How To Know If You're Ready To Open Your Next Location (Why I'm Not!)

We have 3 locations right now, and my goal is to build to 10 locations. But I'm intentionally not opening location number 4 just yet because I've learned that growth doesn't just multiply what's working, it multiplies what's broken too. And right now there are things inside of our company here at Military Lawn Cuts that I want to fix before I copy and paste them into another location. That was very hard for me to realize because I'm naturally somebody who wants to move very fast. If something works, my instinct is to do more of it. New location, more customers, more team members, more revenue. So you see, our purpose and why we exist is to build and develop people. And so my natural instinct is like, let's help more people. Create more great job opportunities for people. Create more impact. But more isn't always better. Sometimes you're just pouring more water into a bucket with massive holes in it. And one of the biggest holes we're focused on right now is customer retention. Our preliminary numbers recently showed that roughly one-third of our new recurring customers were no longer recurring customers within their first. 90 days. We're still validating exactly what is driving all of that. Some people move, some people have financial issues, some cancel for reasons completely unrelated to the service, and some absolutely can be related to things that we need to improve on. But even as a working number, it got my attention— the fact that we were literally losing 1/3 of our customers in the first 90 days is a problem. Because imagine I solve the marketing problem. I spend more money, the phones ring more, we sell more work, we open another location, and then a large percentage of those customers leave. What did I actually scale? I scaled customer acquisition, but I also scaled the leak. So before location number 4, there are 3 things I want to see get stronger. before we launch that next location. Customers staying longer, leaders owning the outcome, and systems actually working without me constantly pushing them. The first one is retention. For years, I was obsessed with getting customers. How many leads came in? How many estimates did we send? What's our close rate? How quickly can we grow? Those things still matter. But eventually you realize a customer you already have can become more valuable than constantly replacing customers who leave. And churn hides inside growth. If you're adding 100 customers while losing 40, you can look at the 60 you gained and feel great. But those 40 are telling you something. Maybe it's quality, maybe it's communication, maybe pricing, maybe expectations. Maybe the customer simply wasn't a good fit. But if you don't know why they're leaving, growth can hide the problem for too long. That is something that we are trying to get better at. We want better visibility into why customers cancel. If it's a quality problem, we need accountability. If it's a communication problem, we need to fix the process. If it's something outside of our control, that's different. But I don't want us guessing, and neither should you, because you can't fix a problem you aren't willing to measure. The second thing is leadership. This one might actually be harder than retention. The first location can survive with a really strong owner. The owner knows every customer. The owner knows every team member. The owner catches every problem. The owner makes every decision. That can work for a while, but now open a second location, then a third. Suddenly you physically cannot be at each one of those locations, and that's where you find out whether you actually built a business or whether you just built something that depends on you. 5 years ago, I was out in the field every single day, knocking on doors, pushing mowers, and bootstrapping my business from the ground up. Today, I am not in the field and rarely ever in the office. I work on the business and not in it. And that didn't happen by luck. We put the systems in place and now we're handing them over to you. Inside our school community, you will gain access to all of the systems that we've used to allow this to happen. Click the link in the description below. I have general managers at each location because the goal for me is not to personally run lawn crews from my phone. The goal is for leaders to own the outcomes. That means when I'm not there, the standards don't disappear. Customers still get taken care of, equipment still gets maintained. The team knows what success looks like. Problems get addressed, work gets delegated, and the general manager doesn't need me to remind them of every single thing they're responsible for. Now, that's difficult because leadership is not just giving somebody a checklist. It's developing judgment into somebody. When something unexpected happens, what decisions do they make? When they're short-staffed, how do they protect the route? When a customer has an unusual request, do they understand the economics? When somebody misses a standard, do they avoid it or do they address it? That's what eventually determines whether a location can operate without the owner. And if location number 3 still requires me to constantly step in and close the gaps, why would I open number 4? I would just create another place that needs me. That's not scale, that's multiplying problems. It's multiplying dependence. The third thing is systems and quality. As you grow, tiny problems become huge problems. One missed process with 3 people might happen occasionally. That same process across 20 team members, multiple trucks, hundreds of customers, and multiple locations can happen over and over and over again. That's why growth exposes weak systems so quickly. If the office doesn't know exactly what to do when somebody wants to cancel, that becomes a retention problem. If a quality complaint gets handled differently depending on who receives it, that's a system problem. If standards exist but nobody follows up on them, that's a leadership problem. Each location multiplies the number of places where those gaps can happen. That's why I've changed the way I think about expansion. I used to think the question was, can we open another location? Now I think the better question is, have we earned the right to do so? right to open that next location? Because those are not the same question. We could probably force growth, hire more people, buy more trucks, buy more equipment, market in another area. But I don't want 10 locations just so I can say we have 10 locations. I want 10 healthy locations, locations with good leadership, customers who stay, team members who know exactly What success looks like, systems that actually get followed, and a business that doesn't become more fragile every time it gets bigger. I'm still extremely bullish on growth. 10 locations is still the goal, but I've learned that sometimes the fastest way to get to where you're going is to stop expanding long enough to fix the next level it's going to expose. Because if you have one broken system, opening another location doesn't fix it. Now you have 2 copies of the broken system. If you have weak leadership, more locations doesn't solve it, they expose it. And if customers are leaving too quickly, adding more customers can make the top line revenue look better without actually making the business healthier. So location number 4 can wait. We're going to keep improving the 3 that we have. We're going to get better at retaining customers. We're going to keep developing our leaders. We're going to tighten the systems that they still rely too heavily on people remembering what to do. And when those things are stronger, then we can grow better together again. Because I don't want to build 10 locations fast. I want to build 10 locations that actually work. Guys, thank you so much for watching. Make sure you're subscribed to the channel if you want to build a more successful lawn and landscape business. We'll see you in the next video.