Will I Lose All My Customers Switching Brands?

What have you seen as the churn in say you know, you have an established company, it's been around for years, they love you, they know who you are, it's like a small, very personal business. And then you try and switch and rebrand that. What is the churn that you see there?

Yeah, pretty low. Mostly because the way that we pitch changing brands and this is helpful regardless if you go to Augusta or if you are doing a new brand, like we talked about yesterday, how you're going to pitch, that is here's all the benefits for you and your price is not increasing. So for example, if we know now you have your phones will be answered 24 7, your credit card can go on file, you're going to show up, we're going to have yellow uniforms and yellow trucks. We're now part of a brand that has 170 locations behind it. And so for every customer that wants a personable, you know, local company, there are other people that want a reputable, very brand backed company because they know if something bad happens, they have someone to go complain to. And so like when I choose a service provider, I will look for franchises because I know that they have to pass a certain threshold of quality as well as liability insurance as well as if they do something wrong, I will go to their franchisor and I will complain. And so there's someone that holds them accountable. And this is the thing, in your market you might have 10, 15, 20 other independent providers that are all trying to be the local small town guy. There's exactly zero, maybe one, there's that is actually a national brand that taps into that 20, 30% of the market that is usually the least price sensitive that wants that kind of service. So I actually believe that by using AI, by being extremely professional, by being part of a larger brand, you tap into a market that none of your competition can even say they go after.

What cash reserves do you recommend being like, say you want to join. How much cash would you recommend we should have?

Yeah, so we, we now are not allowing anyone if they have under 50,000 if they're starting from scratch. Now everyone here has an existing business and so it's more a matter of you have your initial fee and you paint your trucks and wrap your put decals on. So that's really the cost barrier. If someone's brand new, I recommend having at least 80,000 to be able to scale up faster. The locations that scale with, you know, try to get to through 500,000 within, from 0 to 500,000 within two years, I see them usually having at least 100,000, at least. So it's really depending on how much you're going to grind too. Like if you're going to be, if you're willing to do door hangers on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, you're going to have to, you're not going to need as much upfront capital in marketing. So it really is a matter of, you know, that, that equation.

Perfect. Thank you.

You got it. Someone just in the back. Thank you.

What would you say your startup costs are for equipment for if you're shooting for $800,000 business?

If you're starting up from zero, I would not recommend buying the equipment required for an $800,000 business. I would do it to be able to get capacity high enough to be able to.

Because again, we talked about the 4L framework. If you're asking how much liquidity do I need in order to be able to have $800,000 business, I would say, well, you need a certain number of leads, then you need a certain number of laborers and then you need a manager to get to that level.

Yeah, but the question is for the $800,000 businesses in here, like what would you say your value of your equipment is? So if you were just to buy that outright right now, it just depends.

It depends on your service mix. Depends on, for example, in my market we use push mowers only. We have no zero turns in one of my markets and the five that I used to have last year we had 48 inch mowers on every truck. So that's going to be a huge variant. And again, that type of equipment is going to be determined by my property size.

Okay, one other question. How does it pair with a tree.

Care company, Augusta Lawn Care. So we do allow for services outside of Augusta Lawn Care's brands. If you have a green industry like lawn care landscaping, within two years, you do have to convert it into Augusta. And the reason we do that is so that people can't get try to use their other brand as a way to get around the territory system and then compete with another owner. We never want that to happen and that hurts our sales. Quite honestly, I think most people here would be like, hey, I'll do a second location under Augusta within two years. You'll have to convert it into Augusta. And we know that hurts our sales, but I don't want any contention between the owners.

So Mike, Cameron, Mo and Snow question about coming up with instant pricing or over the phone pricing for simple landscape jobs like trimming bushes Pulling weeds, things like that. Do you have any advice for ways to streamline or simplify that so that you can actually give prices for property cleanups over the phone?

Yeah. So we'll get to general Q and A tonight. I just wanted to answer Augusta related ones. In terms of instant pricing, though, the first thing I'd be doing is looking at yesterday, we had three different ways to do instant pricing. The first one is simply put your prices in your existing estimate form and give ranges. So, hey, small, medium, and large. My recommendation is use pictures. It's the highest conversion we see across the board when it comes to instant pricing. And it beats out a lot of other mechanisms. And I think as AI improves, that might change. But for now, we see that as our highest converting form.

Sounds good.

Oh, Mike. So if we transition and we have like say 30,000 door hangers from our old brand.

Yeah.

We know that we won't be able to switch the website right away. Will we still be able to use those door hangers even though we made the transition?

Yeah. Like, I think in terms of if you're, you know, 30,000 door hangers is $3,000. I don't think there's a $3,000 decision. That would be the first part. The second part is, and what I mean by that is like if $3,000 makes or breaks, and whether or not we use the door hangers, makes or breaks, changing the brand, I don't think there's enough value to join. The second thing I would say is you do have time where you can transition the brand. So most people that do transition take four, five, six months. Some people pull the band aid right off. So you could definitely put them out, get the customers in, and then transition down the road. But within two years, you'd have to transition. It is difficult sometimes if you're not gonna transition quickly. Cause you're showing up in a yellow truck, for example, and then yet they're paying, you know, the card statements as Estrella Lawns. And so my recommendation is to do it faster if you can, but most people will do it over the course of time.

Okay.

Yep.

Hey, Mike Taylor here from Midnight Sun Mowing in Alaska here with the different brands that you guys have under the Augusta franchise. You guys never mentioned irrigation. That's going to be pretty huge to us in our local service area and throughout the state. What kind of support would you guys offer to that, if any at all? Or would that be kind of something that we would control under your. Your name brand?

Yeah. So we're agnostic as to what services you offer as long as they're inside the green industry in terms of underneath the brand of Augusta. Right. So you can't go do no paving under in say Augusta paving. You can't do that. As long as it's through the lawn care or it's Christmas lights, it's handled. And there are significant numbers of locations do irrigation. I find over time as they adopt the systems, they start to realize that irrigation is a difficult one to systematize, hire for and scale. Especially when they start thinking about second and third locations and they are forced to start thinking about other services. And so many times I see people get into irrigation because they A have the skills B and B because the other core services that are simple don't provide enough revenue. And so they add those other services. Why usually see in Augusta is they will keep those cores, the service like irrigation and we do quote support them in terms of command center, et cetera. And you know, taking a lead for you, that's totally fine. What we see is that over time the other revenue services, the revenue for the other services grow enough to where they eventually let those services go that are more complicated and harder to do. So simplify.

Can old man ask a follow up question?

Go ahead. Yeah, go ahead.

Jody from Midnight Sun Mowing. Big question. With us being seasonal and going at the end of the year here, would you suggest or would you advocate us borrowing the money to convert to you at this point or wait till we get into season to have when we have the money to do that?

Yeah. Borrowing money adds risk. I'm not a huge proponent of any sort of debt. I think the only equation in this regard that you might want to consider is the interest versus the savings of $400 per month. So I would be looking at what do I have to borrow if I'm trying to accelerate this by say one year and if I'm going to be paying two, three hundred dollars a month in interest for the next two or three years, is that better than having to join next year at the $400 per month increase? So that'd just be my honest. Like if I was talking to you one on one, that's what I'd say.

Okay, cool.

To your right in the middle.

Yeah.

Hi, what was your name?

Sorry?

Christine.

Christine.

Sorry. Thank you so much. So we have a company that serves clients within a 30 mile radius currently. So let's say that we change and we open up Augusta.

Right.

We know that's that five mile radius. We continue to take care of our Clients because there are no other Augusta services around us. Right. And we label all of our trucks, we do all the wrap everything, and we're out there doing our business for a couple of years and then somebody else realizes that there's all these Augusta trucks running around in an area that we aren't tied to. Can somebody then open up a business and then have we no longer are allowed to have that territory?

Great question. So I think that was one of the ones leaping here. So two things. First off, inside of your 30 mile radius, what's your population, do you think? Guess.

Oh, it's 300,000.

We always make sure there's 100,000 people inside your territory. And we believe that it's. You can easily grow an $800,000 business inside of 100,000 people. I grew to 1.1 million up in Blaine, Washington and there's a couple of the people from up there. It's like six or seven thousand people before we moved out of blaine. And the reason I actually like the smaller radius is I can boil the puddle, I can get better out density, et cetera. Now, that being said, to answer your question more directly, because you have these customers all spread out, if I was in this situation, I would personally do is I would take the five mile radius. I would say this is my market I would like to be in and it Maybe contains only 50% of my customers. I'm going to go ahead and get my territory, I'm going to lock the area in and then you can serve outside your territory. That's fine. You're just not guaranteed to have that. If someone else came along, they could get that territory that was outside of yours. That's true. Now, you would not lose your customers. Right.

Really quickly you just said you will not lose your customers. Do our customer market in that area then become that person's or they. We have to stop serving them.

You do not have to stop serving them. Any new leads that come in that are not in the database of that of your system and you're an existing provider for them would then go to the person that bought that territory. Now, if you look at a 30 mile radius, you could literally fit eight different territories of five miles. And so I seem to believe that unless this is extremely dense area, it's unlikely that more than one or two locations will pop up around you. And so it'll be probably small pockets. What I would recommend, even if you didn't join Augusta, I would say look at a map. I would choose a five mile radius regardless. Like if you think? Don't think up here. I would choose that. And that only market in that area. Anything outside of that you can absolutely serve. Your service area can be as big as you want. With Augusta, we don't recommend that for a lot of different reasons, but you can serve outside your territory. You just can't get a new lead inside of someone else's territory. And someone could come along and get that area. Now, we would let you know beforehand and see if you wanted it. But again, I don't think this would even be a problem because you have such a massive. If you took five miles as your locked in area and then one other person got it, it's probably 5% of your current customer base.

And just to final clarify, because I just want to make sure. I completely understand. So in this scenario, we're servicing a client that's 20 miles away. Somebody buys that territory, they own that territory. We still can service that customer. We do not lose that customer. And we can gain additional customers in that area.

We cannot, you cannot gain new leads in that area. Any lead that will come in is first checked. Where's the address? And it goes to that person, regardless of who they're calling. But you can continue to service them. And what usually happens in this regard, because when we see multiple owners get together, there's a lot of synergies operationally. But also from a marketing perspective, the thing that I actually see the most though, is when someone does join, they'll say, hey, you got six or seven clients in my area. Let's swap, because I have some over in yours. Can I have some of yours? Do you have some of mine? These ones are closer to me, these ones are close to you, and it's usually pretty amicable. We also will ensure that if someone ever did come along, you're getting introduced to them before they join. We actually ask that you pass off on it before they join. From a cultural perspective, if a company.

The size of ours wanted to join in and we knew we had that 30, 30 mile radius, would you give us a discount to have multiple locations in an area?

This is what we call the executive model. If you want to get six locations, that's $75,000 though. And we just rolled that. We have a couple people that have just got that. But that would be six locations and you have six general managers from day one, I recommend having significant amounts of capital, over $500,000 at least.

Oh, okay.

All right.

Well, I only have a few minutes. Let's see here. That one was already covered. What Happens if it's a bad fit, I don't want to become a part of Augusta Nation after joining. He'll come to training. At training, before you leave, if you're like, hey, this is not for me, I don't think it's just come talk to me or talk to Lee and we'll give you your money back. Okay. The reason we do that is because I know once you come to training, you'll see the value in it, you know, and. Yeah. So you can get your money back if you think that's better.

Oh, one quick thing. If you do have. If you're a veteran, you do get $5,000 off, so that might be helpful.

Why wouldn't I join another more established franchise? You guys have only been doing this a few years. I would probably go talk to some of those other franchisees from other systems and just get their feedback. What's good, what's bad. Same thing that you would do. I would recommend to owners of Augusta Nation, can I join later in 2025 and get the discount monthly rate? No.

No. Basically, the $5,000 has to be paid by tomorrow at midnight, and then you have to be pay the rest of it and come to training by the end of March. And so we have three more training sessions. They're four days long, so you can come to any of those. It's gonna have to be super loud. You're gonna have to yell.

So if we did sign up, how many people can come to the training? Like, all four of us? How many people in the company could come to the training? Just one person or the whole. Like, we have four in ours.

Where's Lee? Lee. Lee. Lee. Is it two?

Two per location. And then I think it's $1,000 for any one additional. Yeah.

Okay. Raise your hand, but the micron's got to get to you. All right, I'll read one more while we get in there. How do I get my initial fee back? Just follow P4P Open Book Management and wrap your trucks. You get your money back either as a rebate in five years towards your next location or in 10 years. I will hand you a check. What makes a good fit of a member of Augusta Nation?

First off, we believe that a great community, regardless of whether it be a country or a family or a community like Augusta Nation, is only as strong as the people that are contributing to it. And so we are looking for people that want to give more than want to take. And so whether to do the coaching, whether it be helping the people alongside of you, One of the things that I'm extremely against is incorporated in fighting between owners. I will get right in between the two of them and mediate if needs be, because we don't stand for that. So if we think someone's going to be combative, they're going to be trying to take a leads from other people, they're going to be trying to sneak into their territory. We won't have nothing to do with it. And we have let people out of Augusta Nation in order to maintain that standard.

Parker, Dander, Tennessee. My second question is, what kind of expense do we need to be prepared for to coming to the training? So, for example, us coming from Dandridge all the way to Seattle, Airbnb, like rental cars. Like, what's the kind of process of that?

Yeah, you get flight, rental car and hotel, or Airbnb. And then if you're really scrappy, like some people have, they will sleep in their car and they'll make it with basically just the air flight. So it's, you know, how much do you want to spend? If you want to come over to my house, I'll do it for like, $50,000. I'll go take a hotel. I'll do dinner for $50,000.

That wasn't necessarily in the package. Mike, on your left. Yeah, we got a couple more minutes. Oh, nine minutes. Okay. Yeah, go ahead.

This is a little different question, but what does it look like to buy.

Out a Gusta location? Yes, I think there's. My apologies. Go ahead, finish up.

Yeah, just find out a location in my area, and if you've done that.

And what's that look like? Yeah, so I think there's two locations, maybe three that are for sale right now. So if you go on the franchise site, you can actually see which ones are available. Those would not be tied to, like, the initial fee that you pay that. And then we have a transfer that comes across. So that's all spelled out on that page. I think there's a couple locations. Where are you located?

Arkansas.

I'm asking to not be Augusta.

I'm asking to buy Augusta location, turn it into my company.

Oh, yeah, you could do that. You could buy one of those locations out and just talk to them, like, hey, I don't want the license. That would come off the balance sheet. And then you could buy out their customers. That's fine. Yep. On your balance sheet is basically the franchise license. So, for example, there's owners here that, like, they joined, they paid 2, 3, $4,000 for their license. If they go and Sell it on their balance sheet when they sell, they're putting it as $24,000 now, so it will go up in value.

Hey, Mike. So a majority of my business business comes from commercial snow removal. I know that you had mentioned that if it's part of that green industry, you would kind of like merge it all into Augusta. I just was wondering, I feel like it's a completely like separate like business model and the work is pretty different. So I was wondering, if I were to join and wanted to keep that separate, would that be possible or would I have to convert into the whole thing?

Yeah, we don't take a royalty. So we're really like from a revenue perspective, I don't care. It's more a matter of making sure that if someone ever came along and wanted to do snow removal, also that you don't use that brand to get leads inside of their territory. I don't want the infighting between the owners. So that's the type of thing you need to talk to Lee about. And we would distinguish what exactly your territory is, where are you doing your services, and see if that's something that could work. As a rule of thumb, I would recommend keeping it together. And it'd just be a matter of over time, you've probably seen that keeping the brand together would be more beneficial for you.

Mike, far left, Brian from Bonney Lake. You guys are using the term franchise. Do you guys have any like FDDs or if not, do you require anybody to publicly post their financial information?

Yep. So there's a franchise disclosure document and it's like, I think it's 120 pages now. So it has all of that information there. Has average revenues, etc. Also has a list of every person that's ever left Augusta with their contact information. We also give you a contact list of every single owner. Not a cherry picked few. Every single owner. Owner will give you a list of their contact information.

Because when I tried to join or when I was thinking about joining grounds guys gave me three and I know they're cherry picked. I was like, I'm not calling them. I'll call some randomo. And that's what I did. And that convinced me not to go. So, like, I would recommend talking to the other owners.

Go ahead.

Hey, Mike. Oh, sorry. Hey, for those of us with bad backs and can't carry a leaf blower for more than 10 minutes, can you talk about a bit about going IPO? Because I know a lot of us would love to invest and can you share a little Bit of that, yeah.

So, okay, so initial public offerings. When IPO is, that means when you take a company public, you go on a stock exchange.

The goal in doing so, our goal is to be able to have a valuation over a billion dollars by the time we do that. To do that, we believe that there'll be the three entities that we currently have as we bring them together and we have this month into a holding company will be more valuable together. The reason is because the media side, we don't do marketing very much at all. And that brings in our customers. And so we have a negative customer acquisition cost, which means I make money on the media and it also brings in all my customers. So whether it be for Augusta or for Copilot, the software that we're building, the reason I believe that the IPO is important is because first off, when robotics comes along, it'll go. Robotics is going to be the thing that from a technological perspective consolidates the industry. Right now there's 600,000 plus operators. Now if you go back to 2012, no one owned more than 1% of the taxi market and all of a sudden Uber and Lyft came along and now more than 75% of the market is owned by two people. And so for everyone that said that taxis would never become a consolidated market, they became wrong. Because technology came along a pretty prove them wrong. Robotics will do the exact same thing in the lawn care industry. But who will win that game is the one that's best capitalized first of all, but also has the distribution. And that's why I'm doing franchising to get the location so we can buy thousands of robots instead of one at a time. We also have the systems behind the back end for command center to operate said robotics. And then we have the software that we can create to man the robotics. And so I believe that when the robotic technology and price come to the head, we, we'll be able to take advantage of that if we build the infrastructure prior and that's what we're going for.

Can you give like a range like 10 years from now?

8 to 10. 8 to 10 years is the range.

I'm excited for that, Mike.

Yeah, you got it man. But yeah, we're only allowing Augusta Nation to invest in it. It's not like we are desperate for the money. I could probably really, really scrounge myself and make it happen. But big piece of it is in 2024 I made some mistakes publicly and the people that really helped me and like kept it together was a Gust of Nation. And so I want people like that in the company and not just participants, but actually owners far left in the very back.

Mike.

Hi, Mike. Sarah from Central Florida. We have a roughly $3 million revenue for our tree service with no lawn care. At the present moment, we're looking at getting lawn care added in. With that, we've been in business for over 30 years. We don't want to lose our logo. We don't want to lose our people. Would we be able to do Augusta lawn care for our long service, but add a T and K logo onto our trucks as well as on our T and K trucks, add an Augusta logo? It would have to be something you talk to Lee about every single. If the truck ever gets modified, I personally have to sign off on it. And so I will make the distinguishing yes or no on that eventually. But I think before we even talk about whether a logo goes on the truck, it's more a matter of, does this even work in that market? Because what we don't want is like, well, do you do bush trimming? Because if bush trimming is another owner that comes along that they're gonna wanna offer that service. Now, if these are emergency hazardous trees that are not inside the service scope of Augusta, then you can do what you want. Like, we don't really care. I mostly just think about the future owners that will come around you. Cause we will have more locations down the road. And I don't want interfighting. It's like, I hate drama. So that's our only concern. And I would just talk to Lee, go over your actual area. I'd look at your service mix. Is it gonna ever go against another owner inside of Augusta Nation? And it doesn't sound like it is if you're doing big, massive hazardous trees. We're not ever doing that. But if you are picking out flower, picking out weeds out of flower beds and trim bushes, that could become a problem. Okay, perfect. Thank you. You got it. And it would probably be a good thing if you do the hazardous stuff that if you think about yesterday as, like, cure for the recurring side, I'd be looking at potentially this branch for Augusta as that cure to what you're doing with the 3 million. Good stuff. We got a couple more back here. We got two more minutes. Oh, right here.

Okay.

He wants to write it down. Okay. We got, like, a bunch of hands far right in the bike, Mike. Okay.

My name is Garrett from East Springfield. I just bought into the franchise. Do we ever see. I know you recommend five to eight employees for Each location will the territory license if we grow to that point, does it ever split into two territories if it can support a secondary location? Or is your recommendation just to grow beyond that and go to the 1.5 million model?

Totally up to you. Totally up to you. So we have owners inside the gas station that want the 1.5 model and that's where they go to. Generally what I see is if they want to become more absentee, they will do what we talked about yesterday and kind of scale back, focus on high margin services, systematize and scale that way. But there's nothing like we again, I don't take our royalty go to 1.5 or beyond. There's owners that are above that.

So market has the room for the two locations. That's it won't split it and cause another royalty or anything like that if.

You'Re going to have a separate. So we tie territories and locations directly together. So if you're like, hey, I'm operating inside of the same area, just you don't need another, you don't need to get another license. You only would need to get another license if you're going starting a new location, which triggers a new website, a new address, new Google listing, like everything that we set up for you. And I would only do that in that case if you wanted to have a general manager and start doing multiple locations.

Do you guys or do you ever see that happening organically? Like markets grow and you just split the territories.

Yeah, like one of the best ways I think to get into multiple locations is you have your five mile radius. You're like, okay, I know there's some leads up there. Great, I'm going to add that as my service area because you can service outside your territory, just not in someone else's. And then what happens is over the course of a year you get 20, 30, 40 mowing customers organically or you throw some marketing over it, usually just organically, because our SEO will pull in a lot of those leads from outside your territory. And then you're like, okay, great, there's 40 customers. I'm going to get my general manager. I've trained them up this whole year. I'm going to pop them in that area and buy the license now. So I recommend that. And then what we do is we just say, hey, make sure Lee knows that you're doing that. So right before there's not someone else that comes in and he would let you know. But that's the best way to do multiple locations. Even if you don't Join Augusta is you do your five mile radius, you tap into another market knowing you're gonna lose money While you're driving 30, 40 minutes to get there. And then you're gonna start a second location once one route is established so that your general manager becomes a working GM from day one, which is they're producing 25, 30 budget hours a week in revenue. Right off the bat. All right, two more questions.

Back left. Hi, Mike, this is Steve again with Steven Stevens. I had a general question with your services, like for those that don't join, would like your home Service, Web Design, P4P or co pilot ever become proprietary? Or would it always just be like command center, max AI and discounts just for those Just to encourage the community. Just as a concern. Just curious.

Okay, so your concern is that let's say someone uses copilot and say, okay, now it's only for Augusta.

Yeah, like say eight to 10 years. You're like, hey, I'm going public. All these services that we all use, would you bundle or ever take that away from the community that does not join?

No, definitely not.

All right.

There'd be no benefit to us to do that because the whole reason that the the IPO works and the model works is because we make money on those other services for people who can't join and we're able to then use it as a marketing arm to bring in customers with no acquisition cost. That's like it would be crazy for me to do that. Like that's the whole leverage of the business.

Awesome.

Yeah. Last one in the center, Mike. Yeah.

Connor from Wisconsin.

Just curious if there's anybody that has came along and I think you said.

There is a couple that have done.

It, but the enterprise, the executive model, the six locations. Yeah. Just curious of where those have been. Like what areas Can I can say one because they're opening up. Hey, is it Wisconsin? Where's the executive model opening up? Omaha, Nebraska. This is the first phone right here if you want to talk to him. Yeah.

All right.

Yeah. Is that it? All right, cool. All right, let's have a 15 minute break and then we're going to come back. Josh is going to be speaking. I can't wait for it. Thank you all so much.