What Percent Should You Pay YOURSELF?! (Personal Finance for Small Business)

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes and you're listening to the Business Bootcamp podcast. Today we are answering questions about personal finance and money for small business owners. Before we get to today's show though, a big thank you to today's sponsor, which is Gusto. If you haven't already, go to gusto.combootcamp try out their software completely free for 90 days. It's an entire quarter. Check it out. You can do direct deposits for your employees. They can have a nice little app and see all the money that they make, every single paycheck. And it's the cheapest on the market. Check it out today, go to gusto.combootcamp completely free for 90 days. Now today I'm answering questions from real business owners like yourself that have joined the texting platform and have submitted questions. If you want to submit questions, you need to join the texting platform. I don't bombard you with a bunch of text messages. I just text you once every couple weeks. And so text the word landscaping, one word landscaping to 855-575-1267. Text the word landscaping to that number, you'll be part of the group. And then when I ask for questions, you'll be able to submit yours as well. So today we're going to be talking about that. But before we do that, there was a question that came in on the website like a few minutes ago and I think it's a good one because it's from someone that does a restaurant, it looks like, and I have no experience in the restaurant industry, but let's see if it's a question that I can answer. Okay, so from George, annual gross revenue is $443,000. Question is, is it rare? No, it is rare that I believe the hocus pocus and a business guru. But if one is not up to learn and experience new things, then we become the old saying, can't teach old dogs new tricks. We run and operate a small 1200 square foot Mexican bakery. Very cool. A tough and overcrowded in a tough and crowded, overcrowded market. I recently retired from my 21 year military service. Thank you sir. And trying to get my hands in the family business. I helped build the company in 2003. My wife and mother in law run and operate the company remotely. Now I'm trying to, trying to actually be in there, but I am not understanding how it functions based off business theory. I am attending California State University, Monterey Bay Junior in Business Admin.

I feel we are doing something wrong because we have A good customer base, but so little to no profits. My cogs, which is cost of goods sold average between 30 to 40%. Then my overhead, mainly employee cost, eat all my gross profits. I monitor other food and bakery businesses and notice even more employees. How can they afford that? I ask my professor, what is a good gauge of cogs profits, revenues for a Mexican bakery and they respond only with it depends. I understand that, but I need real context after that phrase with actual numbers to reference disgruntled sarge. Okay, so first of all, let me preface this by saying I've never owned a restaurant and I am not a restaurateur. By no means. But because you're asking for specifics, this is first of all before we get into specifics of numbers because that's not my forte. I would say first of all, this business is a tough one to do. When you're trying to your mother in law and wife are trying to operate the company remotely and you're in school, that's a tough thing to do. Especially in a labor intensive kind of industry like a bakery where you have frontline employees that are entry level and they need more management. Typically. Again, I don't know how involved you are. Like if you're doing the schooling at night like I did when I got my business degree, you might be doing that. But this type of industry and in general, whenever you have a lot of entry level employees, you're going to need more management day to day and it's harder to run it remotely. That being said, you're asking about cogs. Okay, so restaurants.

Traditionally standard is like a third of your cost or a third of your revenue is going to go towards cost of goods sold, which is like the actual food and the actual cost of goods, the ingredients, all of that. Okay, that being said, I also know this and that is bakeries should not be that high. Bakeries, again this is just based upon me working with restaurants, not actually owning my own. Bakeries should be some of the lowest cogs out of the restaurant industry. If you're running a steak, mashed potatoes like that kind of a business, a third of your revenue being cost of goods sold might cut the cake, no pun intended. But when it comes to bakeries, they should be making lower cogs because the ingredients are cheaper traditionally. And if it's a Mexican bakery, it kind of fortifies that. Like you're not dealing with really sophisticated ingredients here. You're talking about traditionally. Again, I don't know your exact business, but like I'm assuming pretty basic ingredients. That are cheap. Corn flours, sugars, like it's confectionary things are very inexpensive. Your cogs should. You should be shooting from, like, 20%. Like, I know for a fact that bakeries can be in the low 20s and some even in the high teens in terms of cost of goods sold. So either A, your prices need to increase, or B, there's inefficiencies in your processes that are causing you to use too much cogs, too many costs, too many. You might be wasting ingredients. You might need to go shop around on your ingredients and find a better supplier. I recently been listening to Sam Walton's book about how he started Walmart, and one of the things that they did so well at is, like, really reducing.

The cost of goods, reducing it by going to the supplier and negotiating all of that. So that's what my recommendation would be, is, number one, look for inefficiencies in your labor and in your pricing that you're getting from your suppliers. And number two, you might need to address your pricing because your cost of goods sold should be under 25% in your bakery. That's my two cents, because you asked for specifics. So there it is. All right, now we're going to go to the texting platform. There are way too many questions coming in. I'm gonna try to pound through these. Oh, mercy. Goodness, there's a lot of them. Let's see here. Let's see. How can I see more of these at the same time? Okay, here we go. Let's go. Messages. Okay, they're still coming in. Here we go.

Messages inbox. All right, so these come directly to me. I see these. I can kind of show you. I think I see these right here. And I'm going to read them on the texting platform. I do not know who these people are unless they say in their message to. Some of them are nice enough to. Oh, my goodness, there's a lot of them. Okay, let's just kind of go through these as fast as possible. Here we go. Mike, it's Alex Lopez. Thanks for all you do. Okay, Diego. Hey, Mike, Diego from California here. What is a good way to determine where your market's numbers are? I have kept up with you and other people on social media, and I understand markets fluctuate throughout this country. How can I best go about knowing what my market's numbers are? Because I know my numbers are too low, but. But I don't know how low they are and how much to increase prices by. Thanks. That's a very articulate question. Okay, so I'm assuming you're in the landscaping industry and you're asking about this. Basically though, in terms of figuring out pricing for competitors. Again, I'm gonna reference back to this book that I'm reading from Sam Walton. He literally went into every single Kmart and Target and always was shopping their merchandising and seeing how they presented all of their products. I say the same thing, you know, get your friends and family to get quotes from other businesses. Go into the stores of your other competitors if you're not in the landscaping industry or service based industry. But if you're in the service based industry, ask your friends and family to get some quotes. I'm not a huge fan of this because I feel like I'm kind of ripping the people off. I will actually have if I was to do that, which I have not done since day one of Augusta Lawn Care when I first got started when I was younger, 18. So I haven't done it for a very long time. But if I was to do that now, I would somehow get money to them. I just hate, because I've been in the service industry so long, I hate when people just ask for estimates and then they just leave. It's a waste of our time and money. It costs us money. And so if I'm trying to get information from somebody and I was to do this, I would get my friends and family to get estimates on say for example, their lawn care or their roof cleaning or gutter cleaning or whatever service you're trying to get. And then I would tell them to give money to the estimator and somehow pay for it or offer the company to pay for the estimate just because you want to do a home analysis. And maybe if you have a family that's thinking about selling their house, say, hey, I want to come pay, I want to pay you to come do an estimate to service this part of my property or install this or whatever. And I'm going to pay you because I'm not really needing the service done. I just need it for the cost of getting the estimated. Estimated price. Something like that. Just my two cents on that. When is enough enough on spending marketing Google Ads seems not to pay off, just more junk leads. That's a good question. You should spend some time learning about Google Ads. The words you should be using, you should be figuring out what good click through ratios are. If you're paying $20 per click versus $2 per click, how you can improve those things. Research it for a couple days and then maybe in your market, Google's not gonna do well. And maybe you need to try Facebook, maybe you go and try print. Maybe you literally in your market, who knows, maybe putting a billboard up is the best use of your marketing dollars. You've gotta test these things out. Every single market is different. And I know that's a super can response, but it's very much like that in every industry. All right, what are some pros and cons about purchasing or leasing a vehicle? This is going to come down to mostly around taxes and if you are a personal, like if you is a personal lease. I've never seen a lease financially make sense for a personal. When it comes to business, there's certain write offs that you can use. However, again, 95% of the time when people talk about leasing vehicles and it being so great, they are really just wanting a nicer vehicle. It's not actually the most thrifty or the most like the best thing for your money. If you're talking about leasing your personal vehicle, even if you're a business owner leasing a personal vehicle and you're not able to write it off, I think that's a ridiculously bad idea. That's just my two cents. I think it's the worst thing in the world you could do for a car. That's one thing that me and Dave Ramsey see eye to eye on. All right, next one. This one is a two parter I think. No. How do you manage your buckets of money? For example, do you have a separate operating account and a profit account? Think profit first. If you have read the book. Okay, so yeah, this is from Brandon Tubek. Priority one lawn care, Nova Scotia. No, Novi, Michigan. Somewhere in Michigan. Anyways, back, back to the question. Whoa, whoa. Messed that up. So in terms of profit first he's asking do I have different buckets or different.

Bank accounts or profit? And all the rest of it I do not only because I have multiple entities and businesses and they are all serving me as the business owner. However, they are all at different stages. Some of them are cash cows, some of them require money being pumped into them like the franchise. Some of them just kind of make the same amount all the time and just have a nice dividend almost to me all the time. Like so they're all at different stages. I don't run all the businesses independently. Necessary because at the end of the day if I want to take one like profits from a cash cow and put it towards like the franchise, for example, I'm gonna give myself a paycheck and Then I, as the owner, am going to do an owner's investment into the other company. So, like, the thing is, when you start having multiple accounts like that across different entities, legally and from a tax perspective, you gotta do it right. And that's challenging. I had to learn that a few years ago. But for me, profit first does not work simply due to the fact that I'm in massive growth mode. And so I am going to be taking money and if there's a massive opportunity, I'm going to be like, forget profit first. I'm taking all this money and I am moving it over to buying a company or whatever it might be. And so, but elements of profit first I do like, especially if you're the size of business you want to continue to stay at and you're not being very profitable, it's a good form of discipline to make sure you're taking profit before you start spending a bunch of money on expenses and all the rest of it. So I do like profit first. Unless you're in hyper growth or you are multiple companies that you're kind of using and you have a holding company, things like that, it can get tricky. And if I had five or six bank accounts for every one of my entities, I would lose my mind just because there'd be 60 or 70 accounts. It'd be crazy. So I can't do that really. How I guess you could look at it is like I do have my personal accounts, which could kind of look at as my profit account. And then I kind of have other buckets, which really for me, I look at the other buckets as my businesses. Some of them are draining money. They're an investment. I'm putting money into them like the franchise other ones like the gym or the local offices. The cash is coming in from those ones. And so, yeah, that one's for me personally. I don't use it as strictly as they talk about in profit first. All right, Mike, this is hoseway. As a solo owner operator, I have another of trouble managing my income and knowing how to allocate the money coming in. Like how much to leave to business and what covers personal bills. Okay, good question.

This is gonna really depend on where you're at in life. When I was first getting started, young guy, single, living at home, didn't have a lot of personal expenses. I could afford to put a lot of money back into the business. The only thing I needed to take out was money for when I was going to school and some personal expenses and really, really small. If you have a Family and kids, you're going to have to take more money out. The bottom line is you need to make sure that the business is generating enough profit and is charging the correct pricing for you to able to take the paycheck you need. What I would do if I was you is work your way backwards. What do you need? How many dollars per month do you need to take for you to live comfortably with your family or wherever you're at in life? What do you need for personal expenses now? Then you work your way backwards. Okay, how much revenue I need to generate at what profit margin do I need to be at to make that much money? Then the question is, if I can reduce those personal expenses, how much faster will I be able to grow my business? Because that money will be able to stay in the business again. If you're willing to grow the company, then you might get to a certain level like okay, now I'm going to go move to a little bit bigger house, we're going to start a family, I'm going to take more money out and maybe the business begins to just grow at a few percent a year, 5 or 10% or just stays where it's at and becomes more profitable. These are all things that really come down to the stage of your business and the stage like where you're at in life and it's gonna be the biggest determinant of that. In terms of giving you some concrete information though.

I would look number one at some of the profit margin videos that I made in the past for you hose way and see if you're falling in line with that. And then yeah, that's what I would say. The next question looks like has something to do with this too. Should, should we be taking a percentage of profit or money from our company to get a side hustle or other business started to diversify our start focus or just focus on our landscape company? Okay, this is a good question. Diversification is a big thing when it comes to growing your wealth and you don't want to be susceptible to a crash in a specific industry. That being said, I think you can diversify within your business in a different way and that is I think the biggest sort of weakness in terms of diversification is people put too much stress of the business on themselves and they don't diversify it so that if something happened to them that it wouldn't wipe the company out. I think that's actually the biggest way you need to focus on diversification or risk management in your wealth building strategy as you build your Personal wealth, the number one thing is like, okay, I have this money coming in from this business, but if it's all relying on me and that risk or that pressure is not diversified, if something happens to me, I'm really susceptible to being in trouble financially. And so I think your first step is making sure that you have other people that can bear the load of day to day operations. That might mean you need to grow a little bit, might need to pay people more, might mean you need to have managers that you give a percentage of profit to. Those things might hurt or seem horrible at first because you're like, oh, I don't want to give my profit away, I don't want to pay people more money. But you've got to diversify. You've got to spread out the risk of if something happens to you in your health, in your personal life, whatever it might be, the business needs to keep running. That's your first level, I believe, of sort of risk diversification and is spread that out between more people, the management of the business. Then when you start actually building wealth, start looking at stocks or in real estate and things like that, then you can start thinking about diversification. Like, okay, I am really heavy in the business side of things. Okay, maybe I want to invest in stocks, maybe I want to invest in real estate. But in every single one of those asset classes, business stocks and in real estate, you have diversification with that bucket. So within business you can diversify into different businesses. Within that one business you can diversify into multiple services, right? And then if you look into across different buckets, like real estate, you can diversify by going into different markets, like different neighborhoods, you can diversify by going to different asset classes in terms of commercial or multifamily or residential or single family, you get into stocks, same thing, you can go into growth stocks, you can go into dividend stocks, you can go into bonds. So in every single asset class, and in my mind, the three major ones in my mind again is businesses, stocks and bonds and real estate. And inside of each of those, there's also a way to diversify. Inside of them it's like you need to be across all three, but inside of them you can diversify and then inside of that you can diversify. Alright, so what I mean by that is inside of business you can diversify. You don't have to diversify across multiple industries. You can diversify inside of your business into multiple sectors or having different product offerings to different types of consumers. So for example, you might be having a certain pitch that you're going to be trying to pitch towards baby boomers. And another one that goes after a working class professional, same service, just a way that you're marketing that is going after different markets. That's a form of diversification. Alright, so I see diversification like three different levels. One, one asset class from stocks, stocks, real estate and business. Inside of that I see industry specific. So business inside a business bucket there is diversification of different industries. Inside of the stocks and bonds there is growth stocks, dividend stocks, etc. Inside of real estate there's different types of real estate asset classes. And then each one of those other subcategories there's more diversification. So that's my two cents. I think as you grow your wealth, you kind of work up the chain. So you work it out at the bottom where you're kind of doing one service, one business or you're in like one asset class of real estate. And you work your way up until finally you are investing in stocks, real estate and in businesses in general. And if you look at billionaires like that's what they've done. They have money in gold and they have money in equities of all sorts. And then they have, they diversify across all sorts of businesses and sometimes have equity in 20 or 30 different companies. So that's a lot of times what happens as you grow in wealth to get to the more to where it's even more diversified. But typically you start from the bottom chain which is like right now, who I'm talking to, your business. My first thing is diversify the risk of you being the bottleneck number one. And then two, diversify your services and your offerings using the same services. Then you can always diversify the type of services. There's a lot of layers here, right? And so I think you just start with one and you slow as the business grows. It's pretty native like you look at Amazon, right? They started with one thing, selling books online and now they're doing like driverless cars and web services and all the rest of it. They've diversified as the business has grown. Wow, that was a long answer. Okay, keep going here. These are good though. This is great. I like doing different questions like this. Okay, let's see here. What's the best way about starting to pay yourself first? I currently am using my business account to pay for everything and I'm wanting to figure out how to stop doing that and start paying myself an owner dividend because that's what I'm doing. Because what I'm currently doing is going to put me out of business if this continues. All right, this is what I would recommend. You have different business accounts and you have different credit cards. I wish I had my wallet on me. I'd actually show you. Actually very tough not to show you my card information. But anyways on my credit cards because they look the same because they're from the same bank, I actually take a Sharpie and I write on them what they're for. So I'll write like personal, like with a black Sharpie on that credit card because I have like a bunch of them from all the different businesses. But I need to keep track of all the different businesses and their expenses so that when it goes into QuickBooks it's allocated correctly and written off or if it's a personal expense. And so a lot of my expense categorization is simply which card do I use? Right. So really recommend that you keep your business and your personal completely separate in terms of bank accounts, have different credit cards and whenever you using your personal checking or personal credit card, you are using a different credit card and remembering also that it's not a write off if you're using that personal card. So you're always trying to think how can I use my business card? Again, psychology in your wallet you're trying to figure out how can I use my business card instead of my personal card on all my transactions and keep it separate. Can't overemphasize that enough. You've got to keep your business and your personal stuff separate. It'll come back to bite you if you don't. All right, when should I start paying myself for my business? Should it be a certain percent? Should I wait until I have a certain amount of working capital in the bank? We kind of talked about that a little bit already. I currently pay myself a minimum amount per year as I keep the money in the business for growth. At what point would you recommend paying myself a better salary or what percentage of net profit as an annual distribution would you recommend? My business will need to make it from January to March, operating at a loss each month until we get paid for spring work. So I would calculate that into this situation, but I need guidance on a reasonable percentage of net profit to pay myself. Okay, so you can look at lawn and landscape does a report on average take home salaries of owners and managers, et cetera for different sized businesses. All right, so especially in the landscaping industry, if you're talking about a million dollar business, if you take 12% home, you're doing pretty well. But if you're doing 80,000 in revenue and you're taking 12% home, you're not doing well at all. So it's going to depend mostly on the size of your business. That being said, again, you need to figure out what your personal expenses are, what you can live on, what you need every month to live. And then if there's an operating loss, like you have three months, January, March, three months where you're losing money, you need to add that amount to those months. For three months, say, for example, you have $2,000 a month you need for living expenses. But then, you know, for those three months, every single month you're going to be losing $3,000. That means that every single month you're going to be going in the whole five grand to stay afloat personally and the business, which means you need to go into those three months with $15,000 to burn, not $15,000 in the bank because you're going to need working capital on top of that. So you need $15,000 going into those three months. Literally, you could just burn it, meaning that you're going to be able to stay afloat personally because you covered your personal expenses, health insurance, car insurance, your home mortgage, whatever you need for your kids, stuff like that, clothes, food, et cetera, utilities, figure all that stuff out and then make sure that you have that money to basically burn. If you go into months where you know you're going to lose money in the business in terms of how much you should pay yourself, I think it's kind of funny, like, I don't like creating the narrative of, like, when you're first starting out, you should not take any money from the business because you should all about growth, growth, growth. Like, when are you going to actually make money on the business? There's people, like, I literally just listened to someone not but an hour ago kind of brag about the fact that they haven't made a paycheck in two years. It's nothing to be proud about. It basically means that, yeah, you might be growing really fast, but you haven't figured out a way to make it sustainable, right? So, like, until you take money out of the business, it's not sustainable. That's why if you listen back a few weeks ago and I showed the Mount Vernon Augusta lawn care locations profit and loss statements, I show that there's actually an owner, salary, manager salary coming out every single month. From day one, there was a salary coming out of the business, and we look at it as an expense. So if you're the owner and you're taking a salary out of the business, that should be looked as a business expense. I would highly recommend you take a salary from your business. And if some people are like, oh, well, I don't want to take a W2 as a salary to employee because then I gotta pay taxes. Okay, whatever you want to call it. If you want to do an owner's distribution and then you're just going to end up paying different types of taxes and moving things around. But however you want to do it with your tax account, to figure out the best way you're taking owner's distributions, or if you're taking a W2 as an employee, you should be getting a set amount of money from the business every single week like an employee would. Just like an employee would. And you need to figure out what you're worth to the company. But more importantly, like, what do I need to survive? Because if I'm wanting to grow that number, I want to minimize as much as possible. But as business gets to where I want it to be, I'm probably gonna take more money out. But the bottom line is there's nothing to brag about. If your business does not, you don't get any money like no take home pay, there's nothing to brag about. It basically means, hey, I'm going after this thing, I'm trying to grow it, but it's not sustainable yet. And so eventually you got to start taking money out of the business. That might mean you need to raise prices. That might mean that you have a short term strategy of not pulling money out of the business, growing it, and then raising prices to the point where it can afford to pay you, that's another strategy. But at the end of the day, until the business is giving you a paycheck consistently year round, just like an employee would, it's not sustainable. Okay, all right, next question. This one just has a question mark, so don't know what that means. Okay, we're going to a couple more of these and we'll wrap it up.

How much to invest in your lawn care business? During this uncertainty, I lost customers, but I gained more projects. Yeah, so as Warren Buffett said, I think it's the greed. Oh man, here we go. This is not good. The scared. It's basically when people get greedy, you should be afraid. And when people are afraid, you should get greedy in the stock market. Kind of the same thing that comes to business. And we've seen a lot of growth for our franchisees and our local company, our local offices. That have really invested during this time because you got a weaker labor market. So you got good labor you can pick up as well as you got a lot of competitors that are struggling to keep their labors from going on unemployment. So if you can have a culture and a pay structure that's above minimum wage, you should be able to retain people and attract great talent and be able to be marketing. When everyone else is contracting, when everyone else is contracting, that's when you want to be expanding again. It's all based upon the foundations of the culture that you've built before. Like, if you have had a bad culture or a bad pay system or bad systems in general, and you come to a time of opportunity, you can't capitalize on it because you don't have a strong foundation. And so a lot of people, they've been like, oh, I've been spending a bunch of money in marketing, but, like, I can't keep my employees. Well, guess what? You should have had a great culture. You should have had a system in place like P4P, where they can make more than $12 an hour, $10 an hour. Like, guess what? They're not gonna stick around if they can go make unemployment right now from the government, which is about to end. But I'm talking about a few months ago. So in terms of times of uncertainty, I would be. When people are scared, that's when I get greedy. And I don't mean greedy like that. I just mean, like, that's when I really go on the offensive. That's what I should say. And that has traditionally worked out really well. Hi, Mike. Wondering how many bank accounts do you think a landscaping business should have? We have won and operate everything through the one checking account. And I often wonder how many bank accounts other companies have read. Profit first. Great book. We don't do it exactly like that, but it's not a bad thing to operate on one checking account. It's easy to track things. The one problem I have with splitting bank accounts is that sometimes you get, like. Because there's multiple account levels and numbers, it's not easy for you to track. Like, I know within 2 to 3% on every bank account across all of my businesses. Let me just double check. I'm confident I can stay within 5%. I know within 5% of how much money is in all my bank accounts at any given time for any of the businesses. When you start breaking up accounts, that can become a little bit muddled up. And so I like the idea of having one checking account that's kind of your main one and then you might have smaller ones off of that. But like where money comes in and Profit first talks about that, it's a good book to kind of balance out the idea of like, oh, everything has to go through one. Profit first will kind of balance you out and you'll probably find some sort of happy medium. Okay, questions, questions, questions. What are other forms of P4P if you don't know what P4P is? It's pay for performance. Instead of paying people hourly, you pay them by performance. Profit is my personal finance. I do not understand your question. Sorry. But in terms of other terms of pay for performance, that question I understand. And yeah, there's bonuses, there's incentives, there's profit sharing, all of those sort of things. There's. You can put a pool of money in and then money comes out of that if there's like damage cases, things like that. All right, couple more. What is your investment type of choice? Example, real estate, stocks, mutual funds. Also, what are your thoughts on Dave Ramsey? I like Dave Ramsey for a lot of personal finance thing because he basically is all about frugality like that, thumbs up when it comes to business. I'm a little bit disappointed in some of his stuff, especially recently because he told a lot of people not to borrow from the government on the PPP and the EIDL program. And I know several businesses in terms of restaurants and gyms that followed that advice because of him and went out of business when that would have definitely saved them, especially the PPP because it was forgivable. So not a huge fan of that. In terms of my investment type of choice, I love business. So I'm definitely skewed in my mind towards because I enjoy it. In terms of where I'm gonna park my money is going to be short term stocks, long term real estate. So how I kind of for my personal finance, it's money coming in through businesses. And I'm going to always be trying to use that money to grow the businesses all the time. That being said, if there's money sitting around, I don't want just sitting in a bank account, I want it in the stock market. And if there's a significant amount of money or the market is fluctuating in the real estate to the point where I find a deal that makes sense, I would park my money more long term in the real estate deal and rent that place out. And so that's kind of my strategy is like business and if I can spend a dollar in my businesses, that's probably my best roi because I'm going to take that money, do marketing, scale the business, hire someone, whatever. I'm going to probably get the best ROI in my businesses. But if there's money sitting around, it's not any use in getting 0.0001% in a bank account. So I'm gonna go into stock market, that's what I do. And then when that gets to a certain size and I can't get any sort of better ROI in my businesses, I will then push it off into real estate. And the real estate part is the part I'm kind of coming into now where it's like, okay, I know the business is where I want to spend the money, but I'm not just going to spend it foolishly. I'm going to wait till there's a good opportunity and I'm going to park my money in these other asset classes while I'm waiting for that opportunity. Okay, last question and then we're going to wrap it up for today. Here it is. If you had it all taken away from you and you had to start at zero, what would your first seven moves be after getting 20 clients? Well, that's a very specific question. Alright, so I'm assuming you're a landscaper, you've got 20 clients. What would my first seven moves. I'm not going to be able to figure that out. I'll tell you my first couple how that. What would your first seven moves be after getting 20 clients? If I got 20 clients, that's going to basically pay for some of the basic expenses at that point. 20 clients, I would hire my first person and they would join me in the truck. That's number one. And then number two is I would spend the extra time that I have because I'm not servicing all my properties all day long because I have this other person going faster. I would spend my evenings and weekends marketing.

I would, then that's what I would do. I would make sure I hired someone at that point. Because at 20 customers, I'm assuming that maybe two days a week you're mowing, three days a week you'd be doing small projects and cleanups. Get someone to start working with you in the truck, it's gonna cut your workload down to like 30 or 35 hours a week. Spend the extra 20 hours, 30 hours a week now, marketing, doing door hangers and quickly ramp up to 40 and 50 customers. That would be my two cents, my takeaway on that one. That'd be my first moves. Thank you. So much, everyone for joining here on the Business Boot Camp podcast. Until next time, be great, because nothing else pays.