like it's not going to change a lot. The customers aren't going to. The systems run the business. And so that's what you want. You do not want your customers to be dependent on you mowing their lawn and you bring the invoice to the door and you giving them a call when something goes wrong. You want to make a system in place that they begin to fall in love and they are hiring the system that mows their lawn, the system that takes care of them when they're unhappy, the system that makes sure the lawn is cut at the same height every single time. Those are all the things you gotta be thinking about if you wanna make a systems centric business. So another reason why you wanna make this type of a business is it gives clear standards and expectations from the employees and the customers so they know what they're going to get. The employees know that what is going to happen when they make a mistake on the job, There's a system for that. They know what's gonna happen if they punch out late or if they are cheating the time clock. They know what's going to happen if they're slacking on a job as an employee. They know what's going to happen if they show up late twice in a row. They know there's a system in place as the customer, again, they are depending on the system and they're much, much more a clear standard of okay the lawns and be cut this way every single time without fail, regardless of who is doing it, regardless of whether or not the owner, I'm there, There's a system in place that gives that clear standard and Expectation of service.

And as we talk about today, again, I really don't feel that systems are needed. If $500,000 is your max, like you're like, I'm at 200. If I got like 450, I'd be happy. I could stop there if that's the case for you. Some of these things we're talking about today aren't relevant to you, but every single one of these things that we're going to talk about today for systems and procedures, if you're wanting to scale past $500,000 in revenue, they're absolutely imperative. And so there's a reason why the webinar today is called growing past $500,000. We're not growing to or getting, trying to get to 500. We want to grow through 500,000. And you're just in that process now where you're getting to that point. But we want to go beyond that. And so we want to get the systems and procedures in place now to make sure that we continue to elevate our growth.

All right, so this is the PSP lead conversion system that we talk about at Augusta that I made up. So, like, you can't find this anywhere else. I don't think so. I call it the PSP conversion System. Basically, there's. It's. Anytime we're doing anything with our marketing system, with our website stuff, whenever we're working and tweaking things, we're asking ourselves the question, where in the continuum are we working? Are we working on the prospecting, the selling or the performing? Alright, so prospecting is everything kind of like before. So you can also look at it as like before, during and after. That's kind of how you like prospecting is before, when you're selling is during. That to me, it's the biggest part is selling, like sales is massive. We can't undervalue that. So during, that's the. During the sale and then after the sale. And that for us as landscapers, after we make the sale is when we actually perform the work. After we do the work, that's when we start working the referral process and getting them to do reviews and all of that. So this is where I see the PSP system prospecting. So in prospecting before the sale happens, you're just trying to get new leads, you're just trying to get people who don't know about you to come to awareness of your brand, awareness of what you do. You can provide for them. This is prospecting, this is advertising. This is everything from door, hangers to business cards, to cold calling, to Facebook ads, the Google Ads, whatever you're doing. Advertising, web design. Another form of prospecting is. Is it a really good design? Is it. We're going to talk about this more, but, like, is the erf, the estimate request form high on the homepage or is it like tucked away and hard to find and lots of clicks? Is it very clear that you want people to drive to a certain action, a call to action on your website? Your website is no longer just a business card, all right? No longer should your website be a glorified business card. It just has contact information and what your address is. Sorry, this is just our intro packet. Like, no longer should your website be that. It has to be a way of getting a sale. You do not want people just to get your website. Oh, those are nice before and after pictures. They do great work. They look like nice people. You want them to pick up the phone, you want them to send an estimate request form. You want them to take action from your website. That's prospecting. Everything before the sale. Branding, marketing, all of that is prospecting. And when I say branding and marketing, I'm talking like logos on your truck, uniforms on your guys when they see them before the sale. That's all prospecting. In my mind, prospecting is not simply ads. It's not simply buying a bunch of door hangers. It's everything before the sale. Every interaction I have with a customer, every interaction my crew has with the customer, every single interaction that the brand and the logo has with the customer, in my mind is prospecting. During the sale is the estimate process. It's doing the work, change orders, making sure if you're doing a landscaping job that it's exactly what the customer wants. So the reason I look at a work change order as the sale that selling that middle portion there is because it's like I have not closed them until it's there. 100% satisfied with the estimate and with the line items on that. So what work is going to be performed? What is the scope of work? Those work of change orders, that's all in the selling process. Getting that deposit, that is a sales process. Until that money is deposited in the bank, 50% down and I'm doing a landscaping job until that money's in the bank, I am selling. Getting the 50% is actually, we have a system because that is part of the sales process. Getting that 50% from that person is a sales process. How you say, well, how do you make a process around? Like, how do you. Why do you call collecting the deposit part of selling? The reason for that is because I'm going to make sure that the process of the sales funnel, the process of that sales funnel, the deposit is included in that. I'm asking for 3, 4, 5, $10,000 deposit on work that has yet to be done. It never seen the work. They never seen materials at their prep, at their property, and yet I'm asking for this big chunk of money. You better believe you have a system in place that is going to make sure that they have confidence in you, that they, that you create scarcity to make sure that they get that deposit to you fast. I promise you, getting the deposit is part of the sales aspect here. The during part of making that transaction. Then we have to perform the work, right? This is the psp. Prospecting, selling, performing. Now we're on performance. Like, if you do not believe that your crew goes out and is performing in front of the community, is performing in front of your customers, is performing in front of your competition, you're going to lose. You're on performance, you are on stage. And the same way that you would go to a drama and expect people to have practiced and rehearsed and know what they're doing and what their role is, the same thing as your customers and the community at large, they're expecting for your crew and your team and your brand to go out and perform. And that might be installing the product. You know, you did the prospect and they became a lead, you sold them the project, you got 50% down. You're now installing a landscaping project, you install it for them, or maybe it's mowing services and you perform those services for them and then the job's done. But guess what, you're still in the conversion system. I'm not happy with just performing the work. I want to then make that person continually give me new leads. I want that person to continually give me new work and come back time and time again. You have to have a system in place for that referral system. How do you get repeat business coming back to time and time again? This is the PSP lead system that we talk about. Prospecting, selling and performing. You're always on stage, you're always performing. But how you're prospecting leaks into every single aspect of your business until that person asks for an estimate. Everything that you do. And there's got to be a system in place for each thing. All right, now we're going to actually dig into some of the systems toolbox that we have at Augusta. We're going to talk about eight different systems.

That we teach and I'm going to talk about why they're so important.

All right, so the first one here, don't try to, don't get ahead of me. Too much hiring system. So if you listen to podcast, I talk about this one a lot because it's the most important I feel in our industry.

As the labor market is going to get harder and harder, it's not going to get easier, it's going to get harder and harder and whoops, sorry.

It's gonna get harder and harder. Regardless of what market you're in as a whole, the United States, the labor market's getting harder and harder to find good people. The laborers in our industry are going to trades, they're going to the oil fields, they're going into electricians, all of those things where they can make more money and those companies can afford to pay them more. They're going towards unionized work. It depends on where you're living, what industries you're living around. But hiring, having a hiring system that is going to have a career fair and you know how to interview them and you know how to get them onboarded and you know how to do it quickly and you gotta sell. Like for us now to think as employers that in this job market people are just gonna pick up the phone, call us and ask to work for us. It doesn't happen very rarely. You gotta be. It's a sales process. Back in the day when there was 10% unemployment, you had people lining up to work for you. Now it's a sales process. You've gotta go out and you got a prospect. Alright, let's go back. Literally, let's think about this now in terms of an employee, you've got a prospect to them, you've got to sell them on the job and then you've got to perform as the employer to make sure that again, they go through the system that they go from. You're prospecting and that's again, you're literally advertising, trying to find new leads, which are, I. E New employees. Same thing. You got to have a system to get them in, prospect them, sell them when they meet you. That interview process is part of the sales. You know, you just asking a couple random questions or saying, let's try it out for a couple days. That is a poor representation of the process you have in place and it's making a bad representation to that employee and you know, performing. Once they're hired, you better make sure that you are caring about that individual that you are having teams, you're supporting and training that individual, having that system in place. I really find that to get to 500,000 in revenue, the averages that I see, that someone's gonna have about five to six crew members and they're gonna have, they're gonna hire their office person. It might be an office assistant, if you want to call them that, because they might not work full time. But I see most of the time to get to 500,000 in revenue, a landscaper needs to have five to six crew members, which is usually equates to two or three full time crews, three trucks out in the field, and then they need to have someone in the office again, that's just completely standard. It's gonna really depend on what services you provide, your hourly rate, etc. But these are averages. 5 to 6 crew guys, employees work out in the field, an office person to help you. And then usually I see that, that, that owner being kind of like in between the office, still out kind of managing jobs on the field around that $500,000 marker. Web lead generation again, there's another tool in the toolbox of systems that we are we obsess about. Web lead generation is super important. And when you talk about your website, yes, we can talk about the design that we already mentioned and making sure everything's laid out beautifully and nice and it's really easy to read and it looks really good on a mobile device and it's very intuitive, easy to follow, has a system to drive sales. But search engine optimization is a big thing that's changing right now in terms of making sure that you have certain keywords, making sure you are optimized for certain things. So I've just in the past probably eight months have been thrown into a big time. As we build the franchise out, we're starting to think about like SEO and all these different markets. How can we utilize the fact that we're going to have franchisees all over the country to build a huge amount of SEO and a huge amount of credibility in the eyes of Google as it scans to really drive our SEO. So I've been really deep in this and SEO is still very, very important. ERF is our estimate request form. And actually I could show you our website real quick just so you have an idea. Exactly what I'm saying about here. An estimate request form is basically what is going to drive leads to your website. Let me just go ahead and show you what Augusta's website looks like.

Go back here. Cool. I wasn't planning on this Sorry. But I'll go ahead and pull up our homepage and show you what I'm talking about when I say the estimate request form needs to be high. The homepage. Sorry, let me just go ahead and open it up. Okay, I'm going to show this to you now.

All right. So now you can see here. This is our homepage for Augusta Lawn Care Services at our local Bellingham market. So, you know, franchisees get everything customized, you know, search and optimize for their area, city, whatever.

This is the website. But you notice a couple things above the fold that is above this line. I guess it's above the line here at the bottom. Like, when they first get to the site, there's two places where they can do an estimate request form. Two places. Number one, right here. Because most people, when they come to your website, they're wanting to. They're simply wanting to get in touch with you. They want to contact you when they ask for an estimate. That's the number one thing I want them to do on my website. I don't care if they see my videos or like the fact that there's this nice video playing in the background. I want them to make a sale. I want to transact with this person. I want to take them from P to S, from prospect to now making the sale. And that's as soon as they fill in the estimate request form, I've moved them into that channel. 99% of the population in your area will never go from prospect to selling. Right. You're not. You're all thinking about performance like that third aspect. But you're not even going to get there if you don't make the sale. And you're not going to get there if you're not prospecting them correctly. So my main goal is to move as many people from Prospect into just getting an estimate. In order to do that, I've got to have that estimate request form, which is this form right here that they can quickly fill out another place. The one button that I get says get estimate. That's all I want them to do, right? So that's they're going to click this button. It's going to take them to contact page. They fill it out. That's all I want them to do. And the reason we have it different here is we're able to track the percentage of people that click this and fill in this form versus that click this button. And I'm telling you what. Over two thirds, I think it was 68. Yes. Over two thirds of people use this form right here. Why? Because right when you open up the page, most people are wanting to get a free estimate. They're wanting to get contact with you. Make it easy. Don't tuck your contact form down here on the bottom. You know, contact us for an estimate like, or don't make them click on contact page like, make it simple. They get to your website and bam, right in front of them is their estimate request form. So I'm going to stop screen sharing that and jump back to our slides here.

Were we. Sorry, don't want to miss anything here. All right, so we talked about the hiring system. We talked about the web lead generation form. Make sure that SEO request form is in the right spot. Next system you got to have is culture systems. Again, I talk a lot about this on the podcast. Key elements of having that system is the reporting to make sure that your culture is not just some airy fairy thing. You've got to have numbers behind it. All right? Reporting the culture and tracking that is important. Having a scoreboard, making sure people know how well they're doing, not making it like, oh, you did great yesterday. Like, there's no numbers behind that. There's no way for them to chart how good they're doing against other people. One of the things I love best about Anytime Fitness as a franchisee is I get to see my report, my ranking against everyone else in the system. Your employees want the same thing. They want to see how good they're doing compared to everyone else. And it's even better if, like Josie, in this compensation system, if they're paid based upon how well they're doing against everyone else, but at least for the sake of your culture, if you want your culture to be about profitability and efficiency, and you better make sure that those things are being shown to your people on a scoreboard. I don't care what you call it, a scoreboard, a spreadsheet, a whiteboard, I don't care. Just make sure they know these things. Because if they're. If you're. If you're not managing those things and not reporting it to them and it's not visible in front of them, they are not going to change. And your culture will begin to go and degrade the lowest standard that is accepted meetings. How do you have your meetings? You know, we have Monday and Thursday morning meetings. We just switched from Wednesday to Thursday. We did that for a few different reasons. The main reason being that we want, you know, after Thursday, there's things that people want to address or we need to talk about we need trained or things that came up we want to discuss with the team. So we move that Wednesday morning meeting, a Thursday, but it's Monday and when and Thursday morning meetings and then we have two off site meetings and then I'll usually have one or two management dinners. So like last night I had a dinner with Liz, our office manager, and then Lee, who is the estimator, and the two of them collectively lead the locals shop here at Augusta. Compensation system. You've got to have a system for paying your people. The key elements of this is you can pay by the hour. And if you're going to do that, you got to have a pay scale. Like, how are you going to determine how they get a raise? You got to have a system in place. What are the checklists? What are the things they need to be doing in order to get a pay raise, in order to get $20 an hour instead of 18. Like you've got to have that system in place because they're going to buy into that as an employee, you're selling, you're prospecting to them. If you have a system in place for them to see that they can grow in the business and make more money on that pay scale, that's going to be a massive system advantage that you have over your competitors. Now, another way, another system that we really, really teach and push at the Augusta franchise is the pay for performance model. Using the scoreboard that we just talked about, using the reporting that we just talked about, that's how they get paid. They get based on paid the same way as you, the owner, based upon how much money the business is making, they're making. That is super important. If you're going to try to compete in this labor market and get A players, an A player will make your business twice as much as a B player, and yet they will make maybe 20% more if you're paying by the hour. If someone's really good, they might make $28 an hour. If they are like average, they might make $15 an hour. This is what I see in most businesses. And yet the person that's making the $20 an hour, if you actually did the math, they're making like three times as much as the person that's being paid $15 per hour. Why are they not making three times as much money? Because the dollar per hour system is antiquated. And it really shows that we as business owners are lazy to not pay our people based upon what they're worth and how much work they' and the reason Most people pay by the hour is because it's easy to measure time, it's easy to look at the clock and give them the amount of hours they were working. Because we haven't created a system that is paying them based on how much money they made us, the business owner, the company, how much they contributed to the team. You've got to have systems in place if you're going to pay people on that model. And in my opinion, that is the model that our industry has to take in order to keep talent our businesses. You gotta have a customer service system that means when callbacks happen, having that yellow slip system, having a way to get back to the customer and make sure they're happy and keep their retention of your customers high and not lose customers have to continually be filling spots as customers leave because your employees treat them wrong. And there's not a system for who gets refunded, who gets a callback. You know, how many hours is it before you get back to their property and fix the thing that was done wrong? There's got to be a system in place.

I'm going to go a little bit faster because I'm running a little bit behind and I can see that there's already some questions coming in. So again, if you have questions, post them in the chat box now. And I'm going to answer every single one at the end of today's content here. So I have a few more slides I want to get through. All right, so another process is the estimate process. Key elements of this is communication.

How does your office and how does your estimator, which for most of you is probably you still. How do you communicate to the customer? Do you use technology? Do you use video? Do you audio? Do you use email? Do you use text message? How are you communicating during the estimate process? Do you have a surprise and delight system? So what we just implemented. So I'm actually give you. One of the things we're doing at Augusta is when one of our office assistants gets a phone call to get an estimate at the very end, once they have closed the deal, which for an office assistant closing the deal is getting the appointment. And they set up the appointment for the estimator if it's a landscaping job. So if it's a landscaping job, they got set up an appointment with the estimator, they've closed the deal, they've wrapped it up. They have an appointment that the estimator is going to go to right before they hang up. They ask a really weird question, they surprise the customer, they do something different than the other five companies that that customer is calling. What they do is they say, hey Mr. Jones, just to confirm, I have you on the schedule to meet with Lee, our estimator, tomorrow morning at 9am he'll be there between 9 and 10 o'. Clock. But before I let you go, I just wanted to ask you a really random question. I know it's kind of strange, but I was just wondering, do you like Diet Coke or Pepsi more? And then Mr. Jones is like what? That's kind of a weird question. And they kind of laugh, like break it up. Because he just called five other companies and did the exact same process of getting information, setting up an appointment, getting information, setting up appointment, getting information, setting up appointment. And then bam. They asked them a question. Do you like Diet Coke or do you like Pepsi more? And then what happens if they say I don't like either of those? Well, what's your favorite drink? But if they say either one of those, what we have is we have pre cooled in our refrigerator, those cans of pop. And the estimator has a note on that estimate that says, hey, this person prefers this type of drink and he takes one of those, shows up to the job and delights them. Surprise. That like random question, like that was weird. Like they, the customer forgets about it. And then all of a sudden Lee the estimator shows up at 9:30 the next morning at the property with the Diet Coke that they had just told the office they preferred. That will delight them. You can't give someone their favorite drink and while they're drinking it, give them an estimate and they're not gonna somehow like you just a little bit more than the other five companies. I'll tell you this.

If someone called me to do estimates and I was looking for someone to do work on my house or whatever and one of them asked what your favorite drink was and I said kombucha. And they picked up a kombucha on the way over at the gas station and brought it to me. I don't care what any other competitor would do. I would use their business. It means that they care, they're, they're paying attention. They obviously have a system in place that's taking that information and then actually utilizing it. Not just a CRM where people put information in, but actually gets utilized by the people that come and work on my property, by the estimator. That person that I have an interaction with is well equipped with the information that I gave. All right, Customer intelligence, same thing at that estimate If Lee hears that that person just came out of the hospital two weeks ago or that they going into hip surgery next week, that customer intelligence needs to be what we call customer intelligence. That information needs to be put on their profile so that we can call them in two weeks and ask them how they're doing, recovering, how was the surgery, Is there anything we can do possible to help them? That customer intelligence is imperative. There has to be a process throughout that entire system. Repeat business system. I'm going to go a little bit faster so I don't go on too long. Key elements of this is the wow effect that we call what is. It's an acronym that stands for without words. So we have a system for that which basically means we do work for our customers. Little things during the slow season that they don't have to ask for, we just notice they need it. Might be gutters, might be a branch fell down. Without words, the work gets done. In other words, they begin to realize we're actually paying attention what their needs are and we're willing and caring enough to make sure those things get done. Repeat business system email newsletters. This is something I talk about a lot. If you're in the course, there's an entire video about. You know, it shows 10 or 12 of our templates that we use. Email newsletters is massively important. We just created a system at Augusta, you know, as part of the repeat business system. You know, you do a landscaping job, you never hear from the person again. If you can stay in contact with them, maybe in two years they have another project. Maybe in two years their friend builds a house. And that's the month that they got an email from you that showed a big project, a new construction install, and now word of mouth gets activated. But there was a system in place that activated, that poured fuel on that ignition of the word of mouth. So email newsletters are super important. We just created a system at Augusta where when they click a button, it automatically creates a tag on the CRM, which then automatically sends the office an email that says, hey, this person wants an estimate for whatever this email was about. So if we were like pitching bark mulch installations on an email newsletter, our monthly ones to we now in our database of like 4,500 customers in that database, we send out this email. It's all talking about bark installation. You know, the benefits of it, why you want to do it, how thick do you want to do it, what type of mulch we use, we're educating, educating them. And at the bottom says, if you would like a free estimate in your inbox by tomorrow morning, click this button. They click the button, it goes to a thank you page and that's all they see. Next thing they know, next morning there's an estimate that's waiting in their inbox that has the estimate for the amount of molts they need and the price for it. How it's done is when they click on that button, it instantly is triggered to our CRM, put the tag on their profile. That tag sends out an automation that emails the office that says hey, this customer, this is their contact information. They click the button and they want an estimate that is going to then activate the estimate system which is going to make that office person set up an estimate for the estimator to go measure it out, create an estimate that is going to then trigger the system for follow up and automation which is going to send out the estimate and then follow up with them with emails. So again, systems in place for repeat business. Again, reactivation campaigns. How do you get people that were doing business with you a year ago canceled service last month, how do you get them reactivated? You have a system in place for that. Same thing with pr, public relations, your local newspaper. What things are you doing in your local community for public relations? I think this is our last toolkit, our last systems that we are going to show in the toolbox. Follow up process. I talked about this just now.

Our follow up process. There's got to be an automated way to follow up with the customer once you've done an estimate. I find a massive, like literally this one thing could take you from a $300,000 business to a half a million dollar business is simply by closing a higher ratio of the estimates that you already do. You've already taken their information, done the estimate, designed the estimate, sent the estimate and for that person not to ever do business with you, you are losing a lot of money. And so we, we really do encourage people to charge for estimates. However, if you ever follow up, they're never going to accept the estimate.

About 50, last month it was 50. It's usually around 40% though. 40% of our accepted estimates come after two or more follow up emails, follow up, sorry, contacts. Because sometimes the office, the automation requires a phone call, some of that requires an email. But regardless, in that automation process, 40% of our estimates that we get accepted happen after two or more follow ups to the customer, whether it be phone or email or text message. And so having that follow up process and creating the scarcity, how do you do that? Because some people are like, hey, it's April. I got an estimate for a landscaping job I want to do. How do you create scarcity? When they feel like they got the next thing eight or nine months to get the job installed, or they got, they can, you know, go out and get four or five more estimates over the next month before they make a decision. How do you create scarcity? All right, that's got to be a system in place. You got to tell, you got to use the schedule to create scarcity. Look, Mr. Jones, we're five weeks booked out. In a couple of weeks, we'll probably be booked out two months. I really suggest if you want to get on the schedule, put that 50% down and let's get on the schedule tomorrow. So like that's, you can use scarcity in the schedule to make sure they actually get on the schedule and get the work done. Office communications gotta have a follow up process for that. Using voice notes, using video. How do you upload those videos from your project manager so that the follow up process is seamless with the customer and the office and the estimator never even have to talk to each other. That communication process is absolutely imperative. It's part of the selling system, repeat business system.

So again, this has to do with the wow, without words, the email newsletters, all those things that we just talked about and then the reviews and the snail. Sorry, I kind of did a repeat here. But the reviews and the snail mail, there's got to be a system in place for that too. So what I talk about, reviews and snail mail is repeat business. After we've done a landscaping job, every single person, there's an automation that's going to make the office print out a letter that says thank you or the entire office and everyone in the field, they get put up on the bulletin board and they, everyone signs them when they see them. So there's a pen and everyone just put their autograph on there and we send back a thank you letter with a picture of us. After every single landscaping job, after every single mowing customer, their first mowing, they're going to get a piece of mail that says thank you with all our signatures on there. Then there's another process. After that mail gets there a couple days later, they get a review email automatically. All done behind the scenes. Once that's done, they're getting an email that gives them the links to Google and Nextdoor and Facebook and Angie's list. They can click on whichever one they want. And actually I can show you real Quick, what they see, it's very, very simple. Augustalong36.com.

So this is the page. I'll share it here in just a second. So we send them a link, we say, hey, you know, it's been, they've gotten great service, hopefully they've gotten great installation. They're really happy with it. They had great experience with the project manager. All the systems went in place and then they paid for their bill and then they got a thank you letter with all our signatures and a photo of our entire team. And then they get an email asking for.

A review and they're sent a very simple link that takes them to this page right here where basically they just got to click on one of these and it's going to take them to the designated place. So again, making this simple, they click on there, let's see if this works. They click on here. It's going to take them directly to our face, our Google page where they can instantly make a review automatically. I don't have to do the search. And a whole bunch I wanted to go straight. Okay, so let's go ahead and take this off and take the screen share back to my slides. I got a couple more slides I want to talk about here and then we'll call it good and we'll answer some questions.

Alright, so this is really the crux of, you know, everything that we're doing at Augusta. And I truly believe everyone on this webinar, because you made the commitment to learning, you will be able to grow your business to 500,000. I truly believe that. I don't question that at all. Using systems, procedures. And you can do this yourself, you absolutely can. Or join the franchise. And so that's what if you've been listening to podcast, that's what I'm super passionate about and that we are really trying to build right now. The reason you'd want to join the franchise is because it's really going to save you time. So it goes back to that slide I talked about earlier. Like if I knew everything I know now what systems and procedures and I've seen hundreds of P&LS and if not thousands of profit loss statements and financial statements and numbers from other companies. If I knew all of that now, I could restart Augusta locally, my own little landscaping business again, how much faster I would be able to get to where I am now, where I don't even have to be there. And I knew all the systems and everything. The amount of time I would cut out is enormous. The amount of wasted money on Trying to do services that never became profitable and I expanding and diversifying services too fast or doing marketing that didn't work, doing Facebook ads that didn't work. Google AdWords that did not work. That all gets cut out. So becoming part of the franchise, that's what you're going to get. You get all the systems we talked about, the reporting support. You get to compare yourself against other franchisees that are doing the same business model as you, super valuable. And all these systems are done for. You don't have to go figure them out. Trial, error, see what works, what doesn't. That's what I've done for a long time. That's what we figured out to where now it's the systems run the business. I do not need to be there. It runs better without me because the systems have been honed in and perfected. And so this is what we're offering as a franchise. And I truly believe it is going to be a game changer in the industry. You know, I want to see 5, 600 franchisees in the system and we're going to be able to move the industry where it needs to be. We can make real big impacts in terms of the level of professionalism. What other competitors have to do just to compete with us. They're going to have to treat their employees better, they're going to have to pay them more, they're going to have to increase the value, they're going to have better trucks, they're going to have to make sure they're insured and licensed and not going to be okay under the table. You know, the customer starts to expect that the laborers speak English are professional. And I want to make this industry a trade. I want it where people think like I'm a landscaper is now looked on as like, oh, you're just a bum with a cigarette and cut off shorts working outside. I want to make it more. It's a profession and I truly believe that this is the biggest step I've made so far to making that happen. And so I really, if this is something you're interested in, I'd love to talk to you. This is the link. I'm going to show you where this actually goes. Let me just show you real quick and then I'm going to jump into your questions. So if you have questions, a great time, ask a question in the chat box. But this is what you're gonna go. If you go to augustaloncareservices.com franchise, this is what you're going to see. Oops. Right here, share. And now you can see this is exactly what you're gonna see. You can book a call with me right here. So right in here, you can go ahead and book a call with me next week, 26th, the 27th. Book a call right there with me. We're gonna talk for 30 minutes about your personal, you know, your business, how you convert from your business to Augusta Long Care. Do them joint, make sure it works for you. This video here is really important, a five minute video about the franchise. But down here is really what I wanted to point you all. Because if you haven't already, this answers a lot of questions. Everything from, you know, what's different than us in the grounds guys, most of you probably been called by them. What's different than us versus them is franchising even right for you? I talk about the pros and the cons. If you just click one of these tabs, you can see a video, just click play and it's good to go. You know, should you hire, when should you hire and expand? It talks about how we made sure that the reporting of it tells you when to do this. The system dictates the business, why we're focused on residential. Again, these are all videos I've created that explain a lot of things. What the royalty fees are, what our royalty fees are, what the ongoing support, what the cost to get started. All of these frequently asked questions are answered right here. And once you've done that, please schedule an introductory call with me. I don't try to sell you most of the calls I'm having right now. People are not going to be a good fit for Augusta. And so I'm screening most people out. However, if you've been on this webinar and you've listened to my podcast and you know a lot about me, this is why I'm not doing a bunch of ads on Facebook or doing a bunch of advertising, at least I want people that know what I think about business. Because those first 10 franchisees are getting 50% off on all their initial franchise fee that's going to save. They're only going to pay 12,500 instead of 25 grand, which will be after the first 10. And you don't have to pay any franchise fees all the way till next June. And I'm doing that. So that way if you have a landscaping business, you can spend the money that you're saving on franchise fees and put it towards redoing your trucks, putting new logos on, painting those, getting new uniforms. We're going to Build the whole site out for you, the site's going to look very similar to that one. All the SEO, we do that on a continual basis, updating and improving it. Always looking at stats of the erf, the asking request form, seeing where those best places to put those are all that's done for you. The support reporting, all those systems we talked about today, that's what you get as a franchisee. Alright, so I'm going to answer questions now. I'd love to talk about anything and everything to do with Systems getting to 500,000 in revenue. And if you have any question about franchise stuff, I'll get to that too. But I'm gonna go ahead and open up the chat box here and just go ahead and start going through the questions. So first of all, welcome to everyone that I wasn't able to say welcome to at the beginning. You were late, so I'm sorry, didn't get introduced. But I'm gonna go ahead and jump in here and answer these questions. Go ahead and just post your question and I will answer every single one before we go off the live webinar. So Kenneth asks, when they fill out the erf, do they also get it added to an email list that sends them future communications? Yeah, so as soon as they get an erf, they fill out an erf, we get all their information, which is automatically imported into the CRM. And it doesn't matter if they get an estimate or if they cancel the estimate. They're in our system. Like they're immediately going to be on email, newsletters, promotions, like they're going to get all of that. We got their contact. Right. Like they at least raised their hand and said, I want services. And so we're going to make sure that we stay in contact with them and that we are continually grooming them to become a client, a paying customer. Even if they cancel or whatever happens, we got their contact information. We will definitely be sending them future communications. Jared asked, can you give a good breakdown of a typical outline of your meetings as well as your leadership dinners? Good question.

Good question. So basically for the meetings, I have a few different types of meetings that I'll hold on, like Mondays and Thursdays. One is when things have been going like, there's been a lot of what we call yellow slips or complaints, callbacks. We're going to address each one and then train around those yellow slips. So for example, let me think.

Last yellow slip we had was, oh yeah, I remember this. The guys were taking the push mowers out of the trailer and then they were putting them underneath so that they could take the zero turnout. And that's why I don't like trailerless setups. But we do have four of our trailers that are four of our crews that still have enclosed trailers. But they would take the push mower out, put it underneath to wet it in and drive the zero turnout. What that ended up happening is.

One of the zero turns. As it came out, it tipped the trailer back and crushed the top of the push mower. And so we had to replace the flywheel. And so we just talked about all of that. We showed, hey, that's a really efficient way to do it, but you could also use the curb. And we talked about that. So we altered the system for them and made sure that, hey, no more putting the, the push mower underneath. It's got to go up against the curb or back into the trailer on the side. So that's one way we do meetings. Basically, even as a franchisee, every single week we'll be getting, I'll be giving updated information for you to use in your team meetings. Not that you have to use it, but information that you can use because some of our meetings are more inspirational or not philosophical. But watch a TED Talk. We'll watch, you know, Jocko talk, he did a TED Talk on extreme ownership, 15 minute talk. We'll watch that or we'll watch a training about a certain thing that, you know, aeration, really educating the guys and using it more of a training meeting than anything. Sometimes it'll be safety. So as a franchisee, you know, we expect you to have at least one team meeting a week, where every single week though, we'll be offering two different templates that you can use to have a team meeting. And those team meetings are usually going to be between eight to 20 minutes, just depending on what you're trying to convey. And so again, as a franchisee, a great support thing is like, hey, I don't know what I'm going to do for my meeting today. We will give you some ideas to make sure that happens and that you don't have to use them, but like it's a good system to make sure that you're able to constantly have those team meetings and are giving them valuable information. So usually it's like training or some sort of like revision of a system. So we call it continual improvement. So if people have suggestions on continual improvement, that's our way of saying make the systems better, then we would talk about those and they submit their continuous improvements. Comments on these little pieces of paper and then we have a little box they put them in. And then every single one that comes in we talk about at our team meetings. And in terms of our leadership dinners, that's when we really will go into a lot of like is my way to connect with the guy, my leaders and my managers that are there every single day and know the guys know what like things are falling through the cracks, knows who's kind of struggling or who needs some training or some one on time, one on one time with me. And so that's my time to connect really with the people. Is at the leadership meetings and ask some hard questions about like how so and so's family, how's their wife, like what's going on here? So that's kind of the leadership meetings we're talking about and kind of giving them a broader vision of what's happening because we do that at off site meetings, the one that we do in the spring and the fall for an entire team. But the leadership team, they need like a mid year kind of like where are we at in that progress in showing some numbers, things like that.

Michael Mohler, can you explain the yellow slip system a little more? So Michael, first of all, I would say search that on YouTube, on the podcast or on Facebook and I talk about a whole episode on just the yellow slip system. But basically it's our way of use of creating ownership for the, for the employee. So that way I, the owner or an estimator or a project manager doesn't always have to go back and fix their mistakes. So many business owners are really annoyed, and rightfully so by them always having to like fix everyone's mistakes. The half. The reason for that is because they, you've made it part of the culture where if they make a mistake, it gets fixed for them. They don't get any repercussions besides like, oh, you shouldn't have done that. I much rather want them on the job thinking about the embarrassment of having to come back to that job, talk to the customer. Then the yellow slip system, they have to fill it out and at the next team meeting they have to tell everyone whose property they're at what they did wrong and what they did to resolve it. It's embarrassing. We just had a guy that had two of them in one meeting and my goodness, he got, he got so many jokes about him because like, just like nice jokes. But like, trust me, they don't, they do not want to be embarrassed in front of everyone that they had to, you know, they broke something on a property or that they had to go back because they forgot to do the weeding. Like, creating accountability at your frontline level of employees is really important.

Kevin asks, with the systems and processes in place, it seemed to come down to putting the right people in the right places and building business culture. What books would you recommend to work on this and get in the right frame of mind for this? That's a good question because specific as terms of culture. So let me actually open up our Audible. So one of the things we do for our employees is we have an Audible account that we all share books. So the company pays for all of them. We buy like a pack of 30 you can buy for I think 250 bucks on audible. And so I can actually see right now there's people reading and listening to books today even I'm listening currently to Dan Kennedy's book on marketing to the affluent. But you know, there's another one that one of the guys, Daniel, he liked this book called Honeybee Democracy, which is all about honeybees and how they have leadership and teams. But in terms of your question, Kevin, in terms of like, culture, I'm just looking here. Crucial Conversations is a really good book.

That talks about conversations that are really important, how to deal with those. This Is now youw Company is a book that I'm halfway through and pretty good. It's called this Is now youw Company. And Liz, my office manager, she got this book and then told the whole company to listen to it. Because the transition that we're going through, where it's like I'm not there and really take them taking ownership of the business that was. That book was helping them with that. I'm just looking here. I'll give you one or two more just in case you've listened to all of those.

Culture. Culture. Just looking through. Those are some of the most recent ones, I would say. Kevin.

I'm just looking here. There's a couple in here that I know I loved. So we just have hundreds of books. Like just a ton of books that we bought all for them. They're always in here. But I'm just scrolling through, seeing which ones would be around. Culture.

I don't know if you can see all these, but there's just a ton of books. So I'm trying to scale quickly to see which ones like Servant Leadership. The Servant Leaders Eat Last. I love that book. So anyways, lots and lots of Audible books, but those are a couple of the ones I really love. Are there still spots in the franchise yes, Jared, there is in fact Kevin, who just posted below you a question. He's become one of the franchisees and we're signing on Monday. So I'm really looking forward to that because Kevin's awesome and he's down Tennessee, Mississippi area there. But there are still spots in the franchise and there will be spots probably until October because as I'm filling the spots, I'm getting more and more selective. The people who are in now, they know me really well. They're in Pro plus or they followed me for years. And so I want to keep that throughout the first 10. And so there are still spots. And there will be, because when I get to two spots open, I'm going to be even more selective. And November is the first training for the franchisees, so until October, there's going to be open spots.

Jared asked, a little off topic. Any guidance on if and when someone should make a jump from lawn pro to Jobber? I usually see that happening around.

250,000. Like I kind of see lawn pro still being really good for 0 to 250. I see jobber being good from like 250 to about 3/4 of a million to a million. But once you hit a million, like service, autopilot, service titan, real green, those are really good. That can actually scale to a million plus.

Kenneth, when you were talking about the employee scoreboard, how do you break down accrue? How do you break down accrue? So basically what we do is we look at the revenue they generate and we look at the. So there's two different scoreboards I'm going to talk about. One scoreboard is if you're paying by the hour, one scored is pay by performance. Pay by performance is very much like here's the amount of revenue you made for the business. Divide that by this percentage and there's your, your earnings for the day. As an employee with an if you want to make a scoreboard and you're paying people by the hour, you're going to look at the total amount of revenue they generated and then you're going to look at the total amount of wages that you pay to them, and you're gonna make some sort of a number or rating system based on that number. So for example, if they made $400 for you in revenue and then they, but then they, you have to pay them 200. Their 400 divided by 200 is 2. So 2 for us is not very good. Like we're always trying to get people to be three or above. In other words, Three times the amount of revenue that in comparison their labor rate. And so that was hourly. We've switched to now pay by performance where that is a set number. So they can make more or less based upon that. But essentially there's that the two scoreboards. Let's always look at labor paid and revenue earned. Have you much experience with Yard Book like or dislike? I have not used it for my businesses. I hear a lot of good things about it and I would say the same, same thing. It's very comparable to Lawn Pro in terms of like I see most businesses growing out of it by 250, 300,000 in revenue. But it's good for that getting started. It's cheap and it does a lot of. It's very, very simple. Lawn Pro and Yard Book are simple, simple, simple. But as your business grows you want automations and building more complexity and tags and things like that. You usually do want to have a more complex system. It's going to take a while to learn. It's going to be a lot more, more expensive. But I do feel I have heard good things about Yardbook in terms of simplicity for someone just getting started, like I said, 0 to 300 I would say but if you're willing to get to 500, you need at least jobber in my opinion or kind of something along jobbers lines. And then if you're wanting to go million plus, I really see service autopilot, real green, someone like service Titan, those being the software that you would use. So any more questions? I'm happy to answer those. Go ahead and post them here in the chat. If you have questions about systems that we talked about today, if you have system. If you have questions about growing your business to 500,000 in revenue and you know, ask those. If you have questions about the franchise, I'd really like you to fill out a form and we can talk in person. It's a 30 minute call. It's called introductory franchise call. Just go to augustalongcareservices.com franchise and there actually should be a tab next to this screen right now. I just put up.

Yes, it should say like take the next step and schedule a call. You click that, it'll take you right to my schedule. You can book me a call early next week. So any more questions?

I'm gonna have 30 seconds. If there's another question, I'll answer it. Otherwise we'll close things out. Have a rest of your evening. Hope is fantastic.

Thank you all so much for coming. I really do appreciate, I know it's Saturday evening and you will get a recording of this later this evening, you'll get a recording of the whole webinar and you'll be able to see it all live. But thank you all so much for coming. If you have any more questions, just email me. Franchisegustalawncareservices.com I'd love to schedule a call with. You know, right now there's 18, 19, 20 people on here. It looks like there was about 80 people signed up for today. So if you are on this, I'd love to talk to you about the franchise. I want to make it work for you guys and just that's why we're cutting the franchise fees back to almost basically what it costs us to get you set up, build your website. We do all the legal aspect for you. The lawyers and the attorneys do all the paperwork here. So I'm really hoping that a lot of you guys are the ones that get on the franchise, that I don't have to go and advertise for it because I know most of you have listened to me for a while, know what I'm standing for, what Augusta is all about and why we're doing it.

It's really, I think it's me game changing and so I'd really love if some of you guys can jump on board. I know Kevin was in here, Thomas was in here, and he also is a franchisee already. So that's it. All right. So thank you, everyone. I really do appreciate it. Please, I would like to talk to you, if it is interested to you, about the franchise. AugustAlongCareServices.com franchise thank you so much for coming. It was a lot of fun. I'll try to do one or two more of these later in September, but thank you all so very much. Have a great evening.