When Your Business Keeps You Up at Night, Ask Yourself This

But I didn't raise the prices because I was afraid of losing that revenue and I wanted to hit my 1,000-person goal.

I have to diligently realize that from a numbers perspective, I am being derailed by 5 or 10% of people at the expense of everybody else.

At Service Autopilot, in the early days, we got up to 14,000 requests for features and things like that. For— no exaggeration, 14,000. Eliminating 2 of those businesses that were Brutally difficult to get out of and to have those conversations literally reduced 60% of my stress in life.

What's the cost of not doing it? What is the value of adding this? And then just simply taking the one that's further away from zero. And a lot of times it was very— it was split. It was, it was like a coin toss as to whether or not this was gonna add value or to just me not do it at all.

I could do anything I want with this business. That gave me the permission to go cut the business. And I've told the story where I literally cut the business in half and suddenly Like, I don't have to do anything and we're making money. Hey everyone. Welcome back. Mike, how's it going?

Fantastic.

Good. Well, today I want to try to tack on a little bit to what we did last week, but I want my, I want to try my hardest to like poke on some pain that people might be feeling and see if we can try to get actionable with it. And so the way I want to describe this to you and the way I want you to imagine it and think about it, Is, and this is, Mike already knows what we're talking about. So I'm talking to everyone watching. This is what I want you to think about. Like when you, that feeling you have when you go to bed at night and you've got stuff turning in your brain that didn't get done that day, you've got people that are a challenge that you're frustrated with. You've got a customer conversation that's still turning in your head. You've just got all this stuff. It's on your mind. They wake up the next day. This is the stuff you think about. And then that day, 3 more things get added to your list and this just builds and it feels like it never ends. And it's what really doesn't make business fun. And it happens whether you're a $100,000 a year business, a million and a half dollar a year business, it could still be happening when you're a $4 million business. It happens to everybody to differing degrees. And the feeling is often one where We don't, as they say, see light at the end of the tunnel. Like, how do I get out of this? How does it ever get better? Why would I want more? Why would I want bigger? Because this, this is not awesome. And so you're kind of thinking about, you're feeling drowned, like you're drowning. You're thinking about all the to-dos. You're thinking about all the expenses. You're thinking about where's the money going to come from? You're thinking about all the problems. That's what's going on. And it's so easy to have the conversation. Mike and I have conversations or listen to other videos of that smart people put out, but they don't give you the answer. Like, how do you think through this giant list of concerns and problems and challenges? And how do you tackle it? Where do you start? Like, how do you start to make a dent in that problem that you experience every night when you're trying to go to sleep and your brain's still turning? And when you wake up in the morning, the first thing you think about is the problems. So we're going to take a stab at this. And we're each going to talk through several ideas, uh, around challenges we've dealt with. And the goal is to hopefully give you some ideas to troubleshoot the challenges you're dealing with. And that's, that's the goal for today. You'll have to tell us in the comments if we're successful or if we need to take a second stab at this and try again. But I really, really, really want to try to help with this because this is what I believe most of us go through a lot of our business career feeling, and it's miserable. And the last thing I'll say about this is, you know, Mike, oftentimes when we volley back and forth, you know, he's advocating for the smaller business. I'm the guy that's always, I like the bigger business and I, I hold onto my bigger business thing. And the reason I think why a lot of people don't want the bigger business is all the terrible, painful stuff you're dealing with. It's like, why would I want more of that? Bigger sounds horrible. So, I want to try to help you solve some of these problems. So, maybe you'll want to go bigger. All right. That's my— that's the setup. So, that's what I want you to feel like, feel those problems that you're having. And so, Mike, what— how would you start us off here? I've got several of these. Like, why don't you get us going?

Yeah. So, on the docket that we share, I saw this come through and I was like, I really don't know where this conversation's gonna go. So preparing for this in a linear fashion is gonna be detrimental. So I just kind of have a bunch of ideas that I've thought about and I—

Great.

I actually didn't put it through AI 'cause I wanted to be as raw as possible.

Okay.

And so, um, a couple things I'll start with. First off, all the businesses I've ever started that I still have today, for the first 2 to 3 years were unprofitable and required way more work in terms of hours on them than I currently spend on them. And the reason I say that is because that's the hardest point in my opinion. When you are working so extremely hard and you're not getting any reward for it. It's one thing to be on a rocket ship where when you're seeing like money in, effort in, and it's just like the thing is taking off and you're super profitable and you're stacking money and you're able to buy the nice car, take the family vacation. There's so much positive reinforcement. The hardest point to be is What you mentioned actually last week, which is in bed thinking about all these things, all the trouble in the businesses, all the customer complaints, the employee problems, and at the same time you're losing money. The bank balance is going lower. It just feels like everything is being depleted from you, not just financially, but emotionally in the business. And for anyone that's listening, like every single one of my businesses between 2 and 4 years, it happened when I first started them. And now on all of them, I work less than I do then and they're profitable. But it is so hard during that moment to keep putting in the emotional and financial investment required to get it past that moment of inertia, like that sound barrier, to get it large enough to where it can run without you, large enough to where you can afford great talent. And for myself, like you said something last week that was really interesting. You said the sales type of person— They all go to sleep with those same problems, but they wake up the next day. It's like new day. We're totally fine. I am not that way. I things linger. I overthink things. My family in general is like a very much of a nervous type of people, and we overthink. We overcomplicate. I worry a lot about risk. So whenever there's risk in a relationship, in a business partnership. in the businesses, people saying negative things about me. Like, it's very, like, social media is actually very hard for me, especially starting out, because like, I'm very susceptible to what people say and overthinking and overanalyzing and starting to believe what they say or think I need to change my behavior.

Mm-hmm.

And so I preface all of that by saying, I say most of that because if anyone looks up to me, I will say I have gone through those things and still go through those same emotions. When I'm encountering difficult times in the business. And if you're going to grow a business, this will only continue. The size and scope of the feelings, that pit in the stomach, will only get bigger because the amount of risk that you're taking is bigger as you continue to level up. And so I don't really have a point there, but just to preface this whole conversation with, I believe the hardest point is when you are, you are not getting reinforced positively for the emotional and financial investment you're making. And if you're in that phase, it's a phase that you have to keep going through. And breaking through that sound barrier is the hardest part of business.

And if I heard you correctly, you're sort of identifying that phase as taking 2 to 4 years to get through.

I have just found that for me, that's what it's always been. Almost every single one is about 3 years. So I say 2 to 4 because I haven't like nailed down exactly my finances. But I know for a fact all the businesses I've started that I still own today, For at least 2 and a half years were unprofitable. And the amount of hours that I put into them during that time was like extreme, like—

It was ridiculous, yeah.

Incredible.

Yeah.

And so I say that 'cause I know a lot of people when they're going to podcasts or content, they're in that phase of searching for the answers during that season. And if you're in that phase, like I just say, you've gotta have that why as to what pulls you through all of that pain 'cause it is very difficult.

Yeah, I'd agree. I would echo something similar. And I think the faster you try to go and build the thing, the longer it could potentially be unprofitable and painful. Like, there's a correlation between how fast you're pushing and how long that period of time takes. But there's also a correlation between going too slow because you stay in that for an extended time. So it's—

You just get worn out. You just get worn out.

Yeah. And then I think you said something else that was really good that I want to Go a little bit deeper on just trying to get to what others might feel. So you give the example of— I'll interpret it this way— you take what you like, you care about the quality you put out into the world, you care about the quality of the service, you care about people being happy with what you're delivering to them. And so when there's negativity, you feel it because this is a personal thing. And I think a lot of people feel that it's their craft, it's their trade, it's their thing. This business is my creation.

Identity.

Yeah, it's my identity. I want you to be happy. I, I tried so hard to make this project great, or I tried so hard to deliver customer service, great customer service. I've tried so hard to train these people and we didn't get it quite right. And so you feel bad. And so this shows up in a lot of ways where, just to give a specific, when the customers— and you want to make people happy. Like, that's how a lot of what you described is also how I very much have felt in my business. I really want to solve people's problems.

Yeah.

And so how I think this could manifest with other people is some, you have a great client you love and you want to take care of them. And they're asking you to do things you don't do. Like they're asking for additional services, but you just want to take care of them. They're a great client. And so, but that hurts you. So sometimes we will exhibit our, like what you've described, Mike, the, I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, but one way that many of us as owners could In our pursuit of making people happy, and it hurting us that they're not happy or pleased, we do and deliver things to them we shouldn't be doing because that later harms our business. We take the extra account, we go to the extra market, like we add, we go, you know, take care of their parents' house. It's just outside our territory. There's lots of ways we do this that harms the business. So that resonated with me, and that's a thing that I think a lot of us have to fight because we feel like we're doing the right thing for the client. But In the long run, it's really harmful to us and the business. And I always like to remind everybody, harmful to our families. Yeah.

And I think this conversation is important because it gives people the ammunition to fight the mental wave of trying to please everybody and realizing that you can really hurt the whole organism, like the whole 100% of your customers, the whole 100% of your business by trying to please 5 or 10%.

Mm-hmm.

And it's not to say that we should ever ignore that great customer that you want to serve. That's not, not it. It's putting all your time, attention, and energy, 'cause you have a finite amount of all those things, towards that 5% could come at the cost of hurting everyone else in the organization, all of your team members, financially, your family, time away from them. And that is a hard thing, and the only way to be able to convince myself, for me, is like, I have to diligently realize that from a numbers perspective, I am being derailed by 5 or 10% of people at the expense of everybody else. And that's why like last week we talked so, so important about prioritization cuz like, well, where does this loud squeaky wheel fall in the stack rank of where I need to focus my pri— my attention?

Yep. Yep. I agree the way I thought about mine. So set this up for everyone. I just, again, back to a picture. You have this running list in your brain of all these things. Should I do 'em? Should I not do 'em? How important are they? And so As I go through mine, I'm going to kind of try to relate to how do you clean up the list? That's one way I'll frame it. So if you have listened to me talk over the years, there's a chance you might've heard this story, but I'm going to, I'm going to give you some real-life examples. So when I started CityTurf, I had somewhere heard about this person that had 1,000 mowing clients in my market. Unfortunately, He got into drugs and his business went away, but he had 1,000 clients. Like, that's what I want. I want 1,000 mowing clients.

Maybe that's why you hit the 1,000 customers.

That's what it is. Maybe. Yeah. Never made that connection. Maybe I didn't want 1,000 clients. Anyway, the point was I had this like goal, 1,000 clients. That's like my number one goal for CityTurf. And I had bought some accounts from a fence company, like 75 accounts. uh, mowing accounts from a fence company, mowing and bed and bush work. And very quickly, or not very quickly, but as I got smarter, I realized, hey, I'm not really making hardly any money on these. And they were in high-end areas. They were good clients. Like, like really, they were the highest-end areas of our market. And so I never ever, or no, for the longest time, for years did not raise their prices. And it sounds so Unbelievably dumb in hindsight, but I didn't raise the prices because I was afraid of losing that revenue. And I wanted to hit my 1,000-person goal. So, 2 things were sort of running in the background in my brain when I think back about it. One, I was like, if I get rid of— and it was other clients that needed to be repriced as well. So, theoretically, if I lost these 150 clients or 100 clients, That's a real dent in our revenue and we're trying to grow this thing. We're not making money. We're just, we're all, it's all going back in. So I'm sure many people feel that. And then the other one is I have this goal that's, that's going to delay my goal. This is the noise running in my head. And so what was happening there in my world, and I got, and this could take many forms in many of our worlds, is fear was overriding in my world, a priority, a thing that had to get done. Okay. So if we think about this as questions, the, the version of me that now has more experience, the way I would look at whatever's coming into my head and bothering me is what is not solving this thing that I keep thinking about when I go to bed and I think about in the morning when I get up? What is not solving this costing me? Okay. And so in my case, I was leaving prices alone because I hadn't really deeply thought about this or logically thought about it. So leaving them alone felt safer. I was going to get to my goal faster and we were going to have the money to keep growing the business, but I was forgetting the cost, or I wasn't mature enough as a business owner yet to understand the cost. And the cost was, you know what, this is distracting us from more profitable work that will give us more money to grow the business faster. And so we have to go through this exercise of taking the thing that's on our mind and then thinking about it. And asking that question, what is not solving this costing me? Because that— I always like to phrase things around pain. Sometimes to get ourselves and our team to take action, we have to create pain. I have to create enough pain in myself that these 30 things that I keep whining and crying about, they've been on my list for 6 months. They either need to quit. I say, you probably heard me say this. I like to— I either quit whining and crying about them or I need to fix them. So, I need to make the pain real enough that I'll take action. Okay. So then the secondary question to that, that I like to think about is because a lot of times taking the action's really scary. So the secondary question is, if we have identified this thing as this is truly costing me something or the business something, what is the smallest test I can execute, do to find out if my idea to fix it will work? Okay. Because is there some solution you might have in mind? So an example would be all I had to do back in the day at City Turf was try raising the price on 10 clients. And I did actually eventually do this, but I, and I don't remember it. Maybe, maybe I waited 6 months to do it. Maybe I waited 3 years to do it. I actually don't remember. It's too long ago now, but I do know with clarity, I did not raise prices quickly. It was a long time before I did it. And If I had just had the mindset I have today, I could have ran a simple test with 10 clients. And if it worked, I could have solved my problem and immediately had more money to grow the business. If it didn't work, then I know I have a hard decision to make. They're either not worth it, or I just suck up and I keep them. It's that kind of a thing. So what's that test? Now, one more way this could show up in your world is maybe you have to spend money to solve a problem. And that's a lot of times what I, I still feel that I, I don't know if I'll ever quit feeling the, like, do I spend the money on this thing feeling? The numbers just get bigger. And so, you know, you're like, in the early days of business, like, do I spend $40,000 on this team member? And then one day, do I spend a quarter million on this person? Like, it's all the same feeling at some point because you don't know if it's going to work out. And so here's another way to use this idea. Like, what's the smallest thing I could do? To see if I could find a solution. So let's say you know you need an office person. You're missing calls. That means you're not closing sales. Those sales would drive more revenue. That revenue would get you the new truck. It would give you the marketing budget to do SEO, whatever. So you're afraid to commit to the $24 an hour office person or whatever the number is. And so could you just hire someone from a temp service? For just a few weeks to work your busiest hours. Give them just the smallest amount of training and use them for X amount of time to see if that moves the needle in any way and makes your life better. So you could take the time that's just been reclaimed to go do more work and bill more time, or maybe you're selling more work. So not like there's a million ways this can manifest itself, but. What is like, what is this costing me? And then second to that, what's the smallest test I can run to see if I could fix this thing? Because I think we live in fear of most of the solutions or the cost to most of the solutions. And that's, that's how I would think about it.

Okay. So I, I, I was hoping this is the way you'd go. So I, okay. I kind of had like all these random notes. These, these are the 2 questions that I kind of run through.

And, okay.

And, and I, I like this idea of like kind of giving frameworks or mental models for someone, cuz one of these will click. And hopefully help someone.

Hope so. I sure hope so.

It might be like 10 shots on goal, but if one of 'em land. So for me, I just try to always think about like focusing only on what I can control. And so when I am laying in bed nervous, I'm sweating, I can't sleep, that whole thing, I just ask myself like, can I change this? And there are times where like you can't and it's just a part of the current stage of business that you're at, or it's a part of the growth pattern. And those are the ones that are just like, you could, if you can confidently say, I cannot do anything about this, this is a feature and not a bug, that's when it's just like, okay, this is anxiety and this is not serving me. I've gotten slightly better at realizing there are some things I just cannot control, or there are some things that I cannot take any action on now. Yeah. If the answer to that is yes, so like there, I can change this, there's something I can do that would change this stressor, The question I try to always tie back to, and you mentioned this months ago, I remember, and that is, what's the next action I can take? Like, what's the one thing? 'Cause there's 50. We all think of 50 things. I'm like—

Yeah.

It's like this branch, it's like chess. It's like every single move you're playing out in your mind, the 5 things that will happen, the rippling effect of that decision. Well, if I do this, then these 5 decisions, and then, well, if I do this, then these 20 things will happen. And so if you can control What's the one next action I can take? And I would say most of the time for me, that's, that's an email, a text, or a phone call. The next thing that I need to do to like get myself out of stress is I need to address it, usually with the person that's involved, that I'm just, I'm afraid of what they're going to say. I'm afraid of the judgment. I'm afraid if it's, for example, angry customer. Can you control whether or not they leave a 5, a 1-star review and they rant and say horrible things about you on Facebook? Well, no, I can't control them making the post, but could I potentially go back to them, make a phone call, and say, hey, look, like, I am happy to do whatever. I didn't see that that way, but I wanna make you happy. That's an action you could take, but that's very much of a stressor if you take pride in your work.

Yeah.

And you might have to tamper down on your ego flaring up inside of you, wanting to just curse them out and tell them they're wrong. And so the first thing I'm asking is like, is this something I can control? If no, I have to discredit it because it's not serving me. I can't do anything about it. If yes, what's the next action I can take? And then another thing that's really helped me with this is always asking what is causing the cause of my stress. And the reason I do that is because it usually leads me to something I can control. So for example, the client is The client complaining. I keep— we keep using this one, but that's a lot of times.

We all feel it.

Yeah, 100%. Whether you have 100 customers complaining or 1,000 customers complaining, it's still stressful. And so this is many times you can't necessarily control them leaving the bad review or ranting, but it's like, is the cause of that cause the fact that I don't train my technicians correctly and they're doing a bad job? Is the cause of that cause of my stress the fact that I don't take videos or pictures for my crew to do a good job when they're on site, or I haven't trained them to do a walkthrough of the project with the customer? Now that's something I can actually control. And so a lot of times I'm always asking, what is causing the cause of my stress? Another example would be like if your bank balance is low, but at the end of the month, that's obviously stressful. Like you can't even make payroll. And it's very easy to get wrapped up in how do I make the next dollar, or can I get a deposit? And it's short-term versus what's the cause of this cause, which is the fact that you're doing net 30 on your payment terms where you're accepting checks. And that's much more of a long-term solution. But if you look at the cause of the cause of your stress, it's something that you can actually change. Like, you can go change that in your settings, change that in your invoice terms, and immediately make a process change that will solve it in the long term. And so those, those 2 things have helped me, uh, cuz I overthink everything when things are going bad.

Yeah, those are good. The last one you were talking about, sort of like a root problem analysis, like what is the root of this that keeps creating it? So I like that to tack onto it. If the thing keeps coming up, you deal with the customer who complained about not closing the gate, but then that's back on the worry list next week. And then again, that like, if I've seen this a couple times, we need to do a I don't remember how you worded it. I'll just call it root cause analysis. Like, what's the core that keeps— what's creating this symptom? Like, what's the underlying problem? So that's fantastic. Uh, one little addition to something else you said, you were talking about the next action. Um, you probably do this as well. I do it. I think I have talked about it. It's like you decide what you need to do and you may or may not be doing it, but your brain keeps spinning on the problem. At least mine does. Mine will just keep, especially when I'm tired.

Yeah.

It's like, we keep rehashing this. Like we need, we keep trying to make a new plan. And so I, that's where it's like, hey, have I identified the new next action? Which is what you said. Then my next question for myself is, am I doing the next action? Because thinking about anything other than that is pointless. So that was just a build. Like if your brain spins, my question that's worked for me is like, am I doing the next action? Or is it about to happen? Okay. Then I can quit thinking about this.

Yeah. And I think like, The most detrimental thing about these stressors is that it causes doubt about the plan that you're trying to execute on. And the plan that you're executing on might be correct, but because that one customer went bad, because one employee cursed you out, walked off the job, or created a mutiny, you start doubting the plan and getting off of the plan. Like the, the overall long-term vision, you get off that track. That's a long-term L.

Yeah.

Whereas Being like, and that's for someone like myself who is prone to anxiety or overthinking or stress, stressful stuff. That has always been my, I cannot compromise that and I will not get off the track because there is a derailment or I did make a mistake or like I do have to say sorry. Like I, I just messed up. And, uh, I think that is a, a helpful tool.

Yeah, too. So is it your turn now or does this mean it's my turn?

You go ahead, you drive.

Okay. I didn't know if you were building on the one I just said last time. Okay. All right. So this one, you're going to hear some similarities to what we, a little bit of repeat of some things that have been said before, but I do think this is critical and that's why I included it. And so when you have this big list of things, that's just driving you nuts. I think a top-level question is, what could I stop doing that would make a whole bunch of these problems just all go away? Because I think we, to a large degree, create a bit of the mess we're in by doing too many things. It's back to the simplicity concept you've heard about. It's back to the focus thing. I know we've, we've said this many times, but, but it's so true that I think when things are a mess, we tend to look for additive ways to fix them. So something's wrong. So I think of, okay, do I need to hire a person? Do I need to add a system? Do I need to create some different way to do this? Do I need to make more money? And I, we think of an additive way, but sometimes the fastest way out of our problems is literally to cut. And not just in business, but so you've heard it, like maybe it's dropping a service. It just immediately eliminates the kind of per— people you have to hire, the training you have to do, the marketing you have to do, like the complex billing. Who knows? It could just eliminate the people that complain, the bad reviews. It could just eliminate all that. With one swipe, we're out of that service. And the really important thing to remember is you can, you can get out of anything today. Doesn't mean you can't do it tomorrow. You can get out of anything. You can add it when you're ready later. So it's the dropping of services. It's the shrinking of service areas. It's getting out of business lines completely. It's stopping getting out of a second business. It's, it's also a lot of personal stuff. It's like, it's literally pausing personal commitments. It's killing hobbies. It's stop dating for a while because you have no time. I think it could be anything that you're in the middle of. We need to be heads down, all in, whatever it takes. And so it really hard decisions have to be made during those times, which can be both business related and personal related. I have seen. So many individuals, and we are all at risk of this, that have very difficult business things going on. And they're only complicating their life with the volume of craziness in their personal life. Like they're just, they're, they're saying yes to everything. It's like, they're so consumed in business, but yet they're able to go do the weekend camping trip. They're able to go do, they're buying a new car for the family. Like they're all these, everything you do is a distraction. Everything you add in your personal life, every yes, it's all a distraction. And so, we all do it. I do it. We all do it. And sometimes when you're in the season of just, I got to get out of this season, I got to fix things, you have to go into this hardcore mode. And that means you cut everything out. And then you can bring those things back later. And I've mentioned this example on, I think, in our conversations, Mike. It's like, In the beginning of City Turf, I had 4 companies, or maybe a year or 2 in, I had 4 businesses I was doing at the same time. I had 2 kids. I was married. My wife stayed home. It was crazy. My kids were little, and all 4 of my businesses were legitimately good opportunities. And the 2 of them that I cut were my entire income. And one of them was probably my biggest, what would be considered my wealth. And I just got to a place where I can't do all of this. And I had to make really hard, hard decisions that I fretted over, to be frank. I just, it was really, really hard, but eliminating 2 of those businesses that were brutally difficult to get out of and to have those conversations. Literally reduced 60% of my stress in life. And I've just experienced that lesson multiple times now to lesser degrees over time. And every time I chop stuff, it just makes everything easier and better. Doesn't solve all the problems, but what is that chopping you could do inside your world? So if you think about your list of 28 things floating in your brain, it's kind of like that root cause analysis Mike just talked about a moment ago. Is there something that if we just stop doing it for a period of time, Or I stopped saying yes to this thing for a period of time, it would just take a bunch of things right off my list.

Yeah. One of the things that's helped me like not keep adding more is just adding time. Meaning everything when it first pops in your head sounds like a good idea, seems like it needs to happen tomorrow, but adding it to that list and then having a diligent time, like for example, the end of a sprint where you actually assess which are the few things I'm going to work on. And then you look back sometimes 6 months later, you're And you're like, those are some dumb ideas, some really dumb ideas. And I'm glad I didn't spend 2 or 3 months going down that path. And so one thing that's been helpful for me actually on my Trello, I have what's called a chopping block, which is like, if it stays in to-do, it automatically moves the chopping block after 30 days because like, obviously it's not good enough for me to take action on right now. And it might mean that it's just better to do nothing.

Yeah.

And it has helped me avoid this constantly just adding and more and more and more things. And to your point, a lot of times it happens every like 5 or 10 years, whether you personally or in business, like, okay, I've gotta like cut like heavily, whether it be team, like members of the team I've added on that don't really need to be there. If it's services that I've just kind of added on that don't really need to be there. And avoiding that has been my goal the past few years. And that is using sprints as a way to force myself to not take action on things immediately, but rather have a time. Usually several weeks later where I actually think about whether or not that was a good idea. Is that a good service to add? Is this something I really wanna add to my personal life that's gonna take my time away? And sometimes just injecting those few weeks gives me the perspective to make a better decision.

Yeah. You made me think of, uh, uh, the way you're doing it is similar to, I've heard people say, when I put something on the to-do list, I date it. And if that date just gets older and older, it just tells me we're not really gonna do this.

Yeah.

Uh, The 37signals guys created a product called Wizzy. And I think they, it's a, it's a pro— it's for software companies, but I believe they have a feature in there that if you don't deal with it within a certain time, it does exactly what you're talking about.

So can you imagine doing that with like a feature request when you have like 3,000 of them? They just kind of disappear if no one else votes them up. That'd be funny.

That's, that's what we needed back in the day. I don't know if I've ever told you, I, I know I've told this publicly, but at Surface Autopilot in the early days, we got up to 14,000, uh, requests for features and things like that. 4— and no exaggeration, 14,000. Yeah. John, it was so frustrated. He's like, just, let's just get a new software product and just archive that whole thing. We're starting over.

What would be fun now with AI is like, just take all of that and just have AI go do it and then see what the output was. Just like how, how bad it would look.

It would've destroyed the product. Yeah. So anyway, it's like these lists just build and build. They all sound important in the moment. But, um, I also, I'm just curious as for my own knowledge, you talk about scrums or, um, not scrums, uh, sprints. Has that come into your world since you've gotten into the software world? Or did you do that before?

37signals, like that's all from that.

Okay. I, that when we hired coaches to come in and teach our whole company agile way back in the day, that's That's how that came into my life. And then I applied it other places. I didn't know about it before software.

That was one of the biggest things I like, Dr. Acacio always like drilled into me. Like, wasn't just doing the sprints, but it was like, oh no, like that is very important, but it's not what you're gonna work on. I'm like, sick. Like, it's important, I should be working on it. It's like, no, like that's not the most important thing, therefore you will let it burn. Kind of like we talked about last week.

Yeah. A lot of the things I, I hear you say a number of things like, oh man, those sound like software world things. Like even the reflection on a, like reflecting on the list or reflecting on what we did and having that, that's, you know, a lot of stuff that gets drilled into you in the software world.

And in software we have like roadmaps, right? Yeah. Yeah. And I think that same notion can be taken for business owners cuz you have a roadmap for your internal team. Like where are we going?

Same thing.

Even personally, like you have a roadmap for your family. Like what are we working, like what are we prioritizing vacations? Like, and so the thing that's funny about roadmaps is everyone has an opinion of what your roadmap should be.

Oh yeah.

And so it, it was almost a forcing function, like on the software side to then me take that in my personal life. And then also internally and realize that like as the leader, you have a roadmap and you have to guard and defend it because everyone wants to place their priorities on your roadmap. And that's, again, we talk about software, but like, and features, but like it's in the personal life too. Like the person that's asking you up for the barbecue and then there's a birthday and then there's all these other social obligations and there has to be a time where like, that is not the most important thing for me right now. Yep.

All right, what do you got next?

Um, one, one thing I always think about is what do we— deciding on what to do next, or if I should take action on something. Because we, we've talked about, hey, you have all these ideas, how do we prioritize them? But then what to ignore? Like, what should I just leave? So how do we actually do what we just talked about? What's the decision-making framework for what gets worked on now, versus the thing that I'm going to zero in on. And one thing that I've, 'cause I'm more, I'm better with numbers, I'm just like black and white. So one thing that's helped me is just answering 2 questions. When I look at a certain thing I think that needs to get done, what is the cost of not doing anything? And then what's the value of completing this?

Right.

And just taking whichever is further from zero. And so for example, if the cost of not doing anything is, hey, I'm gonna lose some customers, I'm gonna lose out, For example, adding that new service, I lose out on 20% of revenue or 15% of revenue, and that's $150,000 or whatever that dollar amount might be. And then asking the question, okay, what's the value of actually doing this thing? So basically it's like, what's the cost of not doing it? What's the value of adding this? And then just simply taking the one that's further away from zero. And a lot of times this helped me realize that it was a very— is split. It was like a coin toss as to whether or not this was going to add value or to just me not do it at all. And that was very helpful for me. And this means that there are some things that you will lose money on, but attention on other areas of the business still net a bigger win. So you've got to have some negative $5,000, negative $20,000, negative $40,000 things because you didn't take action on certain items. You got to let those fires burn. But there's another thing you do take action on because Doing it allows a $400,000 win. And so sometimes just using the numbers help me determine whether or not and what to take action on next, determining based upon like which one had the highest impact to the business.

It's a way to score things is how I'm hearing it. So you can prioritize the list.

Yeah. How, how would, how do you think about that? Like when you have the list and you have the 30 things, some of them are causing stress, other ones are like, this one's a great opportunity. I would just enjoy doing this. How do you balance those 2 things out too? Like, The fire versus like the passion to go do something and create or build?

Well, there's what I do and there's what I—

What you would recommend.

Yeah, yeah. There's what I would tell you to do.

Yes.

No, I mean, I try to be pretty good about and thoughtful about the list, and I think about it kind of from an ROI standpoint. It— and but I also have observed in myself that at times I'll work on the thing I most want to work on. And so I'm sure we all do that. And so I can break the rule, but so I would like, let's try to answer that question in a little more detail. Like we'll use my, I said you have 28 things sort of cycling in your brain. So how do you start? I think you gave an example. The way I would think about it is I just try to get it all out on paper. So, or in Trello, but a lot of times I just get it down on paper, write them down. And then I'm trying to think through my general process here off the top of my head. I think I cross off what I think I'm touching on a number of things you said. I'd go through and I'd cross off what I'm just absolutely sure could wait. My brain's cycling on it, but it's like, it could wait. I was listening to All In podcast yesterday, and I got this idea and I need to do this. And now it's in my brain cycle. Like, no, I don't. I don't need to do that at all. So that's like, there's so many, and that's a little bit of my process when I'm talking to somebody. I have, we might've talked about this before. I use Notepad. It's unbelievable how many ideas go to Notepad. 'Cause my real system is Trello. So Notepad is like my blocking container. All my great ideas go here. And most of them, when I'm on airplanes, just trash, trash, trash. Because they all sound so great in the moment. So crossing out like what I can cut or what can wait, and then what would seriously hurt the business or hurt me financially if I wait on this thing, like, cause there's personal items as well. That'd be another way I think about it. I think you kind of touched on that. We've touched on that. And then I order things by the return. You gave an, you gave a little bit different twist a moment ago, but I order them based on the return time return or Money. So I tend to try to look at things like, I think this is worth $50,000. This is worth $100,000, or this eliminates the need to hire a person, or this eliminates, uh, something everybody's frustrated about. And I try to stack rank them. And then I, but I also think about, I've learned to think about time because if you just stack rank on money, you're never going to do so many little things that we could knock out that would just make everybody feel like we're making progress.

Mm-hmm.

Or make you feel like you're making progress and then you get momentum to keep working the list. So there's this value in doing things that are less important that are just quick. And so I tend to think about those 2 things. And then I think it is the rest of this would be just building on what we've both said already. It's like, okay, now I've got my list and these are the things I think are most important. So now I'm going to think about which one am I going to work on and I'm going to pick my next action. And if I can, who's going to own that next action? Is it me or is it somebody else? Um, you know, so a real-world example would be, and you may have used an example like this, if you had a cash flow issue and I've just worked through my list and like, we have a problem. We don't have enough. You did use something like this. We don't have enough money. Maybe the bank, every week when you go to do payroll, it's like the bank balance is just a little bit lower. You're seeing a bad trend here. It's like, One day, what if we can't make payroll? So that should maybe be one of the top things on your 28 things cycling in your brain. So if I'm going through this list, I definitely identify that as my number one thing. Then my question to myself is, how fast can I deal with this? Can I do it like right away? Can I do it tomorrow? And then what's my next action? My next action is I look at my AR report. Who are my top 3 clients? I'm calling them tomorrow. And if they don't answer, I'm emailing and texting them and I'm going to follow up the next day. It's that. It's that kind of immediacy where you take action. That's how I think you process the list, but you gave me a quick question and I'm giving you a long answer. But the last thing I would say to this is, and it really bleeds into what I was going to talk about as my third point today. And I guess let me just go ahead and jump into that because it piggybacks perfectly. It's like, who can solve this? So you, it may be you, but as you work down this list and you're like, okay, here's my prioritized list. Here's the next thing we gotta do. What's the next action? But it's also who will, who can do this thing? Does it need to be me? Could it be an employee? Could it be a contractor? Could it be something I do in AI or to what you said, Mike, could I do nothing? And I think the do nothing is way more common than we think. And so that's why I also like the list or the Trello. It's like where I just, maybe the be— for Depending on how a person's wired, maybe for you, it's best to literally have this list and cross it out so that you see that I've agreed this doesn't matter and it stops so you can stop the cycling in your brain. And then the, the next part of this was like, okay, now who can do it? And I just gave a few examples and oh, and sometimes the who can do it is, well, I don't know because I actually don't know how to solve this problem. So then the who is. Is there a consultant or a book or an advisor or YouTube video, some way I can go get that answer as my next action? Is there a buddy in the industry that I can text? How can I find my answer so I can do my next action? So if I was working through my problems, like, I don't know what to do, then my next action is literally a name of who could tell me what to do so I could solve that. The other thing that comes to mind for this particular who could solve it is, and this is something I see in myself, and I think a lot of us do this. Sometimes I'm the right person to do it, but oftentimes there is somebody else that can do it, but we're afraid to let them do that thing because maybe we're afraid they're not going to do it as well, or we're afraid to spend the money on the person to do it because we have limited money. So, an example of this would be In my Service Autopilot days. So let's just kind of say the company started right at the very beginning of 2010. And then I sold almost all the deals in that business into 2014, pretty far into that business. And I shouldn't have done it for that long. I think I should have done it for 2 years, but I shouldn't have done it for 3 and a half. And I had some other people help me in 2014, but I was still doing a lot of the selling because I was closing the majority of every deal. So it's like, so we had to, that was a problem. That's probably an exaggeration, but I was closing a very high percentage. And so that created a problem that I think other people might be installing or selling installation work or project work. And you're closing great deals at a high rate. And as soon as you hire somebody else, like this could kill the cashflow of our business, it could kill the growth of our business. It's incredibly scary. And that's how I felt inside Service Autopilot, because I knew from previous experience that If I hire one salesperson and they don't work out, this is a mess. And I really didn't feel that ServiceAlpine had the money to hire 2 salespeople and then for me to be the manager of the salespeople because we were funneling every dollar to engineering. So if I hired salespeople, they were going to— and I'm sure you could, anybody listening, like you can feel this in some version in your business. Like this is money that was going to go away from developers and ServiceAlpine. We were trying to build as fast Fast as we could build, all the money was going to engineering, nowhere else. And so that's one of the reasons why I was selling. So I was afraid if I hired a salesperson, this is why I delayed it for so long. That what if we don't close at 88%? Now we're closing at 50%. That's going to hurt us. And now I'm spending money on one or two salespeople, and we just now we didn't hire another engineer, and that's going to slow down solving all the other problems for our clients. So this is what happens goes through all of our brains. And it's, this is a really, really hard problem to solve for, but, and it's one of the big questions that I have when I'm looking at my list is like, who can do this? And why am I delaying the solution? Am I afraid to delegate? Okay. Somehow I'm going to have to get comfortable with that. Am I afraid to spend the money? Okay. Well, how could I step into this? How could I test it? Because we can't keep doing this. Something's got to change. I've eventually got to hire the salesperson. I eventually gotta hire the operations manager. So that's the, that's how I think about that.

That's good. I don't really have a response. I was just listening.

That's okay. That makes all make sense. Did I articulate in a way that it makes sense?

Yeah, 100%. Um, good.

What else you got?

Yeah, I was, I was dwelling on a few things you were saying there. Yeah, that's good. Um, yeah, like what, another thing that you had kind of talked about, like where, where do you determine to spend money? 'Cause another finite thing we have, we obviously have attention, we have time, like where do we spend money?

Yeah, it's a good point.

And kind of back to the point I made before of like looking at, okay, if I do nothing, what's the downside? If I do something, what's the upside? It could be something like buying a truck, for example. It's like, okay, well, if I don't buy the truck, I'm gonna potentially have to pay some overtime 'cause my crews are working a little bit longer. I might have to turn off my ads because I can't take any more customers. And so there's downsides of not buying the truck. Okay, well, if I do buy the truck, so I do take action on this thing that I think is important, what does that do? Well, it allows me to grow by 20%, it allows me to hire another person, it reduces my overtime. And then there's a question is like, well, if I do nothing and I raised prices, would that actually be better? So like, this is where it starts to become more complicated and this is where people like myself overthink every single one of those 3 options.

Like buy the truck. These are infinite.

Yeah, exactly.

Like infinite options.

100%. And so when you have finite amount of money though, what are some of the thought processes you think about in terms of allocating money? Is the first place your money, your thought goes is, okay, if I spend this money, does it allow me to delegate? Is that kind of how you would think about it? Like if, okay, this is a $500,000 opportunity, I'm able to delegate it for $100,000, that's a good trade. One of the things that I have really, this is one of the things that as you were talking, I was thinking about, has helped me is having 2 different lists, one being stuff to do within the next 24 hours and another one to do in the next 30 days. So that way I can get the quick wins 'cause I like the momentum thing. And a lot of times even ideas that I throw on the Trello board, I can actually get 'em done in about 30 minutes or 15 minutes. It's, or the best part is delegating. Once you know the problem and you know the solution, just delegating execution. So I've always looked at it as like to get progress made in the organization, to identify a problem, identify a solution, and execute. And the beautiful thing about delegation is I just need to know the problem and the solution. As long as I'm clear on those things, I can then delegate execution to someone else.

Yep.

One thing Dan Martell said that was really interesting, he said he wishes that every entrepreneur could, uh, feel what it feels like to run a $10 million business and then go back to their, their business because they would think about this process very differently. Because now they think about all the people on their team, their leadership team, their executives, who can take this and run with it and execute. And now their role really becomes finding problems, identifying solutions, and then delegating and taking what could be a 6-month execution process, but making the work on their agenda being a 1 day, half a day, an hour to just identify the problem, identify the solution, and then delegate to someone else. But when it comes to spending money, And making that delegation happen or making a big purchase. How do you kind of determine where to spend the money, uh, when it comes to solving these problems or these an— these things that are stressors or anxiety that is causing someone to stay up all night?

I think there's a lot of ways to answer this. This is the spending the money, I think is the, and I, I kind of talked about in the last one, or I did talk about, you know, you've got the delegation, I'm afraid to delegate, or I'm afraid to spend the money. The spending the money is the hard one. Like, for example, we use Dan's, and redirect me if I get a little too far off here and I don't answer, but like Dan's example, I agree with it. I wish you— how I heard it was, I wish you could come, like maybe you're running a $400,000 business. I wish you could come run a $10 million business, experience what that feels like, and go back and apply the lessons. And I agree. I've heard myself say quite a bit over the last many, many years now, the whole entire game of business is people. And when I say that, what I mean is that the whole game of business is hiring people to do all the stuff. It's delegation. So, I guess it's the equivalent of what Dan's saying. And one of the things that I feel like I have to be very careful about that is I can talk in that language and it's 100% truth. Because I've seen the other side. The problem is you could be running a $400,000 business and you could believe that you could come run a $10 million company. I could put you back in your $400,000 business. And when you're running my $10 million company, it's like, great. That's cool. We had $3.5 million in the bank. Did you happen to notice I have $12,000?

Yeah.

So, the whole game of business is people doesn't mean anything to me right now. Like, that's for the future. And this is where I get stuck. Like, how do we get people to that point? Like, so part of it is understanding and believing that the whole game of business is people and that delegation is the game, but we have to make lots of micro steps and micro decisions along the way to build the bank account to actually get to live in that world. And then when we do have the bank account to actually live in that world, we have to reprogram Our entire way of thinking that has got us there. So the way I got to six million dollars sitting in a bank account in a business is because I made all kinds of little decisions that just added a little bit more profit, a little bit more profit, a little bit more revenue, so that I could go get the next person, solve the next problem. It's like this puzzle that you work out, and then one day you get there. Well, you had to be very careful with your money. Like today's version of Jonathan. Philip probably wouldn't want me to do this, but I could go into City Turf and say, hey dude, I could solve all these problems. We just need this person, this person, this person. I can spend $700 grand like that.

Yeah.

And I could just buy the solutions. And my point is that is a completely different way of thinking. You can't do that for the majority of your business. And you had to make very careful, very wise decisions. You had to be, you had to pinch pennies. You had to not do things. You had to make cr— Like what it would be crazy decisions for a bigger business, but were actually really smart decisions for where you were at that moment. And you train that behavior. And so now when you have a bunch of money, you have to untrain that behavior and say, all that stuff that got me to where I'm at, throw it all out. Now we need to go. Does that, does that resonate the way I'm saying this?

Yeah.

I want to make sure I'm clear.

Yeah, 100%. Do you think though, that for the person that's doing the $400,000 has $12,000 in the bank, The reason they don't ever grow to the larger size business is because they don't take what they learned at that $10 million business and apply it at a much smaller level. For example, oh, sure. Maybe they shouldn't be the one sharpening the blades. They should delegate that to a technician so they can focus on sales.

100%. Like that is, I think most of us, I don't know if you fell into this, but I sure fell into this. I've become a pretty decent delegator, but I, you know, been doing this for a bit. I was, I, I really felt I was probably the best guy at a lot of things, right or wrong. And so, I didn't delegate. And I got to think that a lot of us do this. And I've heard somebody say once, the better you are at things, the harder it's going to be to grow this business. Because I was taught— somebody I was talking to, it was just this week, they were talking about how they know so many people. Who was I talking to? Anyway, they know a bunch of people. You don't want to say them.

You don't want to say their name.

Yeah. Well, I can't think of who it is anyway, but they were talking about like, I know so many guys that really aren't very smart and really aren't even good business owners, but they have really good businesses. I was like, there could be a correlation. They've just been good at hiring good people to do the work. And you do see that sometimes that like, some people are like, how in the world did they build this? That they didn't build their— they just like let everybody else build it. So, uh, 100% to what you're saying, that you do want to model those lessons and you apply them in the way you can apply them. Blades is a perfect example. Why are we charging the blades? Like, why are we mixing the gas? Like, I could go through so many menial tasks. Like, why are we even meeting the guys at the gate in the morning? I could have one of my best guys get the guys out in the morning. You know, there's so many things like that. Why are we doing that? So what it, what it brings up is you do want to model those behaviors, but you have to, again, have your list. Of all the things we've got to do, and you've got to constantly be asking yourself who else could be doing this thing? Who else could be doing this thing? Who else? And that, and you slowly whittle that stuff off, and eventually you're handing bigger and bigger tasks off. The behavior is correct. It's that I think sometimes I or others, we can talk too high level, and we could say, "Hey, come look at how a ten million dollar company runs," and when the person gets back, they have a really hard time extrapolating. They saw you just write a quarter million dollar check to hire somebody to solve all the problems. how do I extrapolate it to me? That's kind of what I was saying.

Yeah.

Some— something else I would add for somebody that's interested in this kind of thing, a really good book for me. It's been a long time. I should reread it. It's a book called The Theory of Constraints. It's by, uh, Goldratt, something Goldratt. It's an older book. He tells it as a story. And the reason why I love this book, I truly put it as a top book. He just simplifies this concept and the concept, this will like lead back to like your root problem analysis. So the concept is that it's a manufacturing company. Okay. So different than anything.

Oh yeah. This is a great book. I remember this book.

You know what I'm talking about?

Yeah. It's fantastic.

Fantastic book. But what it teaches you is how to break problems down and how to think about bottlenecks. So I've got this problem. What preceded that? What preceded that? What preceded like to think back through the problem? And so when you have a lot of money or your business has enough money, you could just hire people to solve all the problems. But when you don't have much money, you have to do the thinking. Like what is the cause? The cause of the problem? What's the cause of that? You have to think back through it. So I love this book for somebody who needs to kind of go back and. Think through the problem, because what you'll generally find is you have the money to solve a lot of problems if you break them down into smaller problems. You already have the people on your team that can solve a lot of problems if you just break down the big problem into smaller problems. So I can't recommend that book enough, and it's an easy, interesting read. It's not high level; it's not theory, and it's interesting because he told it as a story, and it's an audiobook. I read it as a book, but you could buy it as audiobook. I'd highly recommend that because I think it speaks to a little bit of what we're talking about here.

One thing, one thing when it comes to audiobooks recently that I've done is taking my master prompt in AI, taking like a screenshot of the book, and then just having it produce a 15-minute custom audiobook for me and my businesses. And so it'll take all the principles of the business or of the book and then customize.

The why.

Yeah, exactly. So I'll put all my projections in there, what I want to do in the future with the businesses, and it'll be like, okay, this is most relevant for the franchise, this is most relevant or the software is most relevant for the media. Here's how it all works together. And it's been like a 15-minute, 20-minute audiobooks. It just creates it and it's phenomenal.

I love that idea. I've never heard of that.

Yeah.

Sorry, I gotta write it down.

That's good.

You got anything else?

No, not really. Like when it comes to this whole notion, I think we've, I feel like we've kind of shotgunned this, but I'm hoping something landed for somebody.

I do. I hope so.

And if someone's listening to this and they're in this period where they feel this overwhelm or stress that something lands. Is there any other examples that you have from your career? You've shared several which have been super useful that kind of stand out to you as moments you, when you put this on the docket, you were thinking of, or you put yourself in the shoes of that person at some place in your business career that this kind of stood out to you? For me, it was really going through bug hell and just never, like, this is about a year and a half ago, And never being so exhausted and emotionally drained, but the exact same time having to double down and put all the chips on the table. And at the time, for me, it was like buying out my co-founder and then investing a lot more into finding the people and delegating in a business that was losing hundreds of thousands of dollars every month. And that was probably for me the, the first thing that triggered in my mind, because on there you'd put like think of examples in your own career. And that was the first one that popped in my mind of like sleepless nights, multiple nights where like just couldn't sleep. Not because I was working, just 'cause like you could not get your mind to settle down enough.

Yeah.

And maybe that was back to the 1,000 clients and the guy going on drugs. He probably got somewhere where I was at, like couldn't sleep for a couple days. He's like, you know what, I'm out. But are there any other examples in your career where you've kind of ran up this stress or this time in your career where this pressure was so much on you?

Yeah. A lot of them actually were Service Autopilot. It's the hardest business I've done. So yeah, a couple that came to mind, I remember as I was thinking about and making my notes for this today or over the last week, this one, I will probably never forget this. I think it's one of the great business— so I've got a couple I'll give, but this was one of the great business lessons. So when I was doing the cleaning company, One of my business partners in the cleaning company, um, said something to me that's just always stuck with me. And it had to do with— I've told this story where the way I ended up in CityTurf was I did not want to be in this business. I didn't want— I did it through high school into my freshman year of college. I wanted to be in tech. I was doing tech stuff. I just wanted to be in tech. And so now I end up in this lawn care business because he and I went and bought this business for $7,000 that was in the newspaper and had $50,000 in gross revenue.

I've—

you might, some might've heard the story. I've told it several times. So anyway, now I end up at this, it's the, it's before CityTurf. And these guys, they wanted, my partner wanted nothing to do with this thing. And so now it becomes my problem. And I never wanted this business. I wanted nothing to do with this. I wanted to be tech. Do tech. And I was working on the cleaning business with them. I did. I just adamantly did not want to be in this business, but now I have it. And so now it's my problem. They have absolutely nothing to do with this business. And so it's just done nothing but complicate my life. And I made lots of mistakes and I was doing all serving all kinds of properties. So I just want to paint the picture that nothing about this was fun. I was doing residential, I was doing commercial, I was doing big residential, little residential. I had— I didn't know what good employees looked like. I had crummy equipment trucks because, well, we didn't have any money to put into this stuff. Everything was no good. And so—

What do you mean, like 25, 23 at this time, or is it early 20s?

I was probably— my first software company, I would have been more like 27, I think. Okay. Yeah, yeah. And so it's like, and again, you've got to get it. There's all Over time, as people listen to me, I've done a lot of businesses. I've done a lot of stuff. And, uh, so, and I did a lot of stuff at the exact same time. It's like CityTurf was truly never anything more than a part-time business. And it wasn't until CityTurf was past $1 million that I was only doing 2 things in life. CityTurf was built past $1 million when I was doing 3 to 4 things at a time, 2 software companies and no, uh, 1 software company. a consulting software company, cleaning company, CityTurf. Yeah, those are the businesses, like too much stuff. It's insane. So anyway, I got off track. He said to me about the business that I was just miserable in, if you don't like it, you can change it.

He—

and where this came from, and he may have worded it slightly, but he was disconnected from it. He didn't care about the business. He had nothing to do with the business. And so those words really stuck with me. And I've thought about those so many times and I've said things publicly that I think are— I've said because of those words, like the ideas that one of the great things about business is you get to create this thing. You can make it anything you want it to be. You could take it any direction. You could keep it small. You can make it big. You can only serve this kind of client. You cannot serve this kind of problem. You could do anything you want. That's the coolest thing about a business. If you go get a job, you have to do whatever you have to— like, you don't have any say. You're going to Serve whatever client, whatever market, deal with whatever problem. You could create anything you want to create. I think at that time with that business, I was just trying to build it. And so, I was taking lots of revenue in lots of markets. I was trying to figure everything out and I was just doing everything I saw everybody else that had a lawn care company do. You're in fert, you're in irrigation, you do mulch, you do flowers. Like, I got to do all this. I just thought that's what I had to do. And those words were so unbelievably freeing. And partly the reason they were freeing was because he was my partner and he's kind of saying, it's cool if like we don't do this or it doesn't end up, you know, we don't turn in. He was just basically giving me permission to cut the revenue, but, you know, and I felt accountability to like, I wanted this thing to grow. So that was freeing, but also this, just this idea, he never said it explicitly, but The way I heard it was I could do anything I want with this business.

I could.

And so that gave me the permission to go cut the business. And I've told the story where I literally cut the business in half and suddenly like, I don't have to do anything and we're making money. And that was one of the greatest lessons of my life. And all of that happened really quick in like a year and a half from buying the business to that moment was about a year and a half. And that's where the idea for CityTurf came from. And, uh, and so I would, I would remind anybody watching this, like, you, you're not— you don't have to do this for anybody else. You don't have to build what the— your— somebody else you saw at a trade show is building, or what your buddies in the market are building. You could do this any way you want. If you want to do pool cleaning and just trim bushes, I don't know why you do that. You could do that. You could do anything you want.

You could.

And so just like build what you want. And you, and get rid of what is killing you. Like what's driving you insane. Another wonderful book is, um, his name's John and it's about selling. What the heck is it? I shouldn't even start going down this. Built to Sell. Built to Sell. Wonderful book. It's a, it's kind of a book about, again, it's a book I haven't read in forever, but it's a book about simplicity. I interpret it. It's been a long time since I read it, so I may be wrong here, but I hear it, or when I think about that book, I think about building the business you want to build, that you can, and you can build a big business by keeping it simple. So that would be one thing that came to mind. That was a long explanation, but really, really important. Like, you get to design this, you get to build it. You owe nobody anything. This is your thing. And you can cut it up. You can get rid of stuff. You can go in a new direction. But turn it into the thing that you can do for the next 30 years of your life. And then you've, you've actually lived a good— you're living a good life. So that's one. I've got another one if you want, but—

Go for it.

Or you got anything? You said something earlier and this, you'll have, this is a Service Autopilot story. So you'll have to extrapolate to your own business, but it's about the noise. It's about complaining. So early Service Autopilot days in 2010, The thing you got to know, we only had 100 clients by the end of 2010. The thing you got to know about Service Autopilot is everybody was desktop software when we started. We were building cloud-based. It was a very different— like, it was very different than it is today. And so we had multiple people just programming and we had nothing. So we had to build our code base from nothing to even get a product to compete with guys that had desktop software that had been in the market forever, for 20 years in some cases. Going back to the days of DOS, and so we we had to build a bunch of functionality just to get a basic set of functionality to even kind of compete with all the desktop software. And so one of the lessons another lesson I learned is, and I think that first year we had like 100 clients, and by the end of the third year we had 1,300 or 1,700 clients. I can't remember, but they were a lot of smaller clients, and there was a lot of noise. And so I I now look back, and I think we had made some really really smart design design decisions early in the business. And we, I'll make this about service businesses here in a minute, but we were hearing all this noise for the client we were serving at the time. And also we were doing cloud-based software and it was like kind of us and Jobber. There was like nobody else at the time. Everybody was desktop. And so people aren't used to this. This whole cloud thing's new. There's a, there's all kinds of discomfort created because people are having to use a new kind of technology. And so they have lots of opinions. I look back and we listened to way too many opinions. Uh, it's like some of the things we did in the beginning were exactly right for the software and where we were going in the future, but we changed them because we were listening to the wrong people. Now, how does this— do I make this about anyone listening to this? Like you might just be getting started today and you're just building— we like to talk in, it's easy for me to talk in lawn care. You're just building a mowing business right now. And I don't mean just in a negative, like, but you're just focused on mowing. But your dream is you want to build it into a fertilization weed control business, and you want to maybe move into a new market versus the market you're in right now. You have— there's a bigger plan for where you're taking this. Or maybe you're just incredibly passionate about construction and you want to eventually move to construction, but the mowing is just to get you going. So if you listen too much, you have to kind of understand where you're going, or guess at where you're going, and think about who your future customer would be. You can't There's lots of lessons here, but you can't just think about what you're hearing today based on where the business is today and what people are complaining about today or asking for today. You have to sort of have an awareness of where might we be going and are, am I, am I really making the wrong decision based on what people are saying today? Or am I making the right decision? It just doesn't seem obvious right now to the people that we're selling to, but it will be the right decision based on where we're going. There's lots of little things like this where we hear too much noise. And we question ourselves, but we've actually thought through why we're doing the thing. Or another example is it's another, it's another version of the same thing. We listen to such a small number of people. So again, I have to use the Service Autopilot example, cuz it dominated a decade of my life almost. And I, I, so try to, I'll try to extrapolate or make this about your business as well, but kind of think about Service Autopilot. I've said this before, who comes to see us at Service All-Pilot? It's all the individuals with bigger companies. The guy in the truck, the guy with 2 trucks, the guy mowing lawns with 3 trucks, he's— or cleaning pools with 3 trucks, cleaning houses with 3 crews, they can't come to Dallas and see us. But our clients that have $15 million companies, they could sit in our office for a week. They go to dinners with us. So that's who we hear more than anybody else. And so then we build functionality for them into our system more so, or we build more functionality into our system for that group who's noisier than the smaller client. And it alienates the smaller client. It makes our system feel too complex. And the smaller client doesn't even comprehend why half the functionality in our system exists. Because they don't even have the problem yet in their business that that functionality solves for. So don't know if that makes sense, but if it does, what the point I'm trying to make again is who are you listening to in your client base? So in the city turf business, in the northern part of our market in the early days were the wealthier homes, or it's like the eastern part of the market was the real, the expensive homes. And then on the Sorry, western part. And on the eastern part, it was the less expensive homes. And they were 2 completely different clients that had to be served completely different ways. And if I listened to one client, I was alienating the other. And if I built my business just for this client, I was alienating that client. And I lived that for multiple years. And so, we never quite resonated perfectly with either one until we got clear on who our client was. And so, I feel like I'm talking a lot here, but this is really important to try to step— it does have parallels to what we've talked about. There's so much complaining. There's so much asking, can you please do this? And you have to be really careful about how you deal with that emotionally. It's very hard, and not react too quickly to things. Sometimes you have to react immediately. It is something that has to be fixed. It's a root problem in the company, but most of it frankly doesn't need to be. Most of it. Yeah, please.

Oh, I was gonna say, just kind of add onto it and, and hopefully make it applicable too for anyone is like, perfect. One thing that's been really useful for me is just surveying because it gives a quantifiable amount of how squeaky is this wheel, or are there a bunch of squeaky wheels that are just being quiet? Because you also don't want to, if, if a customer's complaining, well, how many customers aren't complaining? That, that's the part that eats me at night, right?

Yeah, right.

It's like, yeah, okay, so, so one person has this problem or wants this feature or a customer is complaining. What about all the people who didn't say anything that I also really want to serve well? And so surveys have been really useful for me. And then it's helpful for me when I do a, when I do my sprints, for example, I'm prioritizing what I think is important, but that should really be based upon the people I'm trying to serve. Like, what do they think is important? And then that is also helpful to make sure that the, the loudest customer doesn't get to kamikaze your, your list of, of priorities because they're simply the loudest on Facebook, or they're leaving you negative reviews, or they're saying things to your crew, or they're leaving phone messages with your admin all the time. So they get all the attention when they might be one of 100 other people, and 80 of the other 100 would love for you to spend time on this other aspect. And so surveys have been really helpful for me to create a metric of whether it be Net Promoter Score. And then one thing that I've thought about is like segmentation of my customers and then how they react to my surveys. For example, to what you just said, like the east and the west of your market might have had very different responses to a survey. And so now I need to actually segment the surveys.

Great point.

Using the example of like Service Autopilot, like you mentioned, is like segmentation of, okay, different sizes of business. I need to— might need to segment my surveys by size of business to determine what I should be focused on next for individual customers or segments of customers. And then the last thing I was thinking kind of around this idea of surveying and matching that up with what we think is important to the business is I think the most valuable person, the person who leaves, because they're the ones that it wasn't just a squeaky wheel, they actually left. The customer who canceled service, knowing why they canceled is a really strong signal as to what should be— what should I be focused on? Because it's not the person who's just loud, not just the person who is annoying. They left the business. And to know why has been always a really clarifying function for me as to what I should be focused on next.

Just to go a little bit deeper on that one, do you have advice for people on how to get that information when sometimes you feel like they're not telling you the truth? 'Cause they don't wanna have, they don't wanna offend you or have that conversation, or you just, they text or email the cancellation and you never get 'em on the phone. Do you have any tricks to capturing that?

I think one thing is just being human at that point and just being like, hey, whether we disappointed you, we, you think we're too expensive, and just like identifying several opportunities for them to just be like, yes, it's that one. So they don't feel awkward. Um, yeah. Is it because we have too many bugs? Is it because our technician didn't do a good job? Is it because we kept not blowing off the backyard patio? Like, Giving them, basically handing it to them and just being like, they just gotta identify it.

Yeah.

'Cause most people are nice. And this was the hardest part when we were going through Bug Hell and I was, I had like a bajillion priorities. Like, what do I fix when there's a burning house? And it was a function of, okay, the biggest pain is the one that's causing someone to leave. But what, most people are nice. They knew I was trying my best. They knew that I was doing everything I could. I was exhausting all my personal resources to try to fix the problems. So they didn't wanna come out with a, You know, a machine gun and start telling me all the problems. And so I had to just tell them, like, was it this? Was it this? Was it this? And I need you to tell me one because that's going to help me. And reversing it for the customer to make it where they feel like they're helping you by giving you that critical feedback is a challenge.

Yeah, it's great. Well, that's all I got.

Let's go. I think that was helpful.

I hope so.

I feel like we did throw some mud against the wall, but I think for anyone that might be going through it in the middle, One or two sentences might have helped them. And I'd love to hear from those of you that are listening and made it this far in the comments. Maybe just describe where you're at right now, maybe some of the things that you're wrestling with or the things that are stressors in your business, and maybe the unlock or something you heard in today's episode that might help you get through that moment, make a decision, pivot, or make a change in your own business.

Yeah, please do. We'd appreciate the comments. It's helpful for us to understand what to talk about here because 'Cause the whole point of this is to try to help solve your problems. And so the more you tell us, the more we can tailor these to you.

Awesome.

Great.

Thank you all for watching.

Appreciate it.

Take care.

See ya.