Why I'm Building a "Campus" for My Team

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes here. And today I'm showing you around a facility that we have had in our possession for over 5 years. And this is land out in Bellingham, Washington, 5 acres. But today we broke ground on the headquarter building for Augusta Nation and HomeWorks. 5 years ago, I bought the land with cash thinking that we could probably build within a year and a half. And it has taken 5 years. It's kind of exciting. First day, break ground, actually get started. Got the excavator, bulldozer, another excavator, big roller installing the front drive area and the culvert for the ditch here. This is what it's going to kind of look like. This is building 1, and it's not even— it's not going to be big enough for us for, you know, the moment this thing is completed. It's not going to be big enough simply because the team's already grown so much. But My hope is in the future we can build this into kind of like a campus. So have multiple buildings and really train owners at Augusta here better. General managers. I'd love to be able to do employees down the road, have live modules that technicians can learn from here on site. Having a team together will be super powerful. It's one thing to have office staff. We have Command Center with 80+ agents now. Just like a mile or two from here. But the ability for them to be able to see the technicians rolling in every day working from the local shop, the ability for them to be able to see them doing that in the cold, in the rain, and then vice versa for the team on the field to see the people that are answering their phone calls every day, the ability for the engineers and the support team on the software side to actually be in the same building, in the same property as the people that they are serving, I think is an intangible benefit that's hard to quantify. This is from like the middle of the property. Back here is where Building 1 will go. It's 100 feet long, 50 feet wide, 2 stories. But in the back there, the property is 5 acres, so it's lots of land. But in the back here is where we already have to start thinking about Building 2. Fortunately, the current command center, we have that, you know, on a lease for another 4 years, so So we got plenty of time to be able to build the second building. And since I already have the land and we're kind of developing it for plenty of more buildings in the future, it should be significantly more cost-effective just to keep building here. In the back here is where we have— this is where we put the well and we have to do stormwater retention pond. We have to do fire suppression with a big tank and everything. Back in here is where building 2 could go. And there's still so much land in the back 'cause it's 5 acres. So lots of room to grow. But my hope is that there's so much I want to do here in the future, and whether it be just better facility for training owners of Augusta, general managers, technicians down the road, and even just being able to bring many of you in person for workshops, etc., would be, would be great. But the reason I wanted to make the video is you probably see for myself or other people, Brian Fullerton has an awesome shop space he recently built as well. It's so easy to— oh wow, look at this, they got the tracks, a bunch of mud pulling through here. Still pretty wet here, honestly, uh, it's still March. So, so easy to be like, man, where am I at, and why can't I get that size and building shop space and having— and I understand it. Like, I just want to be clear though, I started mowing grass when I was 11 years old. I started Augusta Lawn Care when I was 18 years old. It is 12 years since I started Augusta Lawn Care. I'm 30 years old now to where I'm building this. And the reason I say is, don't judge yourself. Don't just judge your day one based on someone else's. And for my case, year 12. It's so easy to compare. It's so easy— like, people say comparison is the thief of joy. I think comparison is what causes people to stop constantly improving on their own craft. And then you start comparing yourself to someone ahead of you, someone behind you. Like, if you're comparing yourself to someone ahead of you, you start to feel depressed. You start to feel like, man, such a loser, I'm so behind. If you start comparing to someone that is way behind you, you start easing off the gas. You start thinking, man, I'm doing so good, I don't need to push as hard, I can let off a little bit, I can relax. That's the exact moment that someone else, another competitor, is willing to take your lunch. Doing the best for yourself and just challenging yourself to improve every single day is really the litmus test for success. It's not comparing yourself to me, to another one of your competitors, a social media influencer, someone else in the field, someone doing big projects that get big pieces of equipment like this. It's just not. It's just getting better every single day. One of the things I was telling, uh, Nick, our owner success manager, we were talking the other day and I said that Constant improvement gets boring when you're directionally correct. And so if you feel like your business is boring, you're not like, you don't have an expectation. I'm not building up this big shop space. This is where it'll go up top here. Um, it doesn't seem exciting. Most riches are really built when things get boring. You're doing the same thing every single day. The monotony of the business recurring services, doing the same thing, just making tiny little improvements, 1%, 2% improvements daily. It's even if you look at like this whole AI thing right now, you know, a company like Apple, for example, everyone considered them so far behind in the AI race for the last few years because they didn't do something crazy, ChatGPT thing. They weren't investing hundreds of billions of dollars into our infrastructure. And yet they're profitable. They just keep making their iPhones slightly better every year. And I use that as an example because You know, most of us aren't trying to challenge OpenAI or Microsoft in the next AI race, but you're going to get that same flashy woman in the red dress thing in your business regardless of a marketing idea, a new service you want to add, a new service area. But many times the most profitable businesses are the ones that just are okay with doing the same thing every single day, 1% better. And also you wake up in 12 years and you do have some cool stuff and you do have a shop space that's being built. I'm very grateful and thankful for that. However, I remember what it's like to see other people do that and just feel like, kind of, where's my shop? Like, where's, where's my nice truck? And where's my equipment? And I've been working at 3, 4, 5 years, and like, where's the evidence of success? And I just encourage you to stick to it. If you look at almost every entrepreneur that you look up to, every competitor in home services, even in technology, almost all of them have been in the game for 10, 15, 20 years. And I highly recommend just think of your business in the next 10 years, in 2036, 2037. That's when you can start judging yourself. But if you've been in the game for 2, 3 years, or even if you start making a big change in your business— I was talking to an owner in Augusta that a couple of years ago made a big pivot away from projects into recurring revenue, and his revenue is basically flat since then. But he knows he's making a structural change to the business and moving away from big projects and towards recurring jobs that allow him to not be there every single day. It's so easy on social media to look at people that are doing it so fast, doing it so quickly, making money so fast, especially with technology and AI stuff. It's like, oh my word, I should be making $1 billion in like 36 months. It's crazy. And that's one out of billions of people that started their business will ever have that outcome. And so to think that you're going to and then judge yourself based upon that is crazy. So as I build this over the next 8, 9, 10 months, don't feel that, that pressure that you need to go build a shop, that you need to go have a big area to be able to park pieces of equipment or fast fancy new trucks. I didn't have that for 12 years. This is a result of doing the boring work and showing up consistently. When I first got started I was allergic to grass. I still am. Back then it was really bad though, and I'd wake up usually around 5 to 6, get started with mowing grass. When I first started Augusta Lawn Care, at the time I just dropped out of medical school, and so I was doing my MBA, my Master's in Business Administration, at night at Western Washington University. So I'd work usually from 6, 5 to 6 in the morning once it was light and bright outside, and then I would usually get off around 4 or 5, come home, shower, sometimes work out. A lot of times I ended up just driving straight to school at 6 down to college. And man, I'd go from 6 to 10 with lectures, and then usually from 10 to 11 or 12 with projects with the rest of my class. That was my routine, my life for the first year and a half to 2 years, just grinding on the business, trying to get off the ground, hiring the first 1, 2, 3 employees. You're like, oh man, like it was a big payoff. Nope. 3 years into it, got trapped underneath a dump truck in a PTO accident and ended up on a hospital bed realizing my business had no systems and everything I learned in my MBA class I had not implemented. And in that moment, I still remember going into the CAT machine, CAT scan, because they thought maybe I'd broken my neck and I just felt like a failure. Like I dropped out of medical school. That's what I had. My whole identity was wrapped up in that for so many years. I went to college when I was 13 years old. I was called Doogie Howser forever. I had posters up on the wall, skeletons and muscles, and my whole identity was wrapped with me being a doctor. I watched every single surgery you could think of. I shadowed doctors in our local area of just about every specialty, all sorts of stuff, like just tons of— it was great. I loved it. And then I dropped all of that and did the only thing I really knew how to do, which was lawn care. That's when I started Augusta. And so I remember going in that cat machine, just being like, man, maybe everyone else was right. Because a lot of my peers, a lot of my professors specifically, kind of said, hey, look, you're crazy, man. Like, you're giving up this thing that you're so good at, and we had so much hopes for you, and you're gonna do lawn care? Like, for crying out loud, like, what in the world? I was doubting myself. I was 3, 4 years deep into starting Augusta Lawn Care and had no evidence of success whatsoever. I was like, man, maybe they're right. I have a business that can't run without me. I was literally on the hospital bed videoing, FaceTiming my crew just to walk them through the next job. Like, maybe, maybe they're right. I should have done this whole thing. And I say that because I think there are people watching this that are thinking the same thing, or they've been told by friends or family that you should give up. They should, you know, throw in the towel. In the next 14 to 16 months, I turned around the business after realizing it needed systems, implemented pay for performance, focused so much on SEO and website stuff and reviews and using video inside the business and dialing in systems for admin phone calls and upsells and follow-up phone calls. I just like did everything I knew I was supposed to do in my business classes. I just did it in my business. And that was the systems that I talked about on YouTube channels early on. That we implement at Augusta Lawn Care and that I hope helps people. But that was 5 years, 5 years before I really saw a business that could produce good money. That, that year after, we did $280,000 in distributions and over a million dollars in revenue. For the first time, I'd made that much money, and I was working 1 to 2 hours a week at the office versus before my accident, I was working 80, 90, 100 hours a week trying to stay up with everything. And so it wasn't me just me needing to work harder. It was me needing to humble myself and realize, like, I don't know everything. I need to learn. I need to change. Like, what I'm doing right now is not going to lead to the business or to the success or to the dream that I've, I've had in my mind. For so many of us, it's actually we're just getting in our own way, and we can't humble ourselves to realize, like, I need help. I haven't done this correctly, and I need to change. And that realizing it could take a year, 2 years, 3 years of change to actually see that come about in the business. I just encourage you to make that. Um, it's just a— it's a humbling experience to realize you don't know everything, you need help. And so whether it be reaching out for like a turnaround— that's what I try to do the Turnaround Show for— reaching out to someone else locally is like, I gotta humble myself and talk to a competitor locally that has done better than me? Are you kidding me? The alternative is that you just— you never hit your goals, that you never succeed, that all the work that you put in is a waste. And when I was in the hospital, 22, 23 years old, and just like realizing that me dropping out of school, me getting my MBA, all that a waste. It was a loss if I couldn't just humble myself to realize I had built a business that didn't work and I needed to rebuild the whole thing. I need to strip out artificial turf and tree chipping and building walls and paver patios. And we had excavators and 3 skid steers. Like, I had to pull all that out and dump trucks, all the stuff that we had accumulated. And a lot of it was just pride. Pride feels good to you, but it will not help you get to where you want to go. And I had to humble myself and just be like, I built a business that was— I built it wrong. And I need to focus on systems. I need to focus on recurring revenue. I need to focus on empowering my team and pay for performance and profit sharing and creating a path for them to move up inside their career. And I had done it all wrong. And sometimes it takes like moments like getting stuck underneath a dump truck for you to realize that. I don't want you to be there. That's why I make the content. It's like every single time I make content, I'm thinking about that person, either when I dropped out of medical school and was just getting started, or B, when I had a million-dollar business that did not work and I had to restructure the whole thing over the course of 12 or 14 months and just redo everything. And it takes humility to, to, uh, to do that. And I just encourage you this year as we head into spring rush, don't compare yourselves to others. Stay focused on what you're doing and do more and better of what you're already doing. More reps, do it better. Focus on 1% improvements every single day. Not trying to build a massive shop space. Worry about the next 10-year swings instead of thinking about next week, next month, I'll be successful this year, I'll be successful. Thinking I'm going to get myself to doing this for the next 10 years. And if you do that, you'll wake up on the other side realizing that you're probably in the top 1 or 2% in the industry. And then why would you switch to another industry when you can just double down on the thing that you're already outstanding at, that you're already in the top 1%? You can always just copy and paste that. You can duplicate that. You can allow other people, your technicians, your general manager, to move up and do exactly what you've done. And so I just encourage you, even as you see this shop space being built over the next year, it'll be fun. I'm super excited about it. I'm excited to see the people learn and have a place that we can all grow together. Augusta Nation deserves a spot like this. We've for a long time been a little strip mall, pack people in one bathroom, one toilet. Got the wives of our owners many times come. We have female owners that come and it's just weird and awkward to have a toilet right next to their little space there is like 800 square feet. And so to have the space, to have the shop here locally and all the trucks, the technicians, the general manager, the call center and command center, to be able to have owners here come and train, it'll be super valuable. Having engineers, you know, build the code for the people that are literally right beside them answering the phone, right beside them going out for a long day worth of work and doing landscaping. Like, it's hard work, man. All right, before I close out the video, I want to do two things.

First off, I want to say thank you to everyone that makes this possible, specifically the owners of Augusta Lawn Care, the members of HomeWorks, and the members of Home Service Web Design. Um, without you guys and your support, everything we do, all the free turnarounds, everything, all the content, over 5,000 videos I've made, is not possible. This headquarter building is not possible. So first off, thank you very much. Secondly, if you want to come see the headquarter building in person once it's done, by the time this video comes out and you join Agusto Nation and then you come to training, this will probably be finished towards the end of 2026. So if you'd like to come here in person get trained up as an owner of Augusta Nation, go to augustalawncare.com. Go down in the description, there's a link directly to book a call with Lee and see if joining Augusta Lawn Care and Augusta Nation is the right fit for your business and be able to take it to the next level. It's an incredible group of people, and you'll be able to come and see the new headquarters building in person once it's built.

So thanks so much.