What Is The Best Business Model For Mowing?

I want to build a business that runs without me. I want to create opportunity for other people to step in and also get paid very well, take over those roles. I think it'll be a lot more difficult at one main location. I was like, hey, do I want to build one behemoth massive company that does 4 or 5 million or do I want to figure out how to build systems and have people run the day to day operations without my presence? When you actually separate them at a different location and they show up at a different place and you don't show up there, there for weeks, not days, weeks. You are forced to look at the KPIs. You are forced to build the systems that run without you. All right, so business model is the topic. What questions do you have?

Yes, sir. So I spoke with Sam recently, Sam Gustin, troops. And he. We had a back and forth conversation about business model. I know that they're changing some things with their model. I forget what the, the name of it is in the book that Mike and he's wrote. I think it's like GM plus is the model they're going to. I might be wrong, but basically you've got an operations manager and then you have managers underneath that person for just one big location. So there's middle management and one just massive location. There's also like a sales manager, office manager, all just put into one. I might be wrong. So he had a lot of good points. His point was, you know, Mike preaches get to 500,000 in revenue for a location and then go into profit mode, raise prices until you're at 800,000. He brings up a point that, I mean, how, how far can you take raising prices though, right? Another thing too is why not capitalize on the market that you have? Why max out at 800 when you could get to 1.5 in an area, Right? Because maybe even he brought up a good point too. But you can only raise your prices to a certain point to where like literally no one will book with you at all. And then you get to a point where. And you get to a point where maybe you're not capitalizing on your market, where you could be. But this is when you brought it to me, right? It sounds good. You know, why max out of 800 when we could take it to double that, triple that for an area, right? Because let's say for you, in your instance, Aubrey is a small area. You could probably really max out at 800 to a million for Aubry because it's small. Just like with us Melissa is very small. Same thing. Whereas you go into Frisco. Right. Frisco is huge. You could probably grow a five to $10 million business right there because it's absolutely massive. There's hundreds of thousands of people that have a lot of money there. So why would you go and throw a location into Frisco and just cap out 800?

Right. Okay. So you're specifically talking about, like, more populated areas where you really could build a. A bigger, larger business.

But check this out. One more thing before. I know you want to answer that, but what would be the point in having four, let's say to capitalize on Frisco, you need to four separate locations. Why would you have all that work when you just have it all in one centralized and Frisco and just do Frisco only?

Yeah. So most. Most cities are not like Frisco. Most cities do not have the market, the money, the amount of homes that are in Frisco. It's like insane how many home residential homes are there. So most cities aren't like that. However, there are different models that you can absolutely build the business on. I think it's. You have to figure out what the end goal is for you. Right? So like, if the goal is to build a $5 million business in a very populated area like Frisco, that's going to take a long time until you can really run it without you. You know, that was one of the biggest things when I was talking to Mike is like, look, I want to build a business that runs without me, and I want to create opportunity for other people to step in and also get paid very well and take over those roles. I think it'll be a bit more difficult, actually a lot more difficult at. At one main location, there's. People have different mindsets. Right. The model that is maybe in the book and maybe that Sam is going towards requires a different type of manager. There's more key man risk in that model when you build it that way when someone leaves, you can't just plug somebody in that was from the field that. Because they need to know a lot, like customer acquisition costs, and you don't know how to. How to figure that out. And like, like they're. They're basically a CEO of their location. Right. And so it takes a while to obviously get there. And because you basically have to build out different departments underneath one main location, I've run the second location out of our main location. And the drive time is horrific. The number one most expensive line item on a P and L is labor. And so if you have a town like Frisco and you're driving five miles away, that could take 25 minutes to get there in rush hour in the morning at 8am guys forget a piece of equipment, dude, that, that, that might be a 45 minute hour turnaround in that type of environment. Or, and maybe it's not five miles, maybe it's more like eight or 10 because Frisco is a larger territory. But you know you're, you're, you're going to have different areas of that location. But it's like you know the, the whole goal is to minimize route density and to have a, you know, and to maximize the profit there. Yes, you absolutely are going to be, maybe leave some money on the table in the market. I will tell you our main location this year. I think they did like 850 or 880. 880,000. Dude, we haven't even tapped into the potential yet. We're still at 90 bucks an hour. Sam's, Sam's charging 120 at his location and we're, we're in Aubrey where it's not like fully developed yet. Right. So there's probably like less volume here. But yeah, dude, you could probably easily like, like you can build a million like million dollar locations. Like it doesn't need to be capped at 800 for, for the model of a working GM with six to seven people that report to them and they're mainly in the field. As a working gm you can build a million dollar business at each location that you do that and siloing them to me makes more sense because you're keeping the route density extremely small. You're minimizing the key man risk if a GM drops out. Cool, I'll pull up another go getter. A player that shows up every day that doesn't need to know customer acquisition cost and churn and life value of a customer and how to increase the value. Like dude, if they know all that, why, why, why are they working at a company? Why don't they just go start their own or go be, you know, you know, something in a, in a higher paying role than lawn care. You know what I mean? Like not, not to, not to knock any strategy approach. I mean it's just, it's two different mindsets. And when I talked to Mike three years ago that that was the decision that, that, that's what we kind of talked about is like hey, do I want to build one behemoth massive where I've got some, you know, key Leaders, admin, sales and ops or do I want to figure out how to build systems and, and have people run the day to day operations without my presence and that's that. That for me is, is the goal is to do that. And so yeah, it's two different approaches. I think both can work. I think both can work. Now which one is better? I think honestly it depends on the entrepreneur, I think it depends on the markets. I think there's a lot of things that kind of go into that decision. But yeah, I think both can work for sure. Okay.

Yeah. So we're on the same page by the way. I just wanted to bring up the question to see your side of things. He's going one way from where he was. He's going for multi location kind of just like you to now just combining it all into one. So I wanted to kind of get a perspective of both ends. I am on your side. However, I've done a lot of deep thinking talks with chat gbt and like you, you brought up with keyman risk. You know, it removes a big chunk of that key man risk. Whereas someone that's like an ops manager of a big four or five million dollars location is much harder to replace.

The other thing too, Caleb. Sam does have multiple locations, but they all, they all show up and roll out at the same location.

Yeah.

So his model, it makes sense for him to do that. He's already doing that or not. We have completely separated the operational side of these locations to where they're not all showing up at the same place. They're not, they're not all loading up or dumping or like at the same place. Now we, we do support each other and support the locations in different ways. We have GMs that show up at the. Obviously Toby at the location. And like I said, I mean there was a period of time that I didn't, I. It was six months. Six months went by, I didn't, I didn't even show up out there. You know. So Sam's specific situation, he was already having all of his cruise and GM show up at the same shop. So like it didn't maybe feel like the GMs had full control because everybody was still loading at the same place. It was just a title at that point. Right. It didn't feel like he was the, they were the sole operator out there and manager that's running the show because the other two are still kind of showing up. They kind of maybe feel like they're just another, a glorified team member. You know what I mean, yeah, and.

That'S a good point too because I, I deep thought, I thought really deep on this part of it is taking accountability. Because if you're just below a mid manager, like an ops manager, just running a small crew, like six to eight people. Well, how can you take accountability of the entire location if you're one out of three lower level management people? Right. And you also don't have full control of the P and L. It's like three different managers that are on the same level as you, all contributing towards that, but you don't have full control of that. To me, that I just know that there's going to be a drag on that business because of that. The people are not going to work as hard, they're not going to care as much because they're not fully in control of it.

Yeah. And the other thing I would add too is like when you actually act like anybody that's watching that does want to do multiple locations, like when you, when you actually separate them at a different location and they show up at a different place and you don't show up there for weeks. Weeks, not days, weeks. You are forced to look at the KPIs, you are forced to build the systems that run without you. And that, that to me is the mindset of the whole, the whole goal is like, I want to build a system that runs without me. And so it forces you to build systems. So when you show up at the shop and everything's disorganized or the trucks aren't washed, it's like, okay, we have to build a system around this. Why are. You know what I mean? Like, how do we build a system and implement this to where every loc I show up or not is washing the trucks every Friday? Okay, well, maybe we have to build a reoccurring meeting inside of Co pilot every Friday. Attach it to each individual crew, right? Like these are, these are operating systems that must be implemented. It's so, it's so easy like when they're all showing up at the same place because you just like, hey, you know, we gotta wash trucks on, you know, on Friday or whatever. And like, you know, it's just like, not as like clear systems, you know what I'm saying? Like, it's not like built out to where if you are doing that and you built, let's say that one big behemoth of a four to five million dollars business, I would be willing to bet that that person that does that, if they left for, you know, three months, it probably Would not operate the same because they're constantly there the other 11 months out of, you know, 10, 11 months out of the year because they're overseeing things. They, they, they, you know, can, can tell the gm, hey, we got to do this. Oh, hey, don't forget to do that. You know, when you're, when they're out, they, they, you don't, you don't see that stuff. And so only when you show up and you check in and you do that stuff, you know.

Okay, yeah, that clears it up, man. You answered that perfectly. We're definitely on the same page. I guess going back to the Frisco portion of what we're talking about, how would you handle that? Would you just have, let's say, four separate locations over time? If you were trying to tackle such a large market as that, you can have like, like four different quadrants or however many quadrants you need of a territory.

Yeah, I mean, there's probably a couple ways off the top of my head that I'm thinking of. I mean, you can, you can slice it up based on zip codes. So you can have certain zip codes assigned to. Let's say, I think Frisco has three zip codes, maybe four. So, you know, maybe you give two to one location, two to the other. I think the hard part would be, you know, okay, maybe you call it Frisco north and then Frisco south. Right. Like, you could make it, you know, military lawn cuts of Frisco north. Military long cuts of Frisco south. Right. Like, you could break it up that way. East, west. Dude, honestly, I mean, we're going to open a location in Frisco in probably 12 to 24 months. We're just going to do one location. I guarantee you. You can build $1 million business in Frisco and pull off at least 20% profit in. Are we hitting every house and every customer capitalizing on all of that? No, that's okay. You know what I mean? Like, we're already targeting our, our model because our model is different than Sam's. Sam's. Sam takes people, customers that just want mowing. We don't. So right there, the pool of people for us, if you have, let's say 100,000 people in that hypothetical numbers, like 100,000 people, probably 80,000 of those people are going to pay a lawn care service down here in Texas. Maybe 20,000 of them will mow their lawn. Right? Because they're fit, they're young, they don't have much money. But the other like 70 or 80k like are working class people, they don't want to mow their lawns, especially when it's 110 degrees. Cool. But then when you also add, hey, we only accept people that want both the mowing in the weed control, that might go down to 40 or 50,000. Right. Because there's probably 20 or 30% of those people that are like, no, I just want mowing. Right. So already that pool gets even a little smaller. And so even though you might have this massive market that you can tailor, like, we don't want the bottom barrel customers. You know, what we do is we try to convert that middle ground customer up to the higher end and we explain the value and we explain why we do both services and we, and we upsell them into that higher tier category which might be the top 30% of the market. And so when you kind of set up that way, you know, again, and a lot of it, like, even though the territory might be 10 to 12 miles wide, we only want it like 6 to 7 miles because we want them the least amount of drive time. We want to maximize as much money. Like, dude, I looked at our P4P stats today. Every single one of our crews are making above 30 an hour or guys and we have, and I got one making 41 an hour. Like, do you know how easy it is to find employees when I tell them, dude, you can make 35 an hour mowing lawns, like if you, if you lower the standards and you, you know, offer mowing services to kind of like the, the majority or the lower end. Like it's kind of like again, kind of degrading the, the cost of the lifetime value of the customer as well. And then, you know, you start expanding the drive time and trying to take over all the territory. It's like, okay, like they'll probably still make 25 an hour, but they're not going to, maybe they're not going to make 35 an hour. Probably right in that model. So like it's whatever business that you want to do. I just have found it easier when we focus on the premium customer that pays premium prices and then our team members make premium paychecks. To me, it's just a lot easier to retain. Less headache, less turnover, less hiring. Yeah, that's like I said, everybody's model is different. But yeah, that's just what we found. That works for us. You know, It's a good point though. I think both models work.

Yeah, I, I just again, like whenever I did the, the deep thinking about it, it's like the manager needs to be in, in my opinion in most of control. Like they need to feel accountable to their location. They need to be in full control. I feel like it's just such an efficient model. You're removing middle management. Middle management is just a drag on almost all companies. That's all it is, dude. 100, it's expensive, it's a huge drag, you know.

And, and, and the other thing too is like if, if you do one umbrella, one company that there's one P&L now you could break it up into depending on departments, you know, you, you can do that. But like it all is one profit and loss statement. If the weed control department is being inefficient or buying two or buying the wrong products or buying too much product and it sits in the storage unit for six months not being, you know, used to make money like, you know, they spend 5, you know, 3 or 5,000 or $7,000 more in the product cost like for a round or two. Like which happens sometimes if you over buy certain things. You know, we, we bulk buy mulch, we bulk buy like the fertilizer and stuff. And so that, that does affect these other departments because it's, it's, yes, it's, it's 1 p. L. And so when you do completely segregate them, like you said, it gives the general manager that full ownership of the P and L. And those decisions of you know, if, if Toby came to me tomorrow and said hey, well I got a storage unit down the road, I think this is the best. I like a solution, it's cheaper. I'd be like, dude, go for it. I'm like, it's your call, it's not mine. You're the one running the thing over there.

So it works so well too because in part they also are a bit of the salesperson, I guess, just depending on how you run it. But I'm sure in your location the general manager is going to be the estimator. I'm not sure if. Do they follow up as well on estimates and things of that nature?

Yes.

Okay. Yeah. So it's so efficient you don't have to have a separate estimator, a separate salesperson. You just have one person at the top that's in good, that has, takes full accountability. You cut out all the waste and all the crap.

Yeah, dude, if I had to have like my estimate, dude, because we, we service Salina, we service Aubrey. We're now going to start servicing little elm here starting February 1st. If I had to have My estimator drive from little like. And, and I know the routes will be different and you would, you would schedule all the routes for Little Elm on one day and then this on the other day. But like there's still yellow slips that come down the P that need to get like scheduled and like, and you could build those systems around it. But like it, it really is I think the most efficient model. And when you hold that GM accountable, especially with the budgeted hours like we do, dude, like this this year we pulled I think like 11 or 12% profit off of the main location. And that was with Larissa literally being a full overhead team member. She did not go out in the field at all. And so we just moved her to a part time regional manager and we plugged in an awesome gm. His name's Daniel. You'll meet him here at the conference. By the way, anybody that's watching, which actually I think this would be too late, but there's a free conference on the 19th and the 20th. You guys should join us down here. Yeah, dude. 25 profit. 25% profit. Honestly, like that, that is 100% very easily achievable with that model. Like I said, we're only charging 90 an hour. Sam's charging 120. So there's no reason why we can't do probably a million maybe, maybe even 1.1. If we. Once we get up there and you know you raise prices a year, you're gonna lose some. And then you just, you just keep doing it year after year for, you know, the next couple, two or three years. Dude, that starts to look very interesting. Like almost maybe 30% profit on a million dollar business that's after everybody's paid and you got a gm. Like dude, that's a great model. Cool.

I love it.

Yeah.

Has, has location 2 as it became.

Profitable yet I think we, I think last year we, we, we. We either broke even or it was like 5 or 7k. Actually last time I looked at the P and L, it was. I think we made like 7K.

Yeah. You started that in 2023, right?

Yeah, 2023, which I started it part time. I was just doing it one day a week. And then 2024. Yeah, a GM took over and then. Yeah, and then Toby took over and really, really he, he doubled the location. He. Awesome. But yeah, this, this coming year we will, we will hit 500k. We will turn to profit mode. Exactly what you did this year basically is, is where we'll be at for the second location, which is nice. Because you can really get some good profits and then we can take that and roll it in the next one, you know.

That's pretty cool. I love the model.

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I guess I know we're at about the 25 minute mark. Maybe if I could ask one more question about GM pay. I'm currently working on my compensation plan for my manager. I'm trying to figure out a takeover compensation plan and also a new starter compensation plan, starting a new location. I've come up with some things and do you have like a quick extra minute we could talk about this? Yeah, just talk about paying. That's the last thing. My idea of it for a starter, just going into a new area starting from 0 is I pay them based on the monthly revenue like a bonus. So they get a salary plus a monthly bonus. So if they get past this between 20 and 40k it's like I think it was 600 extra per month. The base salary would be 50,000 because that's where I see our technicians currently like our high performers max out at is close to 50k a year if they stay throughout the winter. So I think that should be at least our baseline is 50k if that's what you can make as a high performer base. So hearing that, I was also going to add in. I am doing 35% of distributable cash as well on top of that to try to incentivize, trying to be profitable. But obviously I want to mainly focus on the revenue because there's not gonna be any profit at all for quite some time. But what are your thoughts on just that portion?

Are you, you're starting this one completely from scratch or are you prepping it where the GM has, you know, 40 or 50 reoccurring customers already?

We already have a client base. I think we're going to roll in a big chunk of our area because we have a section of McKinney that is very close to Melissa. Basically you would think it'd be a part of Melissa, but it's not. It's technically a Melissa McKinney. Thinking we're going to roll that into it. We've already got customers in our service area that we want to. So, yes, if we do roll in this big area, it's a big chunk. We're going to have 30 to 40 plus customers to start with.

Okay, yeah, I would definitely recommend that. The thing is, is for the first two years, there's not going to be any profit at least two years. So, yeah, the profit, 35%. Just personally, I think that's a bit steep for our model. I think Mike does 35%, but he also doesn't do weed control. And weed control, the higher premium service. And so kind of counterbalancing the premium, more profitable service with us. They're gonna get a lot, dude. Like, I mean, we'll just run. I mean. So Toby, I think our second GM, I think he's at 30%. If he sticks around, dude, he'll make. He can make probably 115, 120k a year.

Okay, so can you kind of walk me through what would be the best way to pay a general manager since you have many years of experience with this? What maybe kind of give me like a way to do it and maybe like a range as well of like salary percentages and whatnot as well.

I think you're on the right track. I think 50k salary is completely fine and kind of just test it. I think 50k is totally okay. Especially in this when you're starting, right. Once you get more dialed in and you expect more from the GMs, then you can kind of raise that. But. But you also get better as a leader and expect better results. Right. And then once you realize like somebody's slipping, it's like either improve or you may not be here long. Right. So. And then the training gets better, the execution gets better and all that stuff. So I think at the start, 50k is completely fair and reasonable for salary. I like those bonuses, incentivizing them based on the revenue. I tried that for our second location. That model, I think it was from 0 to 20k a month. There was no bonus 20 to 40. That was 600. But like, dude, the first year, my GM selection has been continually getting better, right? Like when you first start, I would maybe recommend doing it in 10,000 increment 10k increments. Because once they hit that 20k and they know that the next bonus is not until 40. Dude, they're not gonna try to get to 30 or 40. They're just gonna be like, oh, well, I'm at 22 or 25. Let me just maintain here. I'LL get my bonus. Right? Like, right.

And there are like a go getter would want to get to that though, right? Like if you, if you chose the right gym, maybe they would it correct.

But in the beginning with your first gym, your selection and your skill set on selecting the right one is generally you don't knock it out of the park on the first one. It, you just haven't gone through the reps or the volumes yet to, to, to identify who would be that runner. You may get lucky and you may get, get a really good stud in the beginning, which would be awesome and a huge blessing. But yeah, I think, I think so. I would, I would recommend that dropping it down to 10k increments and then so maybe once they hit 10k they get 300 bucks a month, which I think is fine. The profit sharing is, I think 35% is too steep. I'm just being honest. I, I think, I think it is, I think 25%. Maybe 30. If you want to, if you want to be very generous. 30 is, is more than enough. And when you, because, because here's, here's how you, you basically sell it to them. And like when we put GMs through training, we don't, I mean we talk about base pay but like that's not what, what we really talk about. What we talk about and what we, what we help them understand is like at a 10% profit business, this is what you're going to make. At a 20% profit business, this is what you're going to make. At a 30% profit, this is what you're going to make. So we, it's called on target earnings. And so that's what we're always pitching to them is like hey, like we don't, we don't say hey, the, the base salary, like, like we don't say this, the salary of a GM is 50K. We say the, the, the on target earnings for a GM salary position in the first year ranges from, you know, maybe 55 to 65,000. That is what your on target earnings are based on your performance. If you perform low, don't do well, you're gonna probably make 50. If you follow what we tell you and you execute well, you, you could probably make 65. That's about the range in year one. Now in year two, then you just run the numbers. Okay. In year two, first year they're gonna do 250, 300K probably. And then the year two, ideally you're going to try to bump that up to like 450, 500, get them up to 500k mark, so you can start to make profit. And then you run the numbers at 500k. Okay. And then, and then you do the same thing at a 10, 20, 30% with the profit sharing percentages that you're saying, which you said was 35, but I would recommend coming a little bit lower than that. And then you can start to, and then put the monthly bonuses together and you can base that off of what you did this year. In April, May, June, July, you'll just look at your revenue and be like, okay, in year two, this is roughly what it'll kind be when you're around kind of 500k, right? And then, you know, and then, and then you kind of tell them, hey, the second year on target earnings is going to be anywhere from like 65 to 75k. But, but it'll, it'll fluctuate like for those numbers if they do well, you know, like I said. And then you, you would break it down at the 10 to 20 to 30%. So that range might be up in the 80s. Like the year two, he might be at 80K. Right. And then year three, it's like, hey, the goal is to get you up to 650, 700, like 800k in that year 3 with good execution within 36 months. Like this is the goal, you know, and then you run the numbers at 800k and then they'll see, oh, wow, I can make six figures here. And so you show them the progression. In year one, you'll make maybe 60k. Year two, you'll make 80k. Year three, the on target earnings for GM is you make about 100k. Okay, that's, that's how you would present the numbers and the opportunity to people. I would not. You know, obviously you do tell them about the base and the compensation and stuff like that. But it's just like when we market for field people, I don't tell them it's 18 an hour. That's irrelevant. They make 35 an hour. You know, they make 30, 35 an hour here at our company at the main location. So that, that's what we always like sell. Is that, is that stuff?

All right, cool. I like it, I guess. How do I know? I don't know what to give? Like, I don't know what to give. Like, I want to be generous. So they work hard. But like, how do I know I'm not giving like a crazy amount that's just gonna crush us? How do I know that I'M you know, not underpaying. Like, honestly, I have no idea. I don't know what to base this off of.

So get your help on that. Yet the numbers that you presented to me will not crush your business. The only reason they will crush your business is if the GM doesn't produce. So your job, your weekly KPI, when you, when you sit down, you must make sure that, that GM is making money in the field to pay for their salary. If they're driving around, picking up equipment, doing drive by estimates, going to the auto mechanic, cleaning up the shop, sharpening blades, and then like you get to the end of the week and they only did like five or ten budget hours on the route. Like they're not paying for their salary. And so your job is to make sure that they are paying. Not all of it, but like, you know, for us at a new location. Like, dude, they got to do 30 budget hours to expectation on top of scheduling dispatching and all the other stuff that comes along with being a GM. 30 budget hours. Now we do include, we give the drive by estimates 0.5, even though that, that doesn't make money. But we give them that 30 minutes because you know, they do have to drive out, do the estimate and then when they come back they call them same day. So I'll, I will give them 30 minutes because it doesn't take 30 minutes to do an estimate. It takes like five minutes. But also there's a little bit of drive time in there. So it's, and they're not, you know, they're gonna route it with their route. So maybe it's only like five more minutes. So that's 10 minutes to complete the estimate. But then that gives them, you know, 20 minutes to like call the pending estimate as well. Which 99 of the time they don't answer the phone anyway. So like what we say is like every pending estimate should take two minutes. Yeah. So if there's, if there's 30 pending estimates in the queue that are like sitting there, if you, if, if somebody's going to sit down and call them, it should take them one hour to get through it because 80% of them won't answer. So you're just leaving a voicemail which takes like a minute. And then the ones that do answer, you just get straight to the point, hey, I'm calling, you ask for estimate. And it's normally like a two or three minute phone call, but yeah, so as long, so, so to answer your question, as long as you're making sure that, that GM is doing productive stuff. And the only two productive tasks that they do is doing the work, investments, everything else they don't get anything for. And they need to be at 30 budget hours. And if they're consistently coming in under that then that, that's where it's going to crush your business and it's going to cost you a lot of money.

Okay. Got it. So maybe I should probably just talk to chat GBT Just give him my p. L. Just say hey, help me create some.

Is this for the new location or the main location for this new. New.

I. I am wanting to at some point hire a manager probably 20, 27 for location one but. Or maybe this year but focused on location too.

So location two, like the other thing that you would like really push for is like they have to get reoccurring work over one time jobs. Dude, seriously. Because what's going to happen is the fall, in the winter time is going to come and they're not going to have budget hours. Right. Because it's like fall comes, winter comes. But if they have the reoccurring work which I mean they, they got it. You're going to burn money. That first look, that first first year. I mean even like until they get to like 100 or which our model's a little different I think. I don't know if you do bi weekly or, or things like that. But yeah, until you get to like 100 or 120 clients you're just gonna burn money. So just make sure you got enough cash in the bank, you know. Or, or you really hire the right GM that sells. Sell, sell, sell. That's the only thing that matters. He just needs to sell like madman. Like I'm not saying to not do one time property cleanups but like because that helps make the payroll. But really prioritize the reoccurring in the spring rush because that's what's going to keep him consistently busy to get those 25 to 30 budget hours each week all year round and keep him busy in the fall and winter time. Otherwise you're going to keep paying him salary in the fall and winter and he's not going to be producing much. And then you're really going to burn money. I don't want that. Yeah.

Okay, so you'd say probably around 200 grand is where you would start to go. Start to bring in a profit.

No, no, no.

So what do you, what would you say it'd be? 250, 000.

Yeah. 2. 250. You'll break even.

250, 000 is where you'll break roughly.

I mean maybe, maybe give or take 25 or 50k. So like you might be able to get away at 200k, but like for us, until you get to 250k, we're, we're breaking even. We're not losing any money, we're not bleeding, but we're made. We're just maintaining at least maybe 0 or making a LE like a little bit of profit, 5 or 10k, which isn't much. But once you get above 250k, it's much more smoother sailing to where you're actually making some money. Right.

So probably around 15 to 20 grand a month is where you should start.

To profit because that's, it's going to be higher. It's going to be higher. Like in the summer it like you really, I would say 25 to 30k like a month. Once you get to 25, 30k during the busy season, that, that's where you're breaking even. So the fastest way that that person can get to 30k a month in revenue, you're good. And that's why I said break it down in 10k increments instead of 20 because once they hit the 20k, they, they let the foot off the gas because they're like I'm not gonna do all this and double this in their brains. Like it's like this is too much, you know, which is kind of funny. But yeah, I would do 10k increments. That'll, that'll help.

Yeah, I'll just, I'll consult ChatGPT, I'll figure out the numbers I need to do.

Dude, 50k is good, you know. Yeah. And just, just you build, build a game plan for him. Hey, the goal is to get, you know, 80, 80 reoccurring customers this year. And we're going to track this. And what's most important is the spring rush. You got to crunch all those numbers in about a two, two month period because that's when you're going to get most of your, your reoccurring. And so if you get through the first week, right, like here for us, six to eight weeks is the gold rush starting March 1st. Right. So let's just say if we have to get 80 reoccurring customers and we divide that by eight weeks, you must get 10 customers a week starting March 1st.

Oh yeah.

A minimum. And, and, and that, that'll be probably easy, you know, in the first like first couple of weeks. But then what's going to happen is going to kind of tail off a little bit, and he might only get eight or six. And that's where you as a coach each week be like, dude, you got like, let's put out more door hangers. You need to. You. You got to be, you know, at 10, 10 a week for the next eight weeks. Otherwise we're not gonna hit our goals, you know, versus what I did and I failed to do is I wasn't that quick on the feedback loop with them and like, really pushing them. And so we would get through kind of like the spring rush and like, we only would get, I think, like 40 or 50 customers. And it was me failing as a leader to really push my people. Like, dude, if you got to go in on Saturday because you haven't hit your 10, 10 new customers this. This week, sounds like you're coming in on Saturday. We got to do whatever it takes.

Okay. So based on the math of. I'm just. While I'm talking with you, doing a calculation, I need to spend around 20 grand in marketing dollars to get to 250 grand in yearly revenue. That's with an annual value per customer. 1600 based on this year.

That sounds accurate.

So about 20 grand. Yeah. So we have that we got. We have a big reserve right now.

Okay. Yeah, yeah, you got it.

Yeah.

20K is a good marketing budget.

Yeah, that was. It's actually funny because I, I came up with this exact same number, around 20 grand when I was. I was doing our yearly planner, which is crazy. I think we're going to put in another like 20 grand into the first location too. Maybe I say that now, but I might change that. But I'm. I would like to get it higher in revenue this year and just towards the summertime, just go raise prices even more and just suck profit out of this thing because this is going to be the cash cow for a little while.

Yep. Cool, man. All right. Yeah, that sounds good. That sounds good. You're on the right. You're on the right path. Just make sure you really hold the GM accountable each week doing those budget hours. That way it covers their. Their salary.

Will do, man. I'm definitely gonna be on top of him because I'm investing a lot of money into this and I really. It needs to work. It needs to be successful. Otherwise it's really gonna hurt us. You know, we're not a big corporate. Corporate company with millions of funding.

Yeah. And like from the. More from the most like pure. After doing this for six years, Maybe going outside, whatever you did for the first location and you got all those customers, just do that. It worked. You know what I'm saying? And. And we, we. We make things so complicated. We make things like Facebook ads, Google Ads, LSA door. Like, whatever you did to get those customers for the first location and that growth, that massive growth that you saw in year one or year two or year three, whatever it was, just do that. It worked. You're going a town over. It's probably going to work in that town too now, obviously, monitor it. Don't just like blindly do it for three months. But, yeah, just. Just keep doing what you did on the first one to grow that.

Door hangers, baby. Door hangers. I'm doing what you said too, by the way. I'm hiring a full team of door hangers canvassers to go out and just crush door hangers because, like, we. We crush the door hangers big time. Yeah.

100,000. That's our goal this year.

Yeah. Yeah. So I'm just going all in on flyers, Facebook video, and lsa. Like, I think that's all we're gonna do. I'm not even going to do like Google pay per click or none of never. I don't know, maybe I'm just not good at it, but I don't know. I'm going to stick to what I'm good at.

Yeah, that sounds good, man.

Thank you. Cool.