What it Takes to Go from a 6 Figure Business to 7 Figures!

Hey everyone, I'm Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care. We have over 150 locations around North America and Australia. And today I'm talking about what I see as the different maker between the people that build six figure businesses and seven figure businesses. So a seven figure business would be over a million dollars. A six figure business would be between a hundred thousand and $999,999. So what is the difference maker? This is really where I think what really separates the boys from the men. And that is going to be who gets to the value first, both for you, for your employees and for your customers. Now when we talk about time to first value, typically we are talking about our employees. I'm going to use Copilot as an example. When we sign up someone for copilot, we know time to first value really is when they collect payment, when they actually get money using Copilot, that's time to first value for us. We want to get them there as quickly as possible. And we're going to grease the gears. We're going to have onboarding, we're going to give support, we're going to do everything possible to make sure they get to value as quickly as possible. Now I propose that it's not just your customers that we should be thinking about. When it comes to time to first value. We should think about you, your employees and your customers. So let me walk you through this framework that I think is really helpful. It really helps me think about how do I make sure I get to value as quickly as possible for all parties involved, not just the customer. Because you can get time to first value nailed down. But if you go out of business because you can't make a profit, you got a problem. And you can, you know, get to first value for your customer all day long. But if your employees are constantly churning out and it's creating massive headache for you, we also got a problem. So we got to think about this from a much more holistic standpoint, in my opinion. So this is talking about time to value. How long does it take for you to provide value in the relationship? But let's first talk about you as the business owner. How can we get value from customers faster? Well, first off, this would be things like collecting payment up front. Okay? Collecting money up front. I don't want to wait 3, 4 months to get paid. I could potentially ask for prepayment or a deposit, get paid sooner so I can actually recoup the cost of acquisition. So recoup my CAC my customer acquisition cost. If I spend $100 on a customer, I want to get that money back as fast as possible. My time to value that customer becomes valuable after they become profitable. And so they become profitable after I've recouped the cost of the acquisition. So if I spend $100 to get them, when do I make $101 in profit? Because that's when they actually become valuable. And I can make that happen faster and sooner and grease those wheels by collecting prepayment upfront. All right, so we got collecting money up front, we got recouping we could do also call this deposits so that way I can get money from the customer before the job even starts. Now if we look at again, we want to get value for ourselves as quickly as possible. From employees perspective, we want them to be as profitable as possible. For the vast majority of home service businesses, our tenor of team members will last months, some of them weeks. Especially when the labor market gets really, really, really brutal, it can be very difficult to retain employees. And there's so much you can do in terms of culture. But also the bottom line is can we just create our systems and our training in a way that we get time to value decreases and the value that the employee, the employee provides to us is diminished, it's reduced. So instead of taking three months for them to become profitable and training and onboarding, all the rest of it, I want to get that done within a matter of a week or two. So I want them trained, I want them potentially for us. We want them to be able to go solo so they don't need a trainer, they don't need someone else guiding them through everything. I want them to be able to produce work by themselves. That's when they are valuable to me. Because again, we're talking about me right now and the value, getting the employee to get value to me as quickly as possible. All right, now let's look at the bottom part of the quadrant. Them. How can I provide time to val. How can I reduce the time to value for my customer? Well, first and foremost, we need to realize that the customer wants a problem solved. So I don't care about anything you do from now until you actually solve their problem. All the fancy videos and graphics and I send them this great onboarding sequence. Customers don't care when it comes to home services. They have a problem and they want you to solve it. So providing value to them comes in the form of solving the problem. So until you've cut their grass, until you've put Paint on their walls. Until you've taken away the problem that they have, you haven't produced any real value. Right. Just providing the estimate in and of itself doesn't provide value. Solving their problem does. So how quickly can we solve their problem? Well, in order to do that, I'm going to need to get my payment method squared away because I want a credit card on file. I don't want to have to worry. I don't want the customer to have to worry about how do I set up a check, Do I have to mail this? What's your mailing address? I want a credit card on file. I don't want to ever think about it. And that's providing value to the customer because it means, it means I'm greasing the wheels to getting their problem solved. So get rid of payment method as being a problem. Get a credit card on file that when they accept the estimate, they're putting their card information in. All right. Another thing we can do is make it easy to buy. All right. Easy to buy. All right. If you're thinking about like a buy now button on a website, make it easy. There's a reason why Amazon spent gobs of money creating one click checkout. Why? Because they wanted to grease the wheels to solve the problem for the customer and get them to value as fast as possible. And so I want to make it easy to buy. I want to make it easy to be a good estimate. I want it to be easy for their problem to get solved. If I do all of these things, I can reduce the amount of time it takes for them to go from I have a problem, Mr. Billy Bob Lawn Care. And I would like to solve, reduce the time from then to you actually getting their lawn cut and all the steps in between will have to be refined. How quickly you get to the estimate to them, how quickly you get their payment method sorted out, how quickly you get on their property and how quickly you do the service. All part of time to value. All right. Now also for your employees, we need to provide value to them and we want to reduce the amount of time it takes to get value to them. So can I increase the speed at which I give them their first paycheck? Because they came for a paycheck, I want to get time to value as short as possible. Ideally I like to pay them every single day. And this is actually something we want to work on in copilot next year. That is same day pay inside of pay for performance as well. And that is the ability for employees to be Able to take money out of their paycheck from day one. Why? Because I want to get them the value as quickly as possible. If you have a two week pay period and then a week of processing and it could be three weeks before they get any value from their job. So then you're like, well, that's non negotiable, I don't have the software ready for that. Blah, blah, blah. Great, I agree with you. So here's some other things that you can do to get the time to value lower for your employees. How can we make sure we have upsell reviews and new client bonuses that they can tap into immediately when they get started? Because I want them to be able to make $50 if they bring me a new customer. I'd rather pay them 50 bucks and than Facebook or Google. And so I want to give those bonuses. Get Google reviews. Oh, you need an extra hundred dollars for this week. You're running a little tight. Great. Give me two Google reviews with your name in it and I'll give you a hundred bucks. Like make systems and have things in place to get value to your employees as quickly as possible when they first get started. All right. Another thing is P4P. The harder they work, the more money they make. Pay for performance. You go to p4psoftware.com get all the free training and on there the goal is to be able to send daily reports to them so they can see the value of their hard work quicker, faster. Every single day they see their report, they work really hard, they see the extra bonus that's going to be coming to them at the end of the pay period as quickly as possible. Again down the road, we want to make that where they can actually get money the same day and put it on a debit card. But until then, at least get daily reports so they can get quick feedback. And the value to them seeing a bonus, the value to them seeing the fruits of their labor is diminished. You don't want them to have to wait every three, four weeks to be able to see how well they did on a paycheck or how well they did on a project. Shorten the value. The time to value in all three of these cases for you. By collecting money up front, getting money sooner than later, you get your value. The employee, they want to get paid, they want to get paid sooner than later. And the customer, they want service sooner than later. So if you can decrease the time to value for customers, you as the owner and for your employees, that's what I see as a difference maker between people that make six figure businesses and seven figure businesses. Because the people that build a million dollar business they figure out how to nail each of these three value sets and stakeholders in the business including yourself, the employees and the customers. Remember about time to value Hope that was helpful comment below. If it was take care.