← Fullerton Unfiltered
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Brian Fullerton
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You're now listening to the Fullerton Unfiltered Podcast. Straightforward, no nonsense business advice, completely on filtered. Grow your business, grow your life. Now here's your host, Brian Fullerton. Hey, what's going on guys? Welcome to another episode of the Fullerton Unfiltered podcast. It is your host Brian Fullerton here hanging with you guys and good morning. Well folks, I will be completely honest with you. We are coming in hot with Friday morning show. We always say family first. Well last night we are actually extending our vacation or a couple of days down here in Cape Coral and we were able to go all the way up the coastline to Sanibel area and then all the way up to Captiva island or Captiva Bay, whatever it's called. It was awesome, great time. But of course as we went all the way about an hour or so drive after the Leanscaper event and after all the festivities and like I said, staying down here for an extra couple of days with the entire family, we decided to make this trek in pilgrimage all the way to just a really beautiful area side of town just to travel, explore, see what's going on out there. As you can imagine or if you have kids, you know, you know, the last 50 minute drive or leg, all the kids including the baby fell asleep. Now if you're like 21 years old, you're like, yeah, that's, that's awesome. Like that sounds good. Like what a peaceful drive. Well, if this happens at 6:00pm and you're chasing ice cream over in Captiva island and all of your kids fall asleep from 6 to 7pm 6, 7. All of you guys that are parents know, oh boy, that is probably going to end up being a crash landing just a couple of hours later. And you're totally right because there's nothing else you can really do. Once kids fall asleep, it's like you do your best to make sure that they don't fall asleep so that you time your naps. Like you ever hear the statement like don't wake the baby? These are like real things. Okay. And these are things I did not know pre kids. So there's nothing you can really do we ended up taking a long drive. Normally, what we should have done, you know, because we're still rookie parents. After our third kid, apparently, we should have been able to utilize that hour, drive on, like, the way back, right? And then that way we can just take them out of the car and roll them to bed. Well, no, no, no. We decided to spice it up. Halfway through the drive, I looked at my wife. I went, dude, we're so tired. We're just like, you know, exhausted. We're just trying to vacation, get a couple of days, recharge, like, that's the point of all this. And maybe we, like, let our guard down too much. Well, here we are driving to Captiva island at 6 o' clock at night with the kids napping, and I'm like, this is not potentially going to end well. Well, long story short, we end up getting ice cream. We end up doing the whole deal, paying, you know, 40 bucks probably for, you know, 25 cents worth of ice cream. Because logistically, to get anything on this island and all the way down and around, I'm like, I just don't understand, like, how you're gonna bring in, like, building materials and construction materials. This is like the intercoastal waterway kind of, you know, on the west side of the state of Florida. And to get everything down this way, I'm like, my gosh, just the logistics alone would double the price of anything you're bringing on the island. Right. Well, we do ice cream, have fun, do the deal. Family time. Snap the photo. Cool. Check the box. And not really, like, too much going on over that side of town that we could really figure out or find, you know, at 7:45, 8:00 at night. All right, well, let's peel back, let's head on home. And that's what we did. And again, thankfully, both kids, you know, fell asleep in the backseat. It's been a long day, you know, we're just trying to do the deal. And spent all afternoon at the beach. Well, the baby, miraculously, for about 40 minutes of the hour drive, went to sleep and kind of laid down the last 20 minutes. Holy freaking cow. You want to talk about scorched earth and, you know, baby screaming its head off. And that's what babies do. So it ended up actually not being terrible. We got home at the nick of time for the first time in a little while. I haven't had too many experiences like this, and I'm looking forward to millions more. Is carrying both of my kids to totally crashed, totally exhausted, picking them up out of the car seat. They're like a wet noodle at this point, you know what I mean? And dad taking each kid in one by one by one. Mama took, actually we got here, mom ran inside, had you know, 10 minutes to take her makeup off, get in her pajamas, wash her feet off from the sand, and then came and grabbed the baby. And then I brought each kid in one at a time. And like I said, they're just slinky, man. They're just like a wet noodle. And I'm like this, this is the fun stuff of like summertime. This is like vacation stuff. This is, you know, late nights chasing fireworks and going to bonfires. Like this is the start of that kind of season as we kind of get out of the, the brutal, the brutality of winter, right? And so long story short, came in hot, got my little crew down to bed with mom, got my daughter Emmy in her bed and was able to, you know, get the clothes off, the extra clothes off, and then just put them in bed and you know, put them to sleep. And then guess what, it's about 9, 9:30 at night. Your boy's exhausted too. Coming off two days of leanscape revenge, chasing beaches, chasing sunsets, doing the whole deal. And then I'm out too. I'm like, dude, I'm going to bed. Talk to my guys. They've got a salt run in the morning. We've got a new guy, Phil, that you guys have maybe heard about. He's coming on board. Had a couple other employee challenges. One or two weren't able to make it in. And so we're just doing logistics, you know, at 9:00 clock at night, Rob spearheading this thing while I'm gone. But we're just trying to, you know, confirm everything. My business is still small enough that I'm still attached to it, even if I'm on vacation, fortunately, slash unfortunately. And I've got some great guys that I can rely on. But you know, we're all just double checking everything and anything new that pops up, you know, this should be our last salt run for the season. But then after all that was pretty much done at, you know, 8, 9 o', clock, 10 o', clock, I'm going to bed. Wake up at, you know, 5:50 and I'm like, holy crap, I forgot to get Mr. Producer a podcast for Friday. So if this comes out a little delayed, that's why we absolutely crash landed as a family last night. Everything actually was okay, everything was good, but just exhausted. Beat in the whole deal and of course we do have a Monday, Wednesday, Friday show for you guys. And so I woke up this morning texting Mr. Producer who go figure, is awake. And because he's awesome, he's the champ and he's definitely an early bird, gets the word, kind of an individual. And he said, hey, I'm very flexible today. If you can get me a show even if it's, you know, BY you know, 9am before the family wakes up, I can process at that and get it on out. And I said absolutely, we're going to have a show today we're never going to miss and we're going to make sure that we get you guys here something today. What I wanted to do for just a few minutes is really just maybe give a high level of the leanscaper event that we just came off the heels of on Tuesday and Wednesday here in Cape Coral, Florida. By the way, never been this area, absolutely beautiful. I don't know if it's like the highest end side of town, Cape Coral. We sit at a west end and beautiful area over here. I think a lot of the wealth is like on the coast a little bit further south, Fort Myers, but again Cape Coral, absolutely beautiful, like great area. All these like intercoastal like waterway canals, channels, you know, like think subdivision home America down streets, you know, just regular, not like gated subdivisions like I'm used to in the Midwest. Just, just regular homes on regular roads. But then they have these canals that divvy every third or fourth row and you're able to like water your way around this bad boy or water taxi all over the place. And dude, it's really, really, really freaking cool. There's a huge peninsula on like the north side, the mainland to the east, east and then the coastal waterway going south and then again like this island chain on the west as it kind of rides the coast. A really, really beautiful area. I've always wanted to make it over here. One of my guys, Mark has family that comes down to this area, Snowbirds and always talks about it and yeah, like really, really nice area. Very, very impressed. And as we kind of like have traversed the west coast of Florida, you know, from like Destin to going all the way down to you know, Orlando, Tampa, Fort Myers. Now we've seen, you know, Rosemary beach, we've seen the Emerald Coast. We've you know, just been able to do a little bit more travel the last four or five years and I, I just really like this side of town. One day we'll plant our flag in the ground and probably likely end up, you know, scooping up a small home or a condo here. The dream, the dream, by the way, is like, come on down three or four months of the year and pepper back and forth between up north and down south while we're doing snow in the winter just to get away from the Michigan winters. They're, they really do weigh on you, especially if you can't leave, you know, for four or five months straight. The seasonal depression, the gray clouds, the yellow dormant everything, it does wear on you, especially as you get older. You're like, especially if you start to make a couple of bucks, you're like, dude, I, I can, I can, I can move, I can change spots, I can rent something. You can rent a home down here for a thousand, two thousand bucks a week, which is actually pretty practical for an Airbnb or for a nightly rate, right? And the big dream is to get a condo or a small home down here and be able to start like gifting a week or a couple of days to our crew leads, right? Where maybe we have a six week window between January and February where we're rotating people in and out every four or five days. And they're able to get that blessing as a crew lead, you know, for a company of Brian Saw maintenance, right? Like, that's, that's really where I see this thing in the next, like couple of years at most. Because, I mean, we can rent anything or finance anything for, you know, get a mortgage on a nice home down here. It's 2,000 bucks a month and, you know, Airbnb at the other six, seven, eight months of the year when people do want it, you know, when they come on down to travel to Florida for vacation or Disney and all that kind of mess. And then we actually want it for the other four months when it's a little cooler but still warmer to us, if that makes sense. And so that's the dream, long term. And, you know, one day we'll get there and hopefully in, you know, two or three, four years, I'll be saying, hey, we always talked about this. It's finally happening. Who wants the first week? Who wants second week of January? Who wants third week of January? Who wants fourth week of whatever? Who wants second week of February? And I just don't think that would be such an awesome blessing as long as we get the personnel and the coverage on the snow routes and the salt routes, right, to come on down and give our crew leads and you know, VIP part of the company, a certain, like, bonus or compensation, which is A couple of days here at the condo. Right. So we're not there just yet. In the meantime, I'm still paying the play and I'm still learning to grow my business. There's a lot to learn that is very evident coming off the operations intensive at leanscaper. This is actually my first event. That is my second go around. Okay, so leanscaper was birthed like January, February last year. And this full time is one year later, me giving my debrief or synopsis on four out of four events, plus our second operations intensive. All right, so I'm really, really excited about that. It's, it's actually been a very strong week. It's been a very enlightening enlightenment, if you will, kind of a couple of days. Day one had some great speakers, had some great conversations. It was awesome. No doubt about it. Day two, they dropped the hammer. And things were absolutely fantastic. The guest speakers that came in, the conversations about, you know, lean and the conversations about optimizing your operation were very granular. And I'm, I'm always seeking that kind of stuff, like, don't just give me the high level, dude, you can do it. I, I don't need that. I had 20 years. If I can do it, I need the, what the heck do I do next? And what Mark and a lot of the leaders really brought together was probably the best way to sum it up was a reality check. It's a reality check on like, what are you at? What are you doing and what are you trying to do with your business? And a lot of it stemmed from either being disciplined or being disrupted. Disciplined or being disrupted. And, you know, it's hard to give away every single tip, every single nugget. But the whole conversation was, and here's our M.O. from Brian's Law Maintenance this year. And they coincide. Coincidentally or not, this is exactly what we're trying to do in 2026. My guys know and are going to continue to know and they should be able to repeat, you know, in the next eight weeks back at anybody that we're looking to double maintenance, lawn care maintenance, we're looking to double maintenance and master the morning rollout. Because if we can do those two things, obviously sales and revenue go growth and goals. But number two, production, we need to master production. And 80, 90% of the day is going to be hinged on that morning rollout. Now, that might seem like obvious to some of you guys, maybe even like, dude, what are you talking about? It's me, I get going, or me and another guy he links up with me, or I scoop by and pick him up, or he comes by my place, hey, dude, see you at seven o'. Clock. Let's roll deep. Awesome. And that is true, like, it should be no big deal when it's just you, you and another guy. Your morning rollout is, hey, start the truck. And as long as you left the trailer coupled last night, you can roll on out in three, three and a half minutes. And you're at your first house and, you know, job, you know, by, you know, 7o, 8, right, 7, 10, and you're mowing all day. And you really, really have mastered the morning rollout. There's not really too much to do. And as you can imagine, the conversation evolves. New employees, multiple employees, multiple rigs, multiple trucks, multiple logistics of trying to get more people rolling out on time the same way and in an efficient manner. That is something that I've noticed is actually really hard to do. Not so much in like a dude. People come in, they get their and they roll out, like in a very, like, simple essence. That's all it is. But of course, you're working with people. You're working with dozens of people or whatnot. And you've got to be organized that everything and everyone has everything that they need to get the job done. They've got the route set up, they've got everything optimized, they've got everything organized. And think about, like, when it's just you and you and a guy and you've got one crew, four gas cans, one mower, and, you know, trimmer spool in your pocket, like, no big deal. Well, it is, because there's 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 things that have to go right that morning to make sure you have everything you need for the day. Well, times two crews now, there's 20 variables. Times three crews, there's 30 variables. Times 40 crews. You have, you know, 400 variables that any one thing could choke point a morning rollout by 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes or an hour. Right? And that doesn't count the landscaping side of things, which I absolutely respect and admire all of you guys that are rolling out every morning, hey, I need four yards of topsoil with four yards of base with that compact compactor, that cutoff saw or whatever you guys call all this, you know, mess. Hey, do we get the laser level from the other truck? Like, dude, I couldn't even imagine the hardscape checklist. That's why you have a hardscape trailer or hardscape dump truck, you know, that's equipped with a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand dollars worth of equipment going down the road. And here's the. The whole conversation about this event at Leemon. The idea is we are going to find our wealth in our waste. That was a direct line from the guy, Paul Akers, which got, by the way, I'm a fanboy. That guy was awesome. I ended up doing a podcast with him. You'll have it here. It come out next week, Wednesday. Please don't miss it. In the first 30 seconds, I realized, holy shit, this guy is a somebody. And I perked up and I turned it on. Like I've never turned it on before. And at the end of it I was like, dang, that was a guy was awesome. And he actually, in fact said, Brian, he goes, I'm gonna tell you, no bullshit. He goes, I've done 7,000, you know, speaking engagements and interviews. You're absolutely my best interview I've ever done in my entire career. And I'm like, oh, thank you, Paul. Like, that was awesome. Really appreciate that. He goes, no, I'm not kidding. You are awesome. You are going places. You're destined for big things. I'm super proud of what you're doing. I can tell you. You are doing lean, you're learning lean and you're going to be a master of this in just a short couple of years. And I was like, dude, thank you. Like, holy cow. Like, that makes me really like, dude, I'm trying, bro. Like, I'm trying, you know, just like everybody else. Well, by the way, side note, got done with the event. Dane, one of the guides at leanscaper, that's like their sales guys that helps you get involved with leanscaper and the accelerator program, which is like a pay to play membership. That's not Lana. Lana is like the, the chat GPT for lawn care. That's free. Use it. Please use it. It's always going to be free, they said. But if you want to get in the paid accelerator group, that's the membership. That's the online webinars that they do every Wednesday. That's the quarterly conferences. That's a $3,000 ticket that's comped once you're part of the paid accelerator program. There's the newbie tier. It's a couple hundred bucks a month. You don't get comp tickets, but you can buy them a la carte. Then the next real revenue rung is million dollar business and above. It's a fifteen hundred dollars a month commitment. So it's not for everybody. The education, I think is for people who are doing, you know, a half a million, million and above. It's a solid investment, but it's enough to get your attention. It's enough to get my attention. Right. But that's where you can now start plugging into the quarterly conferences, quote, unquote, for free, because they're comped part of your monthly membership, right? At that point you're paying a couple bucks, they're going to include those tickets and then it's a different price per tier as you go sub a million bucks. Hey, sorry. You're stuck with your boy with Link and stuck being a good thing, right? And that's why we do have link for 49 bucks a month. It's. It's an absolute steal. And until then, there's still a lot of newbies questions, newbie operational efficiencies. You know, a lot of great thought process to go from a zero to a million. It might take you a year or two, it might take you 10 years, but there's a lot to learn. Zero to a million if you want to grow and scale and do this thing right. All right, let's go back to Paul. Paul said it's all about Lean. And in his conference presentation he talked about 99 of what you do is waste. And he wrote a book called Two Second Lean. He's like the master of like the Toyota way that brought it to the us which originally started in the US by the way Lean, then it went to Toyota, then it came back. And he has mastered that in manufacturing and product design with a bunch of inventions that he's done for carpentry in that whole kind of conversation. So great interview, great guy. But he said 99% of your wealth is lost in waste. And that means like the operational inefficiency of our business. And if you wanted to distill it down to the one thing, which I'm always a one thing kind of advocate for us, that's the morning rollout. Because when guys get in at 7, 10, 7, 27, 40, you know, at a 7am start and you're losing 1, 2, 4 guys worth of production for 2 minutes, 10 minutes, 30 minutes an hour, right? Think about not only the lost wages, the lost revenue, production, the lost profit, think about that per day, think about that happening once or twice per week per crew, times 27 weeks, times 9 crews that you got going out, you can easily see how that can bleed out. 10 grand, 20 grand, 50 grand, 100 grand, straight from the bottom line. Now the Irony is, obviously everybody, every year in spring or their annual renewal date wants more money. They want to raise. They want that company bonus. And we can call this leakage, seepage, waste, whatever it is. This is where all those raises and bonuses and higher wages can be if we master our operation right. And it's not just like the silver bullet. It's not like that's exclusively what it is. Because for maintenance, I realized once my guys are out the gate, our rigs are pretty much all encompassing. We need, you know, we have double up on two trimmers, double up on two edgers, double up on two mowers, right? We've got multiple gas cans. We're looking at outfitting our Isuzu with a undercarriage transfer tank. So we've got 25 or 30 gallons. We have to, we, we can stop stopping at gas stations. At least maybe one a week instead of four times a week. Right. Or whatever the case may be once we're out. I've always said my guys are like the juggernaut, you know, out of X Men. Like, once they're moving, they're like unstoppable. Getting them in that is just like anybody, Anybody, anywhere, any company, anytime on planet Earth is always going to be a challenge. And my goal is to incentivize, empower, hire the right folks, given the right tools, with the right thought process about why it matters so much to get in at seven, out the gate at 708, crush this thing. Nine, nine and a half plus hours of production per day. Get done, get back, dump everything off, have a guy you know sub 6am post 6pm come in, clean up, fix up, store up, paint up, fuel up, whatever it takes. It's called value stream mapping, by the way. And then the next day, run it back and when you can start doing 100 per hour revenue per hour work. 1251-502005-00600. Back in the day, Mark Bradley said his snow operation at its prime with loaders and efficiency was running 1200 revenue dollars per hour rates. And in a broad sense, if you're able to allocate 25% of your revenue per hour towards labor, imagine what you could pay guys as a baseline or baseline plus bonus with that type of revenue coming in. And a lot of times you're getting squeezed like, man, things are so expensive. Like labor is through the roof. Like, I can't pay these wages. I will assure you, as I've come to find, it's the operational inefficiency, the lack of revenue being generated per hour, what it should be. That is not allowing you to, A, make profit, let alone, B, make payroll. Okay? And so at the end of the day, this stuff really hits home. Not because we have all these challenges or issues, quite far from it. But where we need to tighten up for sure, is the morning rollout. Once my guys are out there, they're awesome. They know the routes, they know what sites to cut. We've rarely. I don't think me and my team lead right now, Rob. I don't think we had a single. Maybe one, but I don't know if we even had a single callback last year. Like, that says something. Okay, I'm. I mean, like, no, kid, I don't. I'm not here to hype it up. I'm not here to, like, pretend we're anything that we're not. But we didn't have a single callback that I know of last year. And if we did, it was a. Hey, no big deal, honey. Just wanted to let you know, can you guys just grab it next week? I don't even know if we had one. So what we can fix, though, is, hey, I'm 10 minutes late. Hey, I've got, you know, kid challenges this morning. I. I'm gonna be late or I can't come in today. Hey, I got an upset stomach. Hey, I've got tummy ache. Hey, I didn't tell you about this, but I'm not going to be in on whatever day. That's the stuff that I need to operationally get more organized in and for. In our business. And it was such a rich conversation. The other part of that, and I'll just land the plane here on this, is we need to now evolve our conversation. And we are, and it's used to be, hey, just get the lawns cut by Friday. Hey, just get the Snow plowed within 24 hours. And what we're going to start moving towards with what you've heard a term maybe called scoreboards or scorecards, is this is letting your team know direct feedback, how they're doing with their route, their crew, et cetera. It's called tracking hours, actual hours versus estimated hours. So, hey, it should take you 30 labor hours to do this landscape install. It took you 34. Hey, like, what happened there? Like, let's talk about it. Was it the price wasn't correct, which didn't give us enough hours, or was there operational efficiencies? Because again, we forgot the compactor. Somebody had to go back and forth, you know, Maybe Google Search or Aslana or Chap. Hey, what's the Golden Hammer Mark Bradley edition version? And we forgot the Golden Hammer. Right. We had to go back, lost a couple of hours. Like, that's the kind of stuff we're talking about in landscaping for mowing. Hey, you had 40 hours to get 40 sites done. Took you 44 hours to get those 40 sites done. What happened? Oh, well, the local bridge was out. We got stuck in two hours of traffic on Tuesday, and then again, it happened on Thursday. They shut the road down. Oh, we didn't. We. Nobody knew. Okay. Like, that's a real challenge. Like, going over these islands in, you know, this general area of town, Cape Coral. And then also going over, like, back in the day, Anna Maria, Bradenton area. Dude, like, depending on traffic timing, drawbridges going up or down, just traffic flow in general, you could add an hour to your route anytime. In fact, we were looking to stay on Sanibel, but I told my wife, hey, I can't drive an hour into leanscaper each morning at the west end. I said, if I get pinched on traffic and I'm late, dude, everything's screwed. So we decided to stay, like, in an Airbnb seven minutes from the hotel and said, drive an hour later with the family. So we didn't mess up our logistics because our number one priority this week, first one was leanscaper, then number two was vacation. That makes sense on, you know, leanscaper esque days when it's on vacation days, hey, we're on vacation and let's go drive. And let's let our kids fall asleep at 7 o' clock at night. Right. Last but not least, like I said, estimated versus actual hours. That's what I'm using Element and our bookkeeper and our fractional CFO that we've upgraded to with Cycle to start getting me that data, then take it to Pat with Ford coaching to build out our scorecards. Hey, what, what do I need to do? How do I present this? How do I rule it out? How can I equip my guys? In fact, your team and your folks are a lot smarter than you guys would ever think. And I'm embarrassed to say, like, I'm always continuously impressed with how smart my guys are. Because when I said, does this make sense, guys? We're talking about estimated versus actual. And somebody said, yeah, the crew app, is that like the green tachometer, the green scorecard where gives you. You like your crew efficiency score? I go, yes, like, it's always been green for Us, we've like, unless there's a fluke or a one off or a tidy up, it's a yellow or, you know, whatever. If it even does change colors. I think this, maybe it shows on the back end office, but it's always been green for us because we're always, like I said, efficient. We've always done a pretty good job. Now we've got a lot of room to improve. But again, my guys are like, is that the difference between actual man, like that whole tachometer thing, the efficiency score? I said yes. They go, oh yeah. I've never really like looked at it. We just do the route. I'm like, exactly. Does that make sense? And so these are some of the things that we're looking to, to do. We've got a lot of little systems and a lot of little processes that we need to refine as we continue to optimize the morning rollout. Where does that come from by the way? That's going to come from more conversations, more team meetings and more training about how we can get organized as a team, as a company. What's working, what's not working to get us out the door to have a ten hour day and be revenue producing for nine or nine and a half hours of it. Does that make sense? And it's not to again, squeeze every dime out of what we're doing, but in a pretty direct fashion, it's the squeeze every dime out of what we're doing. And then with that extra dime that we have, we're able to divvy it up into more wages, higher wages, more revenue, profit split, and of course new reinvestment into the company for company growth. All right. One of the best humdingers was, you know, you don't have time at 7am to fix all this stuff. This is stuff that you have to master the night before, the day before. I've always heard that, I've always known that. I've always said that because I Learned that about 20 years ago with setting out your outfit the night before for your next day. I'm that dork that does that. And actually was telling a funny story to somebody. It might have even been Paul on that show that I used to do that. My wife and I were like newlyweds or dating even. And she's like, what are you doing? I'm like, I'm getting, I'm getting my outfit out for the next day. And I was in the self help journey already. And she's like, for what? And I go, so I know what I'm wearing tomorrow so I don't have to think about it at 7am When I got to go to work. She goes, it only takes like two minutes to figure it out. I go, it does. Until you realize that clothes is dirty, something's in the wash, something's in the dirty basket, and you're not ready to rock and roll in the morning. And now you're running around like a chicken with your head cut off. She's like, whatever, dude. Like, you know, like you're. You're lucky you're cute. You know, like one of those deals. And I'm like, no. Like, this is really important stuff. Well, 20 years later, you gotta, you know, go to a conference to hear from some guru named Paul Akers, who's like the godfather of all this, saying, hey, the night before, you know, lay out your outfit, get rid of all this waste. And I'm like, oh, my God. Like, dude, this is so funny, right? So I have heard that what I need to do, obviously, is get better at doing that with our business. And we do a fantastic job. I couldn't be more happy and more impressed with the guys. Like, I don't have to be convinced that this is important, but again, operationally, it's all stuff that we need to continue to get back together and get tighter on and to clean up. Mornings, confirm your operation. They don't create them. Right. Mornings, confirm your operations. They don't create them. You can sell all the work that you want and at the highest price, but nothing matters if you're inefficient. That's a humdinger right there. All right, well, there's a lot more notes that I could share. An incredible morning rollout structure. In fact, there's a new morning rollout agent. Is what they call it part of Lana. Lana is free. Punch in your information, punch in your conversation, punch in what you want to have happen with the morning rollout. Like a chat GPT, if you will. It'll give you an exact spit out time schedule. Hey, zero to two minutes, two to four, four to eight, eight to 12, 12 to 15, you know, minute marks. Here's what we should be discussing. Here's how we roll out every morning. Every morning. This was, by the way, documented in our spring shop tour with Etch Outdoor this same time last year. The out the gate at 708. That's a phrase that I heard from him and I know he same Rankin borrowed it from somebody else. And Sam says, we get in there, this is what we do. Everybody Picks their routes, Everybody picks their stuff. They log in, they punch in, they grab keys, warm up trucks. And while that's happening, we do our morning stretches. We do it in front of the employee door with the white PVC pipe, doing our stretches. That way folks have to come through the circle, right? As a public accountability to be on time. A public shame, if you will, that you're late, dude. And that's why we do the morning circle in the yard. 30 people doing windmills with or, you know, stretches with their PVC tube, which I love that idea, right? It's a little safety brief in the morning. Cover anything that's important. Everybody's out the door. 7, 7, 10, 7 15, right? That was documented in that shop tour that we did last year with that child door. Like, that's what some of these great businesses and teams are doing. All right. There's a lot more that I could go into. I'm looking at my notebook here and I'm just like, holy cow. The line that was one of his humdingers was, Toyota knows that 95% of what they do is pure waste or non value added activity. Non value added activity. He goes, what do you think it's like in your life, both personally and professionally? And we were all joking and the crowd's roaring and it's engaging and this guy's just super dynamic and a fun speaker. And we're all like 99%, in fact, never to miss a dull moment and a chance for another humdinger and a zinger with Caleb Allman. He goes, we're about 105% the true self deprecating humor king. That was great, folks. It was a great time. It was a really great conference. We learned a ton. The friendships, the relationships, everything we were discussing, what a, what a fantastic environment. The team did an amazing job. The speakers did an awesome job. The guest speakers were incredible. I might even try to see if we could scoop up one or two to bring them to lal like they were that good. There's a lot more that was shared. There's a lot more conversations Dean Carrigan was able to share. He rolled deep with Tony Robbins for 20, 25 years. He talked a lot about mindset and it was, it was thick conversation, tears were flowing. All right. Mark Bradley talked about some traumatic events lately and how that shaped him into searching out how to be and continue to be a more gratitude, more, you know, locked in individual, to become a more enlightened individual, you know, to like, not let this fleeting moment of life pass you and how to create more margin in your life, in your mental. It was some heavy stuff, folks. This is not stuff that you're going to get at, you know, Equip Expo and nor should it be. They're there to sell you some equipment. But if you're not coming here and really you're not plugged into like Launchmeter Academy or Link, you know, etc. Like, I don't know where else you're going to get access to this kind of stuff. And that's why we make the investment. That's why I bring my kids down. And yes, we were spending time at the pool and yes we were hanging out, you know, the day or two before and the day or two after here. But that's how my family Liz goes, man, like this is, this is crazy. Like you know, renting a house and doing all this stuff and the logistics to get here. But I'm like, honey, like where else are we going to get this? She's like, no, you're right. Like we have to make the investment. It's not cheap for me to come down here any cheaper than it is for you guys. Plane tickets cost the same amount. For me, time away from the business could be doing almost anything else. But if we don't make the investment, if we don't go, if we don't start figuring this crap out, we'll always get what we've always got. And so that's why we have to make it a priority. And I'll tell you what, now that we're a year deep and we're immersed in it and we're taking action on it, we're starting to see a lot of the results because of it. The year before 2024 had like 1% true net profit and like 10 growth with Brian's Law Maintenance. And we had a little bit of slush in there with the shop build and the, the home build and all that mess because there was just a lot of one time expenses. But you know, like the scaffolding, the, the lev rack, the, the loft, dude, you know, just like one off concrete, one off H vac, you know, for the barn. Like that stuff adds up. So we would have been, you know, I don't know, 5 to 7%, let's say not, not anything super grand. But this year, 2025, that we came off the heels of 15% growth, 15% true net. That's a solid, stable, happy little business. And I'm really proud of that. I might, and I know my team is. I told him that at the team meeting like you guys should be very proud of that we're running a very good business. But it's very obvious to me as well that with that's the numbers we posted up with what I do know, with what we did or didn't do operationally. And my guys would tell you the exact same thing. There's no doubt that in a way we probably could have generated more sales for sure. But let's just say that's a flat 15% still growth. We could have easily had a 20 to 25% that for the company, no doubt about at least 18 to 20%. There is that much operational inefficiency in what we were doing and that I have no problem spending that money back into wages and reinvesting that money back into wages and profit share. And that's the idea, that's the mindset here, is to start getting your crew, your crew leads, to start thinking like owners and incentivizing them to be force multipliers in your business. That's the whole ball of wax right there. All right, folks, well, that's what I got for you today. I hope you guys enjoyed the show. If you need anything in the meantime, shoot me a dm, shoot me an email. I'm always here for you. SOP Bundle is going to launch mid to end of March here in about another week, week or two. Look forward to checking that out. More on that probably next week, Wednesday. We've got a lot going on here, a lot of moving pieces. About 15 new commercial leads came through with our marketing push on Monday. That'll be a whole nother podcast probably for next week. I'm very excited about where things are trending and where things are going and we're just getting this thing started. Happy Spring 2026 to all of you and we look forward to catching up with all of you guys here on the next one. A lot of you guys know and love Postcard Mania. And you guys know from launchpreneuracademy.com we have the postcard designs that you guys can purchase and then take over to Postcard Mania to print and even get some customization for the postcard. Marketing is one of the best ways to get new customers. I love it. I'm a believer.
- [38:01]
Samantha
We do everything and it's all done here in house. The great thing is that everybody is here in one building. We have great communication between every single one of our departments. So no matter what type of product you're getting, you're going to be dealing with somebody that can literally Walk over to somebody's desk and talk to them so we don't outsource anything.
- [38:19]
Postcard Mania Client
I had first heard of Postcard Mania at a conference that I was at. It was actually Brian Fullerton's conference in Novi, Michigan. It was the LauncherPreneur Academy live conference. We tracked roughly 70 new clients through call tracking everywhere small business and the postcard mailing. To date, we had received roughly $52,000 in increased revenue. This season alone, we expect to generate roughly $122,000 in sales. So that equates to about $172,000 over the course of the season.
- [38:47]
Brian Fullerton
I was scrolling through YouTube trying to get some business insights and I found this guy Brian's lawn maintenance on YouTube. The response from our first mailing was actually incredible. I got three phone calls at launch for three estimates that same day and they were for mowing and landscaping quotes. Out of those three, I got two customers for year round mowing and a large landscape job out of it.
- [39:14]
I got about 41 leads and 31 new clients for the total of my campaign. The amount of revenue I expect to generate from from my 31 new clients this year would be probably around 55 to 65,000.
- [39:28]
Postcard Mania Client
I mailed out 3,000 postcards and made 27 sales, generating roughly $41,000 in sales.
- [39:35]
Brian Fullerton
We spent about 3 to $4,000 on the campaign and we ended up getting about $45,000 in revenue out of the campaign, which was an insanely high roi, which was great in my eyes. The reason I linked up with these guys was we made post postcards that are effective. They're a proven design, they're simple, they're niched down, but they're not too specific where you're going to get pigeonholed offering a service that you can't do. And then what you do is you email Samantha and her team, take the art file to them. Free edits on the design. All right, so maybe there's a service you don't offer or you wanted to add your own photos. They can do that for you.
- [40:08]
Samantha
Don't be the last to do it. You guys should start and get your marketing going. We make it super, super easy.
- [40:13]
Brian Fullerton
There you go.
- [40:14]
Brian has the best rates just for you. When it comes to using Postcard Mania, use the link in the podcast description and save immediately.
- [40:24]
Podcast Narrator
Thanks for taking the time to listen to the Fullerton unfiltered podcast with Bryan Fullerton. We hope you enjoyed this production. If so, please consider leaving us a five star review for the show. While the techniques and ideas presented here are designed to help you grow a more successful and profitable business. No one can get guarantee these results for you. We want to emphasize that entrepreneurship is not easy and the ideas presented here are just the opinions of Brian Fullerton and his respective guests. No one can guarantee success for you. That being said, we hope the ideas presented here help you and motivate you to go on out there and crush it with your own business.
- [40:58]
Brian Fullerton
Fullerton Unfiltered Podcast thanks for listening and
- [41:01]
Podcast Narrator
we hope to see you on the next episode.
- [41:04]
Brian Fullerton
This has been a Brian Fullerton and Mr. Producer Production.