What It Takes to Revive a Failing Small Business (Business Coaching)

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care. We have over 150 locations around the world. But today I travel to a landscaping company that is really struggling.

I'm trying to get this fixed so I can spend more time with the kids. I mean, I feel like they're just growing up without me.

Right now they're charging as low as $35 per hour to do lawn care and landscaping services, and they're not making a lot of profit. We are 30% underpriced. Furthermore, while I'm in the coaching meeting with the owner, someone is actively leaving the business, trashing the name of the company, threatening him with a lawsuit. How savage do you want to get with fixing this? Because we can fix it, but it'll be really tough. It gets pretty dramatic. Now, this is extended version coaching from a turnaround show that I did just a few months ago. If you want to see the whole turnaround, click below. But this is the extended cut, the entire version of the coaching they have with the owner. And I think it's super eye opening in terms of what to do next In a business that's really, really flatlined, has a lot of debt, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of how do we turn this business around? This is the extended coaching tape. Let's go ahead and roll it. I have, I have franchisees relatively close, so I know what they're charging. Like there's a market for a higher price. The difference though is going to be the fact that like not having a website that appears the value is much, much higher. And like sharing the story of Faith Lawn. And like all of that is what gets you the customer that is willing to pay that premium price. And at 60 to 70% close ratio, I know there's room to be able to raise prices. And yes, less people will accept. But right now, we literally let someone go this morning. Like, we're reducing capacity. I'm assuming if we're booked out that far, like we're maxing out crews, we're maxing out trucks. It's like when we're at capacity, we should be raising prices. And if we're not confident we can do it to our existing customers, because I agree, they purchase at the value proposition that they purchase purchased at, which is like a company doesn't have a website. They heard it from so and so. They said they did a great job. Said they're, you know, they're, they're cheap, great, let's go with them. But if we, if we change the value proposition and then go get new customers at a higher price, we can become profitable. Like at $50 an hour on mowing, we will never make money, especially if our base is $20 an hour. Like at $20 an hour, with the rule of 25%, which is I don't want to be paying more than 25% of what I'm charging the customer to my employee. That means I gotta be at least at 80. If I'm paying them 20, I gotta be at least at 80. Ideally more like 85 or 90. And like, that's unheard of. Well, then it's a matter of like, remember that that's a function of time. Which means if you make your crew more efficient, you don't actually have to raise the price, you just to make them more efficient. Right. And so then it becomes like, okay, is there a cultural efficiency type thing that we can attack? Because then all of a sudden they can make more per hour without raising prices. Right? Yeah.

I mean, as far as like mowing routes go, I. We're already mowing. You know, we don't have any neighborhoods with less than like five or six houses. Most of our neighborhoods, we're mowing 30, 40 houses in one neighborhood.

Yeah.

So we have very good route density.

So. And I think a lot of the people that were making it unefficient are gone. So I'm hoping that efficiency will definitely go up. You know, especially now that the grass is kind of slowing down a little bit. I think our efficiency will definitely go up.

Yeah. Like, I'm just concerned by the fact that right now, like, just based on the numbers you're sharing with me, like, almost like more than 50% of our revenue is going out the door. Just wages for, for the frontline team only. And then you have a very cost heavy with materials. So let's just say, I'm just going to guess 20% or so is materials. 50% in wages, like generously, it's probably more like 55 or 60%. Like 80% of our revenue is going out the door to cogs. Cost of goods sold. There's no room for profit because the other 20 has to cover overhead, admin costs, fuel, insurance, shop space and everything else.

Yeah, no, I feel that. Yeah, definitely the pinch. And that's probably where a good analysis.

Yeah, like the challenging part when you have so much debt is it's hard to be like. Like if you had no debt, I'd be like, look, let's not do 1.5. Let's not do 1.6, let's do a million. But make it, make it very profitable. And we're going to shed 30% of customers by raising prices. And we're going to immediately cut out the services that we know aren't profitable. And we're going to immediately cut out like, but when you have that much debt, you need a lot of revenue just to cover the debt service.

Yeah, we're too, like if you were to raise prices too much, you're going to lose cash flow to cover payments and things like that. So I don't know if we try to sell our way out of it. We, we try to pick up new accounts at higher, higher rates.

Yeah.

And try to go that way with it. I mean, I also feel like our Christmas light business is always, you know, digging out the, the lawn and landscaping, you know, and we've started with our, some of our Christmas light work. So that's going to help us for the rest of the year.

Yeah.

So I mean that, that's a blessing. But yeah, you know, I mean, I always say I would love just to do the Christmas light business because we're super profitable on that end. But we have this chain to the debt, you know, we can't get away from. You know, if I could figure out how to make the debt go away, I'd probably sell off the lawn and snow and hardscaping and I have enough work to do just Christmas lights with myself and a couple other guys and make a pretty comfortable living.

Well, that could be the long term strategy though. Right. And so it's like, okay, as we know, over the next three to five years there's going to be trucks break down and that we have to get rid of. We're not going to buy new ones. We also know that there's natural turn of team members that people are going to leave, usually the ones that are your lowest performers. So capacity naturally decays unless we prop it up with debt and buying more stuff. And so we could just have the longer term vision of this instead of this being like, hey, this is like a two month turnaround. Being like, hey, this is a three to five year process of moving the business model from services we don't want that are low margin to different services that we do want. And we're going to facilitate that by when trucks go down, we're not buying new ones. Like we're going to pay off everything over three to five years and as we do that, raise prices and move towards the services that we want. But I'm more concerned about just like the mental, like, that's tough, dude. Like every week of just like not having payroll is killer.

Yeah. I mean we do bi weekly payroll and it's like, it'll go really well. You know, we get a bunch of money and it goes really well. But then we're paying material, paying fuel, paying just all the bills and it's like by the time payroll comes around again, it's just like crap.

Yeah.

We're scrambling again, calling people that are, you know, the most, you know, far out. Hey, you know, you haven't got a chance come by and grab a check and. Yeah, you know, it's just, it's Don's seem it. She's. It's always a scramble.

Yeah. Okay, so I think, I think we can come up with a plan for like long term, right? We can come up with that. I want to think more short term, like what do we do to get out, like some of the short term pain. And it's like, it's like what are the easy wins? Number one, making sure that we are charging people if they're overdue. Like people will randomly start paying when they start seeing fees racking up and if it can be done automatically through our book, I don't know, but like setting it to where every month there's a fee. Every seven days there's a fee. You can, you can do it manually too. That might be just a more difficult part of our book. And so like some way of penalizing people that are late, like that's like an easy thing we can just do tomorrow.

You think like a 3% fee or something along those lines.

I would do it based upon each like month or week that they're overdue. Right. Like right now if you use collected 1% a month, you're basically staying with the cost of capital, like your debt payments. 9, 10, 12%. And so even if it was like, hey, at the end of each month we're just gonna take everyone that's due and we're gonna add the fee. That would be the more manual way of doing it. And then if you can do it automated through yard book, great, right? Where just like there's a percentage fee that just keeps racking up and they see the bill and then the automation is sending them the email again being like, hey, you're now overdue and there's fees being added. And then you can actually tag that into when you're trying to follow up before that being like, hey, I don't want to charge you fees, please pay. Right. So there's Like a short win based upon what you said. I don't. You don't have open book management. Like, you're not sharing numbers with the team at all.

Some of my main guys have kind of know what's going on.

Okay.

So they know that it's a struggle.

Yeah.

So.

And then what's the extent that they know? They just know. It's kind of. It's just. It's tight easily.

Yeah, they just know it's tight.

Okay.

So, you know, hey, hold up. We're buying, you know, don't buy that today. Let's wait a couple days and we'll get it in a couple days or something like that.

Yeah.

So, I mean, I've been pretty open with like, Brandon and Eric. They know quite a bit, you know, what's going on, so. And then Eric will scold me if I go buy a new truck or something like that. And he's like, dude, like, maybe we should get a used truck next time. But I always go back to. On all the used stuff we bought. We've had tons of issues with.

Yeah.

And I'm not a mechanic. And you know, the shop down the street, like I said, they're taking, you know, 30, 40 grand a year in repairs.

Yeah.

So it's just like, seems like every time I turn around, you're putting five to ten grand into a truck. And that's just, you know, we just got done putting 10 grand into bucket trucks last week, so now it's just like, okay, well, now we got plants to buy and we have payroll to do. And we're.

Is the bucket trucks for the Christmas lights?

Yeah. So we have two. I mean, they're. The bucket trucks are so darn expensive.

I mean, what are they, 100 grand?

They're new ones, like 140. So we got. We bought a 2011 three years ago and it's, you know, 60 grand still for a used truck.

Yeah.

And it's just they're constantly needing something.

Oh, yeah.

And we have, you know, we have an older, like a 99 as well. And we just put an engine and trans in that one last year. So I'm hoping now that we've done that, that'll be good to go for a little while. But it's just they're expensive trucks to own. But I mean, the, the profit margins on the Christmas lights was we're at 150 man hour in Christmas lights. So I mean, you know, we can go out and do, you know, four or five grand in a day. And it's A pretty easy day, you know.

And how far are you booked out the projects right now?

Projects were booked to the end of the year, so we're booked through probably October 1st, and I'll probably try to grab one. One or two more projects for October and November.

Okay. And then you basically. You already know, like, there's gonna be snow and stuff like that, so you just kind of take those off.

You try to. Yeah, I mean, we. We don't book any hardscape past, you know, December 1st, because we like to think.

So we're almost six months booked out.

Yeah. Yeah. And then, like, last year, we didn't have any snow, so that was another contributing factor going into the spring. Spring, you know, we only did about 100 grand of snow, and normally we do close to 300 in snow. So that was kind of coming off of last winter was tough, too. Normally we have some money in the bank to kind of. To roll in the spring. That's, you know, Christmas lights and snow are two more profitable services. But, you know, to be able to get into, you know, like, last year, we didn't have any snow. So it was a rough. A rough year. But, you know, I've always. I always say, oh, man, winters are always tough. You know, there's no. No income. But the last, you know, since we've been doing commercial snow, it's like, we're always sitting pretty good all winter. It's like, all right, we know we. We got money in the bank. You know, we'll have 40, 50, 60 grand coming in the spring. And it's like, cool. But then, you know, that kind of gives us that bump in the spring, and then. But then it just dwindles and dwindles and dwindles and.

Yeah.

And then by, you know, July or August, you're just like, well, crap. Like, we were just living on snow money, and.

Yeah.

And now, like, we come into spring without snow money, and now it's just been a struggle from the beginning.

Right.

So I think, you know, Christmas lights and snow are definitely our most profitable. I think mowing sucks. Sucks cash. I think hardscaping, we do normally pretty well on hardscaping. I think this big project was eye opening, and I'm happy we're. We're right there at the end.

If the mowing is so low in price and you're very confident you can't get the actual a price that's going to work in terms of making profit, why not cut it out? You're six months booked out on projects, cash flow.

It's kind of just nice to have.

That recurring cash if it's losing us money.

If the economy tanks or anything happens, the projects are going to dry up.

Right.

Same thing with Christmas lights. Like, our municipality work will stay, but, like, all our residential and stuff like that.

It will stay busy. We'll stay busy. But we're losing money on it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess I just worry if the economy stuff slows down and we lose the project.

Oh, I'm. I'm 100% on board. Like, we're seeing most. Most places, it's tough to get projects.

I try to stay diversified.

Right. No, I get it.

Have the cash flow and have something there to kind of fall back on.

You gotta make it profitable. Like, we will never make money at 40, 50 bucks an hour.

I mean, I think we break. Pretty much break even. I'm only.

I'm gonna guess we lose 20%.

You think? Oh, yeah.

It's being hidden by the fact that the landscaping and the Christmas lights is paying for the trucks. It's. It's propping everything up. Like. But if you actually took just the mowing, it's just like, it's losing money. And if you sometimes when you take each service of the business actually broke it down, like, hey, if it was its own business and had to support the infrastructure that we have, would it be able to pay for it? Like, it just. These are different businesses. Christmas lights. Very different than, like, mowing grass. Very different than installing paver patios and a $500,000 project. Right. And so I don't know how you're, like, actually managing it all, because, like, that's a huge business. And the fact that you just got an admin person.

I work a lot.

Oh, you know, you have to tell me that. I know you work seven days a week. And before dawn came along, I don't know what you were doing.

Not a lot of time with kids.

Yeah.

That's the other thing. So I'm trying to get this fixed so I can spend more time with the kids. I mean, I feel like they're just growing up without me right now. I mean, I got four kids under nine. Yeah. The whole point of getting into business is to provide for them and try to spend more time with them.

Yeah. So, okay, so right now it's $25,000 a month, essentially that we are paying in loan payments. 9,000 of that's going away in about four to five months. Okay. And then we'll be down to about 400 to 450,000. We'll be paying about $16,000 a month in payments then I think that'll be.

Definitely give us some room to breathe. And it's not going to fix all the problems, but definitely going to be big.

How savage do you want to get with fixing this? Because we can fix it, but it'll be really tough.

This is what I want to do. I mean I'm not, I can't. I don't see myself doing anything else. I mean I'm not going to give this up and go work for back to sales or anything like that. So I don't really have a choice. I got to make it work.

Yeah. Like so from a project perspective, when you're six weeks booked out or six months booked out, we've got to have a ramp of what we're charging the customer. That gets more and more because if you're booked out, like for us, if we were booked out more than six weeks, prices are going up. Right. And then if you hit like 10 weeks, we're going up again because we're getting so far booked out we're starting to lose jobs not because of price, because we're six months booked out.

Yeah. You know, I think a lot of it is too is if we only have one Hardscape crew too. And you know, that's just how long the projects are going to take.

Right. But this is to my point, if we could just raise prices of mowing, lose half of our customers, but make that division profitable and then take all the excess labor that would be otherwise going and doing unprofitable jobs and move that towards the projects where we know we're making money.

I just don't think our mowing guys are going to do Hardscape. Like if we raise. If say we lost a crew for a crew full of work. I just thought if we got rid of the subcontracting lawns, took that crew, move them onto Hardscape, that gives you two extra people over on Hardscape and that would probably help speed things up a little bit.

Yep.

We're running a three man Hardscape crew right now. We made it a five man Hardscape.

Crew or split it and he's down.

Know if I have two competent enough people to. To run too Hardscape or what you.

Could do is do like where there's smaller projects that are don't require the skill. So for example a mulch, a rock install a quick edging don't really have. So it's big stuff.

The old stuff we're doing is More in depth, more complicated kind of stuff. I mean, potentially, I mean, I guess I, I see some options.

Yeah. Because you could even. What was the gentleman's name you said? Juan. You could say, hey, you're gonna be the actual division manager. You have two crews and you're going to have to bounce between projects. But now you double your efficiency because you have two crews going out. And now we're making $85 an hour. We're literally doubling our man hour rate.

Yeah.

And if you don't believe that's possible via mowing, I think it's possible that.

I worry about you. Like, as far as like equipment, like Hardscape requires a lot of larger equipment and things like that where we only have one skid steered.

Like now you're going to have someone like a project manager that can juggle. Right. So you're going to have your assets on a whiteboard. Okay. This project requires a skid steer for these three days. Then I'm going to move it to this other one for two days. And you have someone that actually is doing that because right now you're juggling it all in your brain.

Yeah. I, for example, now like they use the skip through every day there.

Right.

Like it's not a, they use it Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and then Thursday, Friday. It's, it's every day. It's, it's. I mean, I'm pretty good on maximizing my equipment use.

Yep.

So I just worry, I mean, I got. Renting another machine would be an option too. You could rent a machine until, you know, or something like that or.

But we're also making the assumption here that we raised prices so much on our mowing that we lost so much of the mowing clients that we had to do this. And I think by raising the prices on mowing. Yes. You're going to lose people. I also think that if you had a website that has great branding, your new customers coming in will not balk at the new price. Yes, your close ratio might go down to 40%, but I guarantee you that you could have a 30 or 40% close ratio. It's going to seem like everyone's saying no because half of what you're getting right now in terms of close ratio, but of course you have a great close ratio when you're charging 40, 50 bucks an hour.

But as far as like raising prices again, like we literally just raised prices last week. Like do you send out another email like this week or next week? Like, hey, by the way, we're raising them again.

Well, I would probably just do all my new incoming mowing customers. I just have the price and it's going to be like we're not closing very many. Natural turn could burn through all your existing ones. You know, they're going to go out and then next spring. Okay, now we're going to make the cut going. You have way more confidence when you're at capacity. When you're booked out six months, like the confidence you can have on raising prices is like way higher. You're booked out six months like on the mowing crew, like do you have any capacity on that side like, or are they basically maxed out?

They're pretty much maxed out. I mean we could pick up maybe a dozen, a dozen lawns and squeeze them in somewhere. But if they're like right on the route we're already doing or maybe one bigger complex or something like that. But, but I mean they're finishing up at like 4:35 o' clock every day and they do about half a day on Friday. So there's a little bit of room but they're pretty maxed out.

So right now we just said, okay, we are going to first off get rid of these subcontractor ones that we're not making any money on anyways. Like just cut those out of the picture. And then all incoming new customers for mowing is at the higher rates. So we actually know we're making money on them. Other people are going to turn out. For old customers next year we'll take the customers who haven't left and then we are going to do a hard price increase on them. And then just knowing that like on the project side we're six months booked out, like that means also there, like you could probably raise prices there. Like I know it's easy to fall into like comparing to other companies. I don't even look at that because like what's my close ratio for recurring work and how far am I booked out for projects is the determining factor of where my prices are at. If you're booked out six months, you have room to move your prices up.

We went from $60aman hour when we bid the big project to the, you know, the next two projects were 85 man hour. So we still really didn't have a big issue closing those. Maybe we can go a little more on the next one.

60 to 70% close ratio tells me you can raise prices. And the 30 or 40% you're losing right now, they're going to say no. Even if you were half the Price. You are now like, they're so price sensitive. As you start raising your prices, you actually going to cut a little bit your close ratio. But it's not like, it's not linear. It's not like if I raise my prices 10%, I lose 10% close ratio. Like you're going to be able to get that. 30, 40% of customers are willing to pay a premium price for a premium service. I do believe having the website and the social media presence helps present the image and the brand of a premium service.

I have noticed I run into that a little bit this spring when I was bidding commercial mowing work that they're like, whoa, you don't have a website? Like, who are you? Like, what are you doing?

Like, and it's your storefront. It's like if you go to a store, it might be amazing or a restaurant, but if the outside's like, everything's falling down, you can't really tell is that the right. There's no logo, there's no sign. Like, how do we even get in there? Right.

Yeah, I definitely need to get a website going.

Yeah. But hey, when you're juggling as much as you are right now, I know that's like the last thing on your mind.

And then too, like coming up with the money to pay for a website, extra money to pay for a website. It's just we're so tight right as it is just getting the bills paid and getting the guys paid and getting our spaces all covered. It's hard to come up with.

Yeah.

A little extra money to get a website built and.

Right.

I mean, I guess we could probably even do just like something simple like a single page, landing page website and just get something up there.

Yeah. Well, is your, is your brother building it?

He's building one for the Christmas light business.

Got it. And so what does that cost like to build?

He charged me four grand for the whole website.

Okay. So. And then one long term, like, can you do one for the long hair landscaping side? Okay. Yeah, because like, you know, even if we had to do them for your longer web design, like, it, it's, it's a subscription. It's 500 bucks a month. But even if you could do it for a year and then if you, while he's building it, I just don't want him to take five months to build one for you.

Yeah. Two, three months on the.

That's my, that's my concern.

It was supposed to be done by now. So it's up and running for Christmas light season and we're still.

Yeah.

Who knows how far out?

Yeah. Because what I want. I want to happen when we get the website is you get so many leads coming in, you. Your confidence will go through the roof on raising prices. Because, like, if you, like right now you're getting. How many leads a month do you think? Do you. How many estimates per week? Month is probably three, four a week. I would say three or four estimates. See, like, when that goes to 15 or 20, and like I. At this size business, you'll get 15 to 20 a week, your confidence will go through the roof on raising prices.

Yeah, I think that's probably something we need to. We don't. We don't get a lot of new leads or new.

Yeah, no. The fact that you only get that many leads per week on this size of a business with that many mowing customers is crazy. It's just a huge opportunity. Like, the reason you don't think you can raise prices is because you don't have lead flow.

Yeah. And I guess part of the reason too. I was scared to get more lead flows. Cause we didn't have. I didn't think we had the capacity to take on the work if we got it.

And if you don't have capacity, we should be raising prices. Like, like when you hit capacity, you. You either take. Take the decision to buy more trucks and equipment, which you've been doing in the past, and grow the business, or you hit capacity and you raise prices to kind of qualm the demand that's pouring in. And I don't want to like, build a website that just like dumps leads on you and you're like, oh, my word, we have to raise prices. The only way to keep people away from us is to raise prices.

That's kind of what I'd like to do is have. I'm just thinking about that, like, having the lead flow coming in would be sweet. I mean, we were getting 15, 20 leads a week. I mean, then you could go out there with the higher prices and like you said, it might be a slower close ratio. Yeah. But you know, at least you're.

Oh, you don't mind. Because if you. If you 5 extra lead flow and you cut in half, how many you close and you go from 60% to 30% close ratio, you're still growing the business and now you're doing it profitably.

Yeah. You start letting the lower stuff go.

Yep. Oh, you would be like, next season you'd be like, get rid of all these mowing customers are low price. I Got five a week coming in that are accepting.

Yeah, yeah. I mean if you grow the maintenance site or the landscape maintenance in the hardscape at the higher rate and then like you said, let the mowing just expire eventually.

Oh yeah. Or you raise price on all them. You literally are getting so many lawns every day. Like, oh, I raised them two months ago. We're raising them again because we literally can't keep taking these customers without buying more trucks and equipment.

Yeah, yeah. And I'm at the point now where like, I'm pretty happy with like the three mowing crews. I'd like to go. Eventually we have two landscape maintenance crews and hardscape crew. And then that's kind of the size I want to be at, you know, right around the two, two and a half million mark.

But okay, so we established a few things. One collection side, we got to get fees being charged to people and like you only have to tell them like, we're now adding fees. It's just like on the first invoice, overdue emails, like FYI, two days you're going to be charged X amount. It's going to keep racking up. Right. And then create some sort of system if it's not automated around getting those fees added to overdue invoices. Second thing, we got to get a website because I don't, I don't believe you're going to raise prices until you're getting flooded with leads and you're like, oh, like I am confident that If I lose 20 or 30% of my customers, I will refill them in six weeks. Like right now at Augusta we are all raising prices so dramatically and is it is crazy how few people leave and then if you do the math on people leaving, but I got all this lead flow, I'm going to fill it back up within four to six weeks.

That's what I'm worried about right now is not having the lead flow fill it back up.

Right. And so if we can do that, fix the leaf now it's like, oh, that's great. But both of those are long term fixes, like three to six, even eight, nine months in terms of actually raising the prices on the existing mowing customers and cutting the subcontracting, et cetera. How do we, in the short term, like it's things that are going to be talking with the team, like we gotta share the numbers with them. And as much as like the frontline team members or the kind of foreman kind of know what's going on, they still see you buying brand new trucks and they see that and they will assume you are making a bunch of money. And so throws him through a mind spin where like he wouldn't buy materials for us yesterday and asked us to push that off, but he bought a brand new dump truck we're not using and he bought a new hurricane blower system and equipment for the snow blowing. Like they will find evidence to think that you're just loaded with money unless we tell them otherwise. Right. And then, and then how I would take this too. Like when I hear an owner and I've done the same thing, buy equipment and it's not used by the crew, there's a lack of communication because the only reason you're buying the equipment is for them and then they don't use it.

So there's. There's a breakdown of communication there. Right. Because like you're trying to do. You're doing something good, trying to help them. They are like we don't even want it. And that comes to the detriment of the business.

Probably trying to. The other thing she was trying to get out there and give them some hands on training with the equipment. But just for me to get time to get out, I would love to get out in the field and help them be like hey, I've used this in the past. This is how you use it. This is how it should be used. And then showing them how it might want it.

And that comes with the detriment of the business.

Probably trying to the other thing she was trying to get out there and give them some hands on training with the equipment. But for me to get time to get out, I would love to get out in the field and help them be like hey, I've mine how it should be used. But I. I've got time to go buy it. And then they hear use this.

But then you know what solves this is more money because more money is going to allow us to pay these head. These head foremen to and they train people. You're doing a $1.5 million business. You're still playing manager. Like once you get over use this.

In the past, this is how you use it. This is how it should be used. And then showing them how it.

800,000 in annual revenue. You switch from manager to architect. And like architect things about strategic things in the business, the fees, the website, getting more leads, driving more sales, getting the big contracts, closing these big deals. They're not thinking about like how are we doing invoicing and like making sure the crew Sheets are printed out every morning and like those are all manager things. And you're gonna like drive yourself to the ground in every way trying to keep doing that at this size of business.

The other issue I've had too with the cruise is they, most of the guys who are manager managerish have been with me since they've seen me out in the field mowing every day.

Yep.

And like, oh, what are you doing sitting in the air conditioner spinning in your chair all day? Yeah. So it's just like trying to get them to be like, like, hey, like I'm trying to do this for the better of the good. No, I'm not sitting in the office spinning in my chair every day.

Yeah. And you, you feel bad and so you work the crazy hours to prove, hey, like, okay, so this doesn't change. Like every level of business is going to happen. I'm going to this right now. Right. And that is like, people are used to seeing me being more managerial. They're seeing used to having more contact with me. And now I'm putting layers between me and them. I'm saying no to meetings, I'm firing people that like, they're just not, they do not have the skill, experience or the desire to grow with us. That's not fun. But if they cannot see that I am not supposed to be their manager and I'm supposed to be the leader and the architect of the business, they're going to, they got to go. And that's not fun. Especially if you've been around for a long time. They're not bad people. They just didn't stay up with the growth of the business.

And they're hardworking out in the field too.

Right.

I mean they, they go out, they do their job. They're, you know, they get everything done. It's just they don't like change and they don't like grow.

And then that's when it comes down to what can we do about it? Because we can put blame on them not being able to change. But if we haven't communicated what's going on in the business and then them understand what you do every single day, they're going to assume you're buying a bunch of equipment, you have a bunch of money and you sit in the air conditioned office all day long unless we actually share what's going on.

When I've tried to do that in the past and they're like, well, why are we trying to grow? Things are fine just the way they are. Like, why are you growing? We should be becoming more profitable.

And your response?

It's just like, well, we're just trying. I don't know, I just haven't had a good one. Honestly.

I'll answer it. You're a good person. You want to keep them busy and you don't want to lay anyone off, and so you're literally taking on lower paying work.