"You will go out of business." - Episode 089

Now we're recording.

All right. Welcome back. One second.

Too excited. I was too excited.

There you go. You're all right.

I'll take. Hold on. Let me take a breath.

All right, now we're ready. Welcome back. Another episode C Suite Unfiltered with Mike Andes took a week off due to the blue Collar summit as well as the Augusta Nation conference. How we feeling after that event?

Mike? Making it happen. My voice is slowly repaired, so I had three days where I don't have to talk as much, and then tomorrow we're recording for eight hours, so gonna be great. Oh, yeah.

Nice.

Very cool.

So we took the week off to do that event. It is always such a unique and fun time to just be with the all of Augusta Nation. The energy in the room when it's just a Gusta nation is pretty unmatched. So thank you to everyone in Augusta Nation. My heart goes out to you, as Elon Musk would say, but I won't make any motions with my hand.

Sorry, Leah's to get political. My heart goes out to you, but, yeah, it was a great event. So how many people in total did we have at the blue Collar summit for people that were not able to attend?

I'm actually not 100. Sure. I think that we're between like, 3, 350 to 450, I think, including the whole team and everything in the system, there's like 480, but some people don't show up, so. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Gotcha.

What's your. What are some of your takeaways from the event? Let's just talk holistically here. Like, what were some things that you took away that, you know, initial reactions from Andy? So this is our first time kind of debriefing the actual event as a whole. Obviously, we've talked some specifics, but the event as a whole, what were some takeaways from you?

Takeaways as a whole. I think I was very proud of the team. They did a great job. Everyone was very, very high, high functioning and super high caliber. So that was pretty cool. Other takeaways, I. I know I want to do for conference next year. In terms of speakers, I want to change things up a little bit based upon, like, who I think was the best speakers. Obviously, looking into the surveys that come in from everyone that was at the event, seeing what they liked and what they didn't like. So I have some ideas in terms of what we can do for speakers, which will be fun. I have some ideas around, like, Shark Tank style for my audience. If you want to speak on stage? Hey, pitch me. Like, give me your pitch. Let's go.

All right.

My audience, when they get on stage, they know how much I put into it. And so I see the level of preparation is so much higher for my audience compared to even professional speakers. The level of preparation, the slide decks, the creatives that they're putting into it. And I think that's, like, the standard I want at the event. So anyways, I personally thought they were the best speaking was the people who, like, know me, they've been around the conferences. And so I would love to kind of have like a Shark Tank style, you know, if you want to be on stage, let's go ahead and get, get, get some pitches going. So that. That one idea and then, yeah, overall, just a great event. Bring the community together. It was the first time I obviously pitched Augusta from the stage, and so, yeah, it was overall, really good event. Good.

Well, here's the. Here. The people want to know, hard hitting questions. This is. I would never ask this. The people want to know is Lee park getting an invite back to the stage.

After your last part? It was funny because we were like, okay, we're going to debrief this whole. The whole event. And then I was like, I don't know, should we debrief after what Lee said the other day, since Mike's such a tyrant?

But yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that was your best, best talk ever. So congrats, man.

Thank you.

I know you put a lot of work into it.

I did, yes. I wanted to be prepared. Like I said, I wanted to respect the invite as well as everybody in the audience. So it was fun. Yeah. For me, in terms of takeaways, I think agreed. The team was kind of firing on all cylinders, actually. The setup process. I would have to say having this being my sixth or seventh summit, I've helped you.

The least stressful in terms of setup process. So that speaks volumes to the team just being all there for each other, helping each other out, make things. We're running smoothly as well as Liz, from the organizational perspective, I think for anyone who has never put on an event like that, you get a new level of respect for the person organizing it, because it is so insane. But the energy was great. The questions that people brought to the Q and A, that's always one of my things. Obviously, Q A is great for you and for people in the audience, like, they want to directly ask Mike Andy's questions. And it's also good for you to kind of flex that business muscle. Of all right. I don't know what's coming, but I'm going to do my best to give help in these situations. I get nervous about Q A because I don't want there to be bad questions and I feel like I can't think of one bad question. Like, they were very high quality questions. So that's a thank you to the audience for coming prepared with those questions. So those are two highlights for me. The team crush, low stress in terms of setup, tear down, all that. And the questions from the audience were fantastic this year. Like, very high quality questions.

So, yeah, I think having governed Q and A too, is good. So, like, the first night being said, hey, like, we're only going to talk about multiple locations, general managers, absentee ownership, GM models, and like, governing, like what the Q and A is about kind of keeps it more focused too. So I kind of actually like that.

Yeah, I have a.

This is.

This is just a. A funny moment I'll share. Hopefully he doesn't mind. This is Brandon from Simply Lawn Care. You. You've had. He's been featured on your channel before. He comes up to me and we. We kind of. I double take him. I was like, have you. I was like, have you. You know, have you been. Have you been lifting? He was like, have you been. Have you been. I was like, yeah. So we both just talked.

Really?

He was like, yeah, last conference I was this. And I put on this much mass. And I was like, dude, yeah, last conference I was this. And I'm down to this weight. And so it was just like a good bro moment. So sh. Brandon from Simply Lawn Care, he's getting jacked. So anyways, for the people that aren't a part of Augusta, I'm sure they're going to want maybe some of the teasers, some of the updates from Augusta. Now you have posted some of them publicly. But I thought, hey, let's share on the pod. Kind of what we've been doing inside of Augusta and what people can expect in the future, kind of CC C suite exclusives, if you will. The leads program. You've already posted about this publicly on your Facebook, on your YouTube. I've already seen it. But what is this leads program that you are rolling out? Augusta leads?

Yeah, so it really comes back from the feedback of owners over the past year, really saying, like, hey, look, we would love for you not just to do, you know, where you share tutorials and how to do ads and do the tracking, etc. But like actually run the ads, give us the leads Et cetera. And so I've never wanted to do a marketing agency inside or outside of Augusta Lawn Care because it's a treadmill of always trying to stay up with the algorithm, always changing out, creative, getting, you know, ups and downs of the. The seasonality of the industry. And so it's very difficult. And more importantly, then it translates to the owner having to pay varying lead costs. And so, you know, I again, I kind of back to first principles of like, when I started Augusta Nation, like, what would I want from a franchise? It's like, okay, what would I want from a lead agency? I would want to have a flat month, a flat cost per lead, no monthly management fees, no additional cost, no contracts. It's just when you get me a lead, I pay for it. And if I want to stop paying for the leads because I'm full, I'm at capacity, I don't need more work, I can just turn it off. And so that's the ultimate goal for Augusta leads. And that's phase two. Phase two happening in 2026 next year will be much more revolving around serving the existing owners, them having this existing budget us with a flat dollar amount per lead and then being able to start a new location. Say, okay, I have $15,000. That's my opening budget. That will get me X amount of leads. I can cover 50% of those and have a very, very algorithmic way of growing the business and scaling it up so they can take out the skill of marketing that is required to grow a location. That's phase two. Phase one. And this is what we launched at conference. And that, what I've been talking about recently, this week is where we take what we already are getting in terms of leads. There are thousands of leads every single month that come into Augusta Lawn Care from Command center that, that are out of our service area, a mile or two outside of that area, or inside of our service area. But we don't perform those services because specifically, the locations that are in profit mode, that are cutting out complex services, we still get contacted a lot. Like, again, 20 to 35% of leads that come into Augusta, depending on the simplicity of the services being offered at a location, are unserviceable. They're either out of our service area or we don't perform the services. So monetizing those, they're very high qualified. We literally are talking to them on the phone. We are literally getting the information. Some of them we're actually selling jobs to using our instant pricing. And we already have pricing accepted. We can now give those to someone else. And so we're monetizing it. We're getting 50% of that to the owners on a quarterly basis. So my hope is that down the road, as the program grows and they get more partners around their area, they can actually cover their entire franchise fee using just the partners model. And that's basically they can sell 30 selly, sell 30 unserviced leads every month, assuming they have partners that can pick up, pick them up, that would pay for their franchise fee. And so I generally believe that within 12 months, specifically once the partner program is built out, we have enough people in it, I believe that there'll be a good chunk of owners that actually get more money from the leads program and selling unserviceable leads than from Augusta Lawn Care having to pay for franchise fees. So the biggest reason why we do this in the long term, like what's the net net? How does this actually impact the goals of Augusta Nation? Is since our vision is to change the level of professionalism in the industry. Okay, well, how would we regulate that? Well, first off, we want everyone insured and we want everyone licensed because we would reduce the low ballers and people that pay under the table. We reduce the amount of fraud that happens in this industry of people ripping off customers and then them not being held liable because they don't have license, they don't have insurance, et cetera. And so how do we improve the level of professionalism? We would require every person in the industry to have that. Well, how do we then regulate that? We want to make sure sure is where the customer expects that. Because we've always said, like, how do we make the industry change is we change the expectation of the customer. Well, what our objective is as we get more locations is that we become the. What you currently see in terms of Yelp, Angie's, all the others lead services that are at the top of every single Google rank because they have so much traffic coming to it. And sometimes for most independents, it'll take six to 12 months, even with a good SEO firm to be able to outrank these lead agents because there's so much traffic and domain authority they possess. So that's happening more and more for Augusta. Our locations that we start out usually within a week, one to three weeks, are on the first page of Google simply because the domain authority of augustalongerservices.com and so my hope is that as that continues to grow and we get more and more leads, that we are the arbiter of who get the Leads in the lawn care industry, like all leads, come through us and then we distinguish who they go to and who they're going to go to is people inside the Augusta leads program that are licensed, insured and we are vetting. And furthermore that Augusta Nation owners can veto them outside the program if they're known for low quality work locally. And so my hope is that down the road, the vast majority of lawn care landscaping leads are coming through us and then we determine who they go to because by doing that, we set the standard of what is required to get leads in this industry. And so that's the end all goal. The similar thing kind of did with Google Lead. With the Google guarantee and the Google local services program, you have to have a background check, you have to have insurance, you have to have registration. That's the same thing that we're kind of doing. But the leads that we're giving many times have accepted a proposal. They have pricing, they're very, very validated. And so we're selling those for a flat $79 to our partners. And that's like the immediate goal is like, how do we cash in on some of these unserviceable leads? Second goal is how do we make it where you actually make money doing inside of Augusta Instead of having to pay a franchise fee, we can actually account for it and make more than. And the third is changing the level of the industry's professionalism by determining where leads go. And we are the ones that determine where all good leads go. And then that incentivizes then operators to get license, get insured, do good quality work so that they actually get inside the program.

Okay, so just to play devil's advocate, which that was very complete synopsis of what this program is. So I'm an outsider to Augusta. Basically what you're telling me is you're going to to charge me for leads that you're not going to use. What's the catch and why should I pay you for that lead?

Well, yeah, because like if you're going to go get leads on Google, you know, run ads on Google Ads, for example, it's very common to spend 100 to $150 cost per lead. So if I can do that for half dollar 79, it's a flat fee. It doesn't go up and down. So if I can get. You can't get you a lead for 79 bucks, you don't pay for it. So during the winter, during the off season, you could very well in Google Ads by the time you look at your cost per lead and then your cost, your conversion rate be paying 3, $400 cost per customer or customer acquisition cost. And for that reason, most people turn off their ads because variable cost, it goes way up and goes way down. When you say, hey, it's 79 bucks, it simply comes down to this. Can you turn a $79 customer into someone that has a $10,000 project for a landscaping job, a hardscaping job, a pool installation, a tree job? And these are the leads that we are already are getting, but we don't even, we don't have anyone to give them to. And then secondly, if you have a recurring model, can you take a $79 lead and then turn them into a customer because you have great retention and you really get upselling to be able to turn them into two, $3,000 per year annual customer value and then keep them for three or four years and then again that $79 into a 10, $15,000 customer in their lifetime value. And so the only people that should join are the people that have that system dialed. If you're doing a bunch of one time jobs that are low ticket three $400 little cleanups, you don't have any process of upselling. You don't know how to convert a mowing customer into a mulch customer, into a winter services into snow plowing and upsell them, then you shouldn't join because like $79 is probably going to wipe out your profit from a $300 job. However, if you can turn that $300 job into a $3,000 a year customer and then convert them three or four years in a row, now all of a sudden it starts to make a lot of sense. And so yes, there's plenty of people and if you look at the comments, there's plenty of people that say that. And then you look at their businesses and their, they're solo operators. They are, they don't have a website, they don't know how to convert or upsell customers. And so the people that will take value, it's the people who are applying for the program, they're the largest operators, they're the ones that have dialed in systems around marketing and software. And so again, this is what I want to happen in the industry. I want the best operators the most, the people who have great websites. This is why Augusta exists. And so in the past we've just told the customer, sar, we don't do tree service, sorry, we don't do concrete. Now we're going to have actual partners that we vetted and these are the best operators to give these leads to. And. And that's what will elevate the industry long term.

Yeah, I think one way of looking at it, and I'm just trying to, you know, see it holistically from both sides of the fence, if you will. Say there's someone out there that, you know isn't a part of Augusta, but they support you. They support what Augusta is doing, and they're in, you know, a metropolitan area.

Right.

Let's just say, you know, Austin, Texas. And so eventually in Austin, there's going to be 6, 7, 8, 9 Augusta locations. Right. I don't know how many, but there's going to be a lot. Well, if you just have your one location, more than likely your website's probably not going to be able to compete as well with all of those Augusta websites. In theory. And that means that any unserviceable leads from Augusta can actually get to you because of the partner program, whereas otherwise they would just be swallowed up by Augusta and gone nowhere. This actually gives you access to those unserviceable leads or the locations that aren't expanding, that aren't marketing, you can get those leads that I would argue a discounted rate and not having to try and compete on the battlefront that is Google. Right. And SEO and things of that nature. Does that kind of make sense as well?

Yeah, 100%. Like, look, if you can get customers consistently for under $79, you shouldn't join the program. If you have an unlimited source of leads based upon a 40, 50, $60 customer acquisition cost, go for it. I just know, I know the numbers on the back end because we see hundreds and hundreds of companies, people are paying 150, 200, $300 cost per lead because they don't do good. Great tracking on Google. They simply throw money at every door. Direct mail. They don't have no strategy around their mail campaigns, and they. They're willing to spend $300 somewhere else. And you're like, well, I don't want to give Augusta the money because that's $79 to them. Okay, great. We will kick your butt because our customer acquisition cost is so much lower than you. And that lead will go to somebody in your market and somebody will take advantage of that customer and we will get the money. And so I think, you know, if someone's not joining Augusta, then they should probably take the leads for a lower cost than what they're currently getting. And again, if someone's making. Getting customers for 50 40, $50, all power to you. Keep going. You're doing it right. The vast majority of people in this.

And I know this because I've done surveys from my public audience, I see all the data on the back end. So again, the same reason that someone wouldn't join Augusta in general, mostly because they have pride around their brand, et cetera. And I get that. The same thing is true. If you are paying $150 cost per lead on Google Ads and you're not willing to take a customer for $79, that's highly qualified and accepted pricing from us, you have a pride problem. You're not doing what's right to the best of the business. And so, you know, I think that the chips will fall where they, where they may. And I think down the road it'll just be a simply a matter of either, hey, look, if you don't want. This is like the whole notion. The reason we franchise is because I needed to compete with everyone. And so now I'm going at the jugular. This is why some people are very mad about this. I'm going for the jugger, which is I'm going to affect our lead flow. And either you're going to join Augusta and actually become Augusta Lawn Care, or you're going to have the systems and you're going to have the, you know, you're going to upsell customers, you're going to have software, you're going to have a great website, you're going to be insured, you're going to be licensed, and if not, I'm going to put you out of business. And that is the goal because that's the only way to change the level of professionalism. Because me talking about in videos, no one's doing anything. It's always been that way. That's why we franchised. And so the whole goal here is, yes, I need to compete with you and I will put you out of business if you're not willing to adhere by these standards. And the same thing when it comes to, like, employees as we grow, it's like, if you don't do pay for performance, you will not be able to pay how much we pay our employees. And so the same thing is true. And do I wish, do I hope that people go out of business? No, absolutely not. I hate that. But it's a matter of, like, that's the only way people will listen if we compete with them. And now that we're going after their lead flow, there are some very mad people, because I know in their market we will suck out 20, 30% of their leads because right now we're not even taking them. And we're not, we're not, we're just like saying, sorry, we don't serve that area. Sorry, we're at capacity. You know, if we're in profit mode, there's times we turn leads off. Well, now we're going to, we're going to actually, we're going to govern who those go to and they're going to be the best operators in every market. Yeah.

So if you wouldn't mind peeling back the curtain a little, obviously this is a massive amount of development that needs to be built out right back in systems resources websites. The beta website islive Augusta leads.com if someone wants to check it out. Why are you doing this? Is it strictly for the benefit of the owners inside of Augusta? I mean, it's obviously kind of everything you said, but this is, this is a massive build out to do this. What's kind of in it for you, Mike Andes, or you Augusta Corporate, if you will?

Well, like, again, like the only way to change the industry is to affect people's lead flow. And so we've gone after, you know, we've come into markets, we see people join the software that we see, they start to implement PvP. When we move into a market, the same thing is going to be true when we, with the leads. People will have to get insured, they'll have to get licensed because we will cut off their lead source. That's, that's the ultimate goal. And again, I don't relish in hurting anybody, but if you're going to change the industry, we have to cut out the bottom, the bottom shaft. And we're going to, we're going to take the 10% of operations, we're going to consolidate them in terms of who gets all the leads. In terms of, like me, selfishly, I get 50% of all the revenue. So I get $40 in every single one. So that's like how we keep the program alive. Then the owners inside of Augusta Nation, they get the other half. So now they're incentivized to spend money on marketing, knowing that if there's leads that they can are outside their service area, they're going to get money back for them. And so this allows us to spend them, to spend way more on marketing, be much more liberal about where they're marketing and advertising and not worry as much about targeting on Facebook. You know, if that algorithm messes up and all of a sudden they're marketing to people 5, 10 miles away. Fine, have a partner there and collect 40 bucks when. When that lead comes in. And so I think that's super valuable for them. We get 50, like 50% of it. And so, selfishly, I'm not super concerned about the revenue. Like, we're going to take any money we get from phase one and basically funnel that into phase two for R and D so that we can really figure out a great program for the owners to actually push a button and spend more. Because the problem with this one is they're waiting on leads. We then take what comes in, what's already there, and monetize it. It'd be very valuable to them. If I can say, hey, you give X amount, we will give you X amount of leads. And so that's going to be very expensive for us to do the R and D. Really. Like, there's a whole list of different channels that we'd be using in terms of advertising. So I need to fund that. So that's like my main focus. This will kind of fund a lot of the R and D. And so, yeah, I don't know. It's selfish. I just. I just want. I just want to. I just. I just know that people don't listen to me until we start affecting our business. And so people will start to pay attention when they affect. When we affect their leads. And I generally believe we will. In some of our markets where we search, we have three, four locations, and we're surrounding a terror. We will hit. We will get. Get most leads that our green industry will get most leads. And so as we start to scale out to, you know, seven, 800 locations, I think what most markets, I would love to be able to say that we take 40, 50% of all leads that come into the lawn care industry.

Yeah, I love it. Well, that's part of the reason I asked the question. I was just kind of see the full picture, if you will, because if there is someone out there that maybe doesn't trust it or thinks there's some sort of catch, it's like, this is what we're doing. Here it is. Take it or leave it. You can either be a part of it or not. It's up to you. So that is the Augusta leads program that we rolled out. We also rolled out something else that is very exciting, and that is more instant pricing for Augusta. So I know you've been talking about this, you know, a lot publicly. Most people know that Augusta locations have the opportunity to offer instant quote pricing on their website for mowing services, we have now expanded that. So do you want to talk about that a little bit?

Yeah. So like in 2024 is our first full year where we had almost all locations were doing instant pricing. And so for mowing. And so like the data is just so on our side. So like when data is screaming at you to do something, you pivot. It wasn't like it was close. It wasn't like some locations struggled in terms of the instant pricing, converting less like nothing. So we've really focused on okay, winter services and snow. Those are two winter tracks that we have in Augusta. Doing instant pricing for both of those. So we can actually drive new customers during the winter to those forms. Instead of just trying to convert our mowing customers into winter services, we actually drive traffic to these. The instant pricing for winter services, for snow, et cetera. Also the ability to be able to have where the customer actually puts their credit card information on the form. So there's no drop off from accepted estimate to then we get them, we got to wait for their card information to be on file. So that's going to be coming out here in the first half of 2025. So the customer checks out, they accept the quote and they put their card information on file. That then goes in the back end of Copilot. It goes into the customer portal. And that's really like I think something we've been working for a long time as well as with Max AI so on the phone him actually being able to give pricing, collect card information, etc. That'll also be happening hopefully all of it done in 2025. But if not like we'll start we'll get the beta program running and testing it. But Max being able to on the phone take it with the customer. If they, if they want to talk to an operator they can but takes about half as long. If they want to talk to Max and he'll get all the information, use the instant pricing that we use on the website, but do it over the phone. And again like instant pricing. I talked a bunch about conference but like there's just so much data on our side and so like I know there's just. It's just going to be good. And so when you have so much data pointing in your direction, it's really nice because you with confidence move forward. So like the whole year of 2024 with mowing, the way it operate around instant pricing and the amount of savings it had in terms of admin because there is no admin time when someone checks out, you don't have to measure their property. You don't have to send them an estimate. It saves so much admin time. And so even by having the credit card on file again is another step of saving admin time. So it's a saving defensive measure because there's less admin time of measuring a property over the phone, of getting a card information, et cetera. But then from a offensive measure, it is a measure like we go after customers that want the job done. They could care less about price. They just want to get on the schedule and get taken care of and off their to do list. And that's who we're going after. They're the least price sensitive. They're going to accept every upsell, they're going to accept winter services. They're going to be the highest annual customer value. And we will stand apart from everyone else that is trying to be the independent local person, but yet we have a brand in hundreds of locations that stand behind what we do. And so that's again, not popular. People are very unhappy about me the past week as I've launched out leads and like, they start to see what we're doing. I've been very clear from the beginning the reason I started franchise is because I'm going to compete with every single landscaper. And so I agree. I know that you will not like me if you do not adapt this what we're talking about. And so, yeah, I've made some enemies the past couple days.

Yeah, fair enough. Well, let's just keep going. Let's just dig.

Lee, I'm the new, I'm, I'm the new Yelp and Angie's list of the lawn care industry. I used to trust you and now, yeah, that's what I've been getting.

That is, that's an interesting comment, but okay, yeah, I don't, I don't see it, but I, I, I will empathize with that person or people. That is not it. But okay, well, let's just go even deeper because Yelp and Angie's, uh, are not your direct, direct competitor. They actually just take your money for sometimes unqualified leads. But either way, they don't have instant quote pricing that you control. They also don't have the ability to accept credit card or payment information. So that is a new update we also made to Augusta. So now we control the lead flow. We also can sell jobs without ever talking to someone, and now we can collect their payment information. So kind of a triple threat, if you will. The trifecta of lead flow and customer generation. So is that kind of the idea that all of those work kind of in them together?

Yeah, like, look, I've been very clear from the beginning, I want to consolidate the lawn care and landscaping industry. Shoot me, like. And by doing that, I'll put pressure on everyone else to improve and have paid for performance, have open book management, create this much more of a trade. Everyone will be insured and licensed and if you don't, you're just going to lose. And so I hope that at the very worst, you have have to get insured, you have to get licensed, you have to start adopting these programs, principles. And if you're feeling any pressure now, just wait, just wait a few more years as we begin to roll these programs out and get so far ahead in technology. And like, yeah, it's just, I'm just calling my, like, this is, I've said this very, very clear from the beginning. If you all just listened to my content and did what we talked about, I wouldn't have franchised. But no one does. And so now what people get mad about, the reason they get mad is because they know that either A, can't compete or B, they've been lazy and they don't want to do pay for performance, they don't want to get insured, they don't want to get licensed. And for that reason I get very happy because that's what will cause change in this industry and you will go out of business. Business, like that is my goal. If you're not going to adopt these, these systems we talk about, if you're not going to treat your employees correctly, if you're not gonna have a great website, if you're not gonna run with software, if you're not gonna be professional to customer, if you're not gonna paint your trucks and put decals and you're not gonna have uniforms, I want you to go out of business.

Yeah, professionalism. And that's what I, that's what I told people at the summit as well as I said, hey, like you're, you're here, you're supporting Mike, you're, you're, you know, you're, you're watching the content like you're trying to do right? You're, you're trying to implement P4P. You're trying to run a professional business, you're trying to take care of your customer. That's great. I'm going to be one of your biggest cheerleaders, actually. But one day I'm going to have to compete with you. And I don't want to have to do that. Right. Because we are going to cheer the people on that do support the content. Right. There are so many names that you and I know we could rattle off between the two of us. 50, 100, who knows of people that have supported you long time that have been commenting on your pages that we got to see last week at Summit. I just don't want to compete with those guys down the road. Right.

Yeah. It has nothing to do with joining Augusta. Like, the goal of Augusta is a means to the end. And the end is that we want to change the level of professionalism in the industry. And Augusta is the thing that the venue to be able to do that. And so, yeah, some people won't like the way we kind of flex on that around this and that's fine. But it is the only way, the only way to actually create change. The same way that like the cab industry used to be massively fragmented and then from 2014 onwards, Lyft and Uber now control 75% of the market. And so, yes, there's a huge fragmentation of the lawn care and landscape industry. The only thing that will change that is someone else getting way ahead in terms of technology and then being able to force everyone else from, from like, from Ubers and lift legislation from owners, from drivers expectations of wages. Like, they just change the game. And so, yeah, that's the goal.

I'd even look at like Uber Eats. Like, this is a tangent, but Uber Eats. Like, I feel like it has drastically impacted restaurants that just haven't adopted that. Right. Because when we were at the conference, I ordered Uber Eats to my room it a late night. I was like, all right, I need some food. So I just was like, I don't even care. Like, top rated restaurant right there, massive amount of reviews. I don't even care what their delivery fees are. Just like, do it right. But I didn't even. I'm not going to browse around who has the best menu, who has the best this. It's like, who's top rated on Uber Eats. Great. They have food I like, I'm ordering. I don't even care what it costs.

Yeah, the difference, the difference with Uber Eats and Augusta is this. Yeah, they extract value from the owners. They're taking 20, 30% of revenue from the owners for that service. I believe that us changing like the expectation of the customer allows the owner to charge 20, 30, 40% more because the standards change and the standards changing increase the professionalism. And so the same way that somehow, like electricians are able to charge $200 an hour and we're not is because the level of professionalism, what people expect of electrician or an H VAC technician is very different than that of a landscape. And so I believe that although to your point, it becomes the expectation etc. I don't want to extract value from owners. I want the entire industry to improve and get a whole lot more than the 20 or 30% that's extracted back because they raised prices. So that would be the goal. But you're right, like there are companies, a lot of companies that going into Covid didn't want to do GrubHub, didn't want to do Uber Eats and they were forced to because like that's what the customer demanded. And so the question is with you know, not having Covid but like it's a, it's a matter of like how do we force the business owners to change but not extract value from them. I just want it to be where you have to adopt it. But I don't have to extract value from you. It just by doing that it changes the. The industry as a whole.

Yeah, yeah, no, that makes total sense. Gotcha. Well, any other Augusta exclusive updates you want to talk about the people? I feel like I hit the kind of the big ones that we were excited to share. Any. Anything else?

I think people hate me enough. I don't think. I think I need to lie low for a few weeks and just let it cool off.

I got one that's kind of fun is the seven Figure Club. That's exciting. That's just more fun. Don't worry no one, we're not coming for you. We're not attacking seven figure business owners. But that's something that you've wanted to offer for a while inside of Augusta. So maybe tell the people about that. That's something new that we're doing this year.

Yes, like this year I think a little over 20 locations are ran by general managers. We're expecting about 50 locations to be ran by general managers in 2025. And so we're rolling out more training for the GMs two additional days at in person for general managers come to get much more operational training how to deal with their owners, the mechanics of the equipment, running the dispatch board, et cetera. And in addition to that also like as an owner gets multiple locations, has more than a million dollars in revenue across their locations. Like what's that next stage of investing inside the community. And so I've never, I try not to talk about a lot because like the average location inside of a destination is still around that 4 or 500,000 level. And so they don't actually need to know about like how do I diversify, how do I think about, you know, where I should do things for tax incentives, how I should use my spouse to get involved in real estate, etc. And so those will be the tactics we start talking about. It's our first one's going to be scheduled in July for a day with the owners that do over a million dollars in revenue. It's kind of like stage seven of what Inside of Augusta Nation there's seven stages. And so that seven stage kind of giving them more to move into since there's more and more locations that are into that size and multi unit operators, they have multiple locations now. And so the goal is just to be able to create a ladder for them to be able to start a business, grow the business, be able to give inside the community when they are coaches, franchise advisor, counselor, etc. And then be able to expand and grow their personal network as they think about retirement, as they think about moving on to different stage of life, handing the businesses off, etc. And so yeah, that would be like also talk about price and personal stuff. So I'll probably tap your shoulder on a couple of these things in terms of like health things, etc. And so yeah, I'm looking forward to it. Cool.

I love it. Very, very exciting. Well, I think those are the main updates. We have a lot of other stuff we could talk about, obviously new president, all sorts of crazy stuff, but we'll save it for next week because we're both, we both have busy schedules catching up after the summit. So we'll end with some non financial advice. Do you have any for us?

Go ahead, go ahead.

All right, I have mine. This is, it's, it's not going to make a lot of sense. Give me some leeway here. Buy somebody this week that you work with a breakfast burrito. And this is, this is a way for me to publicly give some flowers. Nick Reed, our owner, success manager, bought me a breakfast burrito while we were at conference. And it was just such a, such a kind moment. It was like, oh, he's taking care of me. Like he sees me, he sees I haven't eaten. He just bought me a breakfast burrito. It was very kind of him. So it really lifted my spirits, gave me some energy. So I was very thankful for that. Nick Reed. So I am going to say buy someone on your team a breakfast burrito that could be Your spouse, an employee, a manager, a man, an employee to an owner. Buy someone a breakfast burrito. And here's what I'm going to offer the first five people. If you email me that you bought someone a breakfast burrito, I'll venmo it back to you. I will venmo you the cost of that burrito. So there you go.

What's your email, bro? What's your email?

Oh, my email is in the description, but it's augustalongcareservices.com so shoot me an email like, hey, I bought this burrito. I will venmo you back your cost of the burrito.

That's a. That's the new lead magnet is breakfast burritos is Lee. Let's go.

There you go. It's a great way to lift someone's spirits.

Let's go. Okay. My non financial advice is when you're going to make a bet around golf, don't do it based upon distance, do it based upon actual scores. So I had a bet with Augusta Nation that if anyone could out drive me at topgolf that, that I'd give a hundred dollars. So two people were able to out drive me one time. I might buy my ad, but I just wanted to make a point and that is this. The average distance was much higher for me myself because I was consistently very high. But they all edged, you know, two people, Brian Connor and Landon Smith, both edged me out by a few yards. Well, Brian hit one, got a little lucky one time got went really far. So I have to, I owe them both a hundred dollars. But in the future, my bet will be more along the line of either average distance because some of them hit like a couple that were like 100 yards because they just scuffed it. I just want to make a point. I didn't scuff anything. Yeah, yeah, Every single one was very straight. And also if you actually hit me on a golf course, I will crush you. So my non financial but advice is make sure your bets are more holistic instead of just so one dimensional where people can just like crank away at the ball for 100 times and they might get lucky once but then they win the bet. So hey, that's a bet.

You didn't parameters on it. A bet's a bet you lost fair and square. So.

That's right.

I don't. How many swings did you take?

I did, I did a lot, dude, because I went to like every bay inside of top golf and I was like traveling with as many people as possible. There's 170 people. So, like, I'm trying to, like, meet everyone, say everyone's name. That's kind of, like my thing when I'm there, kind of be there for a guest nation. So I just went from every bay and probably hit, like, four to five, every single bay. So I know I hit at least 100, 150 balls. At least.

And you were giving me guff because I was only six yards under your highest. And I hit two swings. I hit two swings. All right, guy. Okay, so if we talk volume, I'm just saying, hey, I'm happy to take.

You up on the golf. On the golf course, dude.

Fair enough.

I'll do that any day of the week.

Week.

Any day of the week. All right, man.

I appreciate you. That's the pod. Like, and subscribe.