Week in my life-Helping struggling businesses w/ Mike Andes

Asap. All right guys, back up right now. Security.

Got me in this corridor. There's a sign right there. Oh, gotcha. Cool. We have a workplace accident here folks.

So we can't get a car until tomorrow at like 5am.

Like what could have possibly caused this? He just hung up on me. Hey Be, I'm just curious if you guys have two balloons available tonight. Alright, so we're packing for the turnaround show. This is the situation we are currently working with. Copious amounts of gum, beef jerky, meat sticks of various sorts, Plenty of jockos, more meat sticks, more beef jerky and carnivore whey protein. Only the bare essentials.

Good morning. It is way too early to be up right now but we are about to head out to go on the next turnaround.

I'm the one that's excited for it but anyways we're going to hit Boston today and then Illinois the other two days and then fly out of Missouri. So let's do it.

All right. We have a 5 1/2 hour flight ahead of us. So I'm, I've been assigned to look around, look for some meat. There's Wendy's. We're not doing Wendy's. Let's see what we find. Burgers acquired.

Touchdown in Boston folks.

I gotta go.

But this events are still for.

Almost there.

Had a very long travel day, flew from coast to coast about five and a half hours and we made it.

Made it. Let me show you them what I do on the back end.

Yeah, show us.

This is tomorrow's. You can't see his number but basically what happens is I see their financial information. I here get a little bit of information from Zach and that's basically all I get. And then what I do is I go through and say okay, what are some of the titles that the YouTube video could be? I actually would do word for word what I think the introduction should be. And then I do the 4L framework. So liquidity leads labor and leadership based upon the financials that I see. And then I visit them tomorrow and I say hello for the first time.

That's right. And he completely changes their lives because he's just like that.

Right.

So what are your thoughts before going into?

Well, the big issues I see right now is that we have up to 15 employees but our highest month revenue is only 60 something thousand dollars. He's charging less than $50 an hour. He's using an electric fleet. He bought a $75,000 electric lightning Ford truck that charges his equipment but it can only Be charged at his house. So that's not going to scale very well.

Yeah. So he drives from his shop to his house to go recharge the truck.

And so if he's going to grow.

So the question is, do we want to save the environment or do we want to become rich?

Because if you get rich, then you can save the environment.

That's right.

If you really care about it.

Momentarily. We don't care about the trees. Nay, nay, nay. Anyways, Mike has a super dial in. He's really taking a lot of time, especially today, just to look at Cyrus is the gentleman's name that we're going to go see tomorrow. Just look at Cyrus's story and see how he can help.

That's right.

He's going to do absolutely incredible. So looking forward to see what tomorrow has in store. I will try to catch some behind the scenes of all that jazz. Today. I was working on editing the first vlog.

So she. The whole day. The entire stinking day.

Well, on the flight, five and a half hours. Yeah. And then on the car right here. It's pretty fun. Is that all you want to share?

That's all I want to share.

Okay. That is all I want to share. Good night. We will see you tomorrow.

You know, a 120 in to be able to charge the smaller batteries. If they haven't thought of a way to say if you could just plug this in while it's in the trailer. Right. But in reality, it's the pricing. But the fact is, if right now he raised his pricing, he's losing too many customers and therefore I don't think he would actually raise his pricing. How did you feel? Because I know you mentioned that it. It probably is a weird thing for the employees to be driving through another business to get to this business. Yeah. How did you feel coming through this space? Well, if you look back here, we have a very dang successful business. Business. There's probably what, like probably 20, 30 trucks? I think he said, like it's a huge business, probably 10, $15 million. Very successful. It's just a little weird for team members to come back here the very back and pass all their employees, etc. They have a big office and a bunch of fancy equipment. Not here yet. No.

Welcome to Eco Valley Lawn Care in Northampton, Massachusetts. We're here to do our intro. It's a little awkward doing an intro. There's a bunch of employees around or people in general. You know, we're still learning how to make these videos in public. You know what I'M saying this is their shop space where they have all the attachments to the hand tools. These are the backpack blowers they put the batteries onto. They have their hand tools. These are the mowers they use. So this is how you pull this bad boy out. And then you got these. These cost like $500 a pop though, so you gotta have six of them. The mower itself is only six grand, including the batteries. Not bad. But even after 3, 400 hours, they're having problems with stuff. So they're trying to upgrade to a different type of mower called Greenworks. But those are like 15 to 20, $25,000. Very expensive. They got push mowers that are battery operated. Fancy schmancy organization, actually. Really good. I like it.

Alright, chilling in the car. Mike's getting work done prepping for tomorrow. I'm editing the previous vlog that y' all hopefully already saw. If not, go back and watch it. The guys are out there filming, wrapping up for today's video. Any final thoughts?

Yeah, the lighting's bad.

The lighting's bad.

Very, very infrequently do I say that it's a leads problem, which means they just didn't get more customers. Usually everyone thinks they have a leads problem, but they don't. But in his case, if he can get to capacity and get more mowing customers and then raise his prices, he'll be okay. Whereas, like, the next person we're going to has no idea what their numbers are and is a bit of a train wreck in terms of knowing what's going on in the business.

Louis. We get to our car rental. Let's put Avis on blast. And they don't have a car for us, so we're checking other reservations.

Anything these days. Yeah, I guess paying for it doesn't even matter.

And they're like, well, we don't care about your money. We're just gonna.

We can't get a car until tomorrow at like 5am so we're gonna go.

Stay at this hotel instead of making.

The hour and a half drive to Bloomington. We are staying at a hotel that's right next to the car rental place.

Yeah. Watch them overbook us tomorrow morning at.

5Am that's kind of what I'm scared of, honestly.

Do they do that?

Yeah, that's what I was saying.

They reassured us. They reassured us. Oh yeah. You're definite car tonight? Yeah. You won't be on shift tomorrow morning when we come in at 5:00am yeah. If you, if you put a reservation in, you'll definitely pick. Yeah.

Would it be too much trouble get too nice tonight? Is there any? Yeah, right now.

Next door. Are they open yet? No, they. Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. All right, well.

Okay.

Thank you very much. What are we doing folks? This is a green. Tired, please come up on me.

Hey, I'm just curious if you guys have two rooms available tonight.

Hi.

I was great. Yeah, cool. We're like a four ring along the way, so. Yeah.

Priorities.

Charge me whatever you want.

Folks to wintry.

Welcome to another edition of MB Hotel Reviews. Hey, this is a Doubletree. This is one of my favorite hotel brands because it is cheap but it is good quality and it's clean. So first off, wallpaper decent. This is why the Doubletree wins my heart. They always have walk in showers with full out tile. It's like music, bright light. For some reason you. Your skin always looks horrible in hotel lighting. Right? I agree, I agree. Thank you. And then we have the St. Louis Arch, which I have been there one time in the bed. Well.

I will let you know tomorrow. What would you rate this as?

Honestly? We have a little coffee maker over here too. I'd give it a solid like 8 out of 10.

Yeah, I'm getting 8.1. Like look at this, folks. Look at the engineering. The fact that you can put your hands underneath this thing. Beautiful. I want to have my protein drink. I haven't had my protein drink for two days. We haven't worked out in two days.

Yeah, that is severely slack around here.

So what are we gonna do? We're gonna utilize the protein powder.

Can I make it for you?

Carnivore milk. That's probably completely processed. Smash it together, num nums. All right, folks, so I went back to the review booth after sleeping here at night. We must revise our ratings. He's very, very sad. Bed. Very good. Love the heavy comforter. Now folks, what are we doing? You have a door. Is the door just slightly open? We can no longer stand at the sink. Said sink is jammed up in the corner. What happens when you have two people? Well, one person at the stand next to this wonderful trash can to access said sink while the other person is jammed up against this thing and will hit their elbow ever so often up against this as they're trying to kneel over this. Low marks. But you know what? It gets worse. And yes, there's more. There's no stinking.

Fridge. No fridge. So what does that mean? That means warm Jocko's makes me mad, makes me very sad and makes me drop my Points on the hotel rating.

Alright, folks, we're at turnaround number two out here in Caddam Chatham, Illinois. More accurately, this beautiful farm country here with my wonderful pens. The thing I've already dug off right now that's kind of crazy is the fact that we're spending $3,000 a month on Google Ads. Between an agency and the actual ad spend, but the whole business does $200,000 in annual revenue. Last year. We got a problem. What a lot of people do not see in the turnaround show is that we are usually only here for a few hours. Walk in, I have a few little points, talk to the owner. They get actually their employees started for the day and then we go meet their employees. It's pretty quick. It's like boom, boom, chop, chop. And we have two of them today. So Brian's gonna keep me on task because I also have to get a call in between that, right?

That's right.

We know we need to know cost per lead.

Yeah.

We are going to increase conversion the website using the form, using the estimate request form as well as like this part being really focused on like what does this do? When a customer comes here, they want to know do they serve my area and do they do my services? We have a workplace accident here, folks. Blood, bloody nose. That actually might make us demonetized.

It was so stressful inside of the.

I just couldn't handle it.

Just couldn't handle the intense. The intensity of the coaching of the turnaround. But it went good.

It was great.

Good turnaround? Yeah, it was good. Good coaching, really nice family and. What are you doing?

I'm checking.

You're checking the blood? I was joking. Not bad show, blood on YouTube.

Yeah.

But probably higher for the sake of the view. Great retention.

Everything you had to say about his website was really good. Like it all made sense. You were so right whenever you were saying like whenever people look at their website, if they didn't see the top left, they would not know what he did or what service he offered. That was really good.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

I appreciate that.

Of course.

Vote of confidence for my wife.

That's right. That's right. And then yeah, implementing the yellow subsystem so the employees have to take more accountability. He's too much of a nice guy. Letting his wife handle like bring down.

What a trooper.

Yeah, Anna. Go Anna. We're Team Anna over here. Yeah. Good turnaround so far.

It was fantastic.

Our goal is to give David a strategy to turn around the business in the next six weeks and get the company back on track.

Great.

All right, let's get here.

Nice. There you go. Appreciate it guys. Thanks again. Seriously. Thanks for having me. Thank you.

Anything I can get for you? A fresh coffee.

How are you?

Oh my gosh. Had Edmund had to fire his first guy. That guy called me crying.

Because Kyle struggled that first year because I handed him a business that had like, it was like 50, 50 like projects occurring. So then he was selling constantly and then it screwed him in the fall because he was just selling projects all through the spring when we need to be selling, mowing. Right? Yeah.

Good morning. Thank you for choosing Starbucks. When we get started for you today.

Intertwined and everything. So that's where I think it gets a little hairy. People don't think about what are the downsides? What happens if someone gets divorced? If someone else in the partnership gets divorced. Now 50% of their shares of the business are owned by someone else.

I see it all the time. If someone gets divorced, 50% of their shares is going to the other person's walking out the door and wants to spit all over them. Right. And that can get torn up. And now so the business gets sold because someone else got divorced. It's weird. So I would really, really think about, hey, can we add an addendum? It can be a three or four page document. Just think about every bad thing that can happen and what's supposed to happen therefore. How has it been like scaling it up where you always focus on his maintenance or was it like whatever you could get? Yeah, I mean maintenance is our focus. I mean obviously we forgot to get last turn around. They got if you get out of way to get more cash in the bank asap. All right guys, back up right now. Security.

Don't work here. You cannot be in this corridor. There's a sign right there. Oh, gotcha. Cool. Thank you. I got most of it. Our goal is to give Nathan and Brady a strategy to turn around the business in the next six weeks and get the company back on track.

Michael, you're all set.

Enjoy.

Hello.

Hi.

Are you vlogging? I am vlogging.

Hi there. Brianna.

Yes. All right, you're all set. Enjoy.

Have a good day.

You too.

Thank you.

All right people, we are back in town and now we are gonna be doing huge. It's not even a competition.

Huge competition. Everything's a competition.

No, he makes everything a competition.

But cuz all I want to do is win, win, win.

We are doing a canvas swap game. So we're going to start out with a small canvas and have a timer going for two minutes. Once that two minutes is up, we're going to swap canvases, but we're not telling each other what we're trying to paint. I'm sure we'll figure it out eventually, but it also could change throughout the game.

How do you know there's no winner?

Not really.

Is that fun?

Yeah. Imagine wanting to have fun together at May night.

Fun fact. I used to do painting with acrylics.

He's really good at painting. So good thing this is not a competition because I would lose. These are like metallic acrylics. It was just like a cheap. The cheap.

All right, you ready to lose?

Ready to win?

Let's do it.

Oh, no.

Stupid.

So far, this is what I had.

Well, mine is incredible.

No, none of them are incredible. They both have massive flaws.

I don't see them back from running a few errands. And we had a couple big packages in our mail room. One that has been sitting there for about like a month and a half. Not gonna lie, it was off our registry. And it was a piece of furniture. I don't love building furniture. So it kind of marinated in there for a little bit. And then this was the second package, A pelican suitcase that if you guys follow Mike, you saw in his story, he is super hyped about that. One of the main reasons he got that was to protect his jocko go's because whenever we travel, he packs them for both of us. And we were both like, one day these are just gonna break during transport. So in a pelican suitcase, that'll be nigh impossible. The package that I was just talking about is a piece of furniture that's gonna go in a closet. So I'm going to take this out and attempt to put it together. I hate reading instructions. So we're gonna try to do it without having to read the instructions and see how that goes. Yeah, there's no way I'm putting all of this together without instructions. So here we go. It's been like three hours later. That's as far as I got. Pretty much the only thing that needs to happen are those. Or the top drawer goes in and those two slabs go in somewhere. But I have to wait for Mike to get home to help me with that part. The bottom door is installed it. You have to use two hands to open it though. So that was definitely assembly error right there. Anyways, gonna take this down to the recycling bin and clean up around here before Mike gets home.

The vlog, you're stuck with me today. Head to the office a little earlier than usual. But today we might. Very small might. I'd say it's a 10 chance right now be releasing our first big deployment at Copilot.

It's been over a year since we haven't released anything really big that's new. We did a little feature enhancements and improvements and stuff like that every week. But actually a huge feature release we haven't changed and this one is huge. We will probably never release a feature release that is this sensitive and this large ever. It's a new code base that we're implementing using on the customer portal side. But more importantly, we're changing the way we use the integration with Stripe. Now Stripe is a payment processor. So think every single time there is money being transacted in the software with invoices and estimates and deposits and credit cards on file and ach credit card. Like every single time there's money moved, we're changing the way that's being done. And it'll be much more secure. It'll be way better in the future. People can use Google Pay and Apple Pay and it makes the deposit. The way that the software works just so much better for the user, but very, very risky. The reason it's risky is because it'll affect every single user a lot. And we cannot let it go with any sort of bugs. See if it happens today. But that's the plan. And let's. Let's rock and roll.

Good morning.

What's up?

It is Saturday.

We're going to Base Camp Fitness. It's another franchise, kind of a sister partner of Anytime Fitness. They have a couple hundred locations but it's like more studio style, not gym style.

It's like a workout class.

We are.

Just warming up on the bike. We're group A so we follow all the workouts. That's on the screen. It says, hey, Joe's over there representing in his Augusta shirt.

Gotta love it out here on Saturday morning having Jocko and Jocko.

You guys, there's like a whole shelf in our fridge dedicated to just drinks. Yeah, that's right.

We're trying new ones. Yeah, that are like stevia or have. No, this one is actually pretty good. I don't really like the lime one, but this brand, not bad. It has no caffeine. So what you can do is have one of these in the morning and then when you wear a little pick me up in the afternoon but not have the caffeine to affect your sleep. Then you have the update one. You know What I'm saying. And then did you give them update on your sauna experience?

I don't.

So let's be clear, folks. Let's be clear. Brianna did not want the sauna in the house.

Okay? I was hesitant, but it's not that I didn't want it, because look at it, okay? You can't deny it's an eyesore. Our den.

Don't say hurtful things about the sauna.

Our den. Whenever you walk into our apartment, it is, like, right there.

Gorgeous.

And then we have a bean bag and a filter. It's just beautiful.

Now, see, folks, all of a sudden, brand's using it every single day, Right?

That is right.

Right. Now, what we need to convince her of next.

Is that this is the perfect width for a cold plunge. And guess what? It hides behind the nook here. You can't see it. There's a plug there and a plug there. So you could, like, plug it in, and then we can move the bean bag someplace else. And then you could go from sauna to cold plunge. But she's this night, not like it. So you guys in the comments need to get on my side and support the cold plunge movement. She will use it every day. Watch what's gonna happen, folks. It's gonna take me a year to convince her. Then we're gonna get it. That's right. And then she's gonna love it. She's like, that's so great. And she's been using this. Use it at least twice this week. Three times.

Yes, twice.

Sauna, hot tub, cold plunge, water tank. Which, by the way, have you given a review on our water system, folks?

I don't know if I have.

Folks, folks, the number one reason I married my wife is because she was so smart about our water filtration. This is filtration through charcoal. Like, show them what's going on up here, folks. This takes, like, 24 hours to filter, and it goes through these charcoal things. And someone that got this for our registry on our registry, bless them. This is shout out Mary. Is it Mary? Yeah, Mary. Thank you. Mary is the gym manager at Fitness, and it's the best water filtration system I've ever seen.

All right, folks, y' all have ever been to the west side of Washington, you will know that Wood's coffee is a very big deal over here. There's that downstairs. We like to come here to this one specifically because it has a loft and we do our work here. So I'm editing while Michael works on his book. Can I also say that. Okay. Super cozy. Usually that fireplace is going.

And we like it. I'm gonna start editing this vlog now.