What Hormozi Said in 15 Minutes Changed My Business

Hey boy, it's Mike Andes. And today I'm going to be sharing a call that I had with Alex Hormozi about my business. And then afterwards, I'm going to share everything that I'm going to be changing in the business because of the call with him. Let's go ahead and roll the tape.

What's going on? It's Alex. Oh, you're not on speaker. My bad. Sorry. Go ahead, say it again.

Hey, I'm Mike and he's. And the founder of Augusta Lawn Care.

Mike, what's up, man? How's it going?

Get. Get it. Last month we did 1.1 million in revenue across kind of three different departments. So 50 of that comes from the franchise, 20% from the media side of things, and 30% from Copilot CRM, which is like software.

20 software. What was the 30?

50 from the franchise to long care, 20% from the media side of things, and 30 from Copilot CRM, which Is the software.

Okay.

And so we have one hundred and ninety one locations on the franchise side right now in U.S. canada, Australia. About one hundred and eighty are in operations now.

Okay. One hundred and eighty open. Got it. Okay.

System sales will probably be around 70 to 80 million in 2025.

Okay.

And so I came to the scaling workshop last year and you said really focus on economics. So Dr. Cash and I work with kind of five different ways to solve the off season for the franchisees. And the goal is a thousand locations and to go public in six to eight years.

OK.

Right now my constraint is that 100%, I guess my question is 100% of our franchise leads come from my organic social media content on YouTube and about 225,000 subs. So my question is, should I focus more and better on the content side or just start a second marketing channel or acquisition channel, paid ads, outbound calls, et cetera, Just because we want to increase the speed at which we're now selling locations. We really haven't been pushing it up until now.

Hmm. Well, I'll first say that this is a many ways up the mountain type problem. So I want to be clear that like either will work. So just like upfront, so that way you don't look back and think like, oh, I should have done the other way. Like both of them will work. Like if you just say I'm going to spin up outbound, you looks like you have the resources to do it. So that would be fine if you wanted to just say like, you know, I'm going to double down on content and make more, better content. That would work too, because it's not like you're, you know, it's not like you've tapped YouTube. You know what I mean? In terms of the cut that you have, are the people that are coming in, existing lawn care guys that are flipping, or are they people who want to start a lawn care business?

The vast majority are converting about 70%.

No, I think it's better. I think it's better. That's good. Okay, so you want to grow faster. How many units a month are you selling right now?

We've averaged 40 to 50 units every year, basically since we started. Five years.

So one a week?

Approximately, yes.

Okay, so you sell one a week. And have you changed your cadence on content or what you make in the.

Past year and a half? We've basically done weekly, and then shorts are more frequently across all platforms. But they're like turnaround shows. I travel out, it's a full production team, and we go like, turn around the business. It's all home services.

Yeah, yeah, I heard. Okay, so either there's. I mean, there's a lot of. There's. There's a lot of different plays here. So it's like you could just run ads and just retarget all the people that are in your existing audience. That would probably be the lowest lift. It's like, what's going to be the thing that's going to get you to where you're trying to go the fastest? It would be that. And so if you think about it like, I'm drawing a little triangle here. So if we imagine your audience as a triangle, you basically have persisted at making money by letting people kind of float to the top of that. That little peak. And then some of these people convert. Right. And then you have a huge amount of people underneath that are just kind of consuming free stuff. Now you can either move the line down and convert a higher percentage of the audience, which you would do via ads, or we extend the size of the pyramid overall so that the percentage of people who convert then becomes a larger slice.

Makes sense.

Both of them work. And so then the question is, okay, which do you have more skills that you can do in a shorter time period? So given your existing resources, I would.

Say I'm better at the content than figuring out paid ads.

Okay, well, then I would say if you haven't really changed much about your paid ad strategy in the last 18. Sorry, excuse me. Your content strategy in the last 18 months, that's where I would double down on and I wouldn't double down on it. I'd be like, how do I 5x down on it? You know what I mean? Like, I want to, I need to. So how many pieces are you putting out a week right now?

One long form a week on YouTube. It's kind of like the show and then every day is shorts.

Yeah. And you're only doing that on YouTube face.

No, the other platforms too. Facebook, Instagram.

And that's for shorts and TikTok. Yeah, correct.

Those are smaller platforms. They said they get 100,000 followers on those platforms. YouTube is where everyone says they hear from about me.

Yeah, heard. So I'll give you a little tiny little tactic that we've seen work. Well is one is just take. So I don't. Is your CTA just in the description?

Yeah, we really don't do much CTAs. Like maybe sometimes one lower thirds on the videos, but really not much, much CTAs.

Okay. So thing number one is I would put the CTAs within every video. There's five different ones. So you can put CTA in the description. CTA at the 30 sec, 32nd the like 30% mark of the video.

If you're interested in joining Augusta Lawn Care or converting your existing lawn care business into the franchise, go to augustalongareservices.com franchise and see why. Last quarter we had a net promoter score of over 80 inside of Augusta Nation and you can hear from more than 50 owners as to why they joined Augusta. Longhair.

You run your own kind of internal ad. The next is your actual profile. I would put it there. The fourth would be pinned comment on every video. And then number five would be YouTube community posts. Are you using those?

Yeah, right now, daily. About daily.

Yeah, the community post.

Correct. I'm just not going to cta. That's probably where I'm lacking. I've kind of used the strategy like everything free, but. And not trying to be too promotional, but.

Well, you could. So it's a great point. So I kind of see these as kind of persistent. It's like an email sign off. Right. Like, do you have a list that you. I mean, do you give anything away? Like if you give away stuff for free in exchange for an email, I still see that as free. I don't see that it's like a bad thing.

Okay, yeah, we do that. And I have about 50,000 that we can email.

Okay. Are you emailing regularly right now?

Two newsletters. And then on Friday when we release the show, we send out basically a Summary of that.

Do any of those three emails per week have any called actions in them?

Sometimes yes. I've been moving away from that actually. Again, I'm just focusing on the open rate.

But I don't think you having a CTA is going to affect the open rate. So like the key. So here's. So this is, this is how I delineate this because I think your instincts are good. It's just an execution thing. Are you on mosey minute by any chance? My email? Yeah. So I don't think that those emails are super right hooky. I think it's like here's a tactic that you can use today to make more money in the business. By the way, you can go check out our thing which is I only have one line that's a cta and then the entire rest of the email is here's stuff you can use. I think that using. I mean I use that strategy for a reason because I like it and it's not. It's just like when someone is ready, they can raise their hand and I make it easy and quick for them to do it. When someone is not ready, they just can skip past it. No big deal.

Got it.

So I would include. There's two ways that I've seen work really well. One is the way that I do. The other way is basically the ultra ps a super signature, if you will, where you underneath of the email have four different things that someone can do. It's like, hey, if you want more free stuff, go here. If you wanted this, go here. And if you wanted this, go here. I tend to prefer fewer calls to action that are more direct, but that's just me. You could also just have one signature that says psych, here's my CTA. Right? So I think number one, I would be emailing with CTAs. Number two, I would embed in those five places. Again, I don't think it hurts. Like if the big. If the biggest podcast in the world can have eight minute long ad reads, you can put a 30 minute, 30 second thing saying, hey, by the way, if you don't know, I own franchises and I sell these things. And so if you want that, you can go here. Otherwise enjoy the show. Like that to me is not. I don't think people are like screw this guy. You know what I mean? But those are the two of like moving the line down in terms of converting a higher percentage. The other is still how do we take. Basically, I'll bet you that you have to spend more time than you currently are in pre production for the content to grow. Like, I don't think it's, oh, let's go from one video a week to five videos a week. It's how do we make that one video? Like, if you had to spend five times the time on that video, could you get it to perform better?

Right.

And I mean, being real, like the amount of time. The biggest, the biggest belief breaker that I've had with content is that when I saw the guys who are the truly the best in the world, 20 million plus subscribers on YouTube and I asked them to kind of look at my stuff, they said, oh, well, send me your pre production notes. And I was like, what do you mean? And they were like the pre production notes. And I was like, I kind of just like have a couple stories and I turn the camera on. They're like, yeah, well, that's why you don't have 21 subscribers. And I was like, well, that, that tracks. And so right now you're putting all this effort into the production of the show, but I would put a ton to like, here's where huge leverage is, is the selection of the people that you're going to go see. Like, how are they on camera? Huge. Right? That's why they do casting for all these shows. Prepping them ahead of time so that it's like tighter, it's faster, it's better. And then looking at the packaging, packaging and headline for that stuff, looking at outliers, seeing if you model outliers, making sure that the, the hook of the video is going to match the headline and the thumbnails, all that stuff.

Good question on that. Double click on it. Because I do see the constraint of the content as being our casting, like the number of people that apply for the show. Would you use my cta? Yeah, sure.

Not more. Just both. Just both and yep. All right, Mike. Appreciate you, man.

Okay, so I'm going to go into the seven different things that I listed off that I'm changing in my business because of this call with Alex. And I did most of these within about 24 hours. I really believe that if you're gonna listen and learn from someone and have a coach take what they're saying and do it. If you have the trust that they're looking out for your best interest and they have the experience as to know what they're talking about, I'm going to trust them. I'm gonna take action immediately. I think it's almost a slap in the face to someone like Alex for me to listen to what he has to say, him take his time from his day and for me not to execute quickly. So these are the things that I've already started to do or I'm going to be doing in the business over the next couple weeks. First off is inserting a 10 to 15 second call to action in the turnaround shows. So I've always avoided any sort of promotion of Augusta Home Service web Design Copilot. I've really tried to avoid as much as possible unless it comes out organically in the content. Like if I'm on a turnaround show and they need to join Copilot or they need a website, then I'll let it be inside the edit. But we've overly over the past six months reduced it down to almost nothing and even not even having banners as like lower thirds on the videos. I've always done that because I don't want to come across promotional. But I've been really surprised. Last week we were released the first turnaround show with a call to action and everyone was super supportive. So I really appreciate it. I really want to kind of slow step into it. I don't want to come across promotional. I don't think that my products and services are perfect, but I do believe that if I'm going to say and mention one of them, they're going to be the best option for anyone watching. And so really starting with Augusta Lawn Care where our net promoter score for the owners is over 80. I feel very confident in sharing that and I think that anyone with a lawn care landscape business should join Augusta. So I'm very, very confident on it. But 10 to 15 seconds is nice because it's a quick hey, if you want to support, go do this or like I did last week, I just said thank you for those that did support using Augusta Lawn Care, Home Service, web design Copilot, et cetera to make this turnaround show possible. So that felt very organic and easier for me versus a direct right hook like go today and buy it now. So I'll warm up to that. But I really want to make sure there's not a lot of them, maybe one or two 10 to second, 10, 15 seconds in a 45 minute or an hour long episode to Alex's point is not going to make anyone mad. And more, more importantly, I know that if people do buy, I can take that money and make the show even better. So it is serving the audience. Second thing was pinning call to action comments on every video. So the media team has gone through and I didn't even know you can actually pin comments on shorts. We've done pin comments on videos in the past long form like turnaround shows, but never shorts. And we've been hit and miss on the turnaround shows in terms of actually posting them. And because you can't pin a comment before you release the video. So you have to release the video and then make another step for the production team to go in there, pin the comment and every single video after it's been released. So we started going through the last 15 or 20 that we probably have been pretty not diligent on getting those comments pinned. And really we're promoting three things. The call to actions is one, sign up for a, you know, apply to be on the turnaround show. Secondly is get free training@mikeannities.com and the third is to join Augusta. Those are the three main to call the actions. We'll probably rotate them out with Copilot joining Copilot and then also home service web design occasionally depending on what the content of the turnaround show is. All right, the third thing is using the YouTube community post to talk more about Augusta and Copilot. So I will be doing that even like within an hour I think of talking to Alex. I posted kind of a promotional piece on the community post of YouTube and it was well received also and just talked about like the awards that Augusta Nation has won this year, the growth that they've had over the past year in terms of revenue, you know, hitting on the Landscape 100 list, the Franchise 500 list and these I think best managed franchise by Business View magazine. So I just listed those off, shared some of the wins from Augusta Nation and again promoted that. Hey, if you think you might be one of the people that want to join, only about 1 out of 10 people that do apply to be in inside of Augustination get in. So you know, here's a link. So again against my kind of what I've been doing for a long time because I've always want everything free, not promotional and people will find out. But I think having the 10 to 15 second call to actions, having the pin comments, places where people are going to find out more about me anyways. Like I know that if people buy more I will be able to invest more in the media team. And right now we have like 10, 11, 12 people full time. If we could get that to 15 or 20, do more shows, make them better and get way more applications to be able to screen the best applicants, it would be best for the audience too. So that's how I'm trying to kind of reframe it. Number four is running Facebook retargeting to my email list. So we have tens of thousands of people that have signed up for the courses for free@mikeandys.com and usually the only thing we send them is new newsletter emails. And so now I can retarget them on Facebook by putting using their emails. And we didn't really focus on this on the call with Alex, but there was one comment he said that I couldn't help but take notice of. And he's like, he's like the lowest hanging fruit is retargeting that audience on Facebook. And so we're going to do it. Even though that wasn't a main focus that we talked about. We can run ads. I know how to run ads and put up pixels and do lookalike audience, etc. So I can do that. I just know that from a percentage perspective, I'm probably in the top, let's just call it half a percent or less in terms of content. In terms of my skill set, I might be the top three, 5% in terms of paid ads. So that's why we focus so much on the content side, like more and better of what we're already doing. But I do know how to run Facebook ads and because of that line that he said, like the lowest hanging fruit is this, we're going to be doing retargeting ads on Facebook and Instagram. Because of that, we will drive way more traffic to joining Augusta. I know that. And so we are hiring an SDR sales development rep for Lee. Lee takes all inbound calls. In the past for Augusta Nation people wanting to join. The problem is there's so many people want to join. He's usually booked out a week, two weeks, sometimes more of people booking his schedule, just one call after the other. And the problem with that is about nine out of 10, more than nine out of 10 people that want to join, we don't allow in most of the time it's because of, you know, they don't have enough capital, they don't have experience. We don't think they'd be a good fit with the community and we take that very seriously. So we say no to a lot of people. The problem is for that 1 out of 10 person that would be a good fit. We want to spend more time with them. We do a 30 page analysis of their entire area and like look at their demographics and the income levels and population. We have a whole report, we have an analysis of every single potential territory. I want Lee to be able to spend as much time with those prospective applicants as possible and not spend time just wading through all the other applicants that he has to answer questions and really just say, sorry, you're not a good fit for Augusta. And here's a bunch of free resources like on mikeandys.com, which does a great job of doing that, but it feels a schedule to where he can't spend time with the candidates who are eligible and have the money and are great would be a great fit for augustination. So having another sales development rep that they those leads would pour into from Facebook, they can sift through the ones that are good and then put those on the calendar for lead. It'll also really refine the sales process so that when someone gets on the call with Lee, they're already qualified. We know they're a great fit and we can spend longer like couple hours answering those questions, really digging deep and creating projections for them so they're really confident when they join. Number six is focus on getting more turnaround applications and pre screening them. We do this already like the pre screening process. We get the number sent in, we have a video submission process, but we really the limiting factor to the turnaround show becoming better is having more applications. And the problem is with a really, really small business, there's just not a lot of stories. We need bigger businesses, businesses that are doing over 500,000 annual rent, businesses that have multiple employees have an office manager. There's better stories, there's usually more drama and people come for the drama. And that's kind of the bait. On the hook that I want them to get is the business concepts. But if just stand in front of a whiteboard and talk about the 4L framework, that video gets 10,000 views. If that 4L framework is applied to a business that's large, has a lot of moving parts, team members, there's personalities and character development. That video will get 100 or 200,000 views. So 10 or 20x the amount of views like Alex mentioned comes with just having better characters and a better storyline. And so we got to really focus on getting more turnaround applications and those larger businesses that have those stories in there. Number seven is dropping CTAs or call to actions in every email. And that could be everything from joining Gusta to joining home service, web design or copilot. Like having more call to actions in the email, usually as a PS statement or throughout the email. So that way my audience that already has signed up for the email newsletter is able to get an actionable thing that they can do based upon the content of that email, and that's really going to be the objective. So these are the seven things I've changed in the business over the past week or two since the call, and I look forward to implementing the rest of them in the coming weeks.