Winning, Investing, and Marriage 2025 - Episode 087

We in the pod, folks.

We are back. Happy New Year.

Thank you.

New year, new pod.

We're in an empty office, so if there's an echo because there's no one.

Else here, I know I can kind of, I can kind of hear myself in your mic, but it's not that big of a deal, so hopefully it doesn't bother folks, but Happy New Year 2025 and I'm going to start the new year differently on the pod. I'm going to start with a piece of non financial advice and that's going to be right off the top. If you have not already, sign up today for Blue Collar Summit in Seattle, Washington. It's going to be a fantastic event. If there's anything I can do to convince you, shoot me an email and I promise you I will because it is going to be an awesome event. I've seen you put more work into this than I've seen you put into previous events and I'm personally just thrilled about the speakers we're bringing on and all the prep our team has put into this and it's going to be amazing. So that is my not financial advice. I'm starting 2025 with that.

Yeah. I think I've had the opportunity of hearing you through the wall next door practicing your talk. It's gonna be interesting. It's like Lee over there preaching for an hour.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I just want to be prepared, right? I want it to be. I'm following the Alex Hormozi school of thought. Like I want to have done it so many times that when I'm doing it, it's just second nature at that point. It has been so perfectly prepared. Every word is the way it should be said. I want my message to be clear. So I even my putting more prep into this speech than I have for any other speech that I have given because I do respect your time and I respect the ability to be there and everyone who is sacrificing their time to be there, I want to make sure it's valuable. So I'm putting in a 10x effort, I would say, on this speech than I have on previous speeches.

Let's go, dude.

Yeah. Alrighty. 2025, we do want to look forward. So let's start by something that you made a recent change on Christmas 2024 and now today, day of recording New Year's Day, you have decided to give away your courses for free. That is landscape business course as well as MBA for entrepreneurs. So a new direction for 2025 and Mike's courses. Why did you do that?

Okay, well, before we get into that, I wanted to share my first Instagram story of the year. Wanted to be very salacious, so I wanted to, you know, ruffle some feathers, if you know what I'm saying.

Yeah.

Have you seen it?

No, I'm pulling it out. I'm pulling it up right now.

But most people have already fallen behind on their financial New Year's resolutions. They woke up late and took today off.

Yeah, I agree with that. I agree with that.

Gonna make some people mad, but okay.

Yeah, I know. I like it. I like coming into a quiet office. There was no one on the roads this morning. It was fantastic. Got here a couple minutes earlier than normal, so it was great.

Okay. Sorry, I got off track. Yeah, the courses are free now. Landscape business courses are free, which sounds like you're pitching a bunch of stuff. This is free stuff. Oh, yeah, yeah. So yeah, everyone was wondering why I'm doing this. And there's more to come, by the way. There's some new stuff coming out that's free too. Blow some socks off.

Yeah.

So when I first started landscape business school course and then MBA for entrepreneurs is basically to fund the media team. And now the media team costs well in excess of a million and a half dollars a year with the traveling and all the rest of it. This year we'll probably go over 2 million. In terms of the budget, we basically spend every dollar. I think this year we're a little bit negative, but.

That'S why we started the courses is to be able to fund that. So when I started landscape business course, we usually would make like maybe two, $3,000 a month. And that's when I hired Josh Revis full time shout out Josh doing full time video stuff in June of 2020, right. During COVID It was kind of an interesting time, but he kind of started off on the media side. That's how I funded it was landscape business course. And so now, you know, it still makes good money or was making good money, but it was a matter of like, okay, we think we can fund this with landscape web design specifically in home service web design on the media side. And so yeah, we've been able to grow that and thanks to the support of the community. And so it's like, hey, time to try to give back a little bit more. And then also from obviously a lead gen perspective, I think it's a smart move. We get thousands and thousands of people signing up for the course. And so hopefully, you know, a percentage of them get the Longer web design they get, you know, copilot join Augusta, stuff like that. So kind of going down up market a little more, going after the larger size products. Also some of the stuff that we're doing next year with August Nation, I just gotta be careful giving them an opportunity to kind of participate in some of the media side of things. In terms of financially, I want to set it up in a really, really good way to where it becomes a profit center. So yeah, working on some of those things and yeah, dude, doing this two weeks for conference is just brutal. This is. Yeah, I work all last night on like projects that are coming out and I now have to talk with you.

Goodness.

All right. Like yeah, move along.

Yeah, all right, fair enough, fair enough. Well, you said you want it to become a profit center. What portion of your businesses are you referring to when you say that?

The media side. So the media side has always been basically make a dollar and we spend a dollar. So now the media team is one, two, like I think eight, nine people. We've grown it the last little few months. Again the turnaround shows are going to become pretty intense after Q1 in terms of people going out on the trip, the amount of planning, having a producer on set, it's going to be much more involved in the planning and preparation going into it. So it just costs a lot more money. But I think adding in that all the turnaround shows, if we put a lot of effort into them and they're a good story, we get over 100,000 plus views. And so the difference between if we could double the amount of effort that goes into these, can we make them a million view videos is really the goal and if we do that the businesses will be fine. And so that's really what the, the objective is here. And then by, by opening up the courses for free and getting those people in the ecosystem, they probably won't buy something from us today, but in two or three years they, they will likely have a lot more goodwill stored up. And so yeah, it's been crazy even the past week since landscape been business course went went live for free. The amount of DMS and like emails and like people using stuff and screenshotting like their bank balance two weeks ago versus today because of like one little thing I always said in the course, like blew my socks off.

That's awesome.

I think it's obviously you know, helpful for everyone that signs up but then like there is going to be 1% of people that want to join the community realize that like okay, that's what's in the course. Like there's a whole lot more inside of a guestination and like doing it for you and et cetera. So anyways, I think it'll be a good move. I think we'll look back in six to 12 months and like we've already seen the past two months. You and I just like focusing on the sales side of Augusta and like what it's done in terms of growth. And so by kind of increasing the Funnel by literally 20 to 40x the amount of leads that are coming in the top of the funnel, amount of people that come in with their contact information for the, the, the, the, the free courses I think we get. So like, give me till February, but there's some sweet stuff coming that we're going to redesign the whole Mike Andes brand around. Obviously very inspired by Alex and Layla. I woke up on, on Black Friday and they've released their, like, their free course for scaling and I was like, sick. That is so genius. That is exactly what I want to be doing. I want to be giving away for free. Forget this whole paid stuff.

Yeah.

Like the courses have had thousands of people watch them over the course of years, but like there's been more people watch the course in the past week than the past seven years since I started creating content on there. And so like, I want this stuff to be used. Like, that's the whole reason I started it. And so, yeah, so I'm, I'm all in on giving everything away.

How we're gonna make sense of it financially, it does not make sense in the budget, it does not make any sense. So we are relying on like the funnel to do its tricks and it's magic. But yeah, I'm looking forward to it.

Yeah. I think as an outsider, one of my kind of takeaways and maybe a follow up question is that I'm not part of the media team kind of ecosystem. I'm not part of your courses. I'm part of Augusta. So I don't see what you guys are doing over there. I don't know what work is going in into those projects. But from an outsider, from a consumer's perspective, do you think that the optics of hey, I have courses, but they're free is almost kind of moves you up a league, if you will, in terms of entrepreneurs and like social media entrepreneurs, specifically, because it seems that most social media entrepreneurs, once they gain a following, it's like, hey, join my course, join my mastermind group, come to my events, which we will still do, but now kind of following With Alex and Layla, you're saying, hey, like, I'm just going to give away some of the education. Like, I don't need to charge for that because I have other products that have much more value, lifetime value for you and your businesses. And ultimately you're just trying to help the community by giving that away. Do you think that kind of the optics of that decision helps long term?

I think there is validity in someone paying money for a course or education. The reason for that is not so much the actual ticket and the, the cost of the education, but it's more a matter of, it is a focusing mechanism by which because I paid money for this, I will then sacrifice my time and attention on it. So, like, the completion rate of landscape business course drops precipitously. When you get something for free, the perceived value is so much lower. Whereas when you paid like in the past, you're paying $600 every six months. People watch the entire thing and they got to the end and we actually had like a reward at the very end of the course because, like most people would get there and that, that's hundreds, literally hundreds of hours of content they launched. Whereas now, now the drop off rate is kind of like our YouTube channel, where it's like 30% of people drop off in the first 10 questions, courses and so, or 10 lectures right in the first, like probably three, four hours of content. So, you know, it's just a matter of there is going to be that 10 or 15% of the audience though, that watches it all the way to completion and they wouldn't, and the vast majority of them would never have purchased the course because there was a barrier in terms of dollars and cents. Also, I think it's like the thing that pushed me over the edge and like, I made the decision just one day. I just sent an email to the media team and Tory and the web design guys went, all right, guys, this is what's happening. This is how it's going to roll out. We're going to do it within these days. We're gonna have four different courses go out. When I did that, it was a matter of like, does this align with raising the level of professionalism, landscape industry, like, which one's better? And yeah, like, I get the paying part because we do need the money because it does fuel the media team, which then allows me to get free content. That's how I've always justified it. It's like, okay, all these other people, I'm glad they're giving me free courses. I can't Afford it. I need the money so I can actually create the free content. And that's valid. That's valid. But now there are, you know, there are other ticket items that we can sell that are more do it, you know, done for you. So the education, like copy the funnel part we can give away. So I want to be clear, like someone's a new creator or content creator, whatever. It's really tough to get an audience and sell a course. Like, everyone thinks it's easy to make a course. It's hard to sell a course, especially if you're going up above $100. It is not easy to sell a course course to an audience because the audience that is watching the videos, it's free. And so to go up to open up your wallet for a $99 cent app, think about that. Everyone's like, oh, immediately you literally charge $0.99 for a mobile app on iOS. Your downloads will just precipitously drop. Same thing as courses. And so obviously the profit margins are good. You build the thing one time and it just keep. Money keeps coming in. And trust me, it's been eight years, there's been a lot of money made on landscape, business course. And so when you strip that out of the budget, like I said, like, it's not, it's scary because, like, that is how the media team has been built. And so I would say in terms of like moving up the echelon of entrepreneurship, yeah, like, it definitely gives you more credibility. I've always not liked the idea of selling information. The way I have justified it is, oh, that allows me to hire like four more people, five more people, like plus at on the media side. And that I will then be able to double or triple or quadruple my content. And that will help the people who can't afford stuff. That's how I've always justified it. And so now it's like that full, like, okay, let's go all in. That was 2025. We're going all in on this whole strategy of give everything away for free and then sell the implementation. And I'm also confident more in the value of the implementation. Like, no one leaves long care web design, home service, web design, because we create so many leads that we just crush everyone else in terms of SEO and in terms of examples.