Latest / Home Service Millionaire with Mike Andes / $1.4M Landscaping Business Hits ROCK BOTTOM
Transcript
- 0:00Where's the money?
- 0:01We're really scratching our heads at this point.
- 0:02Like, why is it not coming in?
- 0:05Knowing that you can rely on that person, building confidence, and over time, it becomes more of a personal relationship.
- 0:10But he's just the least professional dude I've ever met.
- 0:14Today, we're in Washington, visiting Dylan with Urban Roots Landscaping.
- 0:18Right now, he's that very hybrid position.
- 0:20I'm working 10 to 15 hours a day.
- 0:22What's going on here?
- 0:23Now I'm interrupting the GM four times.
- 0:25And now the GM's annoyed that he's just jumping there and doing it himself.
- 0:28That's not happening.
- 0:29You say something like that, like that's what you're getting now.
- 0:32Congratulations.
- 0:33With a 7.5% profit margin in our main location, that's not something I'm super proud of.
- 0:38Now, if Dylan looks familiar, several years ago, we interviewed him when he hit $200,000 in annual revenue.
- 0:44You can't keep doing what you're doing from where you're currently at.
- 0:46You can't double in size.
- 0:47A couple of years ago, we met back up with Dylan when he was doing about $800,000 in annual revenue.
- 0:52This last year and a half or so off in terms of the family dynamic.
- 0:56I think even if you looked at it like that, it's like, hey, if we just kept doing what we're doing, we're gonna get to a million.
- 1:01What kills me is when my daughter comes up to me and says, Daddy, why are you so busy?
- 1:05Now, today, doing $1.4 million in revenue.
- 1:08Offering to have you guys back is just because it's been so valuable, for sure.
- 1:13He hasn't solidified his general managers yet at his first two locations.
- 1:17He's going through a divorce.
- 1:18I am struggling, probably a little bit depressed.
- 1:20So I don't think it's a good time to be starting a third location.
- 1:22One of the number one reasons why Augusta Locations closed down is divorce.
- 1:26The problem is the trajectory of this business is really bad.
- 1:29I guess entrepreneurship for everybody.
- 1:30The clear answer is no.
- 1:32We got too much going on.
- 1:33We got too much to fix.
- 1:34This is the Business Turnaround Show.
- 1:36My name is Mike Andes.
- 1:37I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care and Homework Software.
- 1:40I travel the country fixing struggling businesses.
- 1:43These are all very small tweaks, very small.
- 1:45Somebody just comes in and is like, hey, here's this thing that's gonna solve a bunch of your problems that you had no clue existed.
- 1:52It's a relief.
- 1:53In order for that to work, it has to be clean.
- 1:55Our goal is to give Dylan a strategy to turn around the company in the next six weeks.
- 2:06Dylan Moyet, finishing his fifth year in business, currently operating two locations.
- 2:11Second location is in year two.
- 2:13He's exploring potential for a third location expansion.
- 2:17Good morning, guys.
- 2:19How's everybody feeling?
- 2:21Good, good.
- 2:22My name is Dylan Moy.
- 2:23I'm the owner of Urban Roots Landscaping.
- 2:26Grew this location to about a million in revenue.
- 2:30And now it's a big milestone for me to know that I've handed the reins off to Michael.
- 2:35We have enough systems in place to where Michael is able to pretty much handle this location on his own.
- 2:39Reminder, five o'clock.
- 2:42especially when we're running behind on the route like this this week.
- 2:45I know a lot of it's equipment related and that kind of thing, but keep working.
- 2:49If we can get one more house done and it pushes us a little bit past, that's totally fine.
- 2:54When we're behind, we don't wanna be leaving early if we're not completely finished, right?
- 2:58The second location last year did $320,000 in its first year.
- 3:03Awesome.
- 3:04Now our big learning curve is just, how do we start to grow, duplicate what we've done here?
- 3:10Not just duplicate it, but improve on it as well.
- 3:12But at the same time, work with someone overseas who's in a VA office position for us.
- 3:17I'm finding that every stage is challenging in its own way.
- 3:20This is the main location, which still did a million dollars in revenue, but...
- 3:267% margin.
- 3:27And so that used to be over 20% when I was within like a year and a half or two years ago, that was over 20%.
- 3:33And I was kind of starting to do the math and I was like, yeah, I know what we're aiming for profit wise.
- 3:38And I was like, we, why did we fall so short to begin with?
- 3:41But again, with a seven and a half percent profit margin in our main location, that's not something I'm super proud of.
- 3:47That's a, that's a,
- 3:48dip, you know, and it just felt like we did all these other things to try to avoid that.
- 3:54We tried to make up for that admin bloat and it just, it didn't work.
- 3:58Yeah.
- 3:58It's tough when he's going through a divorce because you could be building this thing and then it's just going to get ripped to shreds in court.
- 4:06And that's like very much a possibility.
- 4:08Even the fact that his general manager is concerned about it shows that like it's affecting the business.
- 4:13So as you know, I'm going through a separation.
- 4:15So Federal Way Shop is operating out of my ex's house right now.
- 4:19The goal was to get Federal Way up to eight guys running kind of, but now it's kind of up in the air because we just don't know what's going on with the finances and how things are going to be impacted by Dylan's separation there.
- 4:31Yeah.
- 4:31That'll also affect my ability to grow the company at either a faster or slower rate.
- 4:36Unfortunately, the personal issues always become business issues, and that's I think what we're actually gonna face.
- 4:40So I'm definitely putting the brakes on third location.
- 4:43I can tell you right up front.
- 4:44Brakes hardcore.
- 4:45If your first location, when you start a second location, drops from, I think it was like 20% margin down to 7% margin because you're distracted with a second location, don't go start a third one.
- 4:56Fix the problems.
- 4:57Other notes today.
- 4:58When we have equipment issues, A, make sure that we report it.
- 5:02But if it's something that we can fix on the spot, please let us know.
- 5:06I know we've had that issue with T4.
- 5:08Josh, did you still need to get out for trailer training?
- 5:11Yeah, is there not a spare on this?
- 5:13Change the law, you got them crossed.
- 5:15That's right.
- 5:17You can't do much of it.
- 5:18I mean, you can.
- 5:19It's not gonna hit the ground.
- 5:20Yeah, it should be fine.
- 5:22Connect the spare before you guys leave, just in case.
- 5:24And then when you're driving, always keep the windows down just in case.
- 5:28You know, you wanna always be able to hear what's going on with the truck and trailer, so.
- 5:33But yeah, should be good to go.
- 5:34Just make sure you guys hook up that spare to the outside before you head out.
- 5:38Did Federal Way take both our spares?
- 5:40I think Federal Way took them because they were on the side of the building.
- 5:43All right, let me make sure everything's signed out properly.
- 5:46I never want to start another location until the first one is stabilized with a GM in place.
- 5:52And I think this is the part, the thing that he did is he jumped in this next location before that first GM was solidified.
- 5:59Cause when we were there, he was still in the daily operations all the time.
- 6:02It was nowhere close to being stabilized without him being there.
- 6:05Who is this now?
- 6:08Another truck coming back in.
- 6:09There's normally not this much activity in the morning.
- 6:13They've had to jump this truck like three or four times.
- 6:15This is the newest truck we've gotten.
- 6:17And when they got it, it wasn't ready for a trailer.
- 6:20It wasn't ready for certain things.
- 6:22And I've gotten it all ready.
- 6:23And then we'll come to find out.
- 6:25That piece that I chopped off that's now on the ground someplace was missing a part, so I had to go and replace it.
- 6:31Two hours between the lawnmower going out and them actually finishing for the day.
- 6:37Yeah, that is a day killer right there.
- 6:39Is this your first solo route or...?
- 6:41Yeah.
- 6:41Okay, cool, cool.
- 6:42One of the blowers yesterday, it won't let you control the throttle.
- 6:46It stays all the way up once you turn it on.
- 6:48Okay, so...
- 6:50What I want you to do with stuff like that, just do a quick little video, like a 30 second video, displaying what's wrong, send it to the broken equipment group.
- 6:57That way on shop work day, we can just go through and knock that kind of stuff out.
- 7:00So yeah, that's all good.
- 7:02I think we need to go a little bit over more of the, how the guys need to report to us shop time, because they're going to end up missing out on pay if they can.
- 7:11So, I mean, you can't rely on your memory the whole time to be reporting little repairs that they're doing.
- 7:17I'm going to guess he doesn't have a lot of debt because that's always how he's been very conserved financially.
- 7:21The problem is the trajectory of this business is really bad.
- 7:24You've gone from 20% margin down to 7% margin and you're not really growing.
- 7:28He's taken his eye off the ball with the second location, thinking about third location, and more importantly, the personal stuff.
- 7:34And so I just, I need to get through the personal stuff and maintain the business.
- 7:38keep his general manager.
- 7:40I also would imagine that first GM dropped out in part because Dylan took his eye off the ball and stopped managing him well because of all the personal drama.
- 7:49So the personal drama always becomes business drama, unfortunately.
- 7:54and the party has arrived.
- 7:56How's it going, man?
- 7:57Good to see ya.
- 7:58Good to see ya, brother.
- 8:00This is the shop.
- 8:01You moved that, it used to be this way.
- 8:03Yeah, we just had to reorganize a little bit, make some more space.
- 8:07Okay, first off, do we know when the divorce is gonna be done?
- 8:10So tentatively the end of the year.
- 8:12Yeah.
- 8:13Because that's kind of the cloud over our head in a way, right?
- 8:15Yes, exactly.
- 8:17The goal would just be I'm, she's off the business.
- 8:20I mean, I do all the operations and she has the house she's in.
- 8:23I'm in the rental that I've moved into now.
- 8:26So we're hoping for a relatively clean split that way.
- 8:28And when we kind of balance everything out between the equity on the houses, it just kind of comes out to where I'd need to slide her more money to her.
- 8:35So...
- 8:36The dust hasn't settled in terms of division of assets, things like that.
- 8:40So we'll see how that plays out in the future.
- 8:42As long as we make this clean as possible, that's probably the best thing to optimize for this year.
- 8:47Yeah.
- 8:47Like as much of it, like 30 location and like GM stuff, it's like we just need to make sure that that doesn't become like a huge problem for the business.
- 8:55Yeah.
- 8:55And as long as that just can be clean and that's one part.
- 8:59And then the whole other aspect of just trying to focus on the business while you're going through all that is like a whole other department.
- 9:04I'm just trying to prevent the worst case, which is that comes two years, gets messy, and then there's equity stuff and valuation.
- 9:12You don't want to go there.
- 9:13So as clean as we can possibly make that, the better.
- 9:16But I know it's tough.
- 9:17I was struggling, probably a little bit depressed, but at the same time, you just become stronger from it.
- 9:22So it's kind of like if we have to slow down growth for a year or two, it is what it is.
- 9:27I'll build back up.
- 9:27From your perspective right now, why did this location go from 25% profit to seven?
- 9:34I don't know, maybe part inflation.
- 9:37I know we're a bit bloated with admin overhead, I think, because to be honest, there's kind of like a little bit of writing on the wall with performance with our old GM.
- 9:45It sounds though, and this is what I think the pressure, I think on you is, you're probably gonna lose Charlie if he doesn't have more on him.
- 9:52Charlie ultimately ended up leaving late August or early September.
- 9:56potentially looking to start my own location.
- 9:58That's kind of what I was doing before I even came here, just doing my own jobs and everything.
- 10:02But I don't know what the future holds for us.
- 10:04So hopefully Dylan can grow more of the company and see if there's more opportunity for me to grow here.
- 10:09So it's not just completing the jobs, but like taking care of all the equipment, the trucks and everything, because that's kind of where all the money starts to leak out of the bucket, right?
- 10:19It's like when you start losing some hand tools and a bunch of little things like that.
- 10:23Charlie left and I think the last quarter ended up being a lot more profitable than it should have been because of that.
- 10:32So I was kind of like trying to plan ahead.
- 10:34I'm like, all right, so how can I get Michael to slide into GM positions?
- 10:38So we got someone from the Philippines, the VA, to hopefully take as much off of his plate as possible so he can slide into sales and estimates and everything.
- 10:45So, but there's overlap.
- 10:46We had AJ, which is a guy from the Philippines, Charlie, myself, and Michael, all as admin.
- 10:52It's very tempting to take admin and start delegating it to people on the other side of the country, other side of the world, or to AI, and forgetting that there's other costs associated with admin if you start delegating it too soon.
- 11:04I was doing a lot of all the roles.
- 11:06GM salary, office manager salary, plus a VA for a quarter of the year, essentially.
- 11:13It's a big chunk of money.
- 11:14If you don't have systems in place, if you don't have the right software, if you don't have the right training and processes, when you delegate it to a VA in the Philippines, you don't have systems in place, it's going to mean you just rechecking their work every single day.
- 11:26And now you end up just checking their work instead of doing the work yourself.
- 11:30So be very careful about taking low-cost opportunities to cut down expenses when it comes to admin.
- 11:35I would rather actually spend more on my admin and prevent me from having to micromanage them or double-check online.
- 11:40all their work.
- 11:41Got it.
- 11:41So it was like you, office manager, AJ also kind of doing office related things.
- 11:46It was more like AJ wasn't really having much of an impact at that point.
- 11:49We were just training, getting him in the emails.
- 11:52I mean, it was a few months of just like, you know, when you hire someone new, it's, I don't want to say it's a burden, but it's the training burden is there.
- 11:59The biggest challenge I think with it is that he had no industry experience.
- 12:03When he got here, he had never known anything about seeds, sod, grass, ordering material.
- 12:08Just, he's learning a totally new industry.
- 12:10When I took over the office, it was like I trained all winter to take over the office.
- 12:15AJ very much was like, trained on the job.
- 12:18The bigger story there is like, us learning how to train someone overseas, not so much of like AJ's ability to do the job.
- 12:25So now what's the structure look like?
- 12:27So do we still have the two locations?
- 12:29Yep, so the other location is based out of my ex's house right now, so the two-car garage over there.
- 12:35So since last time I talked to Mike, we did start the second location, and I was trying to keep expenses low for the second location, and that's why I was running it out of our house over there, just a little two-car garage we have.
- 12:46So we just finished our first year for Federal Way location, and we're now in our sixth year for this Tacoma location.
- 12:53We have five guys in the field we're booking for right now.
- 12:55Last year I think we're between three to four guys, so we're slowly growing over there.
- 12:59By winter time I definitely want to be out of that spot, closer up north, more towards Federal Way.
- 13:05And so are you the GM at this one location or both or both?
- 13:07Yes, so I GM here.
- 13:10I also do a lot of the office stuff for the second location, so I'm getting my hands in a little bit of everything.
- 13:16Is there a GM there right now or not?
- 13:18I'm the GM for the other location, so I'm doing all the sales.
- 13:21So Michael and I kind of tag-teamed this location a little bit.
- 13:25I would describe my role as more of what a true GM looks like because I have delegated P4P time cards.
- 13:32I'm glad to never do those again, hopefully.
- 13:34So he does the Federal Way and Tacoma time cards.
- 13:37And that was one of the conversations I wanted to have with you is like, some of the challenges we're having with what to delegate.
- 13:44P for P seems to be kind of the hardest because Michael can see all the moving parts.
- 13:49He knows all the crew members.
- 13:50He knows the nuances of like, they did shop work here and we got to do all that.
- 13:54So to me, that seems almost like an impossible task to delegate to someone overseas, right?
- 13:59been reluctant to delegate P4P.
- 14:01So Michael kind of takes on P4P for both locations.
- 14:04Michael's probably 30% office, 70% GM.
- 14:08I would love him to be more like a full GM and then get as much on the AJ's plate or another office person's plate.
- 14:14Now I know we're talking about like, hey, do we go into a third location?
- 14:18I kind of imagine that evolving to be, I want my general managers to not have to be super computer savvy and super office savvy.
- 14:26I want them to be able to sell and run a crew, right?
- 14:28But right now he's that very hybrid position.
- 14:31So he's really stretched right now.
- 14:33I'm doing essentially 95% of the old GM's job plus 30% of my old job.
- 14:40I'm doing 125% of a job.
- 14:43What's going on here?
- 14:44And he's doing a good job with it, but it's just like, not everyone's gonna have the four or whatever years of experience he has under his belt, seeing the systems.
- 14:52He's kind of like very efficient, more than most GMs could be, I think.
- 14:56Right now I'm working 10 to 15 hours a day.
- 14:58I'm in there about 30% of the office work still.
- 15:02And at first it made sense.
- 15:03Like, oh yeah, he doesn't know how to do that and I've been doing it for years.
- 15:07That's fine.
- 15:08And then we hit spring rush and I was like, this is way harder than I thought it was going to be.
- 15:12So where do you see the constraint?
- 15:13Like why is the business where it's at now and what do you want it to change?
- 15:17We did like 1.3, 1.4 last year between the two locations.
- 15:21This year, assuming this location stays at a million, that one's probably going to grow to 600,000.
- 15:26Potentially, maybe, 550.
- 15:28Right.
- 15:29And so what's the thing you're kind of trying to solve for right now?
- 15:32how to overcome our attrition rate on the route, how to get to that capacity that we're looking for and raise prices.
- 15:39And our close rate's sitting at roughly 35%.
- 15:42So like, and that was- Is that blended across everything?
- 15:46Yeah, I think blended across everything.
- 15:48It's pretty close between the maintenance and the one-time projects.
- 15:51How much of revenue right now is like one-off projects versus the recurring stuff?
- 15:56About 50-50 right now.
- 15:58That's one of the questions I had for you too, because like I know you talk a lot about getting to capacity, raising prices and kind of doing all that.
- 16:06And that's what we've wanted to do.
- 16:08And for us, our capacity, we wanted it to be at three maintenance trucks and then one project truck.
- 16:13To me, that's the sweet spot, like 75% maintenance recurring revenue.
- 16:16We just like stalled out on our maintenance clients.
- 16:19It's like we got to two trucks and our attrition rate is just like the churn.
- 16:23We can't keep up with it.
- 16:24So just staying at two trucks,
- 16:26And that was pretty much all last year.
- 16:27We're kind of tracking for that this year.
- 16:29So it's like we're reluctant to raise prices on maintenance clients because we haven't reached that three truck capacity.
- 16:34And it's like we don't want to lose a bunch of clients and then go down to like 1.75 trucks or something.
- 16:38So that's just my reluctance is to go too much into the profit mode before we build it out.
- 16:44As I see it.
- 16:45When I look at the business as a whole, there's the cloud that we need to get it through the year, which is like get through the divorce without tearing the business apart.
- 16:52The 4L framework shares the four reasons why every home service business stops growing.
- 16:57Either a lack of liquidity, cash in the bank, a lack of leads, a lack of labor, or a lack of leadership.
- 17:03Whether that's a check we got to write, if we need to go into some debt, I know you're extremely conservative financially.
- 17:07So like, I'd trust you 100% on that part if you had to take some debt on, but we just don't wanna mess everything up.
- 17:14And the hardest part is gonna be just honestly keeping your head in the game for the next 12 months.
- 17:18That's going to be the hardest part.
- 17:20And so I think as long as for us to know like, hey, there's gonna be weeks where you don't wanna be here and there's gonna be days you're like super fired up and it's just gonna be that way.
- 17:28one of the number one reasons why Augusta locations closed down is divorce.
- 17:32And it's not necessarily when it starts.
- 17:34It's the year of back and forth and ups and downs.
- 17:37And eventually it's like, oh, forget this.
- 17:38I'm out.
- 17:39And so I just want to prevent that at all costs.
- 17:41And so I would say if you run up against that wall, back up and just play defense.
- 17:46Okay.
- 17:47That is we don't need to keep growing.
- 17:48We don't need to get a 70% close rate back up for a minute and just get through this year.
- 17:52Even if we have a flat revenue year, I don't think it's a bad thing to take this year and just make sure that is optimized for instead of like, we're going to grow.
- 17:58Like, I'm not going to come in here and you're like, all right, second location to 800,000, like throw in the problem.
- 18:02We're not doing that.
- 18:03I was reviewing my notes from Mike's book, The Copy and Paste Millionaire, and he's kind of talking about the benchmarks before starting a new location.
- 18:10And one of them was like, hey, let's make sure your first location or your main location is solid and secure.
- 18:15And that's part of the reason why we reached out was because we only hit like seven point five percent profits last year for this location, which is kind of like the hub, right?
- 18:23It's like this should be the copy and paste for all the other locations.
- 18:27So I don't want to keep copying and pasting if it's not, you know, solid.
- 18:30Trying to open a third location when we're not as profitable as we want to be here just kind of makes me like, we're jumping the gun a little maybe?
- 18:40We got too much going on, we got too much to fix.
- 18:42You can't copy and paste something that isn't working.
- 18:45the day dylan has his first location doing a million dollars in revenue if we can just optimize it and make it 20 25 profitable that's a great model that he can copy and paste and the principles that dylan has used over the past year to start a second location is everything we talk about in the copy and paste millionaire book if you'd like me to send a copy of the copy and paste millionaire book to you go down in the description and click the link from a profitability perspective we're fine
- 19:09It's not 911 status.
- 19:11We're not in the hole cash-wise.
- 19:14And so we just need to protect what we got this year and then think about expansion next year.
- 19:18I think there's a lot of ways to optimize things, though.
- 19:20And so when I look at the admin side, the first thing I'm thinking about is the reason it's hard to go into profit mode is because you only have 50% of revenue that's recurring.
- 19:29There's not really a problem with liquidity.
- 19:31And until that divorce is cleaned up, I can't say that for sure.
- 19:33But right now, there's not a problem.
- 19:35The biggest problem I see in urban roots landscaping is the fact that their leads are coming for a whole bunch of one-time projects.
- 19:42And they're booking out their spring rush with a bunch of one-time jobs.
- 19:46Instead of focusing on recurring revenue, they can build out their maintenance and be able to have a much more sustainable profit margin throughout the rest of the year.
- 19:53The big goals for me, I guess, as we continue to talk, is like how to redefine the roles between Michael and AJ, get as much onto another office person's plate and off the GM plate, and just build out my maintenance route.
- 20:08Like for two years now, I've been like, man, if I can get like three maintenance trucks and raise prices, literally recurring revenue is everything.
- 20:16That's what I'm learning.
- 20:17It simplifies things, less in-person estimates, less moving parts, less dump trailers,
- 20:23My life is 100 times better if I can get that third truck, raise prices, and then go to profit mode, but we have just stalled out.
- 20:30Yeah, like you always have churn, so what's happened is you have grown just organically from new leads coming in, and then you've hit this point of like, now new customers equates churning customers, and you go this plateau.
- 20:42Yeah.
- 20:42And so that's when sometimes like being able to gas on ads is helpful because the only way to do it is either increase the number of customers or decrease the amount of customers leaving.
- 20:51If there's customers leaving because of bad quality, then trickles down to the GM is spending time on admin tasks instead of operations.
- 20:59When we look at sales, operations, and admin, the lowest leverage task being admin.
- 21:03Michael's spending so much time doing those things and rechecking the work that his VA is doing on the admin side, he's failing on the operation side.
- 21:11When a GM starts spending so much time on admin, what actually ends up falling apart is the training, the team, there's churn now, you don't have time for one-on-ones.
- 21:19Like, have you done one-on-ones with them?
- 21:21Do you do one-on-ones with them much or not?
- 21:22No.
- 21:23We tried to.
- 21:25We set up calendar events to do initial two, four, and six-week reviews.
- 21:31And then we found that, oh, we're in spring rush.
- 21:35I've got six new guys.
- 21:37I'm just going to have to do reviews as needed.
- 21:39If you're doing okay, you're not getting one.
- 21:40One-on-ones, we see about a 20, 30% increase in efficiency just command center because we track every second.
- 21:46So it's really easy for us to see it.
- 21:48When they do a one-on-one, we just say there's immediate tick up in efficiency.
- 21:51And simply because they're brought back into like, why am I here?
- 21:54What can I do to improve?
- 21:55Where are areas of weakness?
- 21:57Where are areas of strength?
- 21:59I've given feedback to my manager.
- 22:00My manager's giving feedback to me.
- 22:02Like, I'm on track.
- 22:03Let's go.
- 22:04They in turn start to work more efficiently.
- 22:06They help the guys that are just getting started.
- 22:07They're better trainers.
- 22:08Like it just trickles down, but it stems from a GM doing admin tasks.
- 22:14Most of his time should be focused with his team in operations, doing the work.
- 22:18That is making sure they have everything they need for equipment.
- 22:20training, recruiting, hiring, and most importantly, doing one-on-one meetings.
- 22:25Those one-on-ones is the fundamental foundation to be able to have high quality control, make sure the team is trained up, and make sure that we don't have callbacks and yellow slips and a whole bunch of negative reviews.
- 22:36And that all comes back down to operations.
- 22:39And right now he's getting distracted with admin.
- 22:41A lot of these are downtrend effects, though, of like the biggest, for example, if you're having these projects being scheduled like this during the spring rush, it causes like now everyone's working overtime.
- 22:51One person drops out and we're like all scrambling.
- 22:53If that same thing happens in August when there's not like the grass isn't growing, projects are like you just fly through projects.
- 23:00They're so efficient.
- 23:01This is where you make so much money.
- 23:02And so I think a lot of this just comes down to scheduling.
- 23:05and being like, we're not scheduling these projects at all during these months.
- 23:10And it's hard to say, because we statistically do not have enough budget hours for our crew.
- 23:14Yes, that's my big fear.
- 23:15I've always known in the back of my head, like I should block some of this time off, but I'm like, we're only three weeks booked out.
- 23:21If I cut off these projects, we're literally not gonna have work for the guys.
- 23:25But again, I haven't pumped money into marketing and gotten the right kind of leads.
- 23:28And even if you didn't put money in marketing, just focus on attention on it, allowing you to get back to the customers faster.
- 23:35Like drive-bys, instead of being 24 hours, are now done within an hour.
- 23:38Like this starts to happen when just we're focused on it.
- 23:41The crew starts to be more efficient.
- 23:43Your churn goes down because they're not making dumb mistakes because they were trained correctly on just mowing, not doing a paper patio for three weeks that they're demoralized on.
- 23:50So a lot of it's just trickle down.
- 23:52I know it's like very small tweaks, but something like having the quotes for mowing off your plate 100%.
- 23:58If someone freaks out and they want to meet with you in person and it's on your website, you don't want to lose a customer.
- 24:03AJ can also use this over the phone.
- 24:05He can just literally measure the property using the dots, give them the price, you never have to touch it.
- 24:10realistically I don't want to even go on the offensive this year.
- 24:13I really want to play defense and allow you to be able to get your feet underneath you.
- 24:17And I think some of these are just like 5% and 10% cuts and little tweaks that would allow especially you to be a great general manager.
- 24:26Right now, I just want to fine-tune 5%, 10%, 15% efficiencies to make the business more profitable.
- 24:33I'm not trying to think about third location.
- 24:35I'm not thinking about how to grow to $2 million this year.
- 24:38Just make the business more defensible.
- 24:39And you make a business more defensible by increasing the profit margins and increasing from 7% profit to 20% margin again.
- 24:46For the P4P part, I know that will be a tough one for AJ to handle.
- 24:50Yeah.
- 24:50You just got to keep asking, how can we just not have to do this manually?
- 24:54Mm-hmm.
- 24:54whether it be putting things on the schedule, like P4Ps always a visit, they clock in out.
- 24:59So we have like, if it's zero budget hours, P4P team knows use clock time.
- 25:03If it's budget hours, use budget hours.
- 25:05So if it says sharpen blades and it has 0.4 budget hours and 0.6 clock hours, we're using 0.4, that's the budget hours.
- 25:13That's what's been assigned.
- 25:14If it says zero budget hours and it says 0.6, we're gonna use 0.6.
- 25:17Okay.
- 25:18Because now the general manager has made the decision that just pay them whatever it takes them in terms of time.
- 25:23I end up kind of writing estimates at 930 because I had some major thing that took up a big chunk of my day and I just hadn't been able to write things.
- 25:32And then you sit there like, oh, man, I just had to write six estimates.
- 25:37After I got home from work, knowing that we have a plan to train AJ a little better and take over some of this stuff.
- 25:45It's a relief.
- 25:45So I'm sure I could probably I need to go into service autopilot and adjust things.
- 25:52I think everything is based on budget hours now, but I need to figure out the clocked hours for the shop work.
- 25:56So the shop work I've kind of.
- 25:59already put on their list roughly how long it should take them so each individual task does say next to it like how it should like uh dump runs say like 1.5 budget hours per truck yeah we did you know just right there in the list but it's not a separate event so are you doing just make the this ad just a client
- 26:20Like just put like shop, shop, whatever, put that as the address and then we make this the client.
- 26:25So should it be like every task adds up to one amount of budgeted hours or should we be breaking that up?
- 26:32Each task is an event.
- 26:34If they're always done together, just keep it in one.
- 26:36But if you're like, hey, sometimes I only have them do this one part, I just do it separate.
- 26:40So are you saying like shop space being 1.5, but there's like five things inside of that?
- 26:45Yeah, so it's like, it adds up to, I think, like seven or eight budgeted hours.
- 26:49You know, sharpen blades is like one hour total because we've got like eight mowers.
- 26:54They've got things like bring any broken equipment to liquid hardware down the street here.
- 26:59Dump runs is like per truck time.
- 27:02So we know because we are driving like 45 minutes.
- 27:06Yeah, we use budget hours for those just like we would a customer.
- 27:09So we just make the whole thing.
- 27:11Yep, that way AJ just runs the report the same way every single day.
- 27:14What's an example of clocked hours then, would you say for?
- 27:17hey, it's the winter, can you clean out the shop space here?
- 27:21Do like this laundry list of things.
- 27:24So the extra stuff that isn't regular?
- 27:26Yeah, it's not regular.
- 27:28Yeah, the regular parts is where you get budget hours and you really, they can get way more efficient.
- 27:32When I started, Dylan was a guy mowing lawns out of his garage.
- 27:38Found his ad on Indeed.
- 27:39I don't know if he would necessarily say this, but I think I interviewed him more than he interviewed me.
- 27:45I was taking notes, and I was like, all right, I think this guy might actually be able to build something.
- 27:51When you have that second person, second in command person, if you have the right one that can give you the confidence, it's like full steam ahead, right?
- 27:58Michael's been extremely hardworking, reliable.
- 28:02When that dude is sick, like he's dispatching from his couch at home, like I just know I can count on him and that's like kind of the prerequisite right there.
- 28:08We wanna make sure that there's nothing else to reassign before you guys get out of here.
- 28:13That way we don't have so much overflow, all right?
- 28:16If it can be prevented, let's go ahead and prevent it.
- 28:19Just put it in the longer day.
- 28:20All right, let's get it out there, guys.
- 28:21Let's go.
- 28:22Yeah, let's go.
- 28:23It's cool to see Michael evolve from in the crew with just one truck, him and I, and then all the way to kind of being the office manager and then general manager and all that stuff.
- 28:33So that part's rewarding for sure.
- 28:36And then finally Google Ad Agency.
- 28:38So like you could look on Upwork.
- 28:39You don't necessarily need an agency.
- 28:40So you can go to Upwork, get someone that's 80 bucks an hour, 100 bucks an hour.
- 28:45They spend a couple hours a week on your account.
- 28:47Okay.
- 28:47And then you say, hey, I'm going to pause it for these months.
- 28:49We're not doing...
- 28:51ads right now that's fine you don't need to go get an agent for ten thousand dollars yeah you might pay someone 100 or 200 bucks an hour but they only need to work in your account a couple hours a week yeah realistically in google okay i'm gonna put agency slash upwork look if we're talking about spending 20 or 30 thousand dollars a year on ads and maybe four or five thousand dollars a year on management of those ads why would i have a million dollar business owner 1.4 million dollar business owner trying to figure out google ads
- 29:16Pay someone else to do it.
- 29:18So many of the times when you've come from nothing, you start scrimping and saving every single penny and that costs you growth in the business because you're constantly trying to save every dollar instead of just giving that dollar to someone else and then making you $10.
- 29:30I haven't done a lot of research on what's to be expected for that price point.
- 29:34So when someone's like, yeah, for three months I can create some Facebook ads and it's $10,000, you're like,
- 29:39That seems high, but is it?
- 29:41You know, so it's good to hear.
- 29:43I think it was Upworks, was it, where Mike suggested.
- 29:45So I'm going to check that out, see if I can find a freelance guy to help me out.
- 29:48And him getting an agency or a freelancer to unlock Google Ads, where you can get paid acquisition and be able to get the recurring customers he needs is going to be the big unlock for Urban Roots in the future.
- 29:58I'll definitely try to look to partner with somebody that helps take it over, but also can kind of keep me in the loop so I'm not totally in the dark on things.
- 30:06So you think we should start in the direction of trying to delegate P4P to AJ then?
- 30:10Just get those systems in place and slowly kind of train them up on that?
- 30:13Because that's kind of a time suck, and that requires us getting into good habits about getting the crew into good habits.
- 30:20Correct.
- 30:21And, yeah.
- 30:22That's the harder part.
- 30:23It's pretty interesting because we've been able to see Dylan when he first got started as a solo operator.
- 30:27Then as he began to figure out management at $800,000, $900,000 in revenue.
- 30:32And now at $1.4 million, he's learning this next skill.
- 30:35And I like to think of it as you do the work as a solo operator.
- 30:38Then you have to teach other people and be a great manager.
- 30:40That's the next skill that has to be learned.
- 30:42If we're struggling with yellow slips in the field, it's really trickle down, right?
- 30:46So like, I know I'm very fortunate for my hardworking crew.
- 30:49As much as we try to improve, I always think it starts with me first.
- 30:53And the part that Dylan is learning right now is the leadership part.
- 30:57That's the third element of how do I actually lead the organization and lead other managers, people like Michael, to be able to be successful as a teacher, to be able to not have to do the work, not have to teach the work, but lead the team and the entire organization.
- 31:11I guess entrepreneurship for everybody.
- 31:13The clear answer is no.
- 31:14There's a lot of stresses with business.
- 31:16I'm probably more stressed with a business.
- 31:18There's a lot of uncertainty there, but I think it's just kind of how you're wired on and what you thrive off of.
- 31:24For me, I really get excited about growing a team and there's always something new to learn and grow and figure out.
- 31:30And I do like the idea of some of that pressure is good knowing that how much effort I put in into growing a team and teaching and training people, it starts to pay off over time.
- 31:40Getting AD to do it is not difficult.
- 31:42There's a few things I can help you with on how to make that happen.
- 31:45It's the, in order for that to work, it has to be clean.
- 31:49So for example, we only send the GM one message with here are the four questions we have about yesterday's route, let us know what's up.
- 31:56They send us a quick voice note back.
- 31:58It's not like when I'm doing it throughout the day and now I'm interrupting the GM four times and now the GM's annoyed that he's just jumping there and doing it himself, that's not happening.
- 32:07He gets the daily report, crew gets daily report.
- 32:09Seeing how many inefficiencies that there have been to this point actually makes me feel like my job is gonna become so much more manageable.
- 32:17It's gonna be a huge relief to see all this implemented and get things where they should be.
- 32:21Another thing too that AJ can do to help with the whole aspect of like right now you are thinking in terms of like oh we need more mowing customers.
- 32:28I also think we can sell their existing mowing customers more other recurring services.
- 32:32And if they sign up on instant mowing quote they can have the option to choose upsells and you can customize that.
- 32:38But more importantly when someone just accepts their mowing quote I want to call them right away.
- 32:42And so for us we call like a thoughtful upsell which is like for AJ we made it really simple because we also have remote.
- 32:47So it's like hey if it's a mowing job I want you selling them treatments.
- 32:51And if they got cleanup, I want you to sell them bush trimming, like on an ongoing basis.
- 32:57If they got, like, you gotta make it really simple.
- 32:59Like if they bought this, sell them this.
- 33:01Right now their close rate is 35%.
- 33:04Usually if someone's trying to grow their business, I'm trying to shoot for like 60, 70% close rate.
- 33:08That gives me also the inclination that I can then raise prices down the road.
- 33:12At 35%, usually you'd say, hey, we're at the top of the market, we can't raise prices without really collapsing the demand for our services.
- 33:19But before we come to that conclusion and think we can't raise prices and we're at the top of the market and everyone else is really cheap, I wanna look at the sales process.
- 33:27a lot of us will look at our close rate but what we won't look at is the fact that it's taking a day or two days to get the quote to the customer if we could just answer the phone give them a quote and put their card on file and put them on the schedule we could potentially plug links that are currently in the sales process and be able to get our close rate back up does aj do well at answering new sales calls or is he good at customer service stuff
- 33:47Everything goes to him first.
- 33:49Then I typically don't answer if a grasshopper calls come through to me.
- 33:54I use that more as like, okay, I know he's busy right now.
- 33:57I know he missed that call.
- 33:59I might have to like make sure he's been on top of all of these.
- 34:02But usually if I'm getting on the phone, it's like,
- 34:06I got a message from AJ that there's some customer service problem that's like just above him right now.
- 34:14It's not something he has the resources to handle, or it's like clarification about an estimate.
- 34:19It's usually something like that.
- 34:22But most of my phone calls that I get through the day are just like little crew problems.
- 34:29They don't know what to do or where to take something, or they've got like a question about a note.
- 34:35That's like the most common thing we're getting right now is like, hey, what does this note mean?
- 34:39Which obviously means they need to be written differently, but that's a lot of it.
- 34:43Anything related to the estimate itself, we don't have him get into the estimates.
- 34:47It's like, hey, we wrote it, we're gonna answer.
- 34:49So like, if you look at our WhatsApp group, so we're trying to figure out little systems and then this is where he'll tag us and say, hey, these are all the accepted estimates.
- 34:58I need you to audit the schedule that I put together.
- 35:02It's just a lot of this going throughout the day and just trying to do this, answer crew phone calls, and then write estimates.
- 35:10Two things.
- 35:11One, we try to stay inside the CRM.
- 35:12So, like, it serves up, but he could make those into his dues.
- 35:16That way you can set up automations around them, and they show up on your dispatch board.
- 35:20That would probably make things a lot easier, honestly.
- 35:22I'm, like, digging through that group trying to find them.
- 35:24And you don't know who, because you guys don't know who, you're just literally looking for your tag.
- 35:27Yeah, exactly.
- 35:28And so there's pictures, some of those emails, some of those scheduling, it's all over the place.
- 35:31So what you could do, make different types of to-dos.
- 35:35It's like there's a scheduling one, there's an urgent one.
- 35:37It's like we knew if it was urgent, you scroll that one, you open it up right away.
- 35:41There are some things, even the technology piece, that we just, like, wait, Service Autopilot does that?
- 35:46You know, we thought we both knew Service Autopilot really well.
- 35:49And then we're finding like, oh, there's actually a whole other thing that we don't use ever that we could be making our lives way easier.
- 35:56If you use a CRM, I don't care if it's homeworks or Service Autopilot or any CRM, make sure you take a couple of days and really fully understand all the features and the capabilities.
- 36:05Otherwise, you're going to miss out on automations or little systems that could save you a ton of time, just like Dylan has done.
- 36:11And he's been inside of that software for years.
- 36:14Well, this is probably the lightest six-week plan ever.
- 36:17Okay.
- 36:18But the thing is, I think you're not far off.
- 36:20You're just these little tweaks.
- 36:21So first thing is, instant mowing quote, since you already have long crew web design, just reach out to Tori, but you'll want to tweak it.
- 36:27If you guys play with it for an hour, you'll get it exactly what they want.
- 36:30That's the first thing.
- 36:31I think the most excited I am is probably the instant quote on the website and maybe getting connected with someone who will help out with Google ads.
- 36:41Second thing, our goal in the next six weeks is to get P4P tickets handled by AJ.
- 36:46And that's gonna probably require, the same what we're talking about, like right now you have information all over the place, like WhatsApp, you have it in SA, you also have like calls between,
- 36:58team members and you, you have pictures, like it's all over the place.
- 37:02I always want it all in your CRM.
- 37:04Not having to do P4P for two locations every day.
- 37:07Running P4P for 13 guys is a little bit time consuming when those same guys are calling you with questions about their jobs.
- 37:16And it's just a lot of admin that I'm doing that I'm not gonna have to do anymore.
- 37:20This one, I know the P4P one's hard, but it's probably going to give you 20% of your day back.
- 37:23Oh, yeah.
- 37:24And I think that this kind of leads me into, like, the time blocking part for AJ.
- 37:29Okay.
- 37:30AJ should not be, like, so if a phone rings, he needs to be on it.
- 37:34Like, there's no reason that you should be answering a phone call.
- 37:37Mm-hmm.
- 37:38Or if the phone even ringing.
- 37:39It's like, you drop everything when the phone call rings.
- 37:41But when the phone's not ringing, step number one, what do you do next?
- 37:44Mm-hmm.
- 37:45And if that's done, what do I do next?
- 37:47And so some prioritization for him would be helpful.
- 37:50But he needs to know that during certain times of the day is when he contacts you.
- 37:53Outside of that, it's like, unless it's a 911 test, you don't reach out.
- 37:56Least excited is probably going to be trying to figure out how to delegate P4P to someone overseas.
- 38:03But it's a task that I think we could take on.
- 38:06Not first come, first serve next spring.
- 38:08This is not necessarily going to be anything you change the next six weeks, but next spring, we're going to look at April and May and say no projects.
- 38:15Meaning, in March, you're trying to upsell all your database on getting their property cleanups done and saying, hey, we're going to be booked out into June.
- 38:23Get your March cleanups, spring cleanups done now.
- 38:25So you pull all that demand forward, but then when a call comes in the middle of April, we're starting to book out in June.
- 38:30I mean, that first video we ever did, I was literally like with the company for like a few weeks or something before Dylan was like, hey, we're gonna do this video, are you cool with that?
- 38:39I was like, yeah, sure, let's go for it.
- 38:43But it's always a good experience.
- 38:45I think we definitely got the most out of this one.
- 38:49Can't wait for my days to get a little lighter on the admin.
- 38:52The objective is that by that time, and when you feel that like, I don't know if we're gonna fill a schedule, we have got, next one, Google Ads,
- 38:59person up and running when you say, hey, I wanna gas it.
- 39:02Let's put a couple grand in a month.
- 39:04And if we can get 50, 60, $70 a lead even, and we can convert most of those, and they're all being dumped in instant mowing quote, and you're not overwhelmed with projects that are taking three weeks that no one wants to do and you're losing money on, that's where you can get that third truck.
- 39:18And then the last one is to do's and SA.
- 39:20I know it seems small, but this is a constant theme I keep seeing of like, basically he can annoy any of you, but annoys both of you at the exact same time.
- 39:29Yeah.
- 39:30And so you are all three of you are kind of doing like the same job.
- 39:33So an email comes in that he can't respond to.
- 39:35Three of you have been brought into the equation which one person can respond back to.
- 39:38It's almost like the more we can keep each other separate, the better.
- 39:41Yes.
- 39:42And that's why I would just stay with two doing to do's in essay.
- 39:45Yeah.
- 39:45These are all very small tweaks.
- 39:47Very small.
- 39:47Very small.
- 39:51So, so far we have not completed everything, but we've made progress on most of the to-do items that we came up with.
- 39:58Mike, so one of the things that we talked about was learning and teaching myself how to run Google ads.
- 40:03And, you know, what we came up with was maybe hiring it out because it's been a few years now.
- 40:08I've been telling myself I'm going to teach, teach, teach myself.
- 40:11So at this point, I've just got to be realistic.
- 40:13So I'm hiring it out.
- 40:15I did connect with a gentleman on Upwork like Mike suggested.
- 40:18We are very close to launching those ads.
- 40:21Right now, we're also at the same time working with Lawn Care Web Design to go ahead and get some landing pages set up on the back end so we can track those ads a little bit better.
- 40:31So Barkat, the gentleman from Upwork,
- 40:33He's been working really diligently and quickly as well to try to get those up and running.
- 40:37And he said he's really close.
- 40:38We're just waiting on those landing pages.
- 40:40And then I know we talked to Mike a little bit about being able to offer more upsell opportunities.
- 40:45That's something that my office manager, Michael,
- 40:48And I haven't discussed a ton since the meeting with Mike Andes.
- 40:52But another thing that we were looking at doing was getting our website all set up with the instant mowing quote dot com tool that he built that Mike Andes built out.
- 41:03And we have actually gotten that on the website.
- 41:06I think.
- 41:07The landing pages just came through today, right?
- 41:09Those, um, we just got the link so we can send those to, um, to the Google, uh, our Google expert there.
- 41:16But we actually did get one instant quote that was start to finish.
- 41:21It was because we hadn't had the Google ads set up yet.
- 41:24It was an organic type of thing.
- 41:26Someone landed on our website and.
- 41:28uh, filled out the form, accepted the estimate.
- 41:31So that was exciting to see that we didn't need to like take the call, collect their information, send an estimator out.
- 41:38I mean, it's, I'm really excited about the idea of once we can start driving more traffic to our website, we'll actually start to see the time savings there.
- 41:47Another task that Mike Andes suggested we do is try to delegate a bit more to AJ, who is our office coordinator.
- 41:56And Michael and I, we had kind of this mental hang up on can we even delegate the task of P4P?
- 42:03Because we had the luxury of Michael in the office helping out with a bunch of office work.
- 42:07And he saw the comings and goings of our crew every day.
- 42:11So naturally it just made it a little bit easier for him to fill out the time cards for P4P and run that whole system.
- 42:17And our fear was, man, how can we make this work remotely?
- 42:21So we just jumped right in.
- 42:22Mike Andes gave us kind of the confidence that yes, it can be done.
- 42:25And then just the big thing for us was making sure our crew members were accurately clocking into our CRM.
- 42:33So that was part of it too, was we were guilty of not really enforcing the clocking in and out for the day, clocking into the jobs.
- 42:40But I don't know, Michael, would you say we're probably about 95% of the way there with the crew really being better about remembering things?
- 42:47Oh yeah, the crew's definitely about there.
- 42:50They're fully aware that AJ has taken over.
- 42:53Things have definitely gotten a lot better on that front.
- 42:55And that said, AJ is about 99% there.
- 42:58I think I'm basically just watching him run it in the morning to make sure he's good to go.
- 43:02So he's gonna be let loose to just do it and start asking questions here.
- 43:07Yeah, yeah.
- 43:08So again, we've really started and I would say we're about 90, 95% of the way there with delegating the P4P to AJ.
- 43:16We've got the instant quote on our website now.
- 43:19We're super close to launching our Google ads.
- 43:21So we're right on the cusp of some exciting stuff.
- 43:24So now once we start freeing up some of that time, and again, I feel like we're really close to that.
- 43:28Michael's going to be able to do some of those one-on-one performance reviews with our crew members.
- 43:33We can start creating training videos and other SOPs around operations that we've been kind of lacking in the past.
- 43:39We're like 90% of the way through with just about everything on the list.
- 43:43Nothing's fully complete and exactly how we want it, but we're definitely seeing progress.