How to Standardize Pricing When Every Job Is Different | Q&A

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In this video, I'm coaching 10 home service business owners that are trying to build a million dollar business.
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We're gonna talk about pay for performance, how you can pay your employees, not an hourly, but based upon how hard they work.
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We're gonna be talking about getting off of the truck and focusing on sales and working on the business.
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And we're even going to talk about doing multiple locations and how to pay a general manager.
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This is a great episode.
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It's a long one, but it's full of golden nuggets.
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Without any further delay, let's roll the tape.
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Ian, you're up.
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What's going on guys?
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Thanks for having me on Mike.
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Appreciate it.
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Appreciate everything you do.
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First question I have on the list is regarding P4P.
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So currently we're doing like a half-baked P4P system.
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Haven't switched it over yet because I think my pricing slash estimation process is kind of finicky, super inconsistent.
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I've been doing budgeted hours for a little over a year.
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And there's just a lot of variability.
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I do tree work.
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Like every tree is different.
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Every tree location is different.
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I'm just wondering if you have any recommendations on a pricing matrix for, I don't want to say complex jobs, but jobs that have a lot of variability to them.
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Yeah.
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So when you have variability around budget hours, let's assume you have like, hey, there's a 10 budget hour job.
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Give me a range as to how long that would take.
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Are you saying sometimes they get down to three and sometimes it takes them 20?
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Yeah, I mean, and I think a lot of that is not their fault, but it's more my fault based on just the estimating, you know, unforeseen weather events or we can't get a chipper into the backyard, so we have to drag everything out to the front.
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It takes twice as long.
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So there's just a lot of either I'm doing the quotes too fast and not taking into consideration all the variables or they knock it out way faster than I think.
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And
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Yeah, so there's two ways to look at this, Ian.
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One is, so first off, when I talk about P4P, I always say you have to be accurate in your estimating.
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If you're not, it does get really, really hard from a cultural perspective to keep guys headed in the game when you buddh did 10 hours and they're 40 hours deep on a project.
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It's just very difficult.
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And so if you can't get accurate estimates, there's two things I would think about.
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One, if that inaccurate estimate is usually a specific type of tree service, I would try to cut that service.
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So, for example, I've seen this a lot of times with people in tree service that are doing PPP.
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They'll cut hazard trees.
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They're like, hey, it makes a bunch of money, but also sometimes I lose my shirt on the thing.
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Great, let's get rid of it because we already know we can't standardize it.
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We can't systematize this thing.
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It's not simple.
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And if I lose my shirt or I make a gajillion dollars, let's just say we don't do it and we'll be right in the middle.
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And so I would first say if it's a lot of times 20% of your services are causing 80% of these very, this variability.
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And so I'd first look at like what kind of jobs are causing this problem and try to eliminate it that would almost, almost always fixes the problem.
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Second thing I would say, if you're like, well, we actually specialize in hazardous trees and like that's where we make all of our money.
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Then it's a function of explaining to your team like, hey, guys, there's going to be jobs where we crush it and I'm not going to hold anything back on P4P.
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You're getting the percent and you're going to make a bunch of money.
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There's going to be other times where I mess up.
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Because like you guys know, it's so hard for me to estimate these to know what's underneath the ground or what we're going to cut into.
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As long as you're honest with them.
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And I think as an aggregate, you're accurate.
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So for example, 10 jobs over the course of 10 jobs, you can't be off by 50%.
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One job might be up down 30%, 20%, 50%.
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But over the course of several weeks, there needs to be some consistency.
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And the longer your pay period, the less that will matter.
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One job going off or going away quick.
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I would much more look at an aggregate in a longer form, two weeks, four weeks, and making sure you're accurate in that manner.
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And if you are, then I would just make sure you explain things to them really, really in depth.
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And then have some sort of asterisk probably around something like, hey, if it goes over like three to X, I'm stepping in.
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And if it's my fault and it's doing this, then I'll step in and I will make sure everyone gets base pay extra or something like that on the job.
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Gotcha.
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Yeah, perfect.
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Thank you.
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But almost all the time, I was talking to an HVAC company the other day, and they realized once they did this that literally 70% of their jobs that went over budget hours was one service.
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So they cut that one service, which was about 13% of revenue, and then they were able to do P4P with a ton of accuracy.
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Gotcha.
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Yeah, perfect.
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Thanks, sir.
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You got it.
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Eric is up.
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Go ahead, brother.
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So we're a relatively new company.
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We've been in business for about the last three weeks.
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Everything's going super great off the start.
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We've been doing a lot of instant price door hangers, but we want to start thinking about how to get some more of like natural leads coming in.
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So it's one of your great recommendations are for helping get our website start listing higher.
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so people can just naturally find us and then when you think it would be a smart idea to start doing Google ads or Facebook ads.
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Yes, the vast majority of your leads in your first year are going to come from paid traffic, whether it be online or from direct response marketing.
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Direct response marketing is what I would recommend you do
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And because branding will come as a result of boiling the puddle in these small markets.
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So whether it be a neighborhood that sees a door hanger multiple times or see the Facebook ad and a Google, like the more you want to, you want to bottle the boil, the puddle, like these small markets that you're trying to go into.
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I will also say personally, if I had was consistently getting one out of a hundred for door hangers, I would not go into Facebook and Google.
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Also, I'm making the assumption you can deliver about 80 to a hundred of them an hour.
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Is that about correct?
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Yeah, so I got me and my business partner right now.
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We actually were doing some before this, we're going to do some after this.
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And I think we got out, do like 150 an hour, maybe a little bit more than that with the two of us.
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So if you paid someone, let's just assume they're not as good as you, they're going to do 100 an hour.
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That's one hour of labor and printing costs.
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you're probably looking at $30 to $40 customer acquisition cost.
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Because remember, when you get a quote lead from an instant quote door hanger, it's a customer.
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So I would just keep plowing money into that.
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Like, honestly, you're not going to go into Facebook or Google as a newbie and get better returns in that.
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Can you dabble in it?
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Can you test it?
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Sure, go for it.
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But like, I would say if it's working, just keep refining it.
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Because I think that if you just kept refining it, you'd create a system for people to go do them for you so you can scale it.
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Because right now it's not scalable.
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You're doing door hangers.
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Eventually you get enough customers.
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Like it's tough, but I believe I would just create a system around that and make sure you can scale it.
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And so getting team members, training them on how to do the door hangers, giving them incentive program around delivery, getting them on a watch so that you can track and make sure they actually deliver them.
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They're not dumping them in a garbage can.
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Do that because at 30 to 40 bucks a customer, I would be all over this.
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All right.
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Thanks, Mike.
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Yep, you got it.
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Marco, you're up.
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So I own a lawn care company in Canada, in Ontario.
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I wanted to talk about the GM.
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So we decided to have one location and grow because we're very isolated.
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We're split between about 40% lawns, 35% being large projects.
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predominantly sod and then 25% is small projects where we do like stumps and hedge trimming, tree trimming.
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We kind of separated that.
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Next summer, we're kind of shifting stuff around.
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So I'll talk about this summer where we had a office manager, we had a salesman and we just hired a mechanic and then there's me.
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Now the problem is we didn't have a GM quote unquote.
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So we all shared that role and it was kind of getting to the point like who does what.
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So then I really
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operation manager to kind of replace kind of all of us as we grow.
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Sales will grow.
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There's the salesman's only in sales office only do an office.
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And then I got an operation manager, but I feel like we have a lot of complex services.
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So instead of hiring one, uh, general manager to say, I was thinking of running three separate divisions.
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So we have lawns, large project and small project, kind of how I broken it up.
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We're looking to grow probably 30% next year, so be around like $1.6 million in summer revenue.
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What I was planning on doing was having three working GMs for each division, one per each.
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So one would run the four long crews, one would run the small project crew, about two crews.
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And then one would run the large project crew, about two crews.
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So I wanted your opinion on that.
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I think it would work amazing rather than hiring one guy because there's so much to teach.
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And it's this way it kind of keeps everything compartmentalized, right?
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So I wanted your opinion on that.
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And then number two would be how to incentivize these guys.
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I had my idea, but I'd love to hear yours.
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Are they going to be expected to do the estimates for their individual apartments?
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So we know for sod for large projects, our guy is from Ecuador and his English isn't the best.
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So we were thinking of having the salesman doing the sod.
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And the lawns will likely be the salesman as well.
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So a salesperson is separate from what you're calling...
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So I would – I think that in this case, terminology and titling is really important.
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I would not call them working GMs.
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I would call them crew leaders, and they'd be a crew leader for small project, a crew leader for large project, a crew leader for lawn care, whatever you said.
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Because a working GM, by definition, manages the entire business.
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Like the GM –
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Manage the best, whether they're a working GM or whether they're a full-time GM or they're a GM plus.
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The GM is at the top of the company.
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That's technically you.
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So I would classify you as a full-time GM.
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They are crew leaders inside of departments of operations.
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Okay.
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Right?
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And I think that titling is important because now they're expected to be out in the field leading their team, leading their division, leading their crew, but they're not managers.
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Right.
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So my goal with them is to be about 80% on field, 20% off, at least for this year.
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And then it'll slowly get to the point where, you know, they're managing the lawns are a lot easier to manage.
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So they're able to manage both double the crews.
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So he's running four.
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And then obviously the large projects, the one-time projects are a lot more to manage because you've got to, you know, sell them all.
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So yeah, my plan is to, they're in the field 80%.
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They're managing the employees.
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So they're essentially making sure everyone shows up on time, make sure everyone's efficient.
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We wanted to implement sort of like a P for P, but kind of in a way where every week they would kind of calculate gross profit and basically incentivize them based off gross profit quarterly, as well as the employees based off their gross profit per crew.
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Yeah, typically the crew, like, okay, when you say gross profit, please break that down.
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Okay, so I would take revenue minus probably just their two biggest expenses being fuel and labor.
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Sorry, not fuel and labor.
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It would be materials.
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You just want to be careful because now you're basically, if you buy more assets or shop space and you increase overhead, you will make them more efficient while at the same time increasing your cost and inflating assets.
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the amount that you're giving to them.
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So that's why we do profit sharing because it's bottom line, whatever is coming out of my bank account is going to theirs kind of thing.
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But it's gonna get difficult if you try to do the three different departments, right?
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So I would much rather do it based upon, because they don't do the sales, right?
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You have this third party guy doing the sales, outside of their departments.
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You could very well, because that third party, I'm assuming is gonna have incentives around efficiency or like, does the job get to on budget?
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You could just also convey that to each of your team, your three crew leaders.
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It's like, hey, for the month, if – I'm just going to make up numbers.
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90% or more of your projects are below budget, then you get a bonus.
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And you could also do it based on budget hours too.
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Basically, efficiency score.
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If it was 150 budget hours in that project and you got 140, awesome, you passed.
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Out of all your projects in the month, if X amount percent are above or you beat budget hours, then you win.
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The thing is, the challenging part with that is they don't have the sales like in their hand.
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They don't control it.
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So there's always going to be this tension between you and the crew leaders because they don't control what the budget hours are.
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Or how much supplies, materials, and costs were baked in that job.
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And that's the challenge when you start giving incentives to someone who's technically a mid-level because they're not the top is they're going to feel very handicapped as to what they can actually do to make more money because they're getting this job and it's being told to them what the pricing is.
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Okay, I see.
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Now, would we, you mentioned about the salesman kind of getting tied into that, right, with the budgeted hours.
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So my plan was rolling this out was having kind of meetings to make sure that everyone's on the same page, and then it'd be great communication to the salesman, hey, you're charging too cheap at this job, we got to charge a little bit more.
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Yeah, but the challenging part is going to be that you as the business owner have the incentive of making sure your crew stays busy and the crew close ratio is high enough.
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If you give them a percentage of gross profit, the only thing they care about is that that job has enough budget hours and extra supplies and extra material baked into it.
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So their gross profit numbers are high enough.
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Right, which will inflict pricing.
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Correct, and reduce close rate too low.
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Okay.
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And then also, like, if your estimator is like, oh, man, I feel pressure from my crew leaders.
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I got to go higher in price.
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Cool.
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Now your close ratio got cut in half because he's padding all his estimates.
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Mm-hmm.
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Okay, I like that idea of the budgeted hours because, like you said, if we buy a $50,000 stump grinder, obviously they're going to move quicker, but we'll take that into account with budgeted hours.
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That's why P4P we go straight to budget hours.
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It changes in every job.
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We can dial in accuracy as time goes on.
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It has nothing to do with overhead.
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It has nothing to do with any other of my expenses.
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It's just how long do you take because that's what they can actually control.
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And as the leader of your crew, you should make them be more efficient by getting all their trucks set up in the morning, make sure the material shows up on time.
210
00:13:40.495 --> 00:13:44.859
Like you start coaching your crew leaders on how to make their team more efficient so they beat budgeted hours.
211
00:13:44.999 --> 00:13:46.880
Okay, so that would change my incentive plan.
212
00:13:46.900 --> 00:13:54.788
I was planning on giving them like eventually 10% of the gross margin, gross profit there, basically just removing the labor and material.
213
00:13:55.708 --> 00:13:56.488
How would you do that now?
214
00:13:56.808 --> 00:14:02.730
Well, the problem with that model is you could be losing money and still be paying them 10% because you could have a whole bunch of overhead.
215
00:14:03.130 --> 00:14:09.912
That's eating out all the expenses, especially if you grow a product-based business and you have extra overhead, equipment, etc.
216
00:14:10.213 --> 00:14:11.253
And they're still going to expect 10%.
217
00:14:11.873 --> 00:14:15.675
So like you could very well end up paying the money and losing money in a quarter.
218
00:14:15.955 --> 00:14:22.857
And so most of the time, the only thing I wanna do when it comes to that sort of is profit sharing, either based on distributions or P and L, because it's the simplest.
219
00:14:23.097 --> 00:14:31.881
It's challenging when you do this divide like you are, because to your point, there could be one really bad player affecting the profit sharing for the other person, like the other department.
220
00:14:32.201 --> 00:14:34.102
And so that's why I would just go after budget hours
221
00:14:34.762 --> 00:14:50.188
And this is something that can trickle all the way down to your technicians, but you could also just chunk it up to your crew leaders, which is like we take how many budget hours we're assigned to your crew, and if you're at 80% efficiency, 90% efficiency, 100% efficiency, like you could have tiers of bonuses based upon their efficiency score.
222
00:14:50.208 --> 00:14:51.928
Would you do that like weekly?
223
00:14:52.268 --> 00:14:53.529
It depends on your project size.
224
00:14:54.109 --> 00:14:58.031
If you have big projects that take two or three weeks, I'd probably do it like on a monthly basis.
225
00:14:58.191 --> 00:14:59.171
Okay.
226
00:14:59.191 --> 00:15:01.872
The large project crews are like one to two days to three maybe?
227
00:15:02.992 --> 00:15:07.375
I would still do your bonuses based upon at least monthly just to make it more even.
228
00:15:07.975 --> 00:15:14.379
We do quarterly because there's going to be times when in a month bad stuff happens, weather happens, and the guys don't make as much.
229
00:15:14.759 --> 00:15:15.680
Their efficiency stinks.
230
00:15:16.140 --> 00:15:19.922
I don't want them completely throwing the towel for the last week of the month because they know that happened.
231
00:15:20.383 --> 00:15:21.683
So that's why we like doing quarterly.
232
00:15:21.703 --> 00:15:29.748
It's long enough to where they can make up for lost ground, and they don't have months where they just crush it, and now their expectations for profit sharing is too high.
233
00:15:30.028 --> 00:15:30.288
Okay.
234
00:15:30.328 --> 00:15:34.609
And what would be a way to, like, you talked about incentivizing them with budgeted hours.
235
00:15:34.629 --> 00:15:37.530
Let's say they have excess budgeted hours or they're below.
236
00:15:37.590 --> 00:15:41.511
Would you go like, you know, $10 every extra budget hour they saved?
237
00:15:41.711 --> 00:15:42.851
I would probably just do efficiency score.
238
00:15:43.151 --> 00:15:45.471
So I would do, you already tracked their clocked hours.
239
00:15:45.712 --> 00:15:45.952
Cool.
240
00:15:46.452 --> 00:15:47.812
You already know their budgeted hours.
241
00:15:48.232 --> 00:15:55.774
If you can just say, hey, based upon your efficiency score of your entire crew, including your hours, by the way, their hours get wrapped up into this.
242
00:15:56.254 --> 00:15:56.434
Right.
243
00:15:56.894 --> 00:16:02.661
I'm going to look at that whole thing, and I'm going to have tiers of 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, and 100% efficiency.
244
00:16:02.921 --> 00:16:05.705
And at each of those, you are going to unlock a dollar amount.
245
00:16:06.205 --> 00:16:09.149
Not a percentage, because percentages, they don't, like, out the window.
246
00:16:09.529 --> 00:16:11.992
Especially because you have this hairy thing with the three departments.
247
00:16:12.313 --> 00:16:14.095
You can't, percentages aren't going to mean much to them.
248
00:16:14.455 --> 00:16:15.857
You're going to want to just be like, at 50%.
249
00:16:16.077 --> 00:16:17.577
At 50%, you make no bonus.
250
00:16:17.878 --> 00:16:21.118
At 60%, you make, I'm just gonna make up numbers, a thousand bucks.
251
00:16:21.419 --> 00:16:22.679
At 70, you make 2,000.
252
00:16:22.779 --> 00:16:36.223
At 80, you get, and you know you can afford that because now they're saving so many hours on a month, let's just call it a quarter, that's 40 times 50, that's 200, that's 600, three people under them, that's two.
253
00:16:36.403 --> 00:16:40.324
They're basically managing 1,500 to 2,000 of clocked hours in a quarter.
254
00:16:40.624 --> 00:16:43.125
So if you can afford an extra two bucks
255
00:16:43.785 --> 00:16:46.546
per clocked hour, if they're really efficient, that's a good bonus.
256
00:16:46.766 --> 00:16:46.926
Right.
257
00:16:46.966 --> 00:16:47.986
Four grand per quarter.
258
00:16:48.207 --> 00:16:48.387
Right.
259
00:16:48.647 --> 00:16:48.907
Okay.
260
00:16:49.087 --> 00:16:49.367
Perfect.
261
00:16:49.747 --> 00:16:52.748
I got a question about snow, but I'll let these guys go.
262
00:16:52.768 --> 00:16:55.349
And if we have time to circle back, I'll ask about that.
263
00:16:55.629 --> 00:16:55.849
Awesome.
264
00:16:55.869 --> 00:16:56.529
You got it, brother.
265
00:16:56.829 --> 00:16:57.290
Yeah, you got it.
266
00:16:57.310 --> 00:16:58.110
Justin, you're up.
267
00:16:58.330 --> 00:16:58.690
Hey, Mark.
268
00:16:58.870 --> 00:17:01.051
Just a little bit of a background of what I'm doing.
269
00:17:01.111 --> 00:17:07.153
So right now I got about five guys, one part-time kind of, and then one part-time admin doing about,
270
00:17:07.513 --> 00:17:09.435
Right about 700 in revenue.
271
00:17:09.495 --> 00:17:14.560
We profited about 80 this year and I painted myself about 50 as a salary.
272
00:17:14.880 --> 00:17:17.963
So my question is my admin.
273
00:17:18.043 --> 00:17:20.025
She's getting about 25 hours right now.
274
00:17:20.165 --> 00:17:24.369
She's kind of complaining and she's kind of on her way out just because she wants to be full time.
275
00:17:25.089 --> 00:17:26.671
I don't have the work for a full time.
276
00:17:27.431 --> 00:17:33.394
Um, but she kind of, she helps me tremendously just back end just because I'm focusing on the guys and just selling.
277
00:17:33.414 --> 00:17:36.436
And I also do field produce a bunch of the time as well.
278
00:17:36.476 --> 00:17:39.857
So do I take over her position and kind of stay where I'm at?
279
00:17:40.217 --> 00:17:45.600
Or do I give her those extra hours and then just hope that she kind of just fills those hours?
280
00:17:45.660 --> 00:17:55.485
I'm kind of stuck at like what, what my next step is here just to kind of keep her because she does help, but just kind of like strong arm and maybe because I don't have the extra work for her.
281
00:17:55.745 --> 00:17:55.845
Yeah.
282
00:17:55.865 --> 00:17:55.985
Yeah.
283
00:17:56.145 --> 00:17:57.646
That's my main question right now.
284
00:17:58.046 --> 00:17:58.246
Cool.
285
00:17:58.587 --> 00:18:01.268
So are you trying to grow the business right now, Justin?
286
00:18:01.529 --> 00:18:03.570
Or is it pretty much you're going to keep it around that size?
287
00:18:04.210 --> 00:18:05.932
So right now, I'm in profitability.
288
00:18:05.952 --> 00:18:07.733
We just raised prices about 10%.
289
00:18:07.753 --> 00:18:09.454
So right now, I'm kind of happy where I'm at.
290
00:18:09.654 --> 00:18:12.356
So I'm not trying to grow too, too much future.
291
00:18:12.376 --> 00:18:13.877
I definitely have plans to grow.
292
00:18:13.917 --> 00:18:17.319
But my main focus right now is stay where I'm at, trying to buy a house.
293
00:18:17.419 --> 00:18:18.840
So I like where I'm at right now.
294
00:18:18.860 --> 00:18:19.100
Got it.
295
00:18:19.521 --> 00:18:20.561
Got to get some good tax returns.
296
00:18:20.581 --> 00:18:20.922
Let's go.
297
00:18:21.382 --> 00:18:21.702
Okay.
298
00:18:22.363 --> 00:18:22.563
Yeah.
299
00:18:22.623 --> 00:18:24.084
So how much is she getting per hour?
300
00:18:24.564 --> 00:18:25.224
She's getting $25 an hour.
301
00:18:26.123 --> 00:18:26.303
Cool.
302
00:18:26.423 --> 00:18:33.269
So right now, you would basically need to pay her about $25,000 more per year to keep her full time.
303
00:18:33.689 --> 00:18:35.050
You just raised prices.
304
00:18:35.971 --> 00:18:36.912
You said about 10%.
305
00:18:37.432 --> 00:18:40.575
So you just made about 60 to 70 grand extra profit.
306
00:18:41.335 --> 00:18:45.198
I personally, if I have a great admin person, I want to keep them.
307
00:18:45.718 --> 00:18:52.222
I would personally be thinking what else you can offload onto her to make more money in the business yourself.
308
00:18:52.663 --> 00:19:00.508
Because I think you'll make more than $25,000 if you focus more time on other stuff besides admin or anything else you could take off your plate.
309
00:19:00.928 --> 00:19:06.312
And so what I would do if I was you, Justin, because she's pushing for it, I would list off everything that you do on a daily basis.
310
00:19:06.332 --> 00:19:06.752
Yeah.
311
00:19:06.852 --> 00:19:17.481
And I would happen to believe that if you put that list in front of her and said, I am willing to give you more hours, but these are the things that you'd have to be taking on or some of them and go through them with her and be like, could you do dispatching?
312
00:19:17.881 --> 00:19:19.582
Could you do follow up phone calls?
313
00:19:20.043 --> 00:19:27.889
So as I say that, is there any of those type of things that come to mind that you could potentially take it on, but it's going to be like a lift in terms of her skill set?
314
00:19:28.369 --> 00:19:29.350
Yeah, definitely.
315
00:19:29.390 --> 00:19:30.230
She can definitely handle that.
316
00:19:30.250 --> 00:19:32.892
She came from a roofing company, so she knows how to schedule.
317
00:19:32.912 --> 00:19:33.893
She knows how to dispatch.
318
00:19:34.193 --> 00:19:35.354
She kind of does that already.
319
00:19:35.414 --> 00:19:36.335
Are you doing those things now?
320
00:19:36.495 --> 00:19:37.756
Or sometimes you're kind of getting involved?
321
00:19:37.776 --> 00:19:38.796
I do those right now.
322
00:19:38.816 --> 00:19:41.598
It should be kind of, depending on the week, she takes it over.
323
00:19:41.618 --> 00:19:45.721
If it's a slow week, if it's busy, then it's kind of up in the air.
324
00:19:46.141 --> 00:19:49.003
But the only thing is that I have with that is she's remote.
325
00:19:49.283 --> 00:19:50.404
So she's down in Florida.
326
00:19:50.424 --> 00:19:51.285
I'm up in New York.
327
00:19:51.425 --> 00:19:55.508
She has an eye on things, but she doesn't have a day-to-day aspect of it.
328
00:19:55.588 --> 00:19:57.249
This is happening day in, day out.
329
00:19:57.610 --> 00:20:00.098
So that's the only like kicker is like if she was here,
330
00:20:00.733 --> 00:20:01.994
And we had an office.
331
00:20:02.054 --> 00:20:03.215
I would be like, all right, perfect.
332
00:20:03.235 --> 00:20:04.756
This is like a perfect position for you.
333
00:20:04.776 --> 00:20:05.737
But that's the only kicker.
334
00:20:05.837 --> 00:20:07.898
She doesn't see exactly what goes on day to day.
335
00:20:07.938 --> 00:20:08.119
Yeah.
336
00:20:08.159 --> 00:20:10.540
So like something like scheduling is sometimes difficult when they're remote.
337
00:20:10.901 --> 00:20:11.261
I get it.
338
00:20:11.701 --> 00:20:17.426
But there's a lot of things I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you do sometimes that she could do.
339
00:20:18.006 --> 00:20:19.507
And it might be a little bit of training.
340
00:20:19.827 --> 00:20:27.173
But if she's motivated to do those things and take them off your plate, the reason is because if she can do them for $25 an hour, regardless of what they are, it's
341
00:20:27.413 --> 00:20:34.917
And even if she's 50% efficient at it, and therefore it's costing you $50 an hour, you can make more than that if you just went and got in the truck and did work yourself.
342
00:20:35.337 --> 00:20:35.618
Right?
343
00:20:35.898 --> 00:20:51.847
And so I believe that if you really pushed her to take things off your plate and then just displace that time with a higher leverage task, either in operations or in sales, like if you just took that time that you're right now, probably spending, I'm just going to guess an hour to two hours a day that you are spending on tasks that she could probably take off your plate.
344
00:20:52.407 --> 00:20:55.689
If you were able to displace that with just like upselling, the business will grow and
345
00:20:56.309 --> 00:20:58.391
Without spending money on marketing, you'll get to capacity.
346
00:20:58.631 --> 00:21:01.314
You'll be able to get right back to raising your prices very quickly.
347
00:21:02.775 --> 00:21:05.999
You'd be able to get to capacity so fast, you'd need to raise prices again.
348
00:21:06.559 --> 00:21:09.982
And that's a $70,000, $80,000 lever if you can get there.
349
00:21:10.383 --> 00:21:12.785
So let's not stumble over the $25,000.
350
00:21:13.246 --> 00:21:18.451
But I'm going to make her earn it by putting in front of her the things that have to get done if she wants those hours.
351
00:21:18.831 --> 00:21:30.176
So now I kind of have mixed feelings towards growing, towards either staying here where I'm at right now, just because I have this goal and I want to buy a house and I can definitely do it within the next year or two.
352
00:21:31.316 --> 00:21:31.876
I'm young.
353
00:21:32.036 --> 00:21:36.938
So that's why I kind of still want to grow the business and, but I don't want to do the copy and paste.
354
00:21:36.958 --> 00:21:42.080
I get the concept, but in my market, I think it just makes sense for staying, just grow one big location.
355
00:21:42.681 --> 00:21:46.042
Would you say in my situation, since I'm,
356
00:21:46.502 --> 00:21:47.504
Young and stuff.
357
00:21:47.524 --> 00:21:51.971
Should I buy the house, get that, make everything just stay where I'm at?
358
00:21:52.132 --> 00:21:59.965
Or should I kind of grow the business, take it easy, just grow it and then a couple years down the road, then kind of focus on everything else?
359
00:22:00.283 --> 00:22:04.925
The thing is, obviously you want the house for some reason and the business serves you.
360
00:22:05.345 --> 00:22:13.527
And so the reason I encourage people to go into profit mode is because it builds the habit and the skill of saying I'm not going to grow and the business is going to serve me.
361
00:22:13.547 --> 00:22:15.168
When you're in profit mode, the business is serving you.
362
00:22:15.528 --> 00:22:17.068
When you're in growth mode, you're serving the business.
363
00:22:17.469 --> 00:22:19.929
And so I'm a big fan of going into profit mode for a year or two.
364
00:22:19.949 --> 00:22:22.890
You get the good tax returns, make more profit next year.
365
00:22:23.911 --> 00:22:27.972
You can always go back into growth mode by simply taking some of that profit and putting it into marketing.
366
00:22:28.372 --> 00:22:28.492
Right.
367
00:22:28.512 --> 00:22:31.535
It's like you it's not like you can you never can go back to growth mode.
368
00:22:31.975 --> 00:22:38.281
So I'd be a huge proponent, especially you're young, like build the skill of going into profit mode, having cash in the bank.
369
00:22:38.341 --> 00:22:43.346
And when you go back into growth mode in a couple of years, you'll have the capital deal doing it a really big way.
370
00:22:43.806 --> 00:22:48.391
And in a perfect world, you have a full time admin behind you ready to scale you to one point five.
371
00:22:48.751 --> 00:22:49.091
Got it.
372
00:22:49.372 --> 00:22:50.152
OK. All right.
373
00:22:50.212 --> 00:22:50.773
Thank you for that.
374
00:22:51.060 --> 00:22:51.680
We got Aaron.
375
00:22:51.780 --> 00:22:54.442
Hey, Mike, thank you for all the value you add to us out here.
376
00:22:55.382 --> 00:22:58.104
We're definitely trying to do the copy and paste situation.
377
00:22:58.284 --> 00:23:03.086
We have about $45K overhead total between our two small little locations.
378
00:23:03.487 --> 00:23:06.408
Okay, one location does about $141K.
379
00:23:06.688 --> 00:23:10.791
The other location did $79K last year.
380
00:23:11.051 --> 00:23:12.792
So that's where we're at with the two locations.
381
00:23:12.892 --> 00:23:16.634
The one location that does $141K, I have a guy.
382
00:23:16.934 --> 00:23:17.534
He's good.
383
00:23:17.554 --> 00:23:18.835
I pay him salary.
384
00:23:19.395 --> 00:23:23.879
But what do I do as far as trying to implement a bonus program?
385
00:23:23.899 --> 00:23:26.561
Do I try to pay him revenue bands?
386
00:23:27.042 --> 00:23:40.153
Do I pay him the small bonuses like the upsells and the customer referral bonuses, attendance bonuses, being that he's on a salary, he makes about 45 a year, getting to a point to where I need to start backing out somewhat.
387
00:23:40.514 --> 00:23:44.737
Not, I mean, as far as start doing more sales, less operational field work.
388
00:23:45.158 --> 00:23:46.459
I'd really like to get to that point.
389
00:23:46.559 --> 00:23:49.592
Are they basically technicians just in different locations?
390
00:23:49.813 --> 00:23:50.154
Yes.
391
00:23:50.877 --> 00:23:51.138
Okay.
392
00:23:51.299 --> 00:23:51.861
Like, yeah, like...
393
00:23:52.866 --> 00:24:03.329
Any technician I'm trying to incentivize on upsells, reviews, those aspects, are they like starting from different locations and then by themselves in the morning?
394
00:24:03.590 --> 00:24:08.591
Yeah, the guy that's salaried in the flower-bound location, he starts by himself.
395
00:24:08.631 --> 00:24:09.451
He runs the route.
396
00:24:10.112 --> 00:24:11.412
He basically takes care of everything.
397
00:24:11.432 --> 00:24:13.473
I'm really hands-off on that location.
398
00:24:13.513 --> 00:24:14.373
He really does everything.
399
00:24:15.273 --> 00:24:17.014
And how far away is that from your first location?
400
00:24:17.797 --> 00:24:18.738
About 13 miles.
401
00:24:19.038 --> 00:24:20.459
Why would you not just have one location?
402
00:24:20.559 --> 00:24:21.439
Because of the drive.
403
00:24:21.519 --> 00:24:26.842
I figured the 13-mile radius, trying to keep the routes tighter.
404
00:24:27.362 --> 00:24:28.423
How long of a drive is it?
405
00:24:29.864 --> 00:24:30.304
20 minutes.
406
00:24:31.184 --> 00:24:31.965
Yeah.
407
00:24:32.005 --> 00:24:34.346
Personally, Aaron, I would just do one location for now.
408
00:24:35.107 --> 00:24:38.829
Because right now, by splitting it up, you have a bunch of inefficiencies.
409
00:24:39.429 --> 00:24:44.332
If you look at his budget hour, his efficiency score, it would go up dramatically if he was underneath your...
410
00:24:45.418 --> 00:24:51.061
management and he might be your GM down the road once your first location gets past 500,000.
411
00:24:51.621 --> 00:24:53.942
But right now he's a technician out in limbo.
412
00:24:54.683 --> 00:24:58.625
And also you're paying for, is it a shop space or does he keep his own truck as a house or how does that work?
413
00:24:58.945 --> 00:25:01.166
We rent a lot and the lot's about $300 a month.
414
00:25:01.426 --> 00:25:06.228
The $300 a month, if you look at his wages, that covers about 15 hours
415
00:25:08.229 --> 00:25:13.174
of his time, $300, you're not saving that much by saving 20 minute drive.
416
00:25:13.674 --> 00:25:20.420
Personally, I'm never going to start a new, like a secondary location until my first one is over 500,000 and in profit mode.
417
00:25:21.241 --> 00:25:23.963
Then he might be a great GM for that spot.
418
00:25:24.464 --> 00:25:31.210
And it might even be that down the road, you cut off where he's currently serving and make that a second location.
419
00:25:31.770 --> 00:25:40.696
But right now at this size, having two spots, it's very difficult to scale it because he's not going to be a great leader because right now he's a technician.
420
00:25:41.937 --> 00:25:42.517
That's what he's doing.
421
00:25:42.557 --> 00:25:43.758
He's mostly going to be a technician.
422
00:25:44.179 --> 00:25:47.761
And he doesn't even feel like he's really part of a company because he's starting from his own little shop space.
423
00:25:48.502 --> 00:25:52.304
There's nothing preventing him from just doing this himself besides getting the customers.
424
00:25:52.824 --> 00:25:57.308
So you're also putting yourself in a pretty compromised position in terms of him even taking your customers.
425
00:25:57.448 --> 00:25:57.628
Yeah.
426
00:25:57.948 --> 00:26:01.989
Because he's controlling that entire process, and he's essentially operating like a solo operator.
427
00:26:02.169 --> 00:26:05.290
I've been working the second location myself with my son.
428
00:26:05.350 --> 00:26:07.610
My son's a teenager, so he helps me out part-time.
429
00:26:08.150 --> 00:26:10.811
And he doesn't drive to the second location.
430
00:26:10.891 --> 00:26:20.733
He basically, I mean, he's probably producing about 125 to 130, I think, when I ran the numbers, in the one location that he's running the routes on every day.
431
00:26:21.173 --> 00:26:31.239
Would you recommend that I try to find a middle ground between the two locations maybe that he's covering both a higher a second guy or do I hire.
432
00:26:32.321 --> 00:26:37.762
a guy to start running the North Lake location apart from Flower Mound?
433
00:26:38.002 --> 00:26:44.984
I think 20-minute drive, that's a significant amount when you have 5, 10, 15 employees driving that every day.
434
00:26:45.584 --> 00:26:54.286
That starts to really add up, and it starts to make sense to do another location when you start getting a 30, 40-minute drive away, or every day they're driving 45, 50 an hour a day.
435
00:26:54.766 --> 00:26:56.007
It's crushing their efficiency score.
436
00:26:56.367 --> 00:26:58.107
Now it makes sense to split things up.
437
00:27:02.508 --> 00:27:09.312
You could very well have basically you and another guy together if you combine these two locations making almost $250,000 in annual revenue.
438
00:27:09.833 --> 00:27:15.976
You'll be way more profitable if you bring this in-house in one location and then spend a couple years getting that past $500,000.
439
00:27:16.497 --> 00:27:22.981
And he might be the general manager of that location, but right now he's not going to make a good general manager because he doesn't even know what good looks like because he's not watching you every day.
440
00:27:24.133 --> 00:27:26.835
I would personally bring him underneath my wing as a technician.
441
00:27:27.195 --> 00:27:29.937
You're the general manager of location one and only.
442
00:27:30.598 --> 00:27:33.380
And then just make it very clear to him, I would love for you to grow with the company.
443
00:27:33.840 --> 00:27:36.903
And then when we get past 500,000, I would love for you to take this location over.
444
00:27:37.143 --> 00:27:41.186
And then I'm going to go start this other new one in that area and try to scale up.
445
00:27:41.246 --> 00:27:42.307
And then we'll break it off.
446
00:27:42.327 --> 00:27:43.948
So initially, we kind of did that.
447
00:27:44.308 --> 00:27:45.089
We worked together.
448
00:27:45.109 --> 00:27:46.970
We were doing jobs in both locations.
449
00:27:47.811 --> 00:27:49.832
I was only renting one lot space at that point.
450
00:27:50.333 --> 00:27:50.573
But...
451
00:27:51.113 --> 00:27:52.093
And he got the hang of it.
452
00:27:52.173 --> 00:27:53.014
He was doing it great.
453
00:27:53.074 --> 00:27:56.715
And that's when I felt comfortable letting him do the one location by itself.
454
00:27:57.336 --> 00:28:03.318
And so we kind of did that, although I know I did it probably a little bit too soon, you know, but that's where.
455
00:28:04.299 --> 00:28:04.659
I don't know.
456
00:28:04.779 --> 00:28:18.985
So you feel like I should rein it back in a little bit rather than trying to hire another man in the other location and kind of do what I did with the first guy, as far as training him on how we do things and then start meeting both guys.
457
00:28:20.166 --> 00:28:26.611
I think if you hired another person in that other location, next year it'll increase revenue by about 30%.
458
00:28:27.011 --> 00:28:28.633
It's not going to be managed well.
459
00:28:29.013 --> 00:28:30.595
He's doing great as a technician.
460
00:28:31.956 --> 00:28:34.458
And if he does great with an employee, it's such a unicorn.
461
00:28:34.718 --> 00:28:37.339
you now have a huge key man risk because he's such a unicorn.
462
00:28:37.659 --> 00:28:43.440
I don't believe, though, that if you add one more employee, it's going to be double the revenue next year.
463
00:28:43.520 --> 00:28:44.360
It won't.
464
00:28:44.821 --> 00:28:50.262
If you bring that person underneath you, he can learn how to manage underneath you as you learn that skill.
465
00:28:50.502 --> 00:28:54.563
Because right now, you haven't even managed technicians underneath you.
466
00:28:55.682 --> 00:28:59.845
And you've got to learn that skill so that then when you get another employee underneath him, you know what good looks like.
467
00:29:00.305 --> 00:29:05.148
Because the worst thing that can happen is you hire someone underneath him, and you can't even judge whether or not he's being a good manager.
468
00:29:06.188 --> 00:29:07.409
Because you haven't managed yourself.
469
00:29:07.649 --> 00:29:08.610
I mean, I feel like I did.
470
00:29:08.630 --> 00:29:10.351
I mean, I worked with, he worked with me.
471
00:29:10.391 --> 00:29:12.954
We were running routes together for probably a year and a half.
472
00:29:13.174 --> 00:29:16.997
So I feel like I somewhat trained him already on the tech side.
473
00:29:17.097 --> 00:29:18.038
Like he knows the routes.
474
00:29:18.058 --> 00:29:18.718
He knows the work.
475
00:29:19.539 --> 00:29:21.561
He kind of knows our little systems that we have going.
476
00:29:21.881 --> 00:29:28.907
It's just, I'm trying to replicate what I did with him in the other location and then let them roll, you know, let him roll and then,
477
00:29:29.627 --> 00:29:35.530
We meet together weekly or whatever, just to make sure that I'm training and we're expanding.
478
00:29:35.630 --> 00:29:36.170
You know what I mean?
479
00:29:36.230 --> 00:29:38.792
I'm trying to like grow that North Lake side a little more.
480
00:29:39.032 --> 00:29:44.455
If your goal is to make more money, I would bring it in house together as one until it passes 500,000.
481
00:29:44.975 --> 00:29:49.097
And then I would think about making him a general manager or breaking it off and you doing a second location.
482
00:29:49.417 --> 00:29:58.182
But until then, you are banking on this person being a unicorn and being able to basically run their own business underneath your label.
483
00:29:58.302 --> 00:29:58.962
That's what's happening.
484
00:30:00.138 --> 00:30:01.500
And that's very hard to replicate.
485
00:30:01.520 --> 00:30:06.186
So if he left tomorrow, I can guarantee you, you would just hire someone and you'd do what I just said.
486
00:30:07.462 --> 00:30:08.322
because he's a unicorn.
487
00:30:09.183 --> 00:30:30.951
And I would also say, if he just came back to working with you, you'd make more money in the short term, but more importantly, you would gain the skill of management when you get two employees instead of just one, and then three, and then four, and now you're doing past 500,000, you put that thing into profit mode, now you have a real business to hand to someone as a general manager, and you've got the skill of management in building it to that size.
488
00:30:31.191 --> 00:30:37.174
So would you recommend I take the location that's doing less, the one that did 79,000 last year?
489
00:30:38.034 --> 00:30:39.115
What should I do with that then?
490
00:30:39.295 --> 00:30:42.637
I would just keep servicing that area with the main one location.
491
00:30:43.401 --> 00:30:44.202
I'd keep growing.
492
00:30:44.802 --> 00:30:50.005
And then down the road, once you pass 500,000, you could always break it off if you wanted to.
493
00:30:50.505 --> 00:30:53.327
And now it would be maybe 150 to 200,000.
494
00:30:53.988 --> 00:30:55.769
And then you'd scale that one to 500,000, right?
495
00:30:56.389 --> 00:31:05.134
But what's going to happen is you're going to dilute your ability between these two locations at such a small size, and they will not become profitable long-term.
496
00:31:05.334 --> 00:31:10.678
Maybe the short-term because you have this unicorn guy that can literally just – he's basically running his business underneath your name.
497
00:31:11.238 --> 00:31:12.419
which is great for you now.
498
00:31:12.619 --> 00:31:22.549
But if he's out, you will be forced to go to one location anyways because no one else is stepping in and immediately going to run this business for you, start from a shop space by themselves.
499
00:31:22.589 --> 00:31:25.592
Why wouldn't that person not just be working for themselves?
500
00:31:26.073 --> 00:31:27.174
So you would suggest that I...
501
00:31:28.403 --> 00:31:30.465
Just we all start from one location.
502
00:31:30.565 --> 00:31:34.349
I'm working with him again until we get enough revenue to bring in a second guy.
503
00:31:34.630 --> 00:31:37.493
When we bring in the second guy, I let them go.
504
00:31:37.513 --> 00:31:38.394
Nope.
505
00:31:38.634 --> 00:31:39.435
Keep growing the revenue.
506
00:31:39.655 --> 00:31:40.816
I want you to pass 500,000.
507
00:31:41.277 --> 00:31:44.280
As far as I mean, I'm going into sales mode at that point, right?
508
00:31:45.361 --> 00:31:46.503
Myself, personally, myself.
509
00:31:48.404 --> 00:31:49.965
The volume of estimates will dictate that.
510
00:31:50.626 --> 00:31:54.049
I'm mostly looking at whether it be three or four technicians.
511
00:31:54.389 --> 00:31:59.593
Getting past 500,000 would be the first benchmark before I ever think about breaking off another location.
512
00:31:59.914 --> 00:32:00.414
Got it.
513
00:32:00.994 --> 00:32:03.156
With strong prejudice, Aaron, because I want you to win.
514
00:32:03.497 --> 00:32:04.417
I just see it too much.
515
00:32:04.497 --> 00:32:06.339
At Augusta, I see this all the time.
516
00:32:06.559 --> 00:32:07.860
Everyone's like, I want to get another.
517
00:32:08.161 --> 00:32:09.322
We now require them.
518
00:32:09.902 --> 00:32:11.523
Now they can't even, we don't even allow it.
519
00:32:11.903 --> 00:32:17.524
Because we saw the success rate of locations that got past 500,000 and did multiple locations, 100% success.
520
00:32:18.085 --> 00:32:23.306
Almost like all of our closures have been when people start a second location and they're not past 500,000.
521
00:32:24.587 --> 00:32:28.068
So should I wait until the two locations together are at 500?
522
00:32:29.322 --> 00:32:29.922
It's going to be one.
523
00:32:30.323 --> 00:32:30.923
It's going to be one.
524
00:32:31.283 --> 00:32:31.504
Right.
525
00:32:31.564 --> 00:32:38.409
But the two areas, the two areas generating revenue together at 500K and then split it.
526
00:32:38.629 --> 00:32:38.949
Yep.
527
00:32:39.429 --> 00:32:44.053
You would not try to make that jump in one year going separate?
528
00:32:44.273 --> 00:32:44.453
No.
529
00:32:45.213 --> 00:32:46.915
No.
530
00:32:47.075 --> 00:32:52.399
The only advantage you have, as you are currently stating it, with the two locations is drive time.
531
00:32:53.285 --> 00:32:59.351
And so with one or two employees, that's not enough savings for me to reconcile splitting everything out.
532
00:32:59.651 --> 00:33:12.983
Now, down the road, when you have people that you want to move up into new roles, you want to have a flat organization with one GM and multiple technicians, there's more advantages to doing multiple locations.
533
00:33:13.344 --> 00:33:17.147
But right now, the drive time is literally the only reason we're cutting this out.
534
00:33:18.040 --> 00:33:20.541
And it's not enough savings for us to split the two.
535
00:33:20.981 --> 00:33:25.463
Does it make a difference that I already have two trucks and two trailers?
536
00:33:26.063 --> 00:33:27.384
Because that's not an added expense.
537
00:33:27.404 --> 00:33:29.565
We already have that debt free and everything like that.
538
00:33:30.325 --> 00:33:31.886
That doesn't make or break that.
539
00:33:32.046 --> 00:33:33.166
I'm not guessing on this one, Aaron.
540
00:33:33.246 --> 00:33:33.826
I promise you.
541
00:33:33.846 --> 00:33:34.667
I just want you to win.
542
00:33:35.147 --> 00:33:35.927
Bring them together.
543
00:33:36.527 --> 00:33:37.148
One location.
544
00:33:37.208 --> 00:33:38.368
Get it past $500,000.
545
00:33:38.448 --> 00:33:42.770
And then that person, when you elevate someone, they'll actually have a management role.
546
00:33:43.752 --> 00:33:52.961
You'll be able to get better quality people more consistently because most people are not going to be, hey, you're going to manage your location and you're going to work every single day of the week by yourself.
547
00:33:54.002 --> 00:33:56.425
It's just so hard to find that person.
548
00:33:56.885 --> 00:33:59.268
So with extreme prejudice, highly recommend that.
549
00:33:59.608 --> 00:34:05.112
In 2026, we're trying to give away 100,000 copies of the Copy and Paste Millionaire book that I recently wrote.
550
00:34:05.432 --> 00:34:10.736
It's the blueprint from getting from zero to $3 million in revenue for any home service business.
551
00:34:11.136 --> 00:34:17.081
Now, as part of the 100,000 book challenge that we're trying to give away, we have two ways to be able to take advantage of this.
552
00:34:17.421 --> 00:34:19.863
One, you can get the free audiobook, e-book, and the free audiobook.
553
00:34:20.323 --> 00:34:28.585
the course, and a physical copy of the book sent to you for free without paying shipping if you go to mikeandies.com slash CPM course.
554
00:34:29.125 --> 00:34:30.986
Now, if you're like, I don't want to take a course.
555
00:34:31.086 --> 00:34:32.866
I just want the book shipped to me right away.
556
00:34:33.287 --> 00:34:37.088
You can go pay for the shipping at $6.50 for a $35 book.
557
00:34:37.468 --> 00:34:38.428
I'll cover everything else.
558
00:34:38.648 --> 00:34:41.049
Just go to mikeandies.com slash 100K.
559
00:34:41.769 --> 00:34:46.010
Our goal is to get this book in the hands of 100,000 home service business owners.
560
00:34:46.310 --> 00:34:46.931
Christian's up.
561
00:34:47.071 --> 00:34:50.234
So you said that we can't profit and grow at the same time.
562
00:34:50.614 --> 00:34:52.696
To clarify, you can profit and grow.
563
00:34:53.257 --> 00:35:00.163
I believe, though, that like the philosophy of the business as to whether we are in growth mode or in profit mode, but people can grow and profit.
564
00:35:00.444 --> 00:35:02.566
But you're usually emphasizing one or the other.
565
00:35:02.706 --> 00:35:03.667
So but go ahead.
566
00:35:03.687 --> 00:35:03.907
Yes.
567
00:35:04.410 --> 00:35:04.830
Okay.
568
00:35:05.151 --> 00:35:12.276
So we're planning to add a second crew this year and also raise our prices for new customers and existing customers.
569
00:35:12.337 --> 00:35:16.380
Cause we finally figured out pricing, especially for like Moe.
570
00:35:16.800 --> 00:35:22.245
So should we just not raise our prices and grow first and then raise our prices or.
571
00:35:22.265 --> 00:35:23.886
So in general.
572
00:35:24.066 --> 00:35:27.707
Always love raising prices because most people are underpriced.
573
00:35:28.247 --> 00:35:30.828
If I had to ask you what your close rate is, do you know what that is right now?
574
00:35:31.088 --> 00:35:32.008
Approximately?
575
00:35:32.088 --> 00:35:34.449
Out of 10 estimates that you send out, how many accepted do you think?
576
00:35:34.569 --> 00:35:35.489
I'd go 50%.
577
00:35:35.989 --> 00:35:36.269
Okay.
578
00:35:36.589 --> 00:35:36.829
All right.
579
00:35:36.989 --> 00:35:44.151
So I think that in that case, raising prices might actually affect considerably your close rate and existing customers.
580
00:35:44.351 --> 00:35:49.173
The reason I say grow to capacity is because if you already bought the second truck?
581
00:35:49.893 --> 00:35:50.053
No.
582
00:35:50.653 --> 00:35:51.135
You have not.
583
00:35:51.436 --> 00:35:54.566
Okay, so the first truck, is it basically you, Christian, and one other person?
584
00:35:55.188 --> 00:35:57.496
No, so it's my brother, and he has a helper.
585
00:35:58.052 --> 00:35:58.332
Okay.
586
00:35:58.512 --> 00:36:01.193
And then are you just doing out of daily operations right now?
587
00:36:01.754 --> 00:36:02.934
Or where are you at?
588
00:36:02.954 --> 00:36:03.194
Sorry.
589
00:36:03.234 --> 00:36:04.035
Like back and forth.
590
00:36:04.095 --> 00:36:10.938
So pretty much if they need help or it just- I'm going to go on a limb and say you're at capacity now with the one truck, right?
591
00:36:11.438 --> 00:36:12.038
I think so.
592
00:36:12.078 --> 00:36:14.379
But at the same time, I feel like we're not being smart about it.
593
00:36:14.579 --> 00:36:17.901
And I'm just kind of trying to get out of the truck really early.
594
00:36:18.301 --> 00:36:18.901
I would agree.
595
00:36:19.081 --> 00:36:19.401
All right.
596
00:36:19.461 --> 00:36:20.102
Well, he said it.
597
00:36:20.162 --> 00:36:20.562
Let's go.
598
00:36:20.802 --> 00:36:21.262
You're the man.
599
00:36:21.602 --> 00:36:22.523
I'm very happy with you.
600
00:36:22.543 --> 00:36:22.903
Let's go.
601
00:36:23.303 --> 00:36:25.745
I agree with that sentiment 110%.
602
00:36:26.745 --> 00:36:27.326
I will say this.
603
00:36:28.166 --> 00:36:31.449
You want to make sure that when you increase capacity, i.e.
604
00:36:31.489 --> 00:36:34.491
buy another truck or hire another person, you're doing it based upon the math.
605
00:36:34.871 --> 00:36:41.415
Not based upon I wanted to get out of the field or even based upon I feel like we're kind of getting busy or I think we're going to grow.
606
00:36:41.796 --> 00:36:43.917
It needs to be strictly based upon the numbers.
607
00:36:44.417 --> 00:36:46.499
And so have you used budget hours at all yet?
608
00:36:47.059 --> 00:36:48.281
Yeah, but not correctly.
609
00:36:48.541 --> 00:36:50.203
Yeah, we tried.
610
00:36:50.543 --> 00:36:54.567
I would first go through every single job and make sure there's budget hours assigned.
611
00:36:54.948 --> 00:36:56.089
And you're like, well, I don't even know what it is.
612
00:36:56.289 --> 00:36:56.509
Great.
613
00:36:56.549 --> 00:36:57.751
What's our target hourly rate?
614
00:36:57.991 --> 00:37:00.874
Divide every single job by that target hourly rate.
615
00:37:00.954 --> 00:37:01.815
There's your budget hours.
616
00:37:02.115 --> 00:37:02.616
So I was.
617
00:37:03.036 --> 00:37:03.917
Go ahead.
618
00:37:03.937 --> 00:37:04.558
You were doing it right?
619
00:37:04.578 --> 00:37:05.118
Is that what you just said?
620
00:37:05.138 --> 00:37:05.359
I'm fine.
621
00:37:05.999 --> 00:37:06.399
Let's go.
622
00:37:06.419 --> 00:37:06.699
Ready?
623
00:37:06.979 --> 00:37:07.800
Yeah, that's what I was doing.
624
00:37:07.880 --> 00:37:08.100
Okay.
625
00:37:08.280 --> 00:37:08.680
That's great.
626
00:37:09.020 --> 00:37:14.702
Because what we need is to know right now, how many budget hours do we have on a weekly basis recurring?
627
00:37:15.182 --> 00:37:16.282
And do you guys mostly do mowing?
628
00:37:16.302 --> 00:37:17.402
Do you do some projects too, right?
629
00:37:18.223 --> 00:37:18.983
It's a lot of mowing.
630
00:37:19.523 --> 00:37:20.123
A lot of mowing.
631
00:37:20.523 --> 00:37:20.703
Great.
632
00:37:20.823 --> 00:37:23.964
So we determine how many budget hours do we have right now of recurring mowing.
633
00:37:24.344 --> 00:37:32.647
And then as a rule of thumb, you can assume that if someone's working full-time at 40 hours, they're usually getting a complete about 30 budgeted hours.
634
00:37:33.587 --> 00:37:39.589
If I had to guess, you probably have 50 to 60 budget hours per week of Boeing.
635
00:37:39.769 --> 00:37:40.989
I'm just randomly guessing.
636
00:37:41.209 --> 00:37:42.510
That's about two full-time people.
637
00:37:42.950 --> 00:37:45.871
And then your projects you're kind of doing on Fridays or on the weekend.
638
00:37:46.071 --> 00:37:49.251
It's kind of like a little extra, little upsells, little projects, etc.
639
00:37:49.632 --> 00:37:49.872
Great.
640
00:37:51.212 --> 00:37:52.693
determine what that number is first.
641
00:37:52.873 --> 00:37:56.235
So that way, when you sell a product in the future, you're not going to just have like a $480.
642
00:37:56.915 --> 00:37:57.976
That's eight budget hours.
643
00:37:58.436 --> 00:37:59.597
Because I have my target hourly rate.
644
00:37:59.737 --> 00:38:00.477
I know what I'm charging.
645
00:38:00.978 --> 00:38:05.140
And now we can actually determine how many budget hours we have before we need a second truck.
646
00:38:05.500 --> 00:38:12.304
Because one truck moving all day long, let's call it for five days a week, for eight to 10 hours, you're going to get two employees in that truck.
647
00:38:12.745 --> 00:38:15.426
Let's assume they both do 30 budget hours a week of work.
648
00:38:15.846 --> 00:38:16.927
That's 60 budget hours.
649
00:38:17.247 --> 00:38:20.349
We know when we get above 60 budget hours worth of work, we need another truck.
650
00:38:20.849 --> 00:38:23.251
Or we hit capacity and we raise prices.
651
00:38:23.592 --> 00:38:26.294
And so right now, this is why you feel like you're kind of angry.
652
00:38:26.314 --> 00:38:28.516
You're growing, but we also want to make our money.
653
00:38:28.756 --> 00:38:31.719
It's because we don't have a number of what capacity actually means.
654
00:38:32.240 --> 00:38:35.883
And to do that, we need to know how many budget hours are on your schedule.
655
00:38:36.283 --> 00:38:38.445
And then when we hit that number, we have a decision to make.
656
00:38:38.826 --> 00:38:40.867
Do we keep the one truck and raise prices?
657
00:38:40.887 --> 00:38:40.947
No.
658
00:38:41.588 --> 00:38:44.549
go into profit mode, or do we go get the second truck?
659
00:38:44.910 --> 00:38:50.012
Christian goes out and bops into that truck, and now all of a sudden, we can do up to 120 budget hours of work a week.
660
00:38:51.092 --> 00:38:54.654
And if you go that route, then you're gonna be like, you got a lot of excess capacity.
661
00:38:54.734 --> 00:39:00.277
In other words, now you're doing 65, 70 budget hours of work a week with capacity, because you have two trucks,
662
00:39:01.017 --> 00:39:02.118
of 120 hours.
663
00:39:02.618 --> 00:39:06.480
And now you'll need to grow up to this point before you ever want to think about raising prices again.
664
00:39:07.080 --> 00:39:07.380
Right?
665
00:39:08.000 --> 00:39:08.180
Mm-hmm.
666
00:39:08.620 --> 00:39:10.521
So... Go ahead.
667
00:39:10.681 --> 00:39:18.605
If we do that and I go back into the field, necessarily, who's going to be like... Am I still going to be like the ops manager?
668
00:39:18.825 --> 00:39:24.047
And mostly the reason why I'm kind of trying to be out of the field is to help her with admin.
669
00:39:24.087 --> 00:39:29.470
But I know this year we're set on like hiring part-time or full-time admin, and she's going to do more of like the sales.
670
00:39:29.830 --> 00:39:31.791
So I'll give you my opinion.
671
00:39:31.831 --> 00:39:32.632
Sorry, what was your wife's?
672
00:39:32.712 --> 00:39:33.152
Is it your wife?
673
00:39:33.172 --> 00:39:34.373
Sorry, your girlfriend's name?
674
00:39:34.673 --> 00:39:35.454
My wife, Malia.
675
00:39:35.874 --> 00:39:36.314
Malia?
676
00:39:36.394 --> 00:39:36.895
Okay, very cool.
677
00:39:36.915 --> 00:39:40.137
All right, Malia, do you like doing admin?
678
00:39:40.577 --> 00:39:41.958
No, you do not like doing admin.
679
00:39:41.998 --> 00:39:42.919
Okay, that changes the game.
680
00:39:43.399 --> 00:39:44.320
You want to do sales.
681
00:39:45.370 --> 00:39:48.071
I want to talk to people less.
682
00:39:48.151 --> 00:39:49.671
I want to talk to people less.
683
00:39:50.391 --> 00:39:51.792
Hey, that is an honest person.
684
00:39:51.812 --> 00:39:54.032
You guys have honesty down in this relationship.
685
00:39:54.052 --> 00:39:54.593
Let's go.
686
00:39:55.173 --> 00:39:56.653
Okay, so that's hilarious.
687
00:39:56.693 --> 00:39:58.454
Okay, you want to talk to people less.
688
00:39:58.594 --> 00:40:00.994
Okay, when you say people, do you talk to customers or employees?
689
00:40:01.614 --> 00:40:02.215
Customers.
690
00:40:02.555 --> 00:40:03.735
Sales probably is not the move.
691
00:40:04.955 --> 00:40:05.455
Just saying.
692
00:40:07.196 --> 00:40:09.376
Do you want to work less hours in the business?
693
00:40:09.937 --> 00:40:11.297
Is that the actual you're saying to me?
694
00:40:12.189 --> 00:40:13.410
Um, I don't know.
695
00:40:13.430 --> 00:40:15.411
I'd rather work on the business.
696
00:40:15.451 --> 00:40:18.452
Like I like growing the business and doing all the internal things.
697
00:40:18.572 --> 00:40:26.256
And I don't like to do like the admin stuff and the CRM and talking to customers and, you know, sending the texts and everything.
698
00:40:27.897 --> 00:40:28.457
I'm okay with it.
699
00:40:28.477 --> 00:40:30.698
Do you know how to do operations or not?
700
00:40:30.858 --> 00:40:31.739
Do you know how to do the work?
701
00:40:32.139 --> 00:40:32.339
No.
702
00:40:32.859 --> 00:40:32.959
No.
703
00:40:33.019 --> 00:40:33.199
Okay.
704
00:40:33.219 --> 00:40:33.400
Okay.
705
00:40:33.460 --> 00:40:33.900
That's good.
706
00:40:34.360 --> 00:40:34.580
No.
707
00:40:35.120 --> 00:40:35.400
Okay.
708
00:40:35.861 --> 00:40:36.741
Do you like hiring?
709
00:40:37.361 --> 00:40:38.082
Not really.
710
00:40:38.622 --> 00:40:43.625
Okay, so you really just want to think like strategically about the business, maybe finances, things like that.
711
00:40:44.045 --> 00:40:44.325
Yeah.
712
00:40:44.345 --> 00:40:46.046
Okay, so we have to grow this business.
713
00:40:46.846 --> 00:40:49.948
You cannot afford right now for you to be in sales when you don't like to talk to people.
714
00:40:50.248 --> 00:40:52.049
You cannot afford to hire an admin person.
715
00:40:52.289 --> 00:40:55.411
You cannot afford to have Christian off the truck, right?
716
00:40:55.851 --> 00:41:02.315
In order for all those things to happen, you have to grow a much larger business that can afford an admin person and can afford to get Christian off the truck.
717
00:41:02.775 --> 00:41:12.800
So right now, I would, if you can, for the next few years, be focusing much more on growth because none of your things that you want to happen happen at $150,000, $200,000 in revenue.
718
00:41:13.461 --> 00:41:22.665
If you afford an admin person and for you to afford someone that can get Christian off the truck as an operation person, you got to be doing $600,000 plus.
719
00:41:23.106 --> 00:41:23.366
Easy.
720
00:41:23.786 --> 00:41:26.668
So I would just focus on growth, growth, growth, and I would...
721
00:41:29.083 --> 00:41:29.923
Are you guys in homeworks?
722
00:41:30.184 --> 00:41:31.184
By chance, just a question.
723
00:41:31.664 --> 00:41:32.605
Yeah.
724
00:41:32.865 --> 00:41:34.086
Have we had our onboarding call yet?
725
00:41:34.566 --> 00:41:35.066
I don't think so.
726
00:41:35.767 --> 00:41:37.588
We started in what, 20?
727
00:41:38.248 --> 00:41:39.989
Whenever you had the price lock.
728
00:41:40.449 --> 00:41:40.710
Yeah.
729
00:41:40.770 --> 00:41:41.230
Oh my word.
730
00:41:41.250 --> 00:41:42.891
Oh, that was before we even did onboarding calls.
731
00:41:42.911 --> 00:41:44.111
Yeah, we didn't do that.
732
00:41:44.912 --> 00:41:46.273
Okay, reach out to support.
733
00:41:46.313 --> 00:41:47.593
Try to get an onboarding call with me.
734
00:41:47.853 --> 00:41:49.314
They can put you on the next one.
735
00:41:49.354 --> 00:41:52.396
I think it's actually tomorrow, or even if you want in a couple of weeks.
736
00:41:52.796 --> 00:41:55.478
The reason I say that is because we need to create a plan
737
00:41:56.118 --> 00:41:58.601
for your growth over the next two to three years to get to that point.
738
00:41:58.621 --> 00:41:59.863
So you both are on the same page.
739
00:42:00.364 --> 00:42:03.007
Because I understand, Christian, you don't want to be in the field.
740
00:42:03.488 --> 00:42:06.111
And Malia, I understand you don't want to be doing admin and talking to people.
741
00:42:06.551 --> 00:42:12.058
But you'll need to do both of those things to get the business to the size to where you can afford to not do it.
742
00:42:12.399 --> 00:42:12.799
Make sense?
743
00:42:13.560 --> 00:42:13.880
Yeah.
744
00:42:13.920 --> 00:42:14.140
Yeah.
745
00:42:14.740 --> 00:42:23.683
So we need to get a really good plan in place that you're both on the same page because you're both going to have to do something you don't want if you want to get to the point where you can afford an admin person and you can get off the truck.
746
00:42:24.183 --> 00:42:24.643
Yeah.
747
00:42:24.963 --> 00:42:31.025
So this year you're saying that I should still do admin and he should still be out in the field and we should stick to one crew?
748
00:42:31.725 --> 00:42:33.086
I'm not saying you should do anything.
749
00:42:33.286 --> 00:42:35.788
I am optimizing for what's going to make you the most money.
750
00:42:36.509 --> 00:42:47.977
And what's going to make the most money, and more importantly, the security and financials of the family, is that you don't stretch the business too thin by getting him out of operations and you out of admin.
751
00:42:48.577 --> 00:42:52.120
The business cannot afford that right now, and it's not going to afford that anytime soon.
752
00:42:52.500 --> 00:42:55.862
So if I told you to do that, you'd feel good for about six months until you can't make money.
753
00:42:56.223 --> 00:42:56.443
Yeah.
754
00:42:56.543 --> 00:42:56.843
Yeah.
755
00:42:56.903 --> 00:42:57.183
Right?
756
00:42:57.584 --> 00:43:08.292
So we need to have a plan in place, and it's going to likely be a tiered system, which is likely going to look like, okay, we can get Malia out of admin probably within a year and a half.
757
00:43:08.692 --> 00:43:14.636
But Christian, you're probably going to have to be on the truck until you pass $500,000, which might be two or three years, depending on how fast you grow.
758
00:43:15.076 --> 00:43:15.437
Mm-hmm.
759
00:43:15.877 --> 00:43:16.077
Right?
760
00:43:16.257 --> 00:43:17.418
Like last year, did you do what?
761
00:43:17.438 --> 00:43:18.800
Like 150,000 to 200,000?
762
00:43:19.240 --> 00:43:20.941
We were at 234,000.
763
00:43:21.182 --> 00:43:23.283
But that was like combined with... Christmas lights.
764
00:43:23.303 --> 00:43:24.284
Yeah, more than Christmas lights.
765
00:43:24.685 --> 00:43:25.005
Cool.
766
00:43:25.025 --> 00:43:25.906
That's fine.
767
00:43:25.926 --> 00:43:26.486
Like 165.
768
00:43:26.947 --> 00:43:27.147
Okay.
769
00:43:27.567 --> 00:43:28.368
But we got Christmas lights.
770
00:43:28.388 --> 00:43:28.688
That's good.
771
00:43:29.689 --> 00:43:36.275
So, yeah, it's very possible that probably after this year, Malia, I would say let's target admin, getting that off your plate.
772
00:43:36.475 --> 00:43:39.858
We could bring a VA in to be able to do things like phone calls and answers.
773
00:43:40.218 --> 00:43:43.379
excuse me, an answering service, take things off your plate admin slowly.
774
00:43:43.919 --> 00:43:45.759
Next spring rush, you can hand those things off.
775
00:43:46.079 --> 00:43:50.280
This year, you're creating systems, you're creating screen recordings for every single thing you're doing in admin.
776
00:43:50.580 --> 00:43:52.361
And that's your ticket to eventually handing it off.
777
00:43:52.861 --> 00:43:53.701
But we have to do it.
778
00:43:54.141 --> 00:43:55.781
Same thing is gonna be true for you, Christian.
779
00:43:55.801 --> 00:44:03.623
We've got to grow the business past 500,000 before you can afford to get someone in there that's like manage the team, manage the equipment, get all that.
780
00:44:03.663 --> 00:44:07.404
And then you just be able to focus on sales and doing that will probably get you to pass 800,000 to a million.
781
00:44:09.004 --> 00:44:12.727
by you getting and focusing on sales, because that's the part you're gonna crush at.
782
00:44:13.287 --> 00:44:20.811
So I would not do anything though that you thought about this year, like trying to get Malia out of admin, you can't afford that.
783
00:44:21.012 --> 00:44:24.374
You're not gonna get anyone that does it better than you, no one, right?
784
00:44:24.414 --> 00:44:25.995
So like lean into the advantage
785
00:44:26.715 --> 00:44:30.180
And then create systems, Malia, because that's the thing I think you're actually probably pretty good at.
786
00:44:30.200 --> 00:44:33.544
It's like systems, SOPs, like organization.
787
00:44:33.765 --> 00:44:34.245
Do that.
788
00:44:34.726 --> 00:44:35.787
Scratch that itch a little bit.
789
00:44:36.268 --> 00:44:37.470
And then, yes, you're going to have to talk to people.
790
00:44:37.930 --> 00:44:41.115
And then next year, we'll have the systems in place to be able to hand those things off.
791
00:44:41.375 --> 00:44:43.498
And the business next year might be more like $400,000.
792
00:44:44.459 --> 00:44:44.760
Awesome.
793
00:44:45.180 --> 00:44:48.083
Then that next year, Christian, you're going to do the same thing in operations.
794
00:44:48.103 --> 00:44:49.324
You're going to get someone underneath your wing.
795
00:44:49.584 --> 00:44:51.646
You're going to show them how to do one-on-one meetings.
796
00:44:51.666 --> 00:44:52.668
You're going to show them how to do hiring.
797
00:44:52.688 --> 00:44:54.389
You're going to show them how to do the equipment maintenance.
798
00:44:54.469 --> 00:44:57.172
And then you're going to hand that stuff off so you can move into sales.
799
00:44:57.212 --> 00:45:00.996
When we think about sales, operation, admin, we're going to hand off admin first, lowest leverage.
800
00:45:01.556 --> 00:45:07.122
Then you'll hand off operations and you'll move into what's called the full-time GM size, which is 750 plus.
801
00:45:08.103 --> 00:45:11.285
Are we considered solo or working GM right now?
802
00:45:11.785 --> 00:45:15.947
Right now, you're moving out of solo operator into working GM.
803
00:45:16.427 --> 00:45:21.589
And that's why I need the GM, Christian, in the field still as much as possible.
804
00:45:21.970 --> 00:45:23.951
80% to 90% of the day still needs to be out in the field.
805
00:45:24.371 --> 00:45:26.012
That's the difference between making money and not.
806
00:45:26.452 --> 00:45:30.053
And then you take that money, you invest into growth, and you can get to past $500,000.
807
00:45:30.434 --> 00:45:33.015
And then we can start thinking about getting someone else to help with operations.
808
00:45:34.145 --> 00:45:39.709
And for crew leads, so I think my brother would be very, very good at being a crew lead.
809
00:45:39.809 --> 00:45:41.350
And he's the best worker.
810
00:45:41.370 --> 00:45:42.671
He knows everything pretty much.
811
00:45:42.771 --> 00:45:43.291
He's really good.
812
00:45:43.371 --> 00:45:45.773
But the thing is, he doesn't want to do it.
813
00:45:46.253 --> 00:45:46.913
He doesn't want to do it?
814
00:45:47.153 --> 00:45:47.974
Yeah, he doesn't want to manage.
815
00:45:47.994 --> 00:45:49.475
Wow, everyone's so honest in this family.
816
00:45:49.495 --> 00:45:49.895
Let's go.
817
00:45:50.035 --> 00:45:52.737
Okay, so don't push him, right?
818
00:45:52.897 --> 00:45:55.619
Because where my head was, he's going to be your operations manager.
819
00:45:56.139 --> 00:45:56.940
That's where my head went.
820
00:45:57.500 --> 00:46:03.764
But if he doesn't want to manage anyone because people in this family don't like to talk to people, they don't like to manage people, they don't like to work.
821
00:46:03.844 --> 00:46:05.985
I'm just joking.
822
00:46:06.345 --> 00:46:07.326
I'm just joking.
823
00:46:07.366 --> 00:46:08.127
He's still young.
824
00:46:08.187 --> 00:46:08.887
Good guy.
825
00:46:09.307 --> 00:46:10.368
I'm just playing with you.
826
00:46:10.388 --> 00:46:10.508
Yeah.
827
00:46:10.828 --> 00:46:25.097
So assuming, though, that he doesn't want to manage people, then he would just be an excellent technician, probably a trainer maybe, but he's not going to get a role because you do not have enough hierarchy at even a $600,000, $700,000 business to have you as a GM.
828
00:46:25.637 --> 00:46:28.439
and doing sales, then an operations mayor, then a crew leader.
829
00:46:28.559 --> 00:46:29.919
Now, no one's doing work, right?
830
00:46:30.200 --> 00:46:33.942
We need to focus on even your operations person needs to be out in the field most of the time.
831
00:46:34.182 --> 00:46:49.030
And I happen to believe Christian over the next year or two, if he sticks with you, he'll actually want to move into the operations manager role when you need it, because now there'll be four or five employees and he'll move kind of almost organically into that operational role to be able to take things off your plate.
832
00:46:49.730 --> 00:46:53.934
I wouldn't be like, guys, we're trying to set him up with her and promise him.
833
00:46:53.974 --> 00:46:56.516
Just be like, as the business grows, he's going to take more of that stuff on.
834
00:46:56.657 --> 00:46:57.718
I just know he will.
835
00:46:57.738 --> 00:47:00.280
In two years, you're going to need and he'll be ready.
836
00:47:00.780 --> 00:47:01.040
Yeah.
837
00:47:01.361 --> 00:47:03.543
That's what I keep telling him, but we'll see.
838
00:47:04.787 --> 00:47:10.089
When you say you keep telling him, is that him saying, I don't, don't put me in a leadership role.
839
00:47:10.489 --> 00:47:12.950
Or is that you trying to convince him to stay with you?
840
00:47:13.350 --> 00:47:15.591
Him saying, don't put him in a leadership role.
841
00:47:15.931 --> 00:47:16.171
Yeah.
842
00:47:16.191 --> 00:47:16.911
So he's a technician.
843
00:47:16.951 --> 00:47:17.492
He's a technician.
844
00:47:17.552 --> 00:47:19.032
Don't say anything about leadership.
845
00:47:19.352 --> 00:47:20.913
He'll just move into it, Christian.
846
00:47:21.153 --> 00:47:21.993
Don't, don't worry about that.
847
00:47:22.013 --> 00:47:23.314
I think it's literally two years away.
848
00:47:24.114 --> 00:47:24.434
Okay.
849
00:47:24.774 --> 00:47:28.336
Guarantee you in two years, if he's still with you, he'll move into that role.
850
00:47:28.876 --> 00:47:29.176
Okay.
851
00:47:29.708 --> 00:47:35.918
I have a sort of kind of off topic question about routes and route density.
852
00:47:35.998 --> 00:47:40.064
So that's like, we live in Clarksville, Tennessee, outside of Nashville.
853
00:47:40.164 --> 00:47:40.745
We used to live there.
854
00:47:41.306 --> 00:47:41.607
Really?
855
00:47:41.627 --> 00:47:42.328
Yeah.
856
00:47:42.408 --> 00:47:44.912
My mom and dad, my dad was a pastor just outside there.
857
00:47:45.287 --> 00:47:46.389
Oh, you know, Clarksville.
858
00:47:46.409 --> 00:47:46.689
Okay.
859
00:47:47.109 --> 00:47:50.113
You, it'll take 40 minutes to get to the other side of Clarksville.
860
00:47:50.153 --> 00:47:53.758
So we have to be kind of, um, Weird about a road.
861
00:47:53.778 --> 00:47:54.219
Yeah.
862
00:47:54.399 --> 00:47:56.562
Selective because we don't want to be everywhere.
863
00:47:56.882 --> 00:48:00.607
Like we like to target the nicer areas, the nicer lawns, um,
864
00:48:01.220 --> 00:48:03.921
stuff that will stripe and then not just weeds and stuff.
865
00:48:03.981 --> 00:48:09.302
So there's like a really nice neighborhood and then a really not nice neighborhood right beside each other.
866
00:48:09.762 --> 00:48:17.684
So it's really hard to explain to other people, customers, and like if I were to hire admin, where we service.
867
00:48:18.384 --> 00:48:21.605
So what would you recommend for that?
868
00:48:21.925 --> 00:48:23.326
Well, let's question the assumption first.
869
00:48:23.406 --> 00:48:26.206
Why would you not take someone's money if they're willing to let you cut down their weeds?
870
00:48:26.867 --> 00:48:27.867
Oh, you're looking at Christian now.
871
00:48:32.509 --> 00:48:39.453
So in my personal opinion, if we're trying to optimize for making more money, if they're right next to each other, we cut that person with weeds.
872
00:48:40.033 --> 00:48:40.453
Yes.
873
00:48:40.633 --> 00:48:41.174
Okay.
874
00:48:41.614 --> 00:48:46.857
Now let's assume for a moment that for some reason we are not doing that because of our brand or whatever.
875
00:48:46.937 --> 00:48:47.197
Okay.
876
00:48:47.677 --> 00:48:49.359
Personally, all money is green.
877
00:48:49.399 --> 00:48:52.542
If you're willing to pay the same price as next door, I'll mow your weeds.
878
00:48:52.662 --> 00:48:53.243
I'll mow whatever.
879
00:48:53.283 --> 00:48:54.144
I won't mow anything.
880
00:48:54.184 --> 00:48:55.765
I don't need to see stripes other than circles.
881
00:48:56.146 --> 00:49:00.550
But when it comes to the admin side, just do Google Earth Pro.
882
00:49:00.931 --> 00:49:01.872
You can set up maps.
883
00:49:02.332 --> 00:49:07.718
And then what happens is when they put the address of the customer in, it just shows them if it's in the service area or not.
884
00:49:08.118 --> 00:49:09.379
And which day of the week too.
885
00:49:09.439 --> 00:49:12.400
Like you can just make the map separate, like the colors different.
886
00:49:12.760 --> 00:49:15.102
So it's Google Maps Pro.
887
00:49:15.342 --> 00:49:16.902
Sorry, Google Earth Pro.
888
00:49:17.343 --> 00:49:18.103
It's on desktop.
889
00:49:18.123 --> 00:49:18.883
You can download it.
890
00:49:19.464 --> 00:49:24.186
And then you can create maps that they put the address in and immediately will just show them, is this in the service area?
891
00:49:24.206 --> 00:49:26.127
This is what we use for all of Command Center for Augusta.
892
00:49:26.547 --> 00:49:27.868
For all hundreds of locations.
893
00:49:27.888 --> 00:49:31.610
We have service areas and territories, everything on that app.
894
00:49:31.830 --> 00:49:32.110
It's free.
895
00:49:32.552 --> 00:49:33.594
That's crazy.
896
00:49:34.194 --> 00:49:34.715
Thank you.
897
00:49:34.895 --> 00:49:36.918
That's exactly what I was asking.
898
00:49:37.078 --> 00:49:37.659
Thank you.
899
00:49:37.679 --> 00:49:37.900
Yeah.
900
00:49:38.460 --> 00:49:43.007
So is Malia going to be doing the sales as well, or is that going to be me?
901
00:49:43.547 --> 00:49:46.972
Sales in terms of meeting people, that's still going to be you out in the field.
902
00:49:47.673 --> 00:49:53.937
I would really encourage you guys, especially once instant quotes come out at HomeWorks, to push in that direction.
903
00:49:53.957 --> 00:49:56.058
Because first off, it means you don't have to talk to anyone, Malia.
904
00:49:56.198 --> 00:49:56.638
Let's go.
905
00:49:57.138 --> 00:50:01.321
But secondly, it means you don't have to train someone on things like service area and all the other things.
906
00:50:01.381 --> 00:50:04.603
You just like – it's get to my website, check out, right?
907
00:50:05.083 --> 00:50:08.245
So – but in terms of in-person estimates, it's still going to be you, Christian.
908
00:50:08.625 --> 00:50:10.866
Malia, do you guys have any over-the-phone estimates right now?
909
00:50:10.886 --> 00:50:11.667
No.
910
00:50:11.727 --> 00:50:11.827
No.
911
00:50:12.377 --> 00:50:16.620
So same thing, same program, Google Earth Pro, you're gonna use that bad boy.
912
00:50:17.740 --> 00:50:19.001
And you're gonna measure the property.
913
00:50:19.381 --> 00:50:23.383
You're gonna have a very simple sheet, like zero to 5,000 square feet, 5,000 to 7,000, 7,000.
914
00:50:24.204 --> 00:50:26.385
You're gonna measure it by square foot and you can do it via mowing.
915
00:50:26.765 --> 00:50:31.688
And I would recommend don't discriminate between weeds and not like it's a satellite, it's a square footage.
916
00:50:32.089 --> 00:50:37.072
The first visit, you're gonna tell them, hey, if it's overgrown by more than six inches, we're gonna be charging $1.50 per minute per man.
917
00:50:38.132 --> 00:50:40.653
And if they freak out over that, probably means it's overgrown.
918
00:50:40.754 --> 00:50:41.914
Probably don't want the customer.
919
00:50:42.274 --> 00:50:43.495
But if they're like, yeah, cool, that's fine.
920
00:50:43.575 --> 00:50:44.515
It was mowed two weeks ago.
921
00:50:44.535 --> 00:50:45.256
It should be fine.
922
00:50:45.656 --> 00:50:46.477
You're rocking and rolling.
923
00:50:46.717 --> 00:50:48.518
That keeps you in the field, Christian.
924
00:50:48.918 --> 00:50:50.278
And right now you're doing estimates.
925
00:50:50.859 --> 00:50:52.300
I'll say this because I know what it's like to be here.
926
00:50:52.540 --> 00:50:53.940
You're doing estimates because you don't want to be in the field.
927
00:50:54.541 --> 00:50:58.363
I want you to be out in the field doing more work and letting the estimates being handled over the phone.
928
00:50:58.803 --> 00:50:59.944
Down the road, instant quotes.
929
00:51:00.244 --> 00:51:03.906
So Malia doesn't have to talk to people, which is the funniest thing I've ever heard.
930
00:51:03.946 --> 00:51:04.466
That's so great.
931
00:51:04.766 --> 00:51:05.206
We're honest.
932
00:51:05.226 --> 00:51:05.567
We're honest.
933
00:51:05.587 --> 00:51:08.049
Most people aren't willing to say it, so I got to make fun of you guys.
934
00:51:08.429 --> 00:51:08.729
All right.
935
00:51:08.930 --> 00:51:09.850
Is that all for now, though?
936
00:51:09.931 --> 00:51:10.311
Is that good?
937
00:51:10.691 --> 00:51:10.851
Yeah.
938
00:51:10.871 --> 00:51:11.232
Good for now.
939
00:51:11.252 --> 00:51:11.852
Thank you.
940
00:51:12.172 --> 00:51:13.033
Eric is up next.
941
00:51:13.233 --> 00:51:13.754
Go ahead, brother.
942
00:51:13.874 --> 00:51:14.194
Hey, Mike.
943
00:51:14.214 --> 00:51:15.495
So I had another question.
944
00:51:15.615 --> 00:51:20.380
So at the rate we're currently growing, we're going to hit capacity here in probably the next two or three months.
945
00:51:21.000 --> 00:51:22.962
So being business for basically four months.
946
00:51:23.322 --> 00:51:27.426
When do you think the earliest is that we could start raising prices on our customers' prices?
947
00:51:28.030 --> 00:51:30.252
Yeah, so when you hit capacity, then you have the decision.
948
00:51:30.753 --> 00:51:31.994
I try to make it as simple as possible.
949
00:51:32.134 --> 00:51:36.198
So sometimes it is like maybe feels a little diluted, but it is very simple.
950
00:51:36.558 --> 00:51:40.722
When you cannot do any more jobs without working on the weekend, you are at capacity.
951
00:51:41.243 --> 00:51:42.043
Or buying another truck.
952
00:51:42.484 --> 00:51:43.305
Or hiring another person.
953
00:51:43.325 --> 00:51:46.248
That's always like, well, I could just get someone to help me.
954
00:51:46.288 --> 00:51:46.788
Well, great.
955
00:51:46.808 --> 00:51:49.511
You just extend the capacity by hiring another person, essentially.
956
00:51:50.011 --> 00:51:55.294
And so I would first, the biggest thing, Eric, is establishing what capacity limit you are actually going for.
957
00:51:55.594 --> 00:52:00.797
Cause that's why most people will never raise prices or go into profit mode is cause it's like, well, I can kind of work a little more hours.
958
00:52:01.057 --> 00:52:05.039
Like I would ask yourself, how many budget hours can I actually do before I'm like, I'm tapping out?
959
00:52:05.259 --> 00:52:05.879
It might not be 30.
960
00:52:05.939 --> 00:52:07.880
You're like, Hey, I'm willing to do 40 budget hours a week.
961
00:52:08.160 --> 00:52:10.021
That's gonna be put you in like 50 hour work week.
962
00:52:10.302 --> 00:52:10.562
Okay.
963
00:52:10.842 --> 00:52:11.902
If that's fine with you, cool.
964
00:52:12.123 --> 00:52:13.803
But let's set that in stone.
965
00:52:14.003 --> 00:52:16.345
And when we say, Hey, when we have three plus weeks,
966
00:52:17.225 --> 00:52:39.373
of work on the schedule in the future with 40 budget hours i'm making up a number that that budget hour capacity that's when we we flip the switch that way there's no like guessing there's no like well we could put a couple more jobs on that's when people get this very slippery slope to burnout okay but so even for like if we just started a customer like two or three months ago and like tell them we just have to raise the price already that'd be okay
967
00:52:39.972 --> 00:52:44.674
Again, this is the determination when you get to the crossroad is if you're going into profit mode, you raise prices.
968
00:52:44.995 --> 00:52:49.297
And you need to raise prices and lose some customers in order to make room for the new ones that are coming.
969
00:52:49.717 --> 00:52:52.418
And so this is why people are like, well, what if a couple people leave?
970
00:52:52.438 --> 00:52:53.439
I just got them on.
971
00:52:53.459 --> 00:52:58.861
It's like you're not at capacity because at capacity, you're like, I must get rid of customers.
972
00:52:59.021 --> 00:53:00.862
Otherwise, I have to turn off my leads.
973
00:53:01.403 --> 00:53:07.766
So to establish what that number is for you, Eric, and that is like how many budget hours before I'm like literally willing to turn away customers.
974
00:53:08.406 --> 00:53:10.991
that are coming in, that's your number for you to know.
975
00:53:11.011 --> 00:53:14.417
When you hit that, you're raising prices because you need to make room for new customers.
976
00:53:14.658 --> 00:53:18.124
And so if they get mad at you and they leave, you're like, thank goodness, I need some of them to leave.
977
00:53:18.505 --> 00:53:19.828
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
978
00:53:20.808 --> 00:53:21.528
Ian's up next.
979
00:53:21.568 --> 00:53:22.109
Go ahead, brother.
980
00:53:22.510 --> 00:53:23.911
Be back for round two.
981
00:53:24.552 --> 00:53:27.235
Second question, I guess I had on distributable cash.
982
00:53:27.295 --> 00:53:31.300
So last year we were profit mode, did a little over a million in revenue.
983
00:53:31.620 --> 00:53:34.023
So set the goal for 90K in the bank.
984
00:53:34.143 --> 00:53:40.150
But doing that in going back into growth mode for 2026, do you have the same...
985
00:53:40.911 --> 00:53:46.013
Kind of concept for growth mode as you do for profit mode, or is the distributions different?
986
00:53:46.533 --> 00:53:52.835
Should that be less considering that, you know, the growth is going to suck some cash or what are your thoughts on that?
987
00:53:53.216 --> 00:53:59.358
Yeah, personally, I look at the threshold for distributable cash much more based upon your risk tolerance.
988
00:53:59.858 --> 00:54:01.659
So I wouldn't move the 90,000.
989
00:54:01.679 --> 00:54:04.540
What I would do is say, where are we spending the distributable cash?
990
00:54:04.880 --> 00:54:07.122
Instead of it going into your pocket, it's going to be going into growth.
991
00:54:07.442 --> 00:54:12.584
Because if you go into growth mode and you buy another truck, you get more marketing, you're just going to have less above 90.
992
00:54:13.104 --> 00:54:17.727
And I'm not going to go into my cash reserves unless I'm all of a sudden accepting more risk.
993
00:54:18.187 --> 00:54:24.290
So I would only move your distributable cash threshold based upon your risk tolerance, not based upon whether I'm in profit mode or growth mode.
994
00:54:24.670 --> 00:54:25.111
Makes sense.
995
00:54:25.611 --> 00:54:34.139
And then with that 90K kind of nest egg, is that something like that lives in a separate account and that's for emergencies or whatever?
996
00:54:34.419 --> 00:54:38.483
Or is that some, that's your, you know, that's your cash flow.
997
00:54:38.763 --> 00:54:40.045
You just try to keep it above 90K?
998
00:54:40.645 --> 00:54:41.826
We consider it working capital.
999
00:54:42.006 --> 00:54:43.726
It's the business bank account where money goes.
1000
00:54:43.907 --> 00:54:48.128
Some people like to split it up and get fancy when it comes to like profit first model.
1001
00:54:48.589 --> 00:54:52.410
We just think of like, I need $90,000 for your case in the bank.
1002
00:54:52.891 --> 00:54:57.893
That's gonna make sure that if payroll hits, if something crazy happens or I don't get paid for a big job, I'm fine.
1003
00:54:57.973 --> 00:55:00.094
I look at it as working capital for the business to operate.
1004
00:55:00.834 --> 00:55:02.555
I don't need to lock it up behind lock and key.
1005
00:55:02.755 --> 00:55:04.096
That'd be an investment at that point.
1006
00:55:04.436 --> 00:55:06.477
And I'd probably put in like short term yield
1007
00:55:07.177 --> 00:55:10.219
treasuries or like S and B 500 or something like that.
1008
00:55:10.619 --> 00:55:12.240
But in this case, this is working capital.
1009
00:55:12.320 --> 00:55:14.261
This is prior to distributions.
1010
00:55:14.281 --> 00:55:17.142
And then I take distributions and go put that in S and B 500 or something like that.
1011
00:55:17.163 --> 00:55:19.784
If you're just letting money sit, but this is working capital.
1012
00:55:20.004 --> 00:55:21.625
Usually it's being used from the business.
1013
00:55:21.845 --> 00:55:32.471
And the thing is, after you do, like, if you say 90,000 is your, is your deposit or your threshold, there's a really good chance you go down to 60 or 70 sometimes because payroll hits right after you did distributions.
1014
00:55:33.312 --> 00:55:33.552
Right.
1015
00:55:33.833 --> 00:55:38.403
And so that's why we always want to make sure we have enough in that working capital for it to kind of fluctuate a little bit.
1016
00:55:38.744 --> 00:55:41.991
But I would personally just think of it as like it's cash on hand.
1017
00:55:42.352 --> 00:55:42.633
Gotcha.
1018
00:55:43.593 --> 00:55:43.873
Thank you.
1019
00:55:44.134 --> 00:55:44.574
You got it.
1020
00:55:44.654 --> 00:55:45.795
I think Aaron's up next.
1021
00:55:46.015 --> 00:55:52.382
Hey, Mike, I wanted to go back and ask you on the 30% increase expected from a second hire.
1022
00:55:52.722 --> 00:55:53.723
Is that gross revenue?
1023
00:55:54.223 --> 00:55:55.685
You mentioned you could – Oh, yes.
1024
00:55:55.725 --> 00:55:56.566
Back to yours.
1025
00:55:57.046 --> 00:55:57.386
Yeah.
1026
00:55:57.747 --> 00:56:03.813
The reason I say the 30% is because that technician that you have working by themselves right now does not have the skill of management.
1027
00:56:04.253 --> 00:56:08.657
So what happens many times, you have a unicorn technician operating by themselves.
1028
00:56:08.857 --> 00:56:09.718
That's what's happening right now.
1029
00:56:10.218 --> 00:56:12.100
You put another technician with them.
1030
00:56:12.280 --> 00:56:14.361
You're like, okay, I'll build double revenue there.
1031
00:56:14.842 --> 00:56:19.386
And all of a sudden, all sorts of problems are going to arise because that person does not have the skill of management.
1032
00:56:19.826 --> 00:56:24.410
And what stinks right now is you don't really have the skill of management either because you haven't managed a crew of four or five or six people.
1033
00:56:24.430 --> 00:56:26.932
And that's what I want you to do underneath one location.
1034
00:56:27.252 --> 00:56:31.876
So when you go break one off or someone else's managing, you know how to actually coach and train them.
1035
00:56:32.316 --> 00:56:32.596
Okay.
1036
00:56:33.157 --> 00:56:41.545
And then next thing, 30, I have about 30 budgeted hours starting this spring in that North Lake area and 45 in the Flower Mound area.
1037
00:56:42.346 --> 00:56:43.907
When should I hire a second guy?
1038
00:56:44.368 --> 00:56:44.628
Okay.
1039
00:56:44.648 --> 00:56:47.611
So right now you're probably doing 40 there or he's doing like 40 budget hours.
1040
00:56:47.631 --> 00:56:49.673
You're doing like 30 budget hours approximately.
1041
00:56:50.173 --> 00:56:50.894
Yeah, approximately.
1042
00:56:50.914 --> 00:56:51.114
Yeah.
1043
00:56:51.514 --> 00:56:53.636
Yeah, like you're right up against capacity, right?
1044
00:56:53.876 --> 00:57:00.441
And so I would say like if you're bringing in house, it'd be a great camaraderie to have like your next employee and him joining.
1045
00:57:00.861 --> 00:57:05.365
That also opens you up for about 30 more budget hours of capacity to be able to grow in that entire area.
1046
00:57:05.905 --> 00:57:08.328
And now like that gets you to 500,000 pretty quick.
1047
00:57:08.648 --> 00:57:13.273
Like I think, I really believe if this year you brought, you hired one person, you brought that person back in.
1048
00:57:13.313 --> 00:57:15.335
Now you have a bit of a team, you have culture happening.
1049
00:57:15.696 --> 00:57:19.360
He's learning through osmosis from you, how to manage and how to lead.
1050
00:57:20.141 --> 00:57:23.725
That looks like a business that in a matter of six months could very well be doing 50 grand a month.
1051
00:57:24.065 --> 00:57:28.107
And I would rather that than having these two separate entities or locations.
1052
00:57:28.567 --> 00:57:29.748
And he's going to get a second.
1053
00:57:29.868 --> 00:57:37.392
If you put another employee on his plate right now, I can guarantee you without a shadow of a doubt, either he will leave or the efficiency will drop dramatically.
1054
00:57:37.692 --> 00:57:38.012
Okay.
1055
00:57:38.512 --> 00:57:40.553
And so he's already on salary.
1056
00:57:40.673 --> 00:57:43.655
We do the P4P software and program.
1057
00:57:43.675 --> 00:57:44.895
So his efficiency is pretty good.
1058
00:57:44.915 --> 00:57:45.776
It's always in the 80s.
1059
00:57:47.196 --> 00:57:51.458
Although because the salary is so high, he doesn't see much money from it as far as bonus.
1060
00:57:52.059 --> 00:57:52.279
But –
1061
00:57:53.439 --> 00:58:01.581
The plan was to pay him some sort of revenue ban to give him some motivation to help upsell and try to get us up to that 50 a month.
1062
00:58:01.821 --> 00:58:06.162
Should he also be getting the smaller bonuses if he's already salaried?
1063
00:58:07.982 --> 00:58:09.082
Salary is tough.
1064
00:58:09.483 --> 00:58:12.303
What's your base pay if you hire another employee right now?
1065
00:58:12.783 --> 00:58:14.164
18 an hour base.
1066
00:58:14.624 --> 00:58:14.904
P4P 33%.
1067
00:58:16.462 --> 00:58:18.647
He's only at like $22 an hour, right?
1068
00:58:18.667 --> 00:58:20.330
If you actually extrapolate at his salary.
1069
00:58:20.350 --> 00:58:20.811
Right, right.
1070
00:58:20.831 --> 00:58:26.041
So if I was you, I would try to – like I personally believe that he came back – what's your hourly rate?
1071
00:58:26.062 --> 00:58:26.182
Right.
1072
00:58:27.075 --> 00:58:28.075
18 minimum.
1073
00:58:28.255 --> 00:58:29.436
His is like 21.63.
1074
00:58:30.616 --> 00:58:31.517
To the customer.
1075
00:58:31.777 --> 00:58:32.717
Oh, 80.
1076
00:58:33.037 --> 00:58:33.297
80?
1077
00:58:33.737 --> 00:58:36.678
Okay, so if he's running 80%, he'll make more money.
1078
00:58:36.798 --> 00:58:38.879
Yeah, he'll make more than $22 an hour on P4P.
1079
00:58:39.339 --> 00:58:43.841
So in my opinion, I would say, hey, you can make salary, but you're coming back here.
1080
00:58:44.361 --> 00:58:48.683
But I'm going to track your salary, which, by the way, is about $22 an hour, and P4P.
1081
00:58:49.843 --> 00:58:57.444
I know based upon those efficiency scores and that he's a hard worker, it sounds like, he will beat 22 to an hour on P4P if he's under your watch.
1082
00:58:57.965 --> 00:58:59.465
And then you'll just tell him, like, which one do you want?
1083
00:58:59.725 --> 00:59:01.025
P4P or do you want salary?
1084
00:59:01.045 --> 00:59:02.025
You got to choose one or the other.
1085
00:59:02.385 --> 00:59:06.886
He should be making about 24 to 26 bucks an hour based upon what you just told me on P4P.
1086
00:59:07.546 --> 00:59:07.826
Right.
1087
00:59:08.247 --> 00:59:12.967
And I think that will happen once he's being managed by you and, like, you're in one spot.
1088
00:59:13.168 --> 00:59:15.128
Like, I think his efficiency will actually go up.
1089
00:59:16.034 --> 00:59:20.695
And you think I should, should I do the revenue ban bonus situation to help us?
1090
00:59:20.715 --> 00:59:22.756
No, because he's not, he's not responsible for growth.
1091
00:59:23.176 --> 00:59:23.496
Okay.
1092
00:59:24.077 --> 00:59:26.997
And second man, you think I am bumping on the door.
1093
00:59:27.017 --> 00:59:27.838
That'd be a good idea.
1094
00:59:28.418 --> 00:59:28.618
Yes.
1095
00:59:28.678 --> 00:59:29.838
So should I do that this spring?
1096
00:59:29.898 --> 00:59:31.519
Should I go ahead and hire this spring?
1097
00:59:32.059 --> 00:59:32.199
Yep.
1098
00:59:32.559 --> 00:59:36.081
Assuming you have enough cash and you're going to be, your guy's going to be more efficient.
1099
00:59:36.581 --> 00:59:40.864
More importantly, if you're doing 70 budget hours right now, that means that two of you are tapped out.
1100
00:59:41.344 --> 00:59:42.665
And so like get another person.
1101
00:59:43.005 --> 00:59:44.986
And then now he's going to come back to a team.
1102
00:59:45.506 --> 00:59:46.847
It's going to feel like an actual business.
1103
00:59:47.327 --> 00:59:47.567
Okay.
1104
00:59:47.827 --> 00:59:49.068
And then I'm still in the field.
1105
00:59:49.108 --> 00:59:52.390
You know, I struggled before trying to increase sales.
1106
00:59:52.750 --> 01:00:00.034
And that was one of the reasons why I tried to separate us was so that I could have a little more time to focus on sales to try to speed up this process.
1107
01:00:00.074 --> 01:00:02.615
I feel like this has taken so long, you know?
1108
01:00:03.696 --> 01:00:03.816
Yeah.
1109
01:00:03.836 --> 01:00:09.999
So if you get another employee now between the three of you, you guys are going to be doing right up against 100 budget hours a week.
1110
01:00:10.399 --> 01:00:12.600
At 80 bucks an hour, that's $24,000.
1111
01:00:14.541 --> 01:00:17.842
Yeah, $32,000 a month plus any material cost.
1112
01:00:17.862 --> 01:00:20.283
So you're probably looking at like $35,000 to $40,000 a month.
1113
01:00:20.623 --> 01:00:26.806
You're probably one more employee away from getting a $50,000 or so a month to where you could step out of the field.
1114
01:00:27.206 --> 01:00:28.346
So you're closer than you think.
1115
01:00:28.526 --> 01:00:29.466
I really do believe that.
1116
01:00:29.647 --> 01:00:35.068
I think it's just a matter of focusing on getting more work on the schedule and operations and you being in the field, yes, for a while.
1117
01:00:35.189 --> 01:00:35.949
But once you cross...
1118
01:00:36.769 --> 01:00:37.890
The 120 budget hours.
1119
01:00:37.910 --> 01:00:40.372
So now you will have to step out and do sales.
1120
01:00:40.773 --> 01:00:42.154
You'll have four employees.
1121
01:00:42.815 --> 01:00:43.916
You will be out doing sales.
1122
01:00:44.316 --> 01:00:46.238
Now the business is doing $550,000, $600,000.
1123
01:00:46.438 --> 01:00:47.259
That's a good business.
1124
01:00:47.639 --> 01:00:51.322
And the main reason why I shouldn't separate the two is –
1125
01:00:52.303 --> 01:00:57.006
the separation between me and him, not being, not being able to train him as a manager.
1126
01:00:57.787 --> 01:00:58.727
That's one reason.
1127
01:00:58.767 --> 01:01:02.289
The other reason is if he goes down right now, you're gonna have to do this anyway.
1128
01:01:02.309 --> 01:01:09.274
So there's huge amounts of liability and key man risk because you're not going to find people that want to go work by themselves every day as an employee.
1129
01:01:09.714 --> 01:01:11.055
That's what we call a solo operator.
1130
01:01:11.075 --> 01:01:12.156
They just go own their own business.
1131
01:01:12.856 --> 01:01:17.559
And they, that's also opening up you to like them taking the customers because they build the customer relationship.
1132
01:01:17.619 --> 01:01:17.779
Right.
1133
01:01:17.799 --> 01:01:18.660
So, um,
1134
01:01:19.300 --> 01:01:23.242
And then there's not any inherent efficiencies in saving 20 minutes a day with one employee.
1135
01:01:23.582 --> 01:01:30.326
If you had 10 or 20 employees driving 20 minutes a day, that starts to make a real impact for us to go start a satellite location, but not one.
1136
01:01:31.086 --> 01:01:32.747
Now, when I said 20 minutes, it's one way.
1137
01:01:32.807 --> 01:01:35.709
So it'd be 40 minutes to an hour a day.
1138
01:01:36.109 --> 01:01:40.292
Yeah, but that's about $15 to $16 worth of labor times up by 20.
1139
01:01:40.592 --> 01:01:41.192
It's about $250.
1140
01:01:41.372 --> 01:01:44.214
You're paying $300 over there for rent, right?
1141
01:01:44.454 --> 01:01:46.055
So it's not mathing.
1142
01:01:46.235 --> 01:01:46.655
Like, yeah.
1143
01:01:47.976 --> 01:01:51.180
By splitting locations, there's inherent inefficiencies in doing so.
1144
01:01:51.661 --> 01:01:58.909
You overcome that by having drive time saved, as well as having people be able to move up and send the organization and manage people.
1145
01:01:59.390 --> 01:02:00.731
Neither of those two things are happening.
1146
01:02:00.951 --> 01:02:01.932
So I would bring them together
1147
01:02:02.573 --> 01:02:08.957
I truly believe you get another employee at the same time, increase your capacity around 100 budget hours, fill that person, get to the next person.
1148
01:02:09.257 --> 01:02:13.920
And you likely, because it seems like your goal is really getting out of the field and focusing on sales, which is cool.
1149
01:02:14.000 --> 01:02:15.240
I agree that's probably your strength.
1150
01:02:15.661 --> 01:02:19.643
You will do that way faster, bringing that in one location versus trying to dilute between two.
1151
01:02:20.103 --> 01:02:23.864
So for a small period, once last spring, I had two guys rolling together.
1152
01:02:24.364 --> 01:02:28.505
The main guy I have now, and we hired another guy for the spring rush.
1153
01:02:29.125 --> 01:02:30.926
And they were doing both locations.
1154
01:02:31.006 --> 01:02:33.306
This was before I actually split it or whatever.
1155
01:02:33.546 --> 01:02:46.050
So they were driving out there, and I was trying to implement P4P, but because of the drive, it just was not – that extra hour a day was what I felt like kept them under 70, you know, 72% efficiency score.
1156
01:02:46.090 --> 01:02:46.190
Yeah.
1157
01:02:48.270 --> 01:02:54.475
Okay, so you drive out and do those ones while you're also doing sales, keep them close to home where most of the jobs are.
1158
01:02:54.936 --> 01:02:55.676
They'll stay efficient.
1159
01:02:55.696 --> 01:03:02.782
They'll make good P4P, but you have enough on your schedule to keep busy out and a little further because you're going to be driving through all of your service area.
1160
01:03:03.062 --> 01:03:06.305
You can do the estimates on your way to those other projects.
1161
01:03:06.605 --> 01:03:07.826
That's essentially what I'm doing now.
1162
01:03:07.846 --> 01:03:10.267
It's just he's by himself.
1163
01:03:10.507 --> 01:03:14.730
Keep doing that and let him stay close to the shop with the new employee.
1164
01:03:15.230 --> 01:03:17.551
And then as time goes on, you'll get more customers over here.
1165
01:03:17.671 --> 01:03:18.812
Driving isn't going to make a bit.
1166
01:03:18.852 --> 01:03:22.194
20 minutes is not enough for me to move on a second location.
1167
01:03:22.494 --> 01:03:25.456
It's just not until you're at like a large number of employees.
1168
01:03:26.078 --> 01:03:28.121
And it's just solely the separation that you're worried about.
1169
01:03:28.241 --> 01:03:29.702
Me from him, managing him.
1170
01:03:30.183 --> 01:03:31.545
That's the only thing you're worried about.
1171
01:03:31.565 --> 01:03:37.692
You're not worried about like the, because I feel like I really don't have any further expense because we're already done.
1172
01:03:37.792 --> 01:03:38.974
We already have the truck and trailer.
1173
01:03:39.294 --> 01:03:40.355
We have the two softwares.
1174
01:03:40.916 --> 01:03:45.742
Everything, there's really nothing else to spend other than customer acquisition in that other location.
1175
01:03:46.210 --> 01:03:50.715
Yeah, I'm just going off of a lot of seeing this happen.
1176
01:03:50.735 --> 01:03:52.016
I'm not guessing on this one, Aaron.
1177
01:03:52.036 --> 01:03:52.537
I'm sorry.
1178
01:03:52.997 --> 01:03:55.080
So I would highly recommend bring it together.
1179
01:03:56.101 --> 01:04:00.485
The little extra drive time you absorb that while there's an estimator out in the field still doing work.
1180
01:04:02.126 --> 01:04:03.447
get this to four or five employees.
1181
01:04:03.967 --> 01:04:06.967
Now you have a real shot at splitting that other area off.
1182
01:04:07.347 --> 01:04:11.228
But now this core group of four or five employees is very core to their location.
1183
01:04:11.468 --> 01:04:12.389
They're doing five, 600,000.
1184
01:04:12.429 --> 01:04:16.890
They have a strong GM in place that has watched you and has leadership skills.
1185
01:04:17.270 --> 01:04:19.330
Like I guarantee you that is the better route.
1186
01:04:19.730 --> 01:04:22.471
Unfortunately, we won't know which one is the alternative.
1187
01:04:22.491 --> 01:04:25.992
So like if you don't do that, it's gonna kind of continue like it is now.
1188
01:04:26.592 --> 01:04:29.393
And it's gonna be hard to get him to manage people because he doesn't know what good looks like.
1189
01:04:29.633 --> 01:04:30.673
You don't know what good looks like.
1190
01:04:31.113 --> 01:04:35.556
And so like you're going to start bumping up against this, and this is where I feel like you're trying to do this the past couple years.
1191
01:04:35.956 --> 01:04:37.857
What if you just like, all right, I'm locking one location.
1192
01:04:37.877 --> 01:04:38.778
I'm scaling this one.
1193
01:04:38.818 --> 01:04:42.380
I got to get past 500,000 before I think on a second location.
1194
01:04:42.880 --> 01:04:46.943
It's just – it's almost like if I do that, it's not much different than what I'm already doing.
1195
01:04:47.203 --> 01:04:47.643
You know what I mean?
1196
01:04:47.683 --> 01:04:52.805
Like if I tell other than I'm there in the morning, say I hire the second guy in spring.
1197
01:04:53.326 --> 01:04:55.026
I meet them every morning there at the lot.
1198
01:04:55.406 --> 01:04:59.588
And then I go do what I'm what I need to do at the second location because it's further away.
1199
01:04:59.608 --> 01:05:02.729
They might as well stay here so they can make P4P and be more efficient.
1200
01:05:03.330 --> 01:05:09.972
And I work on growing that that location with the less budgeted hours out a little more to gain budgeted hours over there.
1201
01:05:10.592 --> 01:05:15.614
Essentially, I would move all of those customers from the one homeworks account back into the first one.
1202
01:05:15.775 --> 01:05:16.635
Run it all under one.
1203
01:05:17.116 --> 01:05:17.856
Run another one.
1204
01:05:18.697 --> 01:05:20.437
Right, there's $300 a month in savings.
1205
01:05:20.877 --> 01:05:23.278
And apply that towards sales and, you know.
1206
01:05:23.778 --> 01:05:25.219
Again, we're talking about $300 a month, right?
1207
01:05:25.239 --> 01:05:30.521
Like, I think strategically and, like, from an operational perspective, the combination is why we should do this.
1208
01:05:30.781 --> 01:05:37.423
But there are inherent other savings we're not talking about, like software that you've duplicated because of two locations that you're not taking into account.
1209
01:05:37.923 --> 01:05:41.466
But then I'll have to hire another lot space for the second truck and trailer.
1210
01:05:42.046 --> 01:05:44.588
And I'm adding that $300 again.
1211
01:05:44.888 --> 01:05:47.630
I'm adding it back because now I have to add.
1212
01:05:47.670 --> 01:05:53.294
Like where we pay for the $300 in the one location, it's one spot for one truck and trailer.
1213
01:05:53.774 --> 01:05:58.258
So if I park a second truck and trailer there, I'm adding an additional rent space anyways.
1214
01:05:58.278 --> 01:05:58.618
How much?
1215
01:05:59.238 --> 01:05:59.939
The same amount.
1216
01:06:00.199 --> 01:06:00.539
About $300.
1217
01:06:00.579 --> 01:06:00.819
Yep.
1218
01:06:01.220 --> 01:06:01.400
Yep.
1219
01:06:01.963 --> 01:06:09.833
Yeah, so like this is where it comes down to simply like the strategic part, which is I understand that you might be moving basically back closer together.
1220
01:06:09.853 --> 01:06:14.379
And it's like, well, it's why would I pay 300 there versus here when I can just save some drive time?
1221
01:06:14.960 --> 01:06:19.485
The reason is because 95% of employees will not do what your current guy is doing.
1222
01:06:20.006 --> 01:06:27.548
And that is be able to drive to a shop space, pick up materials, tools, a truck, go out and do work, come back by themselves, self-manage.
1223
01:06:28.068 --> 01:06:30.229
Like most – that's not – you can't scale that.
1224
01:06:30.329 --> 01:06:33.030
Like you'll never find a lot of employees that can do that.
1225
01:06:33.470 --> 01:06:33.690
Right.
1226
01:06:33.770 --> 01:06:38.251
And so I want to create a hub that I can attract technicians with a stick.
1227
01:06:38.631 --> 01:06:42.612
And if you do that with four, five, six technicians, that you can copy and paste.
1228
01:06:42.932 --> 01:06:44.633
You cannot copy and paste one employee.
1229
01:06:44.653 --> 01:06:45.093
Right.
1230
01:06:45.653 --> 01:06:47.754
So I know in the short term, you're like, I'm making sense of it.
1231
01:06:47.774 --> 01:06:48.555
It's basically the same thing.
1232
01:06:48.695 --> 01:06:49.135
I agree.
1233
01:06:49.555 --> 01:06:51.216
But that hub, that will never work.
1234
01:06:51.256 --> 01:06:54.458
Like if that employee left, I'm going to ask you, like, what would you do?
1235
01:06:54.538 --> 01:06:56.259
You'd be hiring someone at your one.
1236
01:06:56.339 --> 01:06:57.380
You just go back to one.
1237
01:06:58.580 --> 01:07:06.404
So you lucked out with your first employee and this happened to me, lucked out with my first employee, one of my best friends and like built a business around it.
1238
01:07:06.845 --> 01:07:09.166
And then I realized, oh, not everyone's built like him.
1239
01:07:09.206 --> 01:07:09.806
He's incredible.
1240
01:07:09.826 --> 01:07:10.527
He's a unicorn.
1241
01:07:10.747 --> 01:07:11.327
Forget that.
1242
01:07:11.367 --> 01:07:12.468
We're simplifying services.
1243
01:07:13.168 --> 01:07:14.089
The same thing is true here.
1244
01:07:14.289 --> 01:07:25.180
You can't keep doing this because just by nature of if he was let go or he left tomorrow, you would hire someone underneath you at your one location is evidenced that the model doesn't scale.
1245
01:07:25.641 --> 01:07:32.668
Even if I incentivize them, you don't think with all the incentives, the attendance and everything, the bonuses are not enough.
1246
01:07:33.248 --> 01:07:33.869
I've seen it too much.
1247
01:07:33.889 --> 01:07:34.269
Sorry, Aaron.
1248
01:07:35.525 --> 01:07:36.186
I got you.
1249
01:07:36.666 --> 01:07:37.107
All right.
1250
01:07:37.147 --> 01:07:42.974
And if you need help, like if you wanted to keep it separate, like it's just going to dilute your attention.
1251
01:07:43.094 --> 01:07:45.197
That's like, man, yeah.
1252
01:07:45.638 --> 01:07:46.539
I'm not guessing on this one.
1253
01:07:46.859 --> 01:07:48.641
So I would highly recommend bringing it together.
1254
01:07:48.741 --> 01:07:54.689
I truly believe within six months you could get it to four technicians, and then it becomes a real possibility to split it off.
1255
01:07:55.089 --> 01:07:58.012
So if you didn't want to go through the headache of like joining up in one CRM, that's fine.
1256
01:07:58.032 --> 01:07:58.632
Keep them separate.
1257
01:07:58.892 --> 01:08:02.736
But like structurally, the business needs one location that people meet at.
1258
01:08:03.096 --> 01:08:05.998
That is a duplicatable model where I can move technicians in and out.
1259
01:08:06.399 --> 01:08:08.581
And if someone leaves, I'm not changing my business model.
1260
01:08:08.661 --> 01:08:10.923
I'm getting another technician to come to that location.
1261
01:08:11.243 --> 01:08:15.947
And then once both locations are doing 500 together, that's when you would look at maybe doing that.
1262
01:08:16.396 --> 01:08:17.117
Considering it, yep.
1263
01:08:17.457 --> 01:08:18.218
Then splitting it off.
1264
01:08:18.658 --> 01:08:22.863
And then what would you – you would try to bring some of the text from location A to location B?
1265
01:08:23.463 --> 01:08:25.005
Cross that bridge when you get there.
1266
01:08:25.425 --> 01:08:26.326
Okay, got it.
1267
01:08:26.867 --> 01:08:27.808
Yep.
1268
01:08:27.868 --> 01:08:29.009
Okay, I think that's it.
1269
01:08:29.369 --> 01:08:31.151
Marco and then Ian, go for it.
1270
01:08:31.411 --> 01:08:31.832
All righty.
1271
01:08:31.852 --> 01:08:32.312
Okay.
1272
01:08:32.512 --> 01:08:33.954
So I wanted to talk about snow here.
1273
01:08:34.634 --> 01:08:39.059
First off, I'm in northwestern Ontario with Stefano there.
1274
01:08:39.079 --> 01:08:39.319
Yeah.
1275
01:08:39.399 --> 01:08:39.659
So –
1276
01:08:40.480 --> 01:08:42.941
We're still about 10 hours away, just how big Ontario is.
1277
01:08:43.021 --> 01:08:45.562
But he mentored me a bit on the new snow model.
1278
01:08:46.022 --> 01:08:48.663
And essentially, we started scaling that.
1279
01:08:48.703 --> 01:08:51.083
So we bought four tractors this year.
1280
01:08:51.384 --> 01:08:52.124
And we've been running that.
1281
01:08:52.164 --> 01:08:53.564
We've got about 250 clients.
1282
01:08:53.964 --> 01:08:55.085
We're trying to triple next year.
1283
01:08:55.425 --> 01:08:59.646
Okay, so we also run commercial snow, which we are considering selling.
1284
01:08:59.786 --> 01:09:05.448
Basically, the profit from commercial snow is paying our loss for the residential snow.
1285
01:09:05.708 --> 01:09:08.210
And when I say loss, I just mean with overhead.
1286
01:09:08.390 --> 01:09:13.854
Like on the gross margin, we're making maybe 30%, but our overhead is 30%.
1287
01:09:13.874 --> 01:09:14.715
So it gets wiped.
1288
01:09:14.875 --> 01:09:19.078
And essentially, the commercial snow is covering that, the 50K loss.
1289
01:09:19.951 --> 01:09:24.553
So I have about $250,000 of equipment that I'm looking to sell.
1290
01:09:24.793 --> 01:09:27.214
And we're doing about- Is that paid off?
1291
01:09:28.095 --> 01:09:31.696
So it's about $400,000 of equipment.
1292
01:09:31.936 --> 01:09:33.257
$250,000 equity, got it.
1293
01:09:33.697 --> 01:09:36.978
And $250,000, sorry, $250,000 is paid off.
1294
01:09:37.039 --> 01:09:37.259
Yeah.
1295
01:09:37.359 --> 01:09:42.221
And then we're going to have to replenish and buy some because the plow trucks will sell, but we'll have to get it for sod.
1296
01:09:42.281 --> 01:09:44.482
So it would spare me about-
1297
01:09:45.222 --> 01:10:03.580
150 kuhn or k cash probably uh which would be huge to purchase all these uh tractors uh i would just not have the income from it so i'll try to value that first off um so there's the 250k of equipment and uh the company you know it does 150k revenue it's very variable um
1298
01:10:05.642 --> 01:10:08.244
And I was looking to sell that or consider selling that.
1299
01:10:08.304 --> 01:10:20.991
And I was willing to take like 300K for the whole thing just to get rid of it, like 550K plus the equipment in order to scale the tractors and really dial in on that.
1300
01:10:21.351 --> 01:10:34.639
And I think next year when we increase prices and put all our kind of eggs in one basket, we could really divert our energy and time into that and triple revenue while probably doubling our margins, I'd say.
1301
01:10:34.659 --> 01:10:34.759
Yeah.
1302
01:10:35.839 --> 01:10:39.580
Yeah, like I would say don't let the acquisition get in the way of making the right decision.
1303
01:10:40.541 --> 01:10:45.862
Because you're like, you might not get 300,000, you probably won't.
1304
01:10:46.022 --> 01:10:50.704
At that size of revenue, like there's no multiple on the value of that revenue.
1305
01:10:51.404 --> 01:10:54.486
So it's much more a matter of this is a strategic decision.
1306
01:10:54.506 --> 01:10:56.547
Like these are the type of things, you know, we were talking with Aaron.
1307
01:10:56.567 --> 01:10:59.309
It's like it's hard to put a dollar amount on attention.
1308
01:10:59.769 --> 01:11:05.373
And attention, once diluted, doesn't show up on a P&L, but it likely is the detriment of all of our businesses.
1309
01:11:06.373 --> 01:11:11.116
And so, but I would much more rather be like, I can triple the revenue of this thing.
1310
01:11:11.597 --> 01:11:11.817
Hmm.
1311
01:11:12.798 --> 01:11:16.340
Am I willing to take $50,000 less on this $300,000?
1312
01:11:16.921 --> 01:11:17.762
Probably a good move.
1313
01:11:18.582 --> 01:11:20.644
So just sell it like market value, the equipment?
1314
01:11:21.204 --> 01:11:21.785
I would get rid of it.
1315
01:11:21.805 --> 01:11:30.292
Like if you strategically know the right decision, don't dilute the attention or drag out the decision because you're afraid of losing $50,000.
1316
01:11:30.552 --> 01:11:34.035
And over here is a, let's just call it $750,000 opportunity.
1317
01:11:34.315 --> 01:11:34.756
For sure.
1318
01:11:35.236 --> 01:11:35.556
For sure.
1319
01:11:36.017 --> 01:11:36.257
Okay.
1320
01:11:36.637 --> 01:11:39.920
So basically scale the tractors, get rid of the commercial.
1321
01:11:39.940 --> 01:11:40.040
Yeah.
1322
01:11:40.340 --> 01:11:44.242
Assuming this model you know works, you know that's where you want to go in the future.
1323
01:11:44.602 --> 01:11:52.686
If you want to just tear the Band-Aid off, don't care about making $300,000 versus $270,000, get rid of it, and move to the new thing.
1324
01:11:52.746 --> 01:11:57.009
Stretching it out and diluting your attention between the two different things is what kills businesses all the time.
1325
01:11:57.089 --> 01:12:03.832
Because if you go into the next season and you're kind of doing both again, that revenue will drop simply because you're not focused on something else.
1326
01:12:04.292 --> 01:12:05.453
And now it's worth even less.
1327
01:12:06.034 --> 01:12:07.576
Yeah, perfect.
1328
01:12:07.656 --> 01:12:15.424
Now, in terms of pay for these employees, like it hasn't snowed in two weeks, and then it'll snow three times in one week where they get 40 hours.
1329
01:12:15.805 --> 01:12:17.727
We're averaging 10 to 20 hours.
1330
01:12:18.328 --> 01:12:22.152
What do you recommend in terms of salary, call out pay or hourly pay for these employees?
1331
01:12:22.172 --> 01:12:24.835
I don't know if Stefan will kind of chat with you about that.
1332
01:12:24.975 --> 01:12:27.939
Yeah, what's funny is I was texting Stephan yesterday morning.
1333
01:12:27.959 --> 01:12:29.881
He asked for a call, so I'm going to call him next week.
1334
01:12:29.901 --> 01:12:38.472
He wants to try to do P4P because the whole model of paying people year-round is great, but you can run into some serious problems with cash flow.
1335
01:12:39.153 --> 01:12:42.797
And so he's trying to move to more of a P4P model too.
1336
01:12:43.438 --> 01:12:50.041
So yeah, like in the perfect world, if you have enough work and you got people on call and they're getting paid no matter what, that's awesome.
1337
01:12:50.282 --> 01:12:51.422
It also comes out of supply and demand.
1338
01:12:51.442 --> 01:13:02.248
Like if you can get people to show up when you need them because your market has like a high unemployment rate, et cetera, or you're paying gobs of money, it might make sense for you just to go that model.
1339
01:13:02.508 --> 01:13:08.311
But the reliability of you having people that can go out after four straight days of snowplowing is important.
1340
01:13:08.711 --> 01:13:08.931
Right.
1341
01:13:09.392 --> 01:13:17.577
And so you're usually willing to pay extra for the capacity, even though they might only work 15 or 20 hours, quote, per week on average.
1342
01:13:18.177 --> 01:13:20.118
You got to have them for the weeks when you need them for 60.
1343
01:13:20.459 --> 01:13:23.360
And that's when, if they're on salary, you just keep them top up if they work more.
1344
01:13:23.380 --> 01:13:24.381
I think that's what Stephan was doing.
1345
01:13:24.401 --> 01:13:24.661
Correct.
1346
01:13:24.962 --> 01:13:25.462
That's what he does.
1347
01:13:25.502 --> 01:13:25.682
Yeah.
1348
01:13:26.262 --> 01:13:26.583
Okay.
1349
01:13:26.663 --> 01:13:27.583
Two quick fires.
1350
01:13:28.063 --> 01:13:28.704
Auto renew.
1351
01:13:29.204 --> 01:13:31.606
Do you do that on any reoccurring services?
1352
01:13:32.046 --> 01:13:36.931
We do auto renew, but we're going to make sure we let the customers know like, hey, up front, like, hey, this happens all the time.
1353
01:13:37.291 --> 01:13:40.474
Also, as we go into the service, hey, just FYI, we're starting next week.
1354
01:13:40.514 --> 01:13:42.035
Let us know if you don't want this to happen.
1355
01:13:42.496 --> 01:13:47.020
But like we're not going to be like, hey, you need to renew and you need to like fill this new thing.
1356
01:13:47.040 --> 01:13:48.041
Are you going to accept this?
1357
01:13:48.401 --> 01:13:50.083
We don't raise prices typically then either.
1358
01:13:50.583 --> 01:13:52.866
We only do that if we are already at capacity.
1359
01:13:52.906 --> 01:13:54.647
And then we don't even say like, here's your new prices.
1360
01:13:54.667 --> 01:13:56.129
Just here's your prices for the season.
1361
01:13:56.349 --> 01:13:57.290
We're starting next Monday.
1362
01:13:57.770 --> 01:13:58.010
Okay.
1363
01:13:58.190 --> 01:13:59.711
That's what I've been doing and it worked amazing.
1364
01:14:00.011 --> 01:14:07.372
I find a lot less loss of clients, but I realize Stefano has 5,000 clients and he doesn't do that.
1365
01:14:07.633 --> 01:14:08.253
Yeah.
1366
01:14:08.333 --> 01:14:10.393
You'll see in the coaching call, it comes out Saturday.
1367
01:14:10.893 --> 01:14:11.173
Okay.
1368
01:14:11.433 --> 01:14:11.694
Okay.
1369
01:14:11.714 --> 01:14:11.994
Cool.
1370
01:14:12.234 --> 01:14:12.874
I talked to him.
1371
01:14:12.894 --> 01:14:14.134
I talked him through it.
1372
01:14:14.534 --> 01:14:14.834
Okay.
1373
01:14:14.854 --> 01:14:15.094
Sweet.
1374
01:14:15.114 --> 01:14:16.055
Sweet.
1375
01:14:16.135 --> 01:14:16.735
Software.
1376
01:14:17.155 --> 01:14:19.716
Obviously, he uses Aurora.
1377
01:14:20.236 --> 01:14:21.436
We don't use Aurora.
1378
01:14:21.516 --> 01:14:24.977
I think there's a little bit of risk because I know he's planning on potentially coming to Thunder Bay.
1379
01:14:25.817 --> 01:14:27.959
where he'll have all our client lists and whatnot.
1380
01:14:29.099 --> 01:14:30.960
So we use- So I'll stop there.
1381
01:14:31.261 --> 01:14:32.642
I would not take that as a risk.
1382
01:14:33.122 --> 01:14:34.583
The reason is for a couple of things.
1383
01:14:35.263 --> 01:14:37.284
One, he could use that against you.
1384
01:14:37.344 --> 01:14:39.005
It'd be the stupidest thing you could possibly do.
1385
01:14:39.586 --> 01:14:42.247
So I'm saying this because people say why they don't join HomeWorks.
1386
01:14:42.267 --> 01:14:43.208
I'm like, what do you think?
1387
01:14:43.448 --> 01:14:45.049
Why would I take your client list?
1388
01:14:45.329 --> 01:14:47.511
That'd be like career suicide for me.
1389
01:14:48.491 --> 01:14:53.034
So I do not look at it as a risk because that would be, it's a higher risk to him to do that.
1390
01:14:53.154 --> 01:14:54.295
And you tell everyone about it.
1391
01:14:54.855 --> 01:14:56.336
than for him taking the clients.
1392
01:14:56.356 --> 01:14:58.637
I would eliminate that.
1393
01:14:58.677 --> 01:15:01.599
So if Aurora is the best move, don't do it not because of him.
1394
01:15:01.659 --> 01:15:02.300
That's all I'll say.
1395
01:15:02.780 --> 01:15:03.721
Okay, that's good to know.
1396
01:15:03.761 --> 01:15:07.663
And if I ever sell the company, I think he'd prefer, because he'd probably be the one to buy it.
1397
01:15:07.803 --> 01:15:09.104
He'd want it in Aurora anyways.
1398
01:15:09.504 --> 01:15:10.625
Yeah, probably.
1399
01:15:11.085 --> 01:15:11.926
How about your software?
1400
01:15:12.206 --> 01:15:14.407
Did you guys do anything with the snow model?
1401
01:15:15.068 --> 01:15:16.529
We are adding some stuff.
1402
01:15:16.569 --> 01:15:21.452
We just added in the Field Force where it'll remind you about the clock in, clock out, like...
1403
01:15:22.272 --> 01:15:29.894
like the geo coordinates, if you come close to a property, we're going to hopefully have that surface on the dispatch board instead of just a reminder on the app.
1404
01:15:30.334 --> 01:15:32.834
So it probably does most of it, but there are a couple of features.
1405
01:15:33.114 --> 01:15:40.216
The two features that Aurora does really good is it does the auto showing when they were there.
1406
01:15:40.756 --> 01:15:41.316
That's really cool.
1407
01:15:41.456 --> 01:15:43.996
We should have that here pretty soon where it's on the dispatch board.
1408
01:15:44.016 --> 01:15:47.017
It already does the reminders in the app, but it doesn't show on the dispatch board.
1409
01:15:47.657 --> 01:15:53.960
The other thing that they do really good at is the ability for the customer to see where the crew is at or the tractor is at on the map.
1410
01:15:54.260 --> 01:15:59.383
That's really solid for Snow because the number one request you get for admin on Snow is where are you at?
1411
01:15:59.423 --> 01:15:59.883
Where are you at?
1412
01:15:59.903 --> 01:16:00.383
Where are you at?
1413
01:16:00.403 --> 01:16:00.924
Where are you at?
1414
01:16:01.304 --> 01:16:02.785
And so that saves you a lot of admin time.
1415
01:16:03.405 --> 01:16:06.607
So there's pros and cons of both.
1416
01:16:07.167 --> 01:16:09.308
And the texting would be the number one I'd say.
1417
01:16:09.328 --> 01:16:13.230
It's like we text our clients before we come automatically, the GPU app there.
1418
01:16:13.800 --> 01:16:14.902
Yeah, that can happen in homework.
1419
01:16:14.922 --> 01:16:16.284
Most software's going to have that part.
1420
01:16:16.424 --> 01:16:20.650
I was talking about kind of like the main features I see Aurora being really good at in terms of snow.
1421
01:16:21.031 --> 01:16:21.271
Cool.
1422
01:16:21.632 --> 01:16:21.912
Okay.
1423
01:16:22.333 --> 01:16:22.593
Awesome.
1424
01:16:23.014 --> 01:16:23.314
Thank you.
1425
01:16:23.895 --> 01:16:24.315
You got it.
1426
01:16:24.336 --> 01:16:25.417
Ian and then Christian.
1427
01:16:25.577 --> 01:16:26.439
Then we'll call it a day.
1428
01:16:26.939 --> 01:16:27.200
All right.
1429
01:16:27.220 --> 01:16:28.422
Last one here for you, Mike.
1430
01:16:28.922 --> 01:16:29.143
Um...
1431
01:16:29.618 --> 01:16:38.122
We have a part-time admin currently, and hopefully bringing her on more of a full-time capacity this spring.
1432
01:16:38.522 --> 01:16:41.904
Currently, she does probably 15 hours a week, I'd say, on average.
1433
01:16:42.124 --> 01:16:46.846
But I really think at full-time, she's probably not doing more than 25, 30 hours.
1434
01:16:47.226 --> 01:16:54.290
So it's going to kind of do a hybrid role of half admin and half commercial kind of cold outreach for our commercial sales.
1435
01:16:54.910 --> 01:16:58.912
And basically, we're trying to integrate P4P this spring
1436
01:17:00.655 --> 01:17:01.276
What kind of KPIs?
1437
01:17:01.356 --> 01:17:03.060
What's your revenue again Ian?
1438
01:17:03.100 --> 01:17:03.862
Just over a million.
1439
01:17:04.363 --> 01:17:04.664
Okay, cool.
1440
01:17:04.684 --> 01:17:05.125
Just over a million.
1441
01:17:05.586 --> 01:17:06.989
And how much is that commercial?
1442
01:17:08.172 --> 01:17:08.693
Probably 40%.
1443
01:17:10.065 --> 01:17:10.265
Cool.
1444
01:17:10.285 --> 01:17:10.565
All right.
1445
01:17:10.585 --> 01:17:10.926
Sorry.
1446
01:17:10.946 --> 01:17:16.890
Looking to grow the commercial side because it's more reoccurring or recurring.
1447
01:17:17.951 --> 01:17:24.375
So bringing her on with more commercial outreach kind of boost that recurring revenue.
1448
01:17:24.815 --> 01:17:32.821
Looking for KPIs, what you would recommend for KPIs for pay for performance for admin role that's half admin, half sales oriented.
1449
01:17:33.001 --> 01:17:35.242
Personally, I think you can afford her at your size.
1450
01:17:36.022 --> 01:17:41.663
And what I mean by that is the extra 15 hours a week that she's not working right now, I think that she could take stuff off your plate.
1451
01:17:41.683 --> 01:17:43.664
And it could be sales stuff like cold outreach.
1452
01:17:44.324 --> 01:17:50.345
But I would first – before I say, hey, let's go do this new thing, i.e., cold outreach to commercial customers that we've never done.
1453
01:17:50.665 --> 01:17:51.326
I'm assuming that.
1454
01:17:51.486 --> 01:17:52.126
Is that correct?
1455
01:17:52.166 --> 01:17:52.606
Have you not –
1456
01:17:52.966 --> 01:17:53.126
Yeah.
1457
01:17:53.186 --> 01:18:02.775
So before we go to do that new thing, let's try to do a better job of getting things off of your plate or manager's plate in operations first.
1458
01:18:03.015 --> 01:18:13.245
So like I would be looking at every single thing you do, follow up phone calls, any sort of communication with customers, putting spreadsheets, reports, anything whatsoever that she could potentially take off your plate.
1459
01:18:13.665 --> 01:18:17.709
I would be trying to do that first because, you know, that's going to be a return on investment.
1460
01:18:18.209 --> 01:18:22.955
We do not have a guaranteed return on investment for her doing outbound.
1461
01:18:23.295 --> 01:18:29.503
So I would first focus on what things could go off of the other people that cost more in the organization off their plate, move to hers.
1462
01:18:30.084 --> 01:18:32.226
Guaranteed ROI, 100%.
1463
01:18:32.767 --> 01:18:36.672
Then I would think about, okay, what else could we put on her plate in terms of outbound?
1464
01:18:37.132 --> 01:18:39.774
And then that's like a hole in their conversation of how do we outbound?
1465
01:18:40.015 --> 01:18:41.136
How many calls per hour?
1466
01:18:41.416 --> 01:18:45.059
Do we incent based upon the gross value of closed contracts?
1467
01:18:46.120 --> 01:18:49.623
Those are the type of things you could be – because that's much more of our sales side of things.
1468
01:18:49.923 --> 01:18:58.591
The KPI is around number of dials, number of contracts sent, and then giving a commission on percentages, for example.
1469
01:18:59.112 --> 01:19:00.233
That would certainly be in the cards.
1470
01:19:00.253 --> 01:19:00.493
Yeah.
1471
01:19:01.382 --> 01:19:09.569
So you think if she takes stuff off my plate, it'll allow me to start that kind of cold call outreach program and figure it all out.
1472
01:19:09.749 --> 01:19:16.055
And then almost anything you do besides whatever she could do for you is going to be a higher return for the business.
1473
01:19:16.215 --> 01:19:26.044
Even if that means better training your team and better hiring and onboarding with them, that is a higher value than whatever you're doing that she's going to do for 25 or 30 bucks an hour.
1474
01:19:26.404 --> 01:19:26.684
Gotcha.
1475
01:19:26.804 --> 01:19:36.751
So anything, literally anything off your plate first, then I would, if I was you, I would take that some of your time that you get back and figure out the outbound yourself before you hand it off to her.
1476
01:19:36.972 --> 01:19:41.115
Because otherwise you're going to hand it to her and it's going to fall flat because she doesn't know what she's doing.
1477
01:19:41.135 --> 01:19:43.576
She doesn't know how to, she does not have the power to change the system.
1478
01:19:45.635 --> 01:19:48.800
You would rather put in front of her a script and say, do this 1,000 times.
1479
01:19:49.421 --> 01:19:53.026
Out of 1,000, you're going to have about 20 people responding, 10 estimates, and 4 acceptance.
1480
01:19:54.107 --> 01:19:56.771
You knowing that, then when you hand it to her, it can succeed.
1481
01:19:57.192 --> 01:19:57.512
Perfect.
1482
01:19:57.913 --> 01:19:58.394
Sounds good.
1483
01:19:58.594 --> 01:19:58.935
Thank you, sir.
1484
01:19:58.955 --> 01:19:59.656
Appreciate your time.
1485
01:20:00.246 --> 01:20:04.610
You got last but not least, Christian Malia, our couple of the week.
1486
01:20:04.850 --> 01:20:05.331
Let's go.
1487
01:20:05.351 --> 01:20:08.174
Hey Mike, we're back.
1488
01:20:08.754 --> 01:20:10.556
So does P4P work for the owner?
1489
01:20:11.136 --> 01:20:11.637
It can.
1490
01:20:11.657 --> 01:20:15.360
If you're out in the field working, you can certainly pay yourself that way.
1491
01:20:16.201 --> 01:20:18.202
Uh, typically it's not so much a matter of case.
1492
01:20:18.242 --> 01:20:19.282
It works because it does.
1493
01:20:19.362 --> 01:20:23.944
If you're out in the field producing labor revenue, it was where it breaks down is from a tax perspective.
1494
01:20:23.964 --> 01:20:32.227
Like, is it best to be paying yourself a whole bunch of W2 income and paying a bunch of taxes if the business as a whole is making 40 or 50 grand in profit a year?
1495
01:20:32.387 --> 01:20:32.967
Probably not.
1496
01:20:33.887 --> 01:20:40.029
If you have very little profit and you're taking a whole bunch of W-2 income, I wouldn't make that move.
1497
01:20:40.429 --> 01:20:46.430
And so this would be much more conversation with your accountant in terms of what form of payment is best for me tax-wise.
1498
01:20:46.750 --> 01:20:50.011
Should I be taking more W-2 or should I be taking more distributions?
1499
01:20:50.591 --> 01:20:52.231
Usually going to depend on the profitability of the business.
1500
01:20:52.271 --> 01:20:56.813
The more profit you make is distributions, that's going to be taxed less than a W-2.
1501
01:20:56.833 --> 01:20:58.213
Actually, wait, are you in Tennessee?
1502
01:20:59.070 --> 01:20:59.310
Yes.
1503
01:20:59.891 --> 01:21:00.191
Okay.
1504
01:21:01.171 --> 01:21:02.872
They definitely tucked your account.
1505
01:21:02.972 --> 01:21:04.893
Tennessee has a bit of a weird thing with their S-Corps.
1506
01:21:05.373 --> 01:21:06.314
Are you in LLC right now?
1507
01:21:06.894 --> 01:21:10.296
We're in S-Corp. You're in S-Corp. We're both on W-2.
1508
01:21:12.798 --> 01:21:14.579
Okay, so definitely talk to an accountant.
1509
01:21:14.659 --> 01:21:19.161
You just want to nail this down because Tennessee is actually the one that's a little strange on this thing with the S-Corp thing.
1510
01:21:19.581 --> 01:21:26.144
But they should have good advice as to, should you be getting more W-2 income or do you want to be having more distributions?
1511
01:21:26.764 --> 01:21:32.646
The other thing I would say is, once you take your W-2 income out, how much is in profit right now in the business?
1512
01:21:33.067 --> 01:21:33.467
Not a ton.
1513
01:21:34.187 --> 01:21:35.028
Yeah, no, I don't know.
1514
01:21:35.108 --> 01:21:38.770
Yeah, well, sorry, you're paying yourself essentially and working for the business, that's fine.
1515
01:21:39.231 --> 01:21:48.917
So definitely talk to an accountant because traditionally I would say, let's not pay yourself W-2 where you're paying 30% of income on taxes.
1516
01:21:49.337 --> 01:21:53.160
Let's get some distributions in S Corp and not have self-employment tax.
1517
01:21:53.520 --> 01:21:55.622
But Tennessee has some funky stuff going on.
1518
01:21:55.922 --> 01:21:57.783
So talk to an accountant that knows that stuff.
1519
01:21:58.263 --> 01:22:00.065
If you don't know an accountant, go into Upwork.
1520
01:22:00.725 --> 01:22:09.594
and find an accountant that is a CPA inside of Tennessee and do a consultation with them for 50 to 100 bucks in 30 minutes, they'll answer all your questions.
1521
01:22:09.854 --> 01:22:10.235
Okay.
1522
01:22:10.455 --> 01:22:10.755
Okay.
1523
01:22:11.035 --> 01:22:15.159
So, but should we even do P4P since it's just going to be him and his brother?
1524
01:22:15.520 --> 01:22:17.562
Or should we hold off until we have more employees?
1525
01:22:17.582 --> 01:22:17.682
Okay.
1526
01:22:18.042 --> 01:22:20.283
Um, I want you to nail budget hours first.
1527
01:22:21.203 --> 01:22:22.544
So nail budget, budget hours.
1528
01:22:22.964 --> 01:22:31.427
If you want to watch the P4P course, the number one thing I say is if you're not going to do P4P from the get, just make sure you don't give anyone an hourly wage above what your base pay needs to be.
1529
01:22:31.867 --> 01:22:33.867
So what I mean by that is like, what's your hourly?
1530
01:22:34.648 --> 01:22:37.809
When I said target hourly rate in Malia, you were like, Oh yeah, I'm doing it right.
1531
01:22:37.989 --> 01:22:38.929
What was your hourly rate?
1532
01:22:39.069 --> 01:22:39.709
What's that number?
1533
01:22:40.210 --> 01:22:41.010
A hundred an hour.
1534
01:22:41.668 --> 01:22:42.409
100 an hour, great.
1535
01:22:42.709 --> 01:22:52.716
So in the P4P book, or the book or the course, you'll hear me say the 25% rule, which means the base payout to the employee has to be less than 25% of that number.
1536
01:22:53.237 --> 01:22:58.101
So I'm going to go on a limb and say you guys pay 22 or so an hour for entry-level employees?
1537
01:22:58.681 --> 01:22:58.941
18.
1538
01:22:59.021 --> 01:22:59.201
20?
1539
01:22:59.782 --> 01:23:00.542
Oh, fantastic.
1540
01:23:00.562 --> 01:23:04.145
So you're like, fantastic, you're 18% instead of 25%.
1541
01:23:04.425 --> 01:23:05.306
So that's excellent.
1542
01:23:06.527 --> 01:23:08.929
I would try to make sure, what's your brother getting though, Christian?
1543
01:23:09.389 --> 01:23:10.110
He'll probably be getting 20%.
1544
01:23:10.690 --> 01:23:10.850
Cool.
1545
01:23:10.970 --> 01:23:11.411
That's fine.
1546
01:23:11.451 --> 01:23:11.831
That's fine.
1547
01:23:11.891 --> 01:23:13.433
You're still beating the 25% rule.
1548
01:23:13.833 --> 01:23:16.175
So I would just make sure you don't let anyone go above 20.
1549
01:23:16.475 --> 01:23:22.000
Cause then when you do P for P, there's a good chance your base pay will be 20 and it only would be upside for your team.
1550
01:23:22.541 --> 01:23:24.483
And no one will be have any problem with it, including your brother.
1551
01:23:24.503 --> 01:23:25.163
He'll be like, let's go.
1552
01:23:25.223 --> 01:23:26.224
I can make way more money now.
1553
01:23:26.605 --> 01:23:29.027
And you will be able to pass the 25% rule of 20%.
1554
01:23:29.147 --> 01:23:29.547
Let's go.
1555
01:23:29.748 --> 01:23:32.070
But that assumes we're hitting budget hours.
1556
01:23:32.370 --> 01:23:33.911
And that's why I want you to focus on budget hours.
1557
01:23:33.931 --> 01:23:35.192
Like get budget hours on every job
1558
01:23:35.773 --> 01:23:37.755
You'll see it on the dispatch board in HomeWorks.
1559
01:23:37.775 --> 01:23:39.457
It'll go red if they don't hit budget hours.
1560
01:23:39.677 --> 01:23:41.559
You'll be able to see which jobs you're not hitting budget hours.
1561
01:23:41.579 --> 01:23:45.703
Those are the ones you'll have to adjust prices on to actually make sure you're hitting $100 an hour.
1562
01:23:46.123 --> 01:23:51.168
Because then down the road when you do P4P, you'll have a lot of confidence and your numbers are making sense.
1563
01:23:51.528 --> 01:23:57.594
But for now, let's really focus this year on getting budget hours on every job, every visit, every meeting, every to-do.
1564
01:23:57.815 --> 01:23:58.896
Everything has budgeted hours.
1565
01:23:59.236 --> 01:23:59.636
Okay.
1566
01:23:59.696 --> 01:23:59.937
Okay.
1567
01:24:00.137 --> 01:24:05.381
So essentially like spring rushes around the corner and like we get a lot of rain here, like at least for one week.
1568
01:24:06.061 --> 01:24:14.728
So for that period, do I look for like a part-time or maybe another full-time employee to like help us kind of push through that?
1569
01:24:15.189 --> 01:24:16.950
Well, it sounds like we're going to get a second truck.
1570
01:24:17.290 --> 01:24:18.651
Is that kind of what we're thinking?
1571
01:24:19.212 --> 01:24:20.253
So can you continue growing?
1572
01:24:20.728 --> 01:24:21.388
That was the plan.
1573
01:24:21.408 --> 01:24:24.529
I mean, that wasn't really the plan until we talked to you.
1574
01:24:24.549 --> 01:24:25.649
Kind of a turd.
1575
01:24:26.490 --> 01:24:31.211
Well, the thing is you could hit the, like you're pretty close to the capacity of the one truck, right?
1576
01:24:31.651 --> 01:24:33.171
So you could go into profit mode now.
1577
01:24:33.812 --> 01:24:43.674
This is a conversation between the two of you in terms of how much cash do we have on hand and are we wanting to go into growth mode, get the second truck, or are we gonna stay at one truck and go into profit mode this year?
1578
01:24:44.095 --> 01:24:48.836
That simply comes down to how much cash you have on hand right now and how much you will both have in terms of risk.
1579
01:24:49.476 --> 01:24:52.117
If right now you're like, hey, we don't have a lot of cash and it's pretty stressful.
1580
01:24:52.597 --> 01:24:53.737
I would stick with the one truck.
1581
01:24:53.937 --> 01:24:54.877
I'd raise prices.
1582
01:24:55.217 --> 01:24:57.158
I would go into profit mode like we talked about.
1583
01:24:57.818 --> 01:25:02.839
But also knowing that the only way to get to your long-term goal is for you to grow this business.
1584
01:25:03.739 --> 01:25:09.021
And so if you're both like, hey, let's go ahead and we're going to live skinny a little bit for a second.
1585
01:25:09.401 --> 01:25:11.201
But we're going to get the second truck.
1586
01:25:11.621 --> 01:25:14.562
By doing that, Christian goes in that truck and get another person to help him.
1587
01:25:14.982 --> 01:25:17.643
Potentially that leads to a full-time employee.
1588
01:25:18.083 --> 01:25:19.263
So that would be the growth way.
1589
01:25:19.863 --> 01:25:20.183
Right.
1590
01:25:20.824 --> 01:25:21.024
Yeah.
1591
01:25:21.504 --> 01:25:21.844
Okay.
1592
01:25:22.325 --> 01:25:34.292
We're also, we also made a plan of like creating contracts this season, like a 12 month, not fully like jumping into it a hundred percent, thinking about it like 60%, 40, and then keeping the 42 like monthly.
1593
01:25:35.373 --> 01:25:37.034
Is that a good plan or?
1594
01:25:37.754 --> 01:25:40.597
I think you have a lot on your plate right now in terms of changes that need to happen.
1595
01:25:41.037 --> 01:25:43.579
And so even on the onboarding call, we talk about this.
1596
01:25:43.840 --> 01:25:46.822
I think you can make maybe three good changes in a business per year.
1597
01:25:47.283 --> 01:25:50.105
And so right now, I'm winning budget hours in every single job.
1598
01:25:50.586 --> 01:25:52.728
I'm meeting Malia to a great system around admin.
1599
01:25:53.228 --> 01:25:55.630
And you're potentially getting a second truck and hiring a new employee.
1600
01:25:56.131 --> 01:25:56.852
Lots of changes.
1601
01:25:56.872 --> 01:25:57.252
Yeah.
1602
01:25:57.672 --> 01:25:59.773
Do I think we should throw contracts into the mix?
1603
01:26:00.333 --> 01:26:04.935
I would focus more on getting the amount of recurring revenue this spring while it's coming in.
1604
01:26:05.135 --> 01:26:05.655
Just get it.
1605
01:26:05.956 --> 01:26:07.076
As many customers as possible.
1606
01:26:07.556 --> 01:26:11.218
Going into off season, we're going to focus on winter services, converting those recurring customers.
1607
01:26:11.238 --> 01:26:12.778
You're a perfect market for this, by the way.
1608
01:26:13.258 --> 01:26:18.321
You're converting those recurring services into recurring for the winter, not just the mowing season.
1609
01:26:18.821 --> 01:26:19.841
That's low hanging fruit.
1610
01:26:20.381 --> 01:26:21.722
Next year, think about contracts.
1611
01:26:22.022 --> 01:26:29.145
And it might not even be something you think about once you do winter services and realize you can keep most of your customers if you pitch it right for the off season too.
1612
01:26:29.985 --> 01:26:30.245
Yeah.
1613
01:26:30.726 --> 01:26:32.686
So now there's an issue with kind of right there.
1614
01:26:32.766 --> 01:26:34.247
So we start Christmas sites.
1615
01:26:35.167 --> 01:26:36.788
We can start it early October if we want to.
1616
01:26:37.368 --> 01:26:39.430
But then we come across like not having the manpower.
1617
01:26:39.490 --> 01:26:48.355
And if like both crews are going to be doing lawn carry, what are aerating and all that, because it gets really busy around that time, we can't really start it until like almost mid November.
1618
01:26:48.395 --> 01:26:52.058
And it just we lose a lot of money during that time for Christmas lights.
1619
01:26:52.623 --> 01:26:53.964
Yeah, so you just pull the man forward, right?
1620
01:26:53.984 --> 01:27:00.309
So instead of people doing them in October, you're like, hey, you're going to send a text message or email to all your customers beforehand and try doing it in September.
1621
01:27:00.849 --> 01:27:03.191
You're trying to pull that domain out of that busy season.
1622
01:27:03.592 --> 01:27:06.874
Or there's some people that are like, great, we'll do your cleanup in December.
1623
01:27:07.334 --> 01:27:08.575
And so we send out messages.
1624
01:27:08.756 --> 01:27:09.776
We don't do it this month.
1625
01:27:09.796 --> 01:27:10.517
We do it in a different month.
1626
01:27:11.037 --> 01:27:16.582
So you're like, hey, if you don't get your stuff done in these next few weeks, the next available time is this.
1627
01:27:17.662 --> 01:27:22.404
So basically that November period or October, whenever you're really busy for Christmas lights, you don't schedule anything.
1628
01:27:22.804 --> 01:27:28.546
And you tell your customers three weeks prior to that, say, hey, if you don't get your work done here, it's going to be out six to eight weeks.
1629
01:27:29.086 --> 01:27:34.588
So you want to push demand away from that time so it makes room for the profitable service of Christmas lights.
1630
01:27:34.912 --> 01:27:44.276
So if we have two, sorry, I'm, um, if we have two crews, the plan was kind of to have the first crew as like strictly mowing.
1631
01:27:44.416 --> 01:27:47.157
And then like, they would have the best routes and all of that.
1632
01:27:47.177 --> 01:27:55.940
And then the second crew would kind of help with rain days and do the more one-time services and have a couple of days of mowing, but not like a full schedule.
1633
01:27:56.680 --> 01:27:58.541
Should we, oh, sh-
1634
01:27:58.901 --> 01:27:59.161
You're good.
1635
01:27:59.441 --> 01:28:00.782
I'll say this while you're remembering.
1636
01:28:01.242 --> 01:28:02.503
That will work at the beginning.
1637
01:28:03.363 --> 01:28:05.584
As you get more recurring, it's going to all shift.
1638
01:28:05.924 --> 01:28:09.385
This is why having simple services where you can cross train people easily is good.
1639
01:28:09.666 --> 01:28:11.366
Because you're going to get all this mowing in spring.
1640
01:28:11.386 --> 01:28:14.428
And all of a sudden, instead of two days a week, they're mowing four days a week, the second crew.
1641
01:28:14.928 --> 01:28:15.168
Yeah.
1642
01:28:15.188 --> 01:28:15.388
Right?
1643
01:28:15.628 --> 01:28:18.469
So just don't get that too stuck in your mind because that will work at the beginning.
1644
01:28:18.709 --> 01:28:24.172
But as you go into a spring rush and you're likely going to double in terms of size, all of that changes very quickly.
1645
01:28:24.192 --> 01:28:25.172
So just don't get that too stuck.
1646
01:28:25.212 --> 01:28:27.173
Think much more in terms of budgeted hour capacity.
1647
01:28:27.473 --> 01:28:27.993
Okay.
1648
01:28:28.433 --> 01:28:33.716
But like in that sense, then who would do like the air rating and the Christmas lights?
1649
01:28:33.876 --> 01:28:39.998
You're going to look at the weeks where you know that's going to happen and you're not going to allow any other type of job on that schedule.
1650
01:28:40.378 --> 01:28:43.100
So for example, people are like, I want fall cleanups.
1651
01:28:43.320 --> 01:28:43.600
Great.
1652
01:28:43.640 --> 01:28:49.042
We're sending an email the month before saying we have two weeks from this date to this date that you can do spring cleanups.
1653
01:28:49.402 --> 01:28:51.083
Otherwise, you're in December.
1654
01:28:51.483 --> 01:28:53.984
So you can pull that demand forward or push it out.
1655
01:28:54.244 --> 01:28:59.685
But you don't allow to do a first-come, first-served basis up until the time where you're like, oh, I have no room on the schedule.
1656
01:29:00.025 --> 01:29:04.407
You have to prioritize which leads and which services you're going to do at certain times of the year.
1657
01:29:04.847 --> 01:29:11.929
So, for example, we will not do a one-time project at all at my location locally from April 1st till the end of May.
1658
01:29:12.129 --> 01:29:13.289
So basically, it's April, May.
1659
01:29:14.009 --> 01:29:24.742
No one project at all because I know we're getting pouring in with mowing customers and I want to prioritize them So we sent a message out to everyone in February saying hey if you want your spring cleanup done do it now Otherwise, you're waiting till June
1660
01:29:25.290 --> 01:29:26.170
Yeah.
1661
01:29:26.871 --> 01:29:27.251
Okay.
1662
01:29:27.831 --> 01:29:28.211
Okay.
1663
01:29:28.271 --> 01:29:32.292
So, but like when aerating starts, we just wouldn't mow.
1664
01:29:32.352 --> 01:29:39.974
Like if we have that many aerating customers or like same thing with Christmas lights, would we just stop mowing to do?
1665
01:29:40.014 --> 01:29:41.535
So when do you do aeration a bunch?
1666
01:29:41.935 --> 01:29:43.415
Mostly October.
1667
01:29:43.455 --> 01:29:46.036
October is like a super busy month because we are still mowing.
1668
01:29:46.056 --> 01:29:48.597
We do aerating and then we can also start Christmas lights.
1669
01:29:48.957 --> 01:29:49.137
Cool.
1670
01:29:49.537 --> 01:29:53.920
And so I would say is like the first two weeks of October, all our aerations.
1671
01:29:54.360 --> 01:29:58.923
Second two weeks, all our Christmas lights, meaning we're going to do our mowing and that's it.
1672
01:29:59.423 --> 01:30:00.644
And there is no other product.
1673
01:30:00.664 --> 01:30:01.644
No cleanups are getting in.
1674
01:30:01.784 --> 01:30:03.085
No leaf cleanups are getting in.
1675
01:30:03.365 --> 01:30:04.926
No one-time project, no mulch installs.
1676
01:30:05.006 --> 01:30:07.087
Nothing else gets in in October.
1677
01:30:07.427 --> 01:30:07.828
Okay.
1678
01:30:08.068 --> 01:30:09.829
So we send a message out in September.
1679
01:30:10.469 --> 01:30:13.673
The second week of September saying, hey, for the next two weeks, we have room on the schedule.
1680
01:30:14.053 --> 01:30:16.175
Otherwise, we're booking out towards Thanksgiving.
1681
01:30:16.616 --> 01:30:18.278
If you want to get on the schedule, let me know.
1682
01:30:18.678 --> 01:30:21.501
So you pull as much of that demand back into September.
1683
01:30:21.962 --> 01:30:23.704
Then you go through October through your busy season.
1684
01:30:23.964 --> 01:30:27.328
And if someone calls in the middle of the second week of October, like, I need a prop with them.
1685
01:30:27.568 --> 01:30:27.809
Great.
1686
01:30:27.829 --> 01:30:28.970
We're booking out into November.
1687
01:30:29.330 --> 01:30:41.521
Yeah, because what happens all the time is that mowing, we always, we kind of like separate both businesses and we like think about, stop thinking about mowing and we're like, okay, let's shut down mowing and then let's start Christmas light.
1688
01:30:41.561 --> 01:30:45.004
And then the Christmas light is going to be for like from November to January, pretty much.
1689
01:30:45.124 --> 01:30:51.450
Even though I know we don't do any holiday lighting, like the third week of December, but yeah.
1690
01:30:51.650 --> 01:30:52.551
It's usually how it goes.
1691
01:30:52.611 --> 01:30:53.391
And then we stop mowing.
1692
01:30:53.411 --> 01:30:54.652
We stop doing any leaf cleanups.
1693
01:30:54.792 --> 01:30:58.915
But wow, I know we probably could pick up cleanups.
1694
01:30:58.955 --> 01:30:59.896
We could still be mowing.
1695
01:30:59.916 --> 01:31:01.637
Yeah, we could still be mowing up until December.
1696
01:31:01.797 --> 01:31:02.057
Yeah.
1697
01:31:02.337 --> 01:31:02.938
We just don't.
1698
01:31:03.458 --> 01:31:05.620
Yeah, so it's just really a matter of prioritization, right?
1699
01:31:05.920 --> 01:31:06.901
How many budget hours?
1700
01:31:08.242 --> 01:31:10.783
By having budget hours, this becomes a guessing game.
1701
01:31:10.803 --> 01:31:11.444
This is a math game.
1702
01:31:11.884 --> 01:31:14.306
It's like, okay, how many budget hours of Christmas lights do we have?
1703
01:31:14.886 --> 01:31:17.708
Okay, how many hours of aerations do we have?
1704
01:31:18.309 --> 01:31:19.970
Okay, we know exactly how much...
1705
01:31:20.530 --> 01:31:37.985
employees we need to be doing those tasks okay do we have enough room for mowing if not do i need to temporarily hire someone for a month to increase my capacity short term or can i just move jobs out of that month to make room for the cruise because i don't want to be letting go of recurring mowing for an extra two months because i got busy
1706
01:31:38.625 --> 01:31:39.326
I want to keep that.
1707
01:31:39.366 --> 01:31:40.646
That's like locked and loaded.
1708
01:31:41.087 --> 01:31:51.594
But anything on top of that, there might be a chance that you hire someone part-time for one month and you pay them extra so you can increase capacity by 30 or 40 budget hours and get really high margin services on the schedule.
1709
01:31:51.894 --> 01:31:58.218
But we don't know that unless we know how many budget hours and we know how many budget hours are above capacity and we can fill their schedule.
1710
01:31:58.458 --> 01:32:05.903
So I believe by figuring out budget hours, by the time you hit this time in October, you will have a very good understanding of how many budget hours we have for mowing.
1711
01:32:06.243 --> 01:32:07.384
How much do we have for aeration?
1712
01:32:07.624 --> 01:32:08.825
How much do we have for Christmas lights?
1713
01:32:08.885 --> 01:32:10.086
And do we have any leftover?
1714
01:32:10.446 --> 01:32:12.067
Oh, no, we're way over capacity.
1715
01:32:12.348 --> 01:32:15.890
We will need to hire someone part-time or full-time for six weeks.
1716
01:32:16.270 --> 01:32:16.390
Okay.
1717
01:32:16.410 --> 01:32:16.671
Okay.
1718
01:32:17.071 --> 01:32:18.912
That's a lot of information.
1719
01:32:19.693 --> 01:32:21.134
Yeah, that's why we're not going to do contracts yet.
1720
01:32:21.723 --> 01:32:22.004
Okay.
1721
01:32:22.064 --> 01:32:23.867
I want to say thank you to everyone for hopping on.
1722
01:32:23.967 --> 01:32:24.468
I love you all.
1723
01:32:24.648 --> 01:32:27.533
Hope you have a fantastic weekend, a great 2026 ahead.
1724
01:32:27.873 --> 01:32:28.975
I look forward to seeing you guys around.
1725
01:32:29.095 --> 01:32:29.396
Take care.