The 4 Stages That Transform You From Owner to CEO

Today we are talking about how to build a business that runs without you. We are going to break down exactly the 4 stages that every business goes through, whether you're just getting started or shoot, maybe you haven't even started yet, or you're 3 to 5 years into the game, you've got a few team members that report to you, or you're trying to get off your first truck. And get out of the field, hire your first admin. Wherever you are on this journey, this super quick presentation, by the end of it you're going to know exactly which stage you're in, what the pain points are at each stage, and most of all, how to graduate that stage in order to get you to the next level in business. For those of you that don't know, my name is Will Kelly and we've built Military Lawn Cuts from the ground up. This year we're going to do about $1.6 $1.6 million in revenue. We have 3 locations. We have general managers in place running the day-to-day operations. We also have a backend command center of our office team that handles all of the emails, the phones, the texts, things of that nature, and scheduling. I too, just like you, started literally from nothing. Many of you guys that are watching here, you probably are the same way. I didn't build our business off of debt. We literally bought a mower off of Facebook Marketplace for $100. $100. It was a residential lawn mower, and that's where we started. If you fast forward to where we are today, like, we've come a long, long way. I believe that if you can conquer these 4 stages of business, you will achieve your goals and help other people do the same. So without further ado, let's dive into it. So the goal today is how to build a business that runs without you. The problem is, is that this is a foreign concept to all of us, whether you're just getting started or 5 or 10 years into the game. It doesn't matter where you're at. This is foreign. If you haven't done this before in another industry or another business or a previous business, it is a foreign concept to you. And so we have to start to change the way that we think about things. Because realistically we haven't learned how to methodically build those systems, hire the right people, and manage them to understand that where are the hurdles in the business, where are the problems, how do we solve that to get to the next level? Until now. So Alex Hormozi just recently released a long-form training course that basically I'm gonna sum up each stage of business, their challenge, and how to graduate each stage to unlock you to get to the next level. Whether you're just getting started or years into the game, let's take a look. So this is in the most simplistic form, the 4 stages of business. I still remember when we started the business, I was the technician. I was the guy that was out there mowing every single lawn. I knew every customer's name. I knew every specific specific note on that property to know exactly how to deliver 5-star services every time to the customer. And then as we grew and the demand began to rise, I needed help. So I hired some part-time team members to come join us on our journey and to really help Military Lawn Cuts grow and expand and get to that next level. And many of you that are watching could very well be going down the same journey that I am. I'm learning. First, you're the technician, and then how do you get to that next stage in business to become a manager, which is an entire different skill set than when you were a technician? It takes a whole different approach methodically. It takes a whole different level of thinking about your day, time management, where to focus. It is a complete different skill set than you out in the field mowing lawns. So that was the second stage. And then the third stage is, for us, sharing my personal story, is now we're in a part where we were the technician, we graduated to become the manager of the technicians, and then now we've graduated to be the manager, or the architect that you could say, of the managers who are managing the techs out in the field. And so there's, there's layers of management underneath. And at every single stage, you need to identify the problems and the challenges that you have to overcome. So these are by Alex Hormozi, no matter what business you're in, the 4 stages of business. So stage 1, basically the technician slash you're figuring out how to be somewhat of a manager, similar to our story, is from 1 to 4 employees. So maybe you just started the business, you just filed the LLC, you got your first truck. That's awesome. Living the American dream. You're starting, you're getting started, which most people don't even get there yet. So good job to you. So you've got 1 to 4 employees at the company or the business, right? And really, the biggest challenge that you have encountered at this stage is you need to figure out how to monetize. You need to know how to make money for the service that you're offering. Not only do you need to know how to collect money, invoice money, monetize things. You also need to know how to advertise and begin to market, because the reality is, is people will never do business with you if they don't know of your name or of your brand or of your company. And so it is, it is crucial— all your friends, your neighbors, your city, on Google— that people know your business. So that way you can begin to advertise. And there's many, many forms of different advertising. There's paid advertising, there's unpaid advertising. That's where you're learning how to advertise, you're learning how to market the business, okay? And those are your biggest hurdles. You got to master that, you got to figure it out. I'm going to show you how to fix those solutions and here on the next, on the next slide. So let's say you've graduated that stage, all right? Now you may be at the 5 to 9 employees. You figured out how to monetize, you figured out how to advertise, right? This is awesome. You're starting to build a team around you. It's not you and yourself, the only one out there in the truck, because I've been there before. It was me, myself, and I. Then my wife came along. Shoot, my mom even helped mow lawns in the beginning. That goes— that takes me way back. So very, very cool there. So now you're at a point where you need to prioritize. You need to learn the skill set of prioritizing and executing. You need to learn how to Simplify, because the reality is, is what you're doing right now is not going to be able to scale. It's not. And if you want to build something large, something big, if you want to build a business that runs without you, you have to learn how to simplify your services in order to scale. Simplicity scales. There's no other way around it. Once you simplify, then you systemize. You take those processes, you take those systems that you're learning and you're doing from the technician, and you need to now put them in some kind of documentation, video training, to systemize the way that you train and teach so that way you can scale. Those are your big 3 that you need to be focused on in that realm that you need to master. The next phase is from 10 to 19 Employees. And this is where it gets very exciting because at this point you're not out in the field anymore. You're not a technician anymore. You've graduated that stage. You moved up to become a manager, and then you are now starting to get your first or second manager of managers. So in the military, the effective way to lead people is of a team of 4 to 6. Okay? I was a paratrooper in the Army. Jumped outta airplanes, deployed to Baghdad, Iraq, did all that fun stuff. In the military, they taught me that the structure of leadership, you are effectively only able to manage well 4 to 6 people. Now, there are some rare scenarios where an exceptional leader that's dialed in their process that has been doing this for years can manage more. I've seen it, you know, people manage 8 to 10 people before, but to legitimately focus on really developing the people underneath you, you can't have too many. It doesn't work. You need to give them your time. And if you have way too many people, over 10, 8 to 10, 12, 14 people that report to you, it doesn't work. And so at 10 to 19 employees, you have now gotten into the role where you have a manager of managers. So this is where it gets fun. And what is super important to focus on in this phase is being productive. Not only you, but the manager, making sure that they're productive, making sure the technicians are productive at each level in the business. The fourth stage is from 20 to 50 employees. I would refer to this stage in business as the architect. The architect, when they're building a skyscraper, steps away from the building and looks at it from a third-person point of view. They don't walk over to the building and start picking up a drill or a hammer and start nailing the structure into place or pouring the concrete. They don't do that. They take, they get away, they remove themselves from the business, they get away and they start to see where the problems are in the business that, that needs to get fixed. And so that is why at this stage you have to learn how to optimize. And that is the key to the fourth stage. Now you may be asking, Will, I'm at this stage. Maybe you're at the technician stage, maybe you're at the manager stage, or maybe you're managing the managers, or better yet, in the architect stage. Okay, cool. How do you get— the question is, how do you get to the next stage? How do you graduate this stage in order to get to the next level in business so that you can build a business that runs without you. That's the point. You want to give opportunity to these people, these leaders, to grow up through the ranks, develop themselves, increase their pay, and remove yourself from the business so they have the full opportunity to make the most amount of money, get a chunk of their pie— of that pie— and you can focus and free up your time, which I believe is the most valuable thing, to go focus on other opportunities expanding the business, building out multiple locations, and doing higher-level strategic planning. So let's take a look. How do we graduate each stage? Very simple. There are 4 constraints at every— well, 1 constraint really at every single stage. Okay, so let's break it down. First one, from 1 to 4 employees, the biggest constraint here is money. You are not making enough money. Why is that? We haven't figured out how to be a good technician yet. We haven't figured out how to build route density. We haven't figured out how to hire one or two good helpers and hold them accountable. So in order to graduate stage one and get out of the field, which I see most people in, by the way, a lot of people that I coach are in this realm. In order to graduate, you must offer more services. I think of it like a funnel. In the beginning, our funnel was like this. We did sod, tree trimming, mowing, weed control, bush trimming, mulch, everything under the sun of landscaping we basically offered. And all the customers came down as leads and then they became customers. So you actually have to widen your scope in the technician phase just to make money, just to get the money coming in so you can monetize. You need to advertise and capitalize on all the advertising that you're doing. You need to increase sales. You need to begin to long-term nurture with a CRM. So we're sending texts, we're sending emails out to these customers, giving them educational key points so that way, even though they don't buy today, the goal is that we would want them to buy in the future through emails and texts. That is how you graduate to get to the next stage. So if you find yourself 1 to 4 employees, maybe you being one of them, in order to become a manager, open up your scope of work, increase sales, focus on long-term nurture through emails and texts. We've graduated that stage. We are now at stage 2, which is the manager stage. You've gotten somewhat out of the field. You may still be in the field 50/50 at this point, but you have 5 to 9 employees, okay, you being one of them. The biggest constraint here is you said yes to everyone who would pay you, but the problem is— and this is where the biggest constraint comes— is there's too many types of customers and services. So it actually is in a reverse of what was going on in stage 1. In stage 1, hey, we need to open everything under the sun, we need to take just to make money. We've learned what we've done, we need to start to cut things out. So one of the things that we did in year 2 or 3 of the company, at the end of the year we pulled a report from our CRM and we said, okay, I want a list of all of the services that we offer, which again was tree trimming, sod, mowing, weed control, bush trimming, mulch, de-weeding— like it was a lot— insect control. And we said, okay, so we, we, we offer like 15 services at the time, and then I want to know how much revenue, how much money we're making at each of those categories, those 15 different categories. And what we found when we dug deeper into that is that there were really like 3 services that majority of those 15 services made up of. If I took the 3 most common monetized service out of that, there would literally only probably be like 10 to 12% of revenue. If I took the biggest 3 revenue services out of that 15, what we found is like 10% of the revenue in the entire year came from like 12 different services. It was like 1% sod, 2% tree trimming. It was just very, very small amounts of revenue coming from these 10 different other services. So what did we do? We simplified, we narrowed our avatar and our services, and we got really really good at a small handful of things. So instead of offering 15 different services, we said, you know what, mowing, which made up of 55% of our revenue, we're not getting rid of that because that's our moneymaker, that's our big, big income. Weed control made up like 30% of our revenue. I was like, well, we, we're not getting rid of the weed control. And then the third one was flower bed cleanups. So bush trimming, de-weeding, mulch installation, And again, that made up like 10, maybe 15% of the revenue there. And so we took those 3 services and we cut out all of the other ones. I was like 1% there, 2% there, 1% there. We got rid of them. That following year when we did that was like a massive relief. We weren't running around like a chicken with a head cut off trying to find plants, doing tree installations, plant installation. We said, we're done with that stuff. We don't want to deal with it. If the customer doesn't water their lawn or their plants, they die. Whose fault do you think they're going to look at? Us. Right? So why don't we just cut out the stuff that we can't control, and we can only control the great services that give us the most revenue, that we can make sure we provide a 100% 5-star service every single time? That's what we did. We focused on the 20% of the services that produced 80% of the results, and we simplified in order to scale and get to the next level in business, which at this part you are now a manager of managers. So we simplified, we scaled, We got more team members, we got more trucks, maybe more locations at that point. So what is the constraint at this level in business? The biggest constraint is that customers love you. You're doing phenomenal work. You're doing 5-star services. Your training's dialed in because you've simplified your services. So you're only training your techs on 3 different things or 4 different things instead of 15. So you can get 'em way trained up faster. And even if they do leave, you can get someone back into the system much, much quicker. But the problem is, is the customers trust you and they have money to give you. They, they want— they already trust you with the services that you're delivering, but they have nothing else to buy from you because you've simplified so small to get to the next level. And so this is the biggest problem and where the biggest issue is. In order to graduate this stage you must increase the lifetime value of that customer. So that way you can spend more money on the customer acquisition costs, connect more services, or do more with tiers. Now let me explain this to you guys very clearly. What you're saying to me, Will, is in stage 1, I need to do everything under the sun in service, in lawn care. And then stage 2, I need to completely basically close my funnel to 3 services. And then in stage 3, I basically need to reopen it up back to what it was at stage 1. No, do not do that. I'm going to teach you a few ways that you can actually increase the lifetime value of a customer or an annual value of a customer without having to add all these other services. Because when you do that, you're going to create so much more complex in your business, and you're basically going to create chaos at that point. First thing you want to do is look at the different seasons. If you're in spring rush and mowing, weed control, bush trimming picks up and it's very, very busy in the summer, but then it tails off in the winter, can you plug in maybe one service that can offset the down season? For example, Christmas lights. That has a season that picks up when the demand in lawn care tails off. That would be a good service to plug in. You're not doing everything under the sun, you're not taking on all the extra stuff. You want to avoid services that have the same rush as your initial core services. You don't want to do that. So for example, we were looking at adding dog poop scoop service inside of our organization, again, to increase the lifetime value of a customer. It'd be very easy. We, by the way guys, we have 600+ recurring clients We've got thousands and thousands of people in the database. I could send one email out and probably sign up 100 dog scoop service people on a recurring basis and with one email easily. But I don't want to do that because if we start to offer those services at the same time that our main spring rush is with mowing and weed control, what is it going to do? If the spring rush is happening and we're focused on dog poop signups, which is like $20 a pop per week, we're going to miss out revenue on the people that want weed control, mowing, bush and bed service. That are $300, $400 projects. Like, we're going to get distracted because it's the same demand curve as our main core services. So we don't want to do that. Find a different demand curve if you are planning on adding a service. Now, the other way that you can get around this, by— without— if you didn't want to add services, which we actually didn't really add services much, what you can do is increase the frequency of visits. So I see a lot of people offering biweekly cuts all through the year. What we do in our company is we say, look, We're biweekly in the spring and fall, but during the summer months we are on more of a weekly rotation. Now, if the customer wants to skip, they just need to let us know 24 hours in advance. We'll skip them. They're not filled. It's cool. But 85-90% of the customers don't care. You are the authority. You are the person that knows best in lawn care. If you're telling the customers you have one mow schedule and you're weekly during the summer, that just is what it is. The price doesn't change. That's just what it costs us to come out, mow, weed eat, edge, and blow. So instead of you doing biweekly biweekly cuts where, you know, let's say maybe you go out there 13 times a year because you're going every other week during the summer. If you transition to where you are now weekly during the summer, you could take your same clientele and all of a sudden increase the lifetime value overnight with one email. And you just say, look, this is the new system we're going to. If you guys need to skip, just let us know, we'll pull you off the schedule, but we need a 24-hour advance notice. Otherwise you are subject to getting the lawn cut. So that's something you can do. If you're doing weed control, can you add another round? We do an 8-round program. Can you add a 9th round? Can you add an aeration service in there to where you're billing the customer on another visit throughout the year, increasing the lifetime value of that client? Same thing for bush trimming, bed maintenance. Instead of billing monthly— this is kind of a quick tip. I see a lot of customers, I talk to a lot of coaching clients that are growing their companies and they do monthly billing. Why not shift it to a 4-week billing cycle? Because you'll get an extra billing cycle within the 52, 2-week year. Like, why not do that? Like, why, why only bill them 12 times once a month on the 1st? Why not say, hey, our billing cycle's basically every month, it's, it's, it's like every 4 weeks. And then the customer's like, cool, that sounds good. In their minds, it's basically monthly, but you get a whole nother billing cycle that all of a sudden creates revenue without adding any other services. So that's how you graduate to get to the next stage. You need to increase lifetime value, spend more so that way you can spend more on customer acquisition costs. You're building a brand. If you're not in this for the long haul, you want to build a business that runs without you. You can't think about a 5, 10-year plan. This is a 30, 40, 50-year plan to build something that's going to last. Building brand awareness costs money, and if we can't increase the lifetime value of our current customers out here, you will stall. You're not going to be able to get to the next level. That's how we graduate. Level number 4, or stage number 4, you are at 20 to 50 employees. We just We did everything under the sun, then we simplified, and then we figured out how to increase our lifetime value per customer to graduate to stage 4, which is the architect stage. This to me is the best stage. We get to tinker with our business, we get to change a couple things, and we get to see our changes improve the company. Training systems get implemented, we see where the holes are. When our GMs aren't aligned, we're like, okay, we need to build a training system around that, because if all 3 of them don't know, then clearly we, we dropped the ball in training. Right? Like, this is to me the most, the most fun time in a business. You're not in the field, you're not even managing the people anymore. You're managing the managers. You're oftentimes sitting down with them once a week going over KPIs. A lot of your time is spent educating yourself, learning about the next opportunity in the business, plugging different holes in the business. So the biggest constraint here— so improving two products slows down improvement. This is basically what happens at this stage. People, they get bored, okay? They're like, oh, oh, we gotta add another service. Service, like for example, in the last one, Christmas light installation. And they're like, okay, we got to build a website, we got to grow, uh, this whole other department, whatever that may be. We're going to build a sod department, we're going to build a weed control department, right? All of a sudden you now have basically two businesses, or two services departments under one business. And the problem is, is you're trying to scale two different service offerings, two different products, two different main businesses. When there's companies out there like TruGreen, for example, that has built a basically billion-dollar business, or many, many hundreds of millions of dollars worth, on one service— weed control. So what makes you think you're going to add weed control, add mowing, do sod installation, and then add a tree department, and you not get diluted with your focus and your time because you're trying to build basically 4 different businesses under one? So in order to graduate, you have to install incremental service improvements. You need to identify a list of issues and let the small fires burn. You need to calculate the cost versus risk versus the gain. So on a frequent occurrence, because now you have multiple services underneath your one umbrella of the business, you have to pull down and treat them as different departments and figure out where the problems are and what the highest leverage task to fix, and you need to let all the other small fires burn. And it gets hard because people will get diluted in their focus and they won't know what to focus on because they have so many products or so many services going on. This is the 4 stages of business to build a business without you. So I wanted to share this quote from James Clear, and here's the reality of it, guys. If you can get one 1% better each and every day for 1 year, you'll end up 37 times better by the time you are done. If there's one thing that I've learned in my career as an entrepreneur, starting literally from the ground up, buying a $100 mower off of Facebook Marketplace— residential, by the way— I still remember sweeping the sidewalks because we didn't have a blower. That's where we started, but that's not where we had to stop. That's not where we ended up. And every day I listen to YouTube videos, I would listen to podcasts. I reached out to mentors. I sought coaching. I got inside communities that would help me grow and get better, just like I'm doing right now every single day in order to get to the next level. I'm not putting my feet up, kicking my feet back, saying, "Ah, yeah, we built a business that runs without us. That's cool." No. With AI constantly changing, constantly evolving, new technology, new automations, new opportunities, we are identifying the risks, versus cost versus reward at every strategic opportunity. Just get 1% better. Figure out non-negotiables. Hey, I'm gonna read every day, I'm gonna listen to an audiobook every day, and just get one nugget. One nugget, guys. As long as you can do that consistently every single day, you will blow anybody else out of the water that's not doing this. That's one of the foundational things that I learned back in the day when I was in Amway. I was in a mentorship program, and every single week— I think it was— no, actually it was daily. It was literally daily. We had to read for 5 to 10 minutes, and We had to listen to an audio for 5 to 10 minutes and we had to submit to our coach what we learned, the 2 or 3 nuggets that we learned. And I learned from a very early age that this was a fundamental thing because 99% of people that graduate high school or college don't open up another book. Be the 1%. You have to be willing to do what the other 99% aren't willing to do. Guys, thank you so much for watching. Hit the like button if you got value from this video. 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