"You should stay small!" - Episode 065

In education, even we have like, hey, you got to graduate from kindergarten to go grade one. You got to graduate from grade one to grade go to grade two. And entrepreneurship, somehow it's like, okay with people going from, like, grade one to grade eight.

All right, we ready? We good? We doing this thing?

Let's rock and roll.

Welcome back. Another episode C Suite Unfiltered podcast we have at least up here in our neck of the woods, we're kind of on the tail end of spring rush.

Yeah.

So how are we feeling about that in general?

Good, I guess. We had a very delayed. Like we have. It's not been warm.

Yeah.

So a lot of rain.

How's spring rush been for the command center? It's been good for those outside of Augusta.

Yeah. But the metrics that we really were focusing on this year was no missed calls and how fast we get back to estimates. So both of those metrics have been really improved. And so we have, like, what we're working on the next eight, nine months before next spring rush now. But those have been the two things we tracked and, like, they really nailed it.

Cool. I love it. Well, I want to jump in here. We're going totally off the cuff. Don't look at my screen. All right. I don't want any spoilers.

One of those screen things where you.

Alrighty. So we asked actually last pod people do put questions in the comments, leave comments. We got a lot.

Oh, really?

Everyone, we are going to get to a couple of questions after this first topic.

Yeah.

And if we don't get to all of them today, which we might not because there are quite a few, which is great. Some of them are fantastic. We'll get to them in future pods.

All right.

But I want to start with this. So a. A friend of yours, if I can use that term, I might be using it lightly. Or an acquaintance, Jonathan from Florida Turf Pros released a video four days ago, and the title of that video was Mowing Grass Solo makes me Happy. And I want to preface this. I'm not going after Jonathan. He's an awesome guy. But I wanted to get your unfiltered thoughts on this video and maybe I'll share some of mine. But that is the title of the video. Being Solo makes me happy or Mowing Lawn Solo makes me happy. Now, he goes through this video and it's just him talking and he's narrating with just B roll footage of him mowing and very soothing video. Some nice music in the background. And he goes through his philosophy as to why? For some people, mowing solo will make them happier than scaling up and growing a large business. Very good, very good video. And throughout the video, he basically makes a disclaimer. He has four main points as to how you can be happy as a solo mower. And then he has a quote, and I actually really like the quote. So we'll tease that. The disclaimer is this. He, you must be okay with not getting rich. That was what he said in the first couple minutes of the video. What are your initial thoughts to the disclaimer of this video?

Yeah, it's all about what you're trying to optimize for. What is the goal in this case? The goal sounds like to be happy, which is fantastic. And so if you're optimizing for happiness and it makes you happy to mow solo, then, yeah, mow solo. Yeah, I happen to win more money and that just is different goals.

Totally.

So, yeah, I think it's awesome.

Yeah. And I don't want to misquote him here. I didn't write down the whole video verbatim. Um, but he, he did kind of mention like, there are a lot of guys that make great money doing working solo. You can make 100, $150,000, you know, a year. And if you have like, you know, some part time laborers that help you with projects or you sub out some work, he said you could make a really good living. He said since he systematized his business, he, you know, he has more availability to do like vacations and time with his family and things of that nature. So the disclaimer is, oh, you have to be okay with not getting rich. But he's not saying that you won't make money being a solo operator. You can still make very good money being a solo operator. So his number one point to be happy mowing solo was that you must be willing to be independent. And that basically was kind of self governance, that you have to take care of yourself. There's no clock in clock out time. You have to manage yourself and how you handle your work. Do you want me to just run through the four points and I get your thoughts? All right. Point number two was prioritize work life balance. He said this is a really good thing. Once you've figured out how to be independent and how to manage yourself, then you have the ability to prioritize that work life balance. But you have to hold yourself accountable in order to achieve that work life balance. He says once you can do that kind of one, two punch, it's actually can be very beneficial for a lot of people. Point number three was embracing the physical labor. He said, you just have to realize, like, if you're gonna stay small, you are the one doing all the work. And this is a point you've made before. Too many people in this industry try to get out of the field too quick. If you're gonna stay small, if you're gonna stay solo, you have to realize, like, you are the one doing most of the work. And he said, and that's fine if you're okay with it, but if you're gonna get burnt out in a couple of years, maybe think about scaling up. And then he kind of goes off on a tangent on that. And then the fourth point was take pleasure in the routine. And I thought this was an interesting point, that it's okay to have kind of the pleasure in the routine of simple things, if you will. And it's not to say that. That it's bad to do the simple things. One thing that you've been recently kind of preaching to all of us at Augusta is do the boring work. Right. It's like you have to just kind of take pleasure in the routine. There's boring work that needs to get done to make you successful, but you can take pleasure in it because it will create success in the long run.

Did you see my video command center yesterday about that? Okay. That's how I was like, yeah, yeah.

So what are your thoughts on those four points? How do you feel about them? I'll flip this. I don't want you to get ahead or read the quote.

Okay.

But those are the four points listed out. If you want to reference them, I think it's great.

Like I've always said in the past, like, to me, success is contentment. And so if someone is content and they've. They figured out what amount of money they need to have and how many customers they want to serve and then be able to optimize for those things, especially if they go into profit mode. And every year, just keep raising prices. Like, if you can just understand, okay, as a solo operator, I need 50 lawns per week or 60 customers or whatever it is. And then when you hit that, you just keep raising prices. You can make it very profitable. Yep. And so it's just, what are you optimizing for? Are you optimizing for money? Are you optimizing for autonomy? Like, do you want to do it, Be able to have a general manager? Are you optimizing for the ability to be happy? Like, if you enjoy the mowing process that might be what you want to do. And there's nothing wrong. I think I'm a big proponent of is like, don't get locked in on one of these things, cause life changes. And so if you build a business and you enjoy the actual solo operator side of things, like mowing the grass, for example, great. Do that. Establish what your threshold of number of customers is, keep raising prices and become very, very profitable at it. Which gives you the opportunity and the option if something were to happen to you, if you hurt yourself, if there was a calamity, if you needed to move away for a couple months, there's enough margin to be able to scale it if needed. And so that's what I'm a big prone of. What I get afraid of is when owner operators are making 50, 60 thousand dollars a year and if they weren't actually doing the work and they hired someone, they'd immediately make $0 in profit. They actually probably usually lose money. And the only way that I think solo operator model works in terms of someone out in the field doing all the work themselves is do it at a price that if you were to pay someone else to do the actual labor, the business can still get by. I think that's very important from a liability insurance and just providing for your family perspective. And that's like, I want this for everyone. Hash hashtag asterisks is like, if you're really. If you're providing for people and you have kids, I think it's your obligation to make sure that you're charging high enough prices. And that's the problem is a lot of the solo operators go really low on price because they don't have the overhead. Right. They don't take into account is the fact that if they were to get injured, everything stops because they can't go hire someone. And if they did, they would immediately be losing money.

Yeah. And that was quite a few of the comments, right? Of course, it's YouTube, Jonathan. I thought it was a great video. Great video. But yeah, a lot of the comments were like, what if you get injured? Like this is a horrible plan.

It doesn't matter which way you go. Like the other day made a video about like scaling to massive. Yeah. And people are like, you should go back to the basics. And like. And then people were like, you're talking about million dollar business. I'm just trying to get my first five customers, like all that sort of thing. So you can't win on YouTube, of course you're serving which community. And I really like Jonathan, because he's stuck to what he is doing and he serves that community 100%. And so I would actually say that most people getting started in lawn care should watch his content over mine.

Yeah, I think he's a fantastic wealth of knowledge. When I kind of first started buying into, okay, maybe, maybe Augusta could be a career for me. Maybe I do need to learn more of the technical skills of this industry. I watched a ton of his content because you spoke highly of him and he is, you know, more technical, more in the weeds, sales tactics, mowing tactics. We recently shared a video with one of your locations employees saying, hey, this is a great video from Jonathan on how to be more efficient on properties. Fantastic video for a frontline team member to watch if they don't know how to move efficiently around a property. So he puts out a lot of great content. I think it's really good. But yeah, the hate comments are always going to be there whichever side you go on. I saw the one you're referring to. They're like, you need to do more videos for people starting. And your response was.

I've never responded. Oh, yeah, I respond a bunch. You responded.

Or some of your media.

No, it's always me in the comments.

But you basically said, I've made like, thousands of pieces of content about getting started and like, as I scale, my knowledge is going to grow in the scaling department, if you will. So I want to share that.

Well, it's what I'm learning, right?

Yeah, you said I want to share that knowledge with others.

Well, and I think what I said too, I think I said is, like, there's people that followed me five years ago and there's owners that joined Augusta four or five years ago that, like, they're not interested in, like, how to cut grass better.

Right.

They're like, how do I have multiple locations? How do I have general managers? How do I take capital and start to, like, get a loan and use the SBA and leverage and investing and like, that's what more and more of my content will be. And then if people want to have the other stuff, go back to when I was going through those things and sharing those things. And a lot of it's the whiteboard. Way back when, when I was going from like 7,800,000 past a million, I had to like, revamp the whole business and create a whole bunch of systems. Like, I'm not doing that anymore. I'm like, now it's much more of. I've gone to a different place. And so I think people hopefully that follow me five years can, five years ago, can still learn and, like, be right behind me and scale up. So, yeah, I'll be talking a lot. Even next week, I'm going to be doing one about, like, how to start with $140,000 and start scaling multiple locations and how to do that over the course of 10 years. I'm going to lay out a budget, how to get your general managers, regional managers. I'm going to lay out the whole thing. At least that's my plan.

I like it. So Jonathan shared his thoughts, and you and I both agree with kind of these four main points and the disclaimer, it's good to kind of know what you, I guess, want out of life or out of your business. Now, before we get to his final quote, I had a thought is do you think someone before that say, someone comes to you and they're like, mike, I want to scale up. Like, I want to do what you did with your first location, like, million dollars. For some reason, that's the magic number in a lot of people's minds. I want to have a million dollar business. Okay, great. They say, you know, I don't have a lot of resources, but, like, I'm going to work my, you know, brains out to make this possible. They come to you with all that information. Would you suggest that they maybe try this route first, knowing that you can make good money as a solo operator, learn the technical skills, learn the customer service skills, and then scale up? Or do you think that this proverbial person, do you think that sometimes they just try to scale up too quickly? Because that's the cool thing to do.

Well, comes down to two things. One, your skill and to your capital. So if you have the skill of sales and leadership, you can scale much faster without as much pain. If you have the capital to do it, you also have another ingredient required to scale up as well. And so those are the two skills required or two ingredients required to scale up is like, you need money to buy all the trucks and the equipment and hire more people. And to be able to scale, you're gonna have to also usually have a lower close rate or a higher close ratio, lower price. And then secondly, you need the skill of sales to actually get the jobs. And then you need, once you get a lot of jobs, you need to actually have the leadership skills to be able to lead your team. And so we've seen owners that, you know, even inside Augusta, that like, within the first couple months, get to 90, $100,000 in monthly revenue. And then they get a second location and all of a sudden you get a second location. Everything just like for a year they're just trying to figure out how to manage people and they'll burn through three or four GMs and they're trying to figure it out. It's a whole different skill. And so even though they might have had the capital and the skill of sales, they then have to learn the skill of leadership. That's what was required for multiple locations. So you're getting me on my notes for like next week. The stuff that I have in my head. All right, I'm going to, I'm going to lay out the whole roadmap. I think it'll be a long video because I did one yesterday where I'm just playing with like Tuesday of releases on the main, main channel. Obviously Alex is inspiring this. I'm just gonna go like super deep next week, I think, and just see what happens. It's gonna be like a full out roadmap of a 10 year roadmap. But everyone is gonna roast me in the comments because they're gonna be like.

Well, the first thing is you gotta.

Get $140,000 in cash. And I'm like, yeah, and that might take you five years before this called investing. Yeah, but it might take someone five years of this to get the 140,000 and then they can start that roadmap.

Yes.

But I believe that there's a lot of this good content that's out there from like four or five content creators like Jonathan. And I'm trying to create like, hey, what do you do after you have the 140k? Where do we go from there? Yeah. And that's what we're trying to do.

Yeah. Do you think I agree with you? There's a lot of nuance. There's many variables in this situation. I want to, I want a blanket statement from my Candace. Do you think that this is a better route for someone that says, I want to scale up, I want the million dollar business, they have money do. Nope, nope, nope. Just no, no. I just want the blanket statement. The average person.

No. Then definitely this is the right way to do it.

This is the right way to start. Small figure out. So be profitable. Profitable.

Pay as if you pay as if you could pay an employee, would you still be profitable? Like we were just talking about Max up in Vancouver. You know, he. In his. In what?

He was talking about one of our owners in Augusta.

Yeah. Vancouver, bc. Let's go Canada. And so, you know, the first Year, not a lot of profit. Second year, not a lot of profit. This year he's like, okay, I kind of want to move out of this province. It's extremely expensive. And to do that though, you got to make a profitable business and then be able to pay a general manager in addition to your revenue. So what I like what he did is he actually calculated in his wages and then he's able to make 35, 30, I think it was like 34 to 37% profit the past several months. Now it makes sense, you can actually make it work. But if you would have just stayed small by himself, even if you really optimize it, even if you really optimize, it's very, very difficult to like actually bail. So he has to optimize his business for his objectives, which is get out of the country, get out of the province, bill move, still have enough profit for a few employees, a few trucks and a general manager to run and be very profitable. But it takes three years. So it really comes down to like, what are you optimizing for? And then realizing if you're going to scale, the delay of gratification keeps moving further and further down the road. So like you're like, I want a million dollar business, Great. Expect five to ten years. Right? Right. If you're trying to just get a route and make it optimized and profitable, you can do it this way within like 6 to 12 months. And so most people should do this. They should get profitable, hit capacity, raise prices, become very profitable. And then it's a much safer route to grow and scale. But it's just a slower method. So it's like, how fast do you want to do it? Is also a massive question that has to be asked. When it's like, which route should I go? It's like, how fast do you want to do it? Like, if you want to build a million dollar business in five years, get ready to like live on beans and rice. Not put any money into your personal life if you don't have any cash reserves. And you're going to be like just working like a dog.

Yeah.

If you're willing to take 10 years, very different because you take this route, make it profitable to kind of go Max's route, get a great gm, like you'd really do it slower, you do it more profitably. So it's like, what do you want out of life? Is like, what are you optimizing for?

Yeah. And you could even argue that this way, starting solo, being profitable. Right. That you could in theory do it faster, and if not do it faster, it's a higher success rate.

Oh, yeah.

Guaranteed.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah. So, like, would you rather do it faster or would you rather do it. Yeah, like you have a higher success rate of doing it with this route, or you can try to do it faster. Just know it's much riskier.

Yeah, yeah.

All right, so this is the quote that Jonathan puts in at the end. I took a screenshot here. We must know the difference between contentment and settling for less than we are worth. There is no shame in ambition, nor is there peace in devaluing ourselves. Press on towards your worth with contentment as a beacon.

Yeah, yeah. Success is contentment. Yeah.

That's a good quote. Yeah, I just liked it.

Wait, did he actually this is a quote and read it, or did he just say it's like, off the rip? Just off the rip?

Well, no, he said he had been journaling.

Oh, okay.

He had been journaling.

I was like, that is a very deep couple sentences. No, no, no. Say out loud.

No. So in his video, he said he'd been. And he's been thinking about this a lot before he released the video. And this is kind of a compilation of some thoughts he had in his journal. He put it into one nice kind of quote that he's been ruminating over.

The audience needs to make sure that Jonathan gets a hold of this video since we talked about him for the half the time.

That's good, but it's great. It's really good content. I think that this is a fantastic piece of advice if you are. And part of the reason I was probing so much on, you know, the person that wants to scale up, I think if you are listening and you are the person who wants to scale up or you're in that solo operator, two, three employees, like, go watch this video.

Yeah.

Like, figure it out at this level before you scale up. Because even for me, it was kind of. Kind of nice to, like, bring me down to earth. Like, we're building this really big thing. It's great. It's fun, and it's exciting. I was like, oh, yeah. Like, these are the people we're doing it for. We're trying to help the solo operators, the people that do want to scale up. And I think Jonathan, like, has his niche, and he's a great representative of, like, professionalism in this industry, and we need more people like him. And so I thought, great video. Wanted your thoughts on it.

Yeah. People that, like, in education, even we have, like, hey, you got to graduate from kindergarten. To go grade one, you got to graduate from grade one to grade go to grade two. And entrepreneurship, somehow it was like, okay with people going from like grade one to grade eight. Yeah, that's fair, right? It's like, well, where do you graduate? Like, well, have you made a profitable business? Have you hired your first employee? No, I'm like five locations from day one. Like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Do you have the money? Do you have the skills? Like, those are requirements. And so there. Because in entrepreneurship, there is no grades and there's no graduation from level to level to level. And people do believe everyone moves at such different rates. That's what's difficult about it. Like how fast you progress up those ladders, that chain. But like the most systematic way of producing an outcome, which is like a high school graduate, is to go through every single level stage by stage.

Yeah, yeah. You say you're pro standardized education now because on a previous pod you were very anti.

So predictable outcome is different than looking at the outliers.

I just want to make sure. I'm just checking. All right, well, now that made my brain take an interesting turn here. Now this is what I want to do. I want to know your thoughts on immediate red flags. When someone's talking to you about scalability, like when they are saying, I want to go from kindergarten to eighth grade, I want to go from kindergarten to a master's program, what are your immediate red flags? I got one.

Okay, go ahead.

Yeah, I'll just subcontract that out.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Just like, what are some. What are some of your red flags?

Red flags. It kind of comes back to, I always says, like, do they have the skills of leadership and then do they have the capital to do it?

Yeah.

If they don't have either those things, it'll just be ten times more painful.

Yeah, but I want just like a quote someone would say to you. Like if I, if I came to you and I was like, I want to go from kindergarten to eighth grade and you asked me, like, how I'm going to do that work a bit. Oh, just some contract it out. Yeah, that's going to be a red flag for you. What are some other quotes? Any time the juicy stuff.

Anytime the word just is used.

Oh, okay.

You just said. Yeah, I'll just. Yeah, any word just is used, you throw.

All because. Because it's not a plan. Is that, Is that why?

Because they're diminishing the amount of work and effort required to make it successful.

Oh, yeah, that's fair.

Anytime the word Just is. You just throw it out and just like, oh, man, it's going to be so hard for you.

Well, now you all know if you talk to Mike, don't say just. I'll just do X. All right.

I try not to be nitpicky at people's life.

I know, I know. I know you aren't. But it's like, there's obvious moments where when somebody says something, it's like the alarm bells go.

I use the word just way too much.

Yeah.

I learned this and when writing the book. Dude, it's a passive word.

Yes.

So you can throw the word just any time and it will never change a sentence.

There's a lot of things I say. That's very passive words. No, by the way, passive is not passive aggressive. It's like a different type of voice. I add way to me. Adverbs to my. To my. When I talk to.

Yeah, I haven't finished.

But so, for example, like, instead of saying, you should go, you should do that quickly. I should just say, you should go do that.

Yeah.

I don't need to throw the quickly part in there. That's just passive.

Yeah. I have. I have a moment like that. My seventh grade English teacher, Mr. Hager, like, drilled this into. To our brains. He hated this. This is a water bottle. Also. This is a water bottle. There's no reason to say also. But we say it. So many writers say it. It's just. This is a water bottle. This is a water bottle. Right. You don't need to say also. It's a filler word.

Right.

But a lot of writers, unless you're.

Trying to make it a joining statement, he would disagree.

Really, there's really no point. Just make the statement.

But if you're trying to compare something like Lee. Lee is tall also.

No.

Mike is short.

Yeah. You could just say, lee is tall. Mike is short.

No, yeah, I get what you're saying. I think you're trying to make a comparison, though.

Yeah, but you don't need to.

Okay.

It's a filler word.

I agree. Trust me. I've been cutting so many words, I cut over a thousand words out of just filler words.

Yeah.

Out of 48,000.

That's the same thing with me on my Zoom Calls. I have an AI assistant that tracks all my filler words.

Oh, right.

I've gotten really good at eliminating a couple.

Yeah.

And I've increased on others. It's really annoying. I hate it. I hate, hate it. I used to say so all the time. We talked about I say the same thing. I used to say so all the time. I've gotten that down very low. But I filled it with, you know, I hate that. You know, is worse.

You know, it's horrible. You just said it.

Right. That's why. That was an example. That was an example. That was an example. That was intentional.

Yeah.

Anyways, here we go. We're gonna jump into some questions now.

Okay.

We got a few from the last pod. So this is from at all ashore.

Oh, yeah. I just know that the username.

Fair enough.

I think he did a coaching call with me recently.

He said, I didn't know we could ask questions. It's the Internet. If people can leave hate comments, you can ask questions. It's fine. Everything's allowed. All right, what are Mike's views, slash strategies for company trucks that employees take home? It seems very common in certain home service industries, and I see a lot of different ways that you could do it. Example, some places leave the employee responsible for repairs and maintenance. Maintenance. What are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, I do believe this works in some fields where you can afford to pay the employee more than $35 an hour. And I know there's, like, a broad stroke here, and everyone's gonna jump on me for saying this, but like H vac, electrical, garage doors, those industries where they've become very technical and they're able to pay 35 to 40 an hour, that type of applicant, usually you're okay with them driving your company. TR if you have a lower margin service where you're paying someone 20, $25 an hour, most of the time, you wouldn't want 100% of those people driving trucks. And it causes so much headache. More headache than the upside that goes to the employee and the upside that comes in efficiency gained by not having to drive to the office. And that stinks. But the bottom line is, if you can't have 100% of people, you can't have the system. You can't have it where it's like, yeah, if I like you, if I trust you, I'll give you a truck. And you could tie it to, like, hey, if you've worked with us for a year, for example. But then it makes. Where half your workforce is coming to the office and the other half of your workforce is going from their house. And it becomes now your least. Your least skilled people don't have the skilled people to actually manage or, like, oversee or overlook what's going on. So you can actually get a very weird distribution of how your culture shifts I've seen that happen before.

Yeah. I know that we have a couple owners inside of Augusta that do it. And I, off the top of my head, haven't heard any horror stories. But that's not to say there isn't the oddity that it can't happen.

Right.

Or something bad happens.

Okay. It really comes down to also, like, the owner's involvement. I think the owner is very hands on. It can work a lot more. As soon as you start making it more passive, you're now like, really. You're like layers removed from employees taking trucks home. And the one time I let someone take a truck home and got an accident, baby. And that. That literally cost that, like, that was hundreds of thousands of dollars. And so it's like, well, is it worth the extra hour? Is it better for employers? Absolutely. Is it a benefit? Yes, absolutely. Is it worth hundreds of thousands of dollars?

That's tough.

Yeah. My question too, and this is more, not directly to you, it's more theoretical, is, will this mean that the trucks are better taken care of or worse?

Yeah, it could go both ways.

Right, Exactly.

And you can have standards around what needs to be done. But then it comes like, okay, now we're starting to manage this system that was supposed to save us time, and now we're like tracking trucks or we're requiring gas stuff or requiring number of miles. Now they have to get cleaned now. Now we have one truck goes down. But they. They are like, I need this. I want it, like, kicks right now. And like, there's not. There's no demand. So it's just expectations. Managing expectations, I think is important. I'm not against it. I think it could. I think it's really, really good, to be perfectly honest. You on like 80% of accounts. Mostly it's positive, but I also have been stung by it. And so I know what the cost of it can be if something goes wrong and you become liable for a lot of the things that they do off the clock and you know, they do have a DUI in your vehicle. Like, this can affect you and they crash into someone else's vehicle. It's kind of. It can affect you.

Right.

So these are the type of things just to think about. Yeah, I'm not against it. Yeah, I'd be totally down for it. Like, I think. I think that, you know, as we move all the trucks at the Bellingham shops, like all brand new trucks, for example, and then we get to the new headquarter building where there's a, like, a lot we can lock it down how we want and build it the way we want, and then we increase wages and we increase prices significantly more once we go back in profit mode. I would consider it.

Yeah, Fair enough. I think there's pros and cons both ways.

Yeah.

As an employee, I guess. Let me speak as the employee in the room. I don't care either way. Like, I've never really wanted a company car or vehicle.

The argument for it, in my opinion, is the amount of time it takes to drive to the office, get things set up, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Versus just having it in your truck and you go to your first job from your house.

Yeah.

I think that it works really well for certain industries. And I. For our industry, I haven't seen it work as well, and I've seen too many downsides. But, man, home services in general, I'd make the blanket statement that if you can get there, great. And if you can get the trucks nice enough and pay enough to the employees to rehire, hire a high enough applicant in terms of quality, then I'd be down for 100%.

Yeah. One of my neighbors right across the street, he's in the trades. I can't remember off top of my hand, but yeah. He has a company van. Right. Just one of those cargo vans. And I can guarantee he's clocking in as soon as he starts it up in the morning. And then he pulls into his driveway and then he's clocking out. That is kind of a nice benefit for sure.

Yeah. And then you got people, like some of the owners we were just talking about, like, that they. They don't have to have any sort of shop space, really.

Right.

It's all in the van. It comes down to, like, well, why would you need a space still? Well, are there tools that sometimes go out, need storage? Anyways, if you need a dump material, like, do you go to a dump? Well, then, yes, you're okay. But if you do have to have a collection site where you're having space anyways. But if you can somehow figure out a model, like, especially because with command center, where you don't have any space.

Dude, save you some money.

You get a truck or a van set up where it's like, every employee goes to their house, they work from there. You manage from your. Your office, like, their routes, their schedules, all the rest of it.

Yeah.

Cool.

All right, Another question here from Urban Roots Landscaping.

We know Dylan.

Dylan, yes. All right. He said. Because we were talking about Christmas lights on the last pod. He said, we keep busy through December December, with fall and leaf cleanups, do you feel it would still be useful to get into Christmas lights? We slow down more in January. February. Thanks.

Yeah. So the goal here is like, in January you're usually taking down the lights and most people leave their lights up for like three, two to four weeks in January. So you can, you can keep January busy. And then for example, because I know his market, then you could technically only have about two to three weeks of downtime because you're still going to stay busy. Ish. Like, if I looked at revenue, I can almost guarantee like, okay. Because I know his business. So, yes, I bet it's. He probably does 9 to 100,000 in like September and then like 7 to 80 October, 6, 50 to 60 in November and then like 30 to 50 in December.

Yeah.

So it's like, if you can keep it all at 80 to 90, all the way strong the end of December, then keep the crew busy taking down lights during January, storing, getting everything reset up. And then really you have like two to three weeks in February, like the end of January and last week or two or first couple weeks of February, and then we go right into spring rush and train your guys the last part of February to go into March 1st.

Yeah.

So it's just a matter of like, I think for someone like him, the Christmas lights would probably just take his off season from like two months to like two weeks. But that six weeks could be the difference between, you know, having to cost 40, $50,000 in the hold during the winter versus making 30 to 40 grand.

And potentially keeping staff year round.

Yep.

Because if you can increase that gap that you were saying from say 30 to $50,000 up to 80 to 90 with Christmas lights now you can staff year round.

Yep.

And you'd only have maybe a couple weeks of downtime, you know, late January, and then, hey, maybe just give people some time off or whatever it is, and you start.

This is the. The other benefit is the fact that you stay on the aggressive throughout the winter, meaning you're getting new leads. And all of the people who are hanging Christmas lights, they're probably likely to be great candidates for mowing services, landscaping services, etc. So you actually keep all, you get all this database of leads, even if they don't buy lights and actually buy from you, they then convert right into like great candidates for one click estimate, emails and upsells.

Yeah, I love it. Fantastic. All right, another question here. This is from Joe Gonzalez. He said this is a tax question. How should we be paying ourselves and Say we hire someone for bigger jobs. How should we pay them? My business is about 50 residential customers and two commercial, which adds up to around 580. So I don't know if he left off a number there.

58,000.

Yeah, maybe, maybe he meant that. Anyways, we have two commercial mowers, three push mowers at work, truck and a trailer, and everything is paid off. Me and my brother own the business. We do guaranteed payment checks. We're kind of scared to put money into ads because we might hit capacity quickly. I don't, I don't.

Why would that be a problem?

I don't know.

Okay.

This is the question.

Afraid to run ads because I might get customers.

So how should we go about paying ourselves?

Yeah.

So this, this is. I don't know if the, the total. I'm trying to figure out what that means.

Okay. So if you're, if you're paying yourself and you're. You and your brother. Oh, I think he's saying that the 2 commercial add up to like probably 580amonth.

Oh, the 2 commercial. Got it.

Okay. So I think in terms of paying yourself, just take distributions, make sure that you file an 1120s so that you don't have to pay self employment tax, which, which will help a little bit for you and your brother. And then if you're hiring a person occasionally, you know, the correct answer is use Guster or QuickBooks and hire that person with a W2, et cetera. But like if it's one off, like blue, out of the blue. Okay. Like off the record, you probably are going to pay them cash. Like I'm just not going to believe that you're going to fire someone for two days and actually run them through a W2. Yeah. I just don't believe that. So that's usually what most people do. If you're hiring someone consistently though I do recommend for the sake of liability and no one thinks about this until someone does get hurt. And we work around things that you can get hurt. So like I don't recommend if you're hiring, if you're consistently hiring and having someone work for you that you should not, you know, put them on W2.

Fair enough.

Do it legally.

Yeah.

It's going to cost you more. Yes. You're going to have to pay for software, you have to pay more taxes. You're going to have to pay for workers comp. And all the rest of it. Yeah.

And then we're kind of scared to put money into ads because we might hit capacity quickly.

Yeah. So do whatever you can to get to capacity so you can raise prices. And those prices will then be able to afford more ads that will then refill the hopper if you lose any of your customers when you raise prices. Because those 50 mowing customers, if that's at your capacity right now, I would just get to that as quickly as possible. Raise prices. Do it again. Raise prices. Keep going.

Fantastic. All right, last question.

He doesn't like money.

Yeah, it's like, do we want the money?

We need money. I'll take it. Hey, if you hit capacity, I'll pay for your ads and you can give me all the profit when you raise prices.

Yeah, there we go. All right, this one is from Momen Lawn Care Services. My name is Phelps with Momen. My question is this. I am currently trying to save up money to move out of my parents home once I'm finished with college. However, I am in growth mode and still try to use as much money in the business as possible. I want to know the best way to save that money so I can buy an acreage or my acre and a tiny home, which will cost just under $200,000. I bring in around 21,000 in revenue each month and just want some advice on how I can save the money. For reference, I am waiting to move out until the beginning of 2026. So 18 months. He's trying to move out. Great.

Okay, so then you have a lot of time. So you're going to need three years of good tax returns. So I'm going to go on a limb and guess that last year wasn't super profitable because you're in growth mode. So I would try to make this year and next year super profitable. So you can go to a bank and you can say, hey, I got 50 grand, 40, 50 grand as a down payment. That's assuming a conventional mortgage. You only really need about 10 to 15 grand in cash to actually get a, you know, government backed loan. You like 5% down. So 5% down on 200,000. Like you literally can get a house for 10 grand. So it's a matter of will you actually be able to get an FHA loan. So first homeowners, first homeowner, you know, loan is great. 5% down. You pay some property, mortgage, insurance. If you can get an acre though, basically covers what you'd other ways otherwise paying storage or rent for your business. So I'd just be focused on profit. Like if you can do 21,000 right now in growth mode, if you raise your prices, you'd probably, you could bring another three grand to the bottom line. Raised by 15% prices. That three grand will pay for the mortgage. Right. And more. So it's like can you stack away 15 grand get qualify for an FHA loan and you have 18 months to do that. I would just stay in profit mode a little bit and optimize for profit. So you can do it.

Yeah, yeah, I think that, I think that's good advice. I would say would he stay, would he switch to profit mode right now knowing that it's summer? Or maybe try to kind of stay in growth mode for the rest of this year? Well then all of 2025 go to heavy profit mode again.

The goal I have heard is that he wants to buy property and that is his main objective.

Right.

If that's a negotiable. And you're like, well how bad do you want to buy the property versus do you. How fat, how bad do you want to grow the business? Well, I have heard that this property is important to him. Therefore I'm optimizing for that. If you're trying to optimize for growing the business and that means more to you, it means I kick that thing off for five years, you don't have to worry about profit mode and grow the thing faster. But I'm basing, basing this based on what the objectives are.

Yeah.

Awesome.

Well, ending on financial advice for the people, that's all I got for today.

Okay, you start us off.

I got a simple one, very straightforward, you know. No, no shame in self promotion if you will. If you have not taken the MBA for entrepreneurs course, check it out. I've been revisiting.

Oh really?

Yeah, it's good.

Okay. Yeah.

So it's your course, MBA for entrepreneurs. It's really good.

Have you seen the recent consulting calls up?

I have not. I'm not up to date on all of those.

Yeah.

But yeah, I've been revisiting some of the. Just random sections. Just refreshing.

Yeah, yeah. Like every, I'd say three to four weeks I put a new coaching call like consulting call or webinar or something in there. Those are great.

Yeah, they are good. They're a little bonus content on the end. Yeah, like some people might not even know they're there.

Yeah. So my non financial advice. Dude, I'm blanking.

Oh, dude, you gotta get security cameras. I got, I got. I've been robbed twice.

Yes. Yeah.

Nice, dude. Stinks. So yeah, someone came through my window the other day while I was at church and stole stuff.

This was on the weekend?

Yeah. So anyways, I'm getting security cameras and I just gotta like buckle down a little bit. I'm like. So we were raised in the country up until I was. Oh man. Probably like we were always in the country, so we didn't lock doors or anything.

Yeah, yeah.

And so. Yeah, I just. It's just annoying. It's annoying because I've been at the tiny house and my house and so now it's like, okay, I gotta like lock this down.

Yeah.

And those are both the places where I've filmed before.

Yeah.

So it's just, you know, I don't like to be paranoid. I like to just like live my life especially. So this is a little bit weird. So. It was funny. They stole all my watches, bro. I got a couple here. I got a couple here. Fortunately.

Yeah.

That were given to me by the owners, but. Yeah. It stinks.

Yeah, it stinks. Sorry, man.

Yeah, dude, it's just. It's just like a weird. Like I don't even really care about the watches because they're not like super valuable. But it's just like, oh man, I got a security camera. Yeah. And all that.

It's a weird feeling. I've had my truck broken into twice.

Oh, really?

I think people just assume big truck, canopy, probably got tools or whatever in it.

And.

Yeah, one time I had like this really nice leatherman I got as gift and it like was like a high end leatherman and that was the only thing I stole. It was like the only thing of value in my truck.

Yeah.

So that. Yeah, it sucks, dude. It's a weird feeling.

They missed out on some other very valuable things in the house.

Like the cameras. Yeah, that's what I thought.

Right next to everything. Yeah, well, they. The other time they stole the cameras. Okay. And that was like $5,000. So anyways, life goes on. But I just don't like, I don't have to even think about it. It's weird in your house because like it's your private space.

Totally.

And so.

Totally.

Yeah. I don't like putting cameras up either because like it just. It feels like I don't trust anyone else that comes into the house. Cause like I'm the cleaning person and then like they pick up the laundry and like I just leave the door open and let them in. And so now I was gonna be like, hey, FYI, there's a security camera. It's not cause I don't trust you. Yeah. It's cause I don't trust other people. And so that's. I don't like that in general. I try to keep it, like, the team and stuff away from things like security cameras and checks, and I don't want to. I wouldn't want that. Like, we don't scan people's computers and stuff like that.

Yeah. So, yeah, it's more. It's a trusting environment.

Yeah.

It just sucks when someone outside of your environment violates that trust.

Trust and verify.

Yes.

Yes. All right.

I think that's everything for today. See a spot?