What $100K in Coaching Taught Me—You Won't Believe #3!

I built a $50 million business called Augusta Lawn Care.

I spent over $100,000 in the past year on private coaching and peer groups. In this video, I'll share what I learned along the way. I made mistakes that cost me millions. Today I'm going to share with you what those mistakes were, what I learned, and how you can prevent from making the same costly errors. There's really four ways to grow a business. The first is brute force. If I'm trying to move this massive mound of mulch, I could do it just a shovel and one at a time moving across the shop. Now that's fine, but that's kind of like running your business 100% by yourself, using only your own experience. Just brute force you figuring it out on your own. Now the second way to grow a business is use the shovel and use the work ethic that you have, but then utilize the tool that is this bucket. To be able to transport this much faster, I'd probably cut down the amount of time I spend moving this mulch like half just by using this bucket to transport the mulch. This is kind of like using YouTubers or if you get landscape business course or any sort of courses online to learn from other people that have already done it. And it doesn't cost a lot of money, but it cuts down massively amount of time it takes for me to accomplish the goal. Now there is a third way to grow your business and it's going to make it faster because make it easier and you're gonna make a whole lot less mistakes. And this is what we call peer groups. This could be a franchise, this could be a community that is specific to your industry and other business owners that are trying to do what you're doing. This past year I spent $5,000 per month to be in a peer group that was building software. Cause I needed to figure out that problem and figure out a solution to it. And I wanted to surround myself with like minded people that were trying to do the same thing. Joining Augusta Lawn Care a franchise also. Again, this is going to be a peer group of people that are trying to do the same things here. That's like the wheelbarrow even faster. I'm able to probably triple or quadruple how fast I'd be able to move that pile of mulch because of this tool. And that's a peer group. All right. Now if you really want to level up, it's going to cost you a lot, but you're going to get a whole lot done very, very quickly and that is to hire the people that have already done it in the past. A lot of times you can only get to this fourth stage when once you've already built the business and you have a decent amount of money because they're going to be expensive, this is the next move. And this is what it took me over the past year to figure out. To go hire executives that already had done technology, already built the businesses and already done what I'm trying to do in my company. Now some of you heard that I.

Paid $5,000 to be inside of a group and think that's crazy. Honestly, it was one of the best investments I've made. I was able to get around other founders that were doing software and for the people that were behind me, I.

Was able to share best practices for.

The people that were ahead of me. They were able to teach and tell me like, hey, you're okay. What you're going through is normal. Because at the time when I first joined we were going through bug help and we had over 200 reported bugs inside Copilot and I was losing my mind. And for people ahead of me to say, yeah, that's what happens when you have five times the amount of users dropped in your account in a month. That's normal. And it's normal to have to take a year and not put produce features and just make sure the infrastructure is solid.

And so just the reassurance from people.

Ahead of me and being able to know that I was on the right path, extremely beneficial. But then to be able to gain skills and education around how to hire engineers years and do all these things that I could have figured out over the course of four or five years, but instead I paid my way into the room to be able to learn those skills and do it in one year. For example, if someone's thinking about joining Augusta Lawn Care and joining a franchise, there's benefits of the website and marketing material and access to a lot of different systems and training. But honestly, being part of the community is the most beneficial. And that's what I found being part of this founders group with software is my connection with these other people. Being able to text them and get access to that community is extremely valuable.

One of the biggest mistakes I made in business when I first got started was thinking that I constantly needed to make things new and shiny and fast when reality I just need to take what I currently had and make it better. Most people go buy a house and like they think in a year or two I'll fix it up, put some Lipstick on the pig and I'll sell the house. And I think people take the same exact notion when it comes to business. I'm going to buy the business, I'm going to grow it really fast, and I'm going to sell it to Someone. Less than 1% of small businesses end up being sold, and the likelihood of you being able to whip together a business in one or two or three years and then sell it off to another business owner is very, very small. The mantra is just fix it. When we first started Augusta Lawn Care and we started franchising, we grew the business really, really fast. And that was fine. We grew it really quickly. But the problem was I was always trying to think about what new things I could offer to the franchisees to offer them more value. But in reality, by doing that and growing so quickly, it made the business really unstable. And what I've recently learned is that instead of trying to focus on making new things for them or trying to reinvent the wheel, what they wanted was just what we currently had done better. And if you ask your customers what they want, most of the time they're not going to ask for something revolutionary. They're going to ask for some new service or you to expand into a new service area instead. They're going to want you to answer your phones faster, they're going to want your crew to be well trained, they're going to want your, your trucks to be cleaner, they're going to want you to do a faster job. And so you're not on the property as long. And what that doing is fortifying the business. So instead of trying to think about new and exciting new services, new employees, just take what you currently have and make it.

At Augusta Lawn Care, our goal is to get to over a thousand locations and change the level of professionalism in the industry. And we want to be able to use the franchise, the software, and then when robotics come along, be able to take the company public. And that's all fine and that's good. And it's probably 10 to 15 years from now that that will happen. And when we do that, everyone will look to the business at that stage and they'll think, wow, that's amazing. That's awesome. I like to think of it like a tower or like a massive building that someone's constructing. No one goes up to the building and looks down at the foundation that's now buried and like, oh, that foundation is just so awesome and amazing. No, they look up, look at all the, the towers and the floors and everything. That you built above ground. But really what's holding that entire tower together is the foundation not exciting to build. And right now you're probably working late, working on weekends, working on holidays. You're in facilities that you're like, man, this is just so confining. Like, I can't even get a space that's warm to sharpen my blades or work on my truck. And that can be really demoralizing and super debilitating. The first few years in business, you actually dig down. You make less money in your first few years of business than you were at your 9 to 5. And you could look up to the people that you left or people in school or in class and they're up on top and you're down in this hole and you're building the foundation for your business that's required for you to have the success that you one day down the road to people will come admire. But if you don't build the foundation, you'll build the business in a way that'll be faulty and failing down the road.

The reason having a coach and having a community and having a peer group is so important is because the dig, build, bury process is extremely lonely. One of the things that I love most about Augusta Nation and all the owners inside of Augusta Lawn Care is that we have the community to be able to share wins and people don't think you're bragging and to be able to share losses and not everyone think that you're a loser and just to beg on you for being such an idiot. Having that group and having that community is so valuable when you're in the middle of digging a foundation and it can take years to actually get to the point where you're building the tower, but you need that community to just keep your head in the game. Most people quit in their first years because they get down in that hole and they have no one in their community to reach down, pick them up occasionally and give some to what they're going to build in the future. Also, it's a lot easier to build the foundation and build the tower if you have scaffolding. And that's what systems and procedures and a community and a trainer and a coach is going to give you. They've done it before and they can build the scaffolding, therefore making the tower being built a much faster process.

One of the things I've learned in the past year is that to build a big business, you need two things. One, customers that refer other people come do business with you, and two, customers that never want to leave. When you think about your business like a bucket at the bottom of the bucket, if you have holes, this is what causes churn. These are when customers leave because there's specific things in your business that make them unhappy. Bad quality job, and for some reason they leave the business. And a lot of us get super focused on always trying to out figure fill the bucket with more leads and more customers. When reality, if we just plug the holes at the bottom of the bucket, we wouldn't have to spend as much money on marketing and advertising with Augusta Lawn Care. With the franchise this year, we started surveying our owners and asking like, what are the holes? What are the things in the business model that if we fix for you, would allow you to be more successful? If you don't know what the holes of your business are and why you're losing customers, just ask them. You can do this via email. You can send text messages to your customers and just have a form which says, like, what could we do better? What are we really good at? Why do you use our services? Would you promote us? Would you refer us to your friends and family? There's something called a net promoter score or an NPS score that you can send out to customers and ask them.

How likely are you to refer us.

To one of your friends or family? What is an NPS score? It's just a numerical way to be able to track whether or not customers like your business. And there's a scale from negative 100 all the way to positive 100. We're at 58 in Augusta lawn Care, so we're not doing bad. Considering the fact that Chick Fil a is at 59.

Let's run some hypothetical math. Let's assume that a customer on average stays with you for two years before they cancel. That would mean that 50% of your customers every year are leaving. If you have 100 customers, that means that you've got to go sell 50 new customers. And this year, just to get back to the original 100 that you had at the start of the year. And so you're like, I'm selling one every single week. 50 new customers a year. But why at the end of the year am I still at 100? Because your churn is equal to the number of new customers that you're getting. And so I've seen big businesses. I talked to one recently that was doing over $4 million in annual revenue, but they were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in marketing and they weren't growing at all. It stayed stagnant for about three years or why? Because the churn on $4 million, let's just call it 1.2 or $1.3 million of churn people leaving every year they were spending a couple hundred thousand dollars just to be able to regain the customers that were going out the bottom of the holes. And so when it comes to a service based business that is recurring, the question is, should I get more leads and get more customers or should I just try to increase how long customers stay with me by offering a better service, better customer service, higher standards and quality and making sure my customers are happy all the time. Now this revelation of fixing the holes and why customers are leaving instead of finding new customers all the time. It took having a personal coach and tens of thousands of dollars spent in order to be able to learn this lesson. Now is it worth it? Well, just this one thing likely led to more than a seven figure return in just the past 12 months of me just plugging the holes and focusing on the current business instead of always chasing the next shiny customer. And this was reflected by us actually building out an entire new division of Augusta Lawn Care. It's called Augusta Lights. We do Christmas lights and we built entire infrastructure on the back end in terms of a website@augustalights.com for our franchisees to be able to have access to.

Why?

Because I knew one of the biggest reasons they fell out the bottom of the hole is because at the end of the year, during the winter, they don't have as much revenue. And when revenue drops, they leave. And I want to plug that hole.

Over the past 12 months, I've realized that in order to fortify Augusta Lawn Care, I needed to make sure there was a bulletproof system to get someone from 0 to $500,000 in annual revenue. And the hardest hurdle for most people at that stage is sales and getting leads. Beyond that, it's leadership. It's hiring a general manager. There's a more management and leadership involved. At the beginning it's all about sales. So we've made sure we have instant pricing on our website to make sure if someone's not good at sales, it doesn't matter because it's instantly on their website and they never have to see the customer or they can call into command center and the estimate is done over the phone. I'm trying to reduce the friction from then get from 0 to 500,000 now in order to be able to really take it to the next level. The thing I'm focused on now is how do I get them more leads? How do I run their ads and drive leads to their website for them? Now, in order to do this effectively, I've had to hire coaches in disciplines like email, text messages, lead scraping, paid advertising on Facebook and Google and many other platforms in order to make sure I fully understand exactly what I need to do to make this campaign successful. Was it cheap to hire these experts and people that have been in their discipline, focused just on that one aspect of marketing for 10, 15 years? No. It's extremely expensive, usually paying hundreds of dollars per hour in order to be able to get one or two nuggets from them. But that small little key can open up a massive door of opportunity and massive success in the future.