B (12:26)
all right gang, well I want to jump back into it here with about four or five bullet points that I wrote down to help you guys out with your cash flow. Having more finances, you know, more money on hand and really trying to navigate the spring rush most effectively when it's one of the busiest and most expensive times of the year. I'm gonna go with some low hanging fruit here and we're gonna dissect a couple of these as we continue to go. But I will just tell you, please don't just gloss over these or hear them and Then just say, oh, I've heard that before. Like I really want you guys to do a litmus like, am I doing these systems or processes in your actual company? And if not, this isn't a, hey, fix it, you know, in three months, six months, 12 months, or I'll get that next winter. Dude, this is a fix it this week, next week situation and scenario. Every one of you guys listening in can and yes, we're going to talk about charge cards on file and some of the basics that you've heard me talk about in Champion for many, many a times before. But I'll just tell you, do you have everybody's card on file? I mean everybody. Not, you know, 90%, I'm talking a hundred percent. Are they all getting tagged up on time on Friday? Like we're going to get into some of this here, but I just want to encourage you guys, don't just gloss over and think you've already heard this episode before. Let's take it from the top. The first one I want to talk about is. And here, hear me out. Do you have a good CRM to manage your actual workflow? Look, I couldn't care less if you utilize Element. I think it's a fantastic platform for anybody doing, you know, 3, 400 grand and above Element starter. You've heard me talk about it ad nauseum for, you know, two years. Nothing in terms of charging and finances and budgeting and what we should price. Absolutely nothing has changed our business more than getting on and utilizing lmn. And I always thought it was design build software hardscape guys synced up versus Element versus Aspire. You know, big business, you got to do a million bucks, you know, and all this stuff, hardly from it, hardly from the case. Like I, I just didn't know what I didn't know and frankly I just don't think it was communicated to me or my pay grade effectively at that time. Over the last five, seven, ten plus years and now that I, you know, have literally went all in on the platform and we utilize it for every single thing that we do from you know, setting our financial budget to importing customer data, figuring out our price list, creating estimates. Estimates turn into jobs jobs. We have our schedule and our calendar view. From there it creates timesheets on the crew app in the field. That's how we log work the look word that we, the work that we log generates timesheets and then we invoice on those through an invoicing schedule or a charge credit file. Then we can export all that data to QuickBooks. Nothing has changed my business more than Element. But let's just say, for example, sake, you're not there. Let's say you want to utilize Jobber or Yardbook. Fantastic platforms, fantastic systems and processes, fantastic software. Some are free, some are 100 bucks a month, some are 200 bucks a month. Folks, here's what I'll just tell you. Please get on something if you're still out there, pen and paper in this thing, or Excel, you know, file or folks, even worse, you're not utilizing one of these big three, big four, big five platforms, I'll just tell you. And I don't know how to say this without being mean. You're just wasting time. Like, why reinvent the wheel? You know, I can't tell you how many other times I've seen other people, even other influencers say, oh, you should use this software or you should use this for whatever reason why shape or form. Some of them at equity stakes, some of them get a kickback, some give an excessive kickback because, you know, they're able to pay different margins. But some of these have went belly up and defunct and you know, there, there's, there's just not the big ones that have all the bells and whistles. You can't be jobber. They have 100,000 customers, I think I saw now. Congrats to them, by the way. And they have literally infinite money it seems, with VC money to put into the platform. Fantastic. Good for them. Same thing with Yard Book Market. Yard Book, fantastic people. There's another mark out there with that, owns Yard Book with his team of investors. Fantastic platform. I use that platform for six or seven plus years before we made the switch to Element. Still awesome, still fantastic. Everything we're talking about today, we're able to manage through Yardbook, where we kind of outgrew it was we didn't have a system and a budget for pricing our work. Part of that system, it just doesn't exist. It's different software. There's, there's no budgeting software with Yardbook and Jobber. Not an indictment. But again, like do you need to Worry about that sub 3, 400 grand in revenue? Yes. But no, because when you're in the field, you're able to work, you're able to comp these nuances of being up or down 10% because you're doing all the labor. So you're always profitable on the work that you do. It doesn't work like that when you send people out in the field to do the work on your behalf as the company and you're hoping to, you know, make 10, 15, 20, 25% margin. So that's where LMN comes into play and the synced ups and maybe even the aspires if you're growing a 10, 20, 50, $100 million organization. So number one, I don't want to gloss over it, but for the love of God, utilize a CRM, utilize some software and actually use it. Don't just use it for the 2, 3, 4, 5 top features and functions. Learn the platform intimately. All right? I know so many folks that are like, oh, I use this platform but we invoice a different way or we use this platform but we also use this other software or design build or we use this other software to capture our books or use this other, you know, form or mode of taking payment. And I'm like, why are, why are we doing that? We are all in from soup to nuts. Everything I do is with Element. And by the way, this is like a last 24, 30ish month process. I've only been with Element for like 2 plus years, bro. And if I can learn it doing 700 other fricking things in my life, you can learn it and use it as a 23 year old guy with seven team members doing a half a million bucks and you literally have nothing else. And I say this with love, nothing else to worry about and no other major life responsibilities, you know what I'm saying? You're still living at home or you got an apartment and all you think about is the business. That's awesome folks. If I can learn Element and it's a 20, 30, 50 hour commitment, I assure you you can learn that or even something probably a little bit more simple like a yard book or a jobber, right? So I don't want to just take it from the top and say everybody here is doing $700,000 and has a team of five guys and you need to use LMS like I get it, there's a big spectrum of people out there. My encouragement though, let's just keep it simple. Everybody needs to be using some type of software to help enhance your whole process of being more organized. Number two, let's go to some of the more simple low hanging fruit is having an automatic way to bill and we'll get the charge, but to bill. I know a lot of softwares out there have an auto generate invoice at the time of completion of service, or you can do seven equal monthly payments or you know, whatever you set your payment terms up, you know, consistently build out on the 1st. If your software offers that, and I know Yardbook does, and I know LMN does, then why would you not take advantage of that set up in that operation right at the end of the day? If you can do that, then that's one less thing that you have to worry about. And I would highly encourage you guys to spend a few minutes and again learn the most that you can about that software and platform and do your best to set up your invoicing in a way to where it's automatically done for you. Now I'm not saying that you charge cards and files or sent that invoice. I'm just saying figure out a way to where it auto generates. Because I'm not naive or too far removed from being in the field or being an owner operator to not know that once work is completed, we need to generate an invoice and then double check the invoice, meticulously double, triple check that invoice and then send it out. But think of it this way. What if you could have 100 residential customers on an auto invoice schedule or once you complete the work you mark completed and it populates an invoice, let's say, I think, I think you can do that in jobber, obviously. Or you have a commercial site and you have 7 or 8 or 9 or 10 or 12 month equal payments or lawn or lawn and snow or snow only like whatever you're doing, but it's just auto generated on the first of the month and then you have it in an invoicing group. So I don't want to talk about charge cards on file or you know, getting paid on time. I'm talking about generating your invoices in a very consistent and organized manner. My guys are 100% exclusively. We use Element Crew. There's nothing we miss. If there is, it's because there's a note and the note is hey, we skipped or we're circling back to we skipped it, we're coming back tomorrow. We don't log work any other way. We don't text work any other way. There's no email follow up system any other way. Every single thing is done, monitored, tracked and updated in Element Crew. It's very, very simple. Now if there's a one off situation, I get a phone call, I email the office email, I email Marge our admin va and then we can make an adjustment to where maybe we have to move a day of the schedule for that client to, from a Wednesday, cut to Thursday because they got skipped. But all communication and all processes are done inside the app. Do your best to utilize the software the best you can. From the the guy that's been with you the longest, that's the most sold out to the newest guy on the team. They should know how to log work in whatever software or whatever processes you do in your business so nothing gets missed. All right, So I don't want to just say charge card on file. Like dude, you got to generate the damn work and invoices first. And if your team can't all do that and you're missing timesheets and you're missing work, getting punched in, stop rushing out the door. Take the hour that you don't think you have and go frickin do a team meeting. I don't care if you have a locker or a shop. Go to Panera Bread, go to Dunkin Donuts, pull out an iPad and do an hour long training. Make the investment. Anybody here can do that. And I used to do that stuff all the time before we had a meek little Mickey Mouse shop at my house. You don't need some giant, you know, setup. You can do it inside your shipping container, you can go to Panera, have everybody come hang out in your garage, in your basement, do whatever works, right? Whatever. Do a zoom. Do a zoom meeting. It doesn't have to be anything fancy. Hey everybody, it's raining until 11 o' clock today, delayed start. But we're going to do a 9 o' clock zoom. Everybody can hop on a zoom or teams meeting. Okay, let's keep going. Outside of utilizing software, outside of having a way to generate auto bill out your invoices, obviously the next thing I would encourage you guys to do is create a system or a process to charge cards on file regularly and invoice for the work you're doing regularly. And I don't get, I'm not saying you need to do all this, but somebody could and somebody should. And I'll tell you, super awesome win for Brian's Law Maintenance and Brian Fullerton. Just last week it was Friday afternoon, what my guys finished up work on Thursday at 5 o' clock and everything was done. And we're going into the second round of billing our charge cards on file for all of our residential clients and we're going into the second round of billing all of our commercial sites on the 1st. So at my company residentials charge card on file at the end of the week and commercial is billed on the first, no if, ands ors or buts about it. We have one out of like 40 plus commercial sites that is built at the end of the month because they're selling that building. And so we're just doing an accrual situation where any work that accrues we just charge, I should say invoice at the end of the month. We're going to have them as a customer for 30, 60, 90 days. Whenever they sell this building, hopefully we continue to get the next customer, the next tenant. But every single person is billed on the first of the month in an invoicing group. So we click the Invoice Group on LMM. It populates that build on the first of the month, 20, 26, we have 3540 invoices that populate. We click through each one just to make sure it says May, you know, monthly services, may, monthly services, may, monthly services for this business, that business, this business. We check the name, we check the month, we check the total amount and we can batch approve, we can batch send. And 35 invoices go out for probably $25,000 worth of work, $30,000 worth of work. Build out immediately on the first and all the residential. It's charge credit file, charge credit file, charge kind of file. We continuously go through each one for now to meticulously make sure that every timesheet and invoice looks accurate. And then we can batch out 38 or 42 residentials within, you know, 20 or 30 minutes. Really. We could bulk approve in bulk charge card, but we're going through a week by week obviously right now still, as it's only our second week under our belt. Well, what's the big win? What's the big breakthrough? Here it is. I didn't do it because we have the SOPs and we have the systems and the processes and we have the office admin VA help to do it. Your boy wasn't the one doing it. At Friday at 2 o', clock, you know what I was doing? Taking my family to a late lunch, to a restaurant and I was driving with my wife and I said, you know what? Marge is doing end of month right now and beginning a month, end of month, AKA beginning of month. She's you know, sending out our first of the month invoices and charging cards on file. So I just call end of month. I said, you know what's interesting? And I've been doing this for 20 years, 12 months per year. That's 240 end of months that I've done in my career. Think about it for some of you guys listening in, there's not three more words in the English language that I hate more than end of month. Not only have I done it 20 years for lawn care, I've done 20. I've done four or five years end of month for Little Caesars when I was a store manager. End of month, final numbers. You know, all this relates to your bonus and your P. L and whether or not you have a job. You know, when I used to work at TruGreen, it was what was your production for the month? End a month, end a month. End a month. End a month, end a month. Anybody who is self employed or is in a sales position has heard and said the words end of month. It's just what you do. It's just what you say. It's just what it is. It's end of month. And that's a financial conversation, that's a business conversation. Well, here's a quick tip. For the first time in 240 months, somebody else did end of month. When I tell you I'm excited and this stuff works. And the SOP bundle that we just launched where there's a whole video on how we do end of month invoicing and charge cards on file, let alone how to add a charge card on file and the systems and the process to do that. And again, the more we continue to see gaps in the training, we're going to continue to add more videos to that SOP bundle. But to show you guys proof of concept, took five or six months to get there. It should take you guys five or six weeks because you actually have the videos, the documents, all this crap and the SOP bundle. But to tell you that Friday at 1:32 o', clock, I'm taking my family to a local restaurant for a late lunch and somebody else is doing my billing and charge cards on file and billing out about 30, I don't know, 30 to $35,000 worth of work, maybe more. I don't know, 30, $35,000 worth of work. And it's not me. And I'm telling this to my wife and she goes, dude, I'm so like, you're, you're awesome. I'm so excited for you and I'm so proud of you. And I'm like, I'm proud of me too. Every single month for 240 months, I have cringed at doing end of month because I hate doing it. I just don't like doing it. I despise it, I detest it. I don't want to do it. I hate being so detail in every fricking invoice. Every single process, every single do we get everybody? And so when I tell you guys, log every single piece of work and every single action with timesheets, with emails with your VA and have a system and a process to do it, I'm telling you from firsthand experience when I would do it in a month. Like, I don't. Do we, like mow Mrs. Smith's lawn that third week of July? Or was it cold out or too hot or was the grass burned out? Was it crispy? Did we still mow it just to, like make stripes? Like, I don't know, three and a half weeks ago? And if you don't think I don't remember, do you think the team remembers either? Hell no. Right? We don't have to worry about that anymore. We haven't had situations and problems like that for over a year and a half since we've really gotten everybody onboarded and utilizing crew. It really is like that awesome. It really is that good. And for any of you guys that are like, well, my team won't do it, or they won't adopt or dude, let them go, or give them an ultimatum or tell them, this is how it is, this is what we're doing 30 days from now, you don't like it, you don't have to work here. Well, I'm going to lose one or two guys. Bye. My guys all figured it out. I didn't have one of them fuss. I didn't have one of them wine. Well, you have. Your guys are different. No. Maybe the way I'm explaining it to them is different. And they see the reason and the benefit and the upside for me in the office, for them in the field, and for the company in whole. So how we can take this thing to a larger outfit, it's not going to be with time sheets and pen and paper and little text message communiques. That doesn't work when you have five crews, let alone 25 crews. Okay, so let's go back full circle. Charge cards on file and billing equal payments on the 1st. We're talking about how to get our cash, get our cash fast and keep cash on hand. There has to be a system in processing for invoicing. You guys do you. For us, we bill all of our residentials on Friday at the end of the week and charge credit file at the end of the week. And. And all of our commercials are invoiced on the first of the month. It's very Simple. It's very streamlined. We used to do charge cards on file at the end of the month, but we moved it to a weekly, which just helps offset our regular expenses and our payroll and just helps us to get our cash on hand. And also, by the way, it helps us from, you know, mowing somebody's lawn for four or five weeks and then realizing they're a deadbeat and they go, oh, like, yeah, we sold the property. We, we thought we texted you guys and go, no, no, nobody texted us. They go, oh, sorry, we don't live there anymore. And you're like, yeah, no, I'm going to charge your card. So for 250 bucks to go, yeah, we, we, we, we haven't lived there for the last month. You can catch up with the new homeowner. I'm like, no, no, it's your job. And then you go to charge card on file before they do a, you know, duck and run and they've already canceled that card on you or remove their card on file. Even better. And you're like, I'm out for 250 bucks. And then you go to the new homeowner, hey, you owe me 250 bucks to go, oh, we, we don't want to hire you. We're going to mow it ourselves. Like, these are real situations and scenarios that have happened to me and Lord knows the probably 2, 5, $10,000 that I've just taken on the chin, dude, over 20 years. Okay? So learn from my mistakes and learn from the mistakes of others, especially if you're brand new to this thing. All right? So like I said, let's just take it from the top. Have a CRM, have a way of logging work, have a way of invoicing work, have a way of charging that work and billing frequently. And one of the last few here as we wind down is have a follow up system to make sure that your invoicing was received. And if you have any invoices that are late that they're followed up on, that's huge. Huge, huge, huge, huge. And for me, that was one of probably the last crinks in the armor or bottlenecks in the process. In the system was making sure that we were getting paid for our commercial work. And a lot of times I noticed my receivables were ballooning a lot more than they should have been. And what would have been a net 30 invoice was taking 40, 50, 60, 70 plus days to be received. And half of it was them and the other half was me. Now if you, you know, take full ownership, 100 of this problem is my fault. But practically speaking, half the time they just didn't receive the invoice or somebody had a personnel changed or an invoice wasn't approved or wasn't followed up on or fell through the cracks or you know, who, whatever the black hole got it. And the other half was, I didn't follow up with them in a timely fashion. For example, if an invoice is NAT30 on day 32D34, they better be getting a reminder invoice saying, hey, we just wanted to check the status of invoice 2456. If they say, oh, we never received invoice 24 or 56, you go, oh, no big deal, let me invoice it for you right now. By the way, can we keep this on a net 30 payment schedule? It would have been due today. Would you guys mind doing a rush and an expedited payout on your next payout cycle? Normally businesses pay out bi weekly, you know, let's say the 4th and the, you know, 17th of the month or whatever it is. And they can say, well, yeah, actually I can get this on this week's payment run. You'll get it by Friday. That's rare. But sometimes it does happen. But more than likely they'll say, oh, no problem, we'll get on the next pay run two weeks now. And that's better having it paid two weeks after you notify them that, hey, they're doing their net 30 than to let them just process it on their timeline. They don't give a. And it's still going to be another net 30 when they enter it into the system. And then it goes out on their pay, you know, payout run on the following month, you know, the 4th of the month. And now you're like 30, 35 days out from the 30th day being due. So your invoice is getting paid 60 or 65 days out. Does that make sense? These are all little systems and processes and things that we've learned as we continue to pursue in court and earn new commercial work that are very, very critical. These are big Invoices, these are $400 monthly invoices, 1700 dollars a month invoices, $2700 a month and $3700 a month invoices. These are big cash flowing chunks of your business and you need to absolutely have those funds in the checking account. The last thing I'll say on that is, do you have a system in process to follow up with these folks on the 21st, all of our customers are getting an invoice reminder because it's net 30 and I expect it to be paid on day 30, not day 32, not day 40. It's nat 30. I want it paid on day net 30. Or here's a tip, you can pay your invoice early. I know it's a world shocker. You know, breaking news, Fox 2, news at 10 here, CNN put it on the Chiron. You can pay an invoice early, but who would have thought about that? And by the way, we have a lot of customers that do and those are great. And guess who, when they call, we hall pick up for the people that pay, not only on time, but fast. But on day 21, we're sending out an invoice reminder for all net 30 invoices. And on Mondays and Fridays we have a process to follow up on our receivables about what's owed to us. And that is those soft reminders for any invoice that happens to eclipse past nat 30. I've utilized cycle CPA for that. I said, hey, blank check, throw me a number. They said, what's your workflow? What's your process look like? I go, do it. Extremely simple, very streamlined. I said, we have no outstanding invoices over net 60 in the history of my company. Currently we have, you know, maybe a dozen over net 30. Those are easily just needing to be either a touch base with or B they could have already paid. And it was an ach. I just haven't reconciled it. They said, well, what other ways you get paid? I go, we have three or four different processes on how we get paid. But anybody could easily manage this process in the system. They looked at it, they said, hey, it'll be this amount of an investment for us on hours with one of our team members to look at it on Mondays and Fridays. Here's the total for the month. They shot me a number. It was a couple hundred bucks. I said, done, Absolutely done. I'm willing to make that investment for somebody to put a half hour, you know, boots in the ground Mondays and Fridays, looking at our receivables and looking at our Chase bank bank account to reconcile any ACH payments or to process any virtual cards in the card terminal. Very simple stuff. They gave me a number. I said, sounds great. Can I promise that they'll do that for anybody or everybody? No, but anybody here can hire or has an office VA admin that can do this stuff. I'm Just giving you some systems and processes that work for us. Mondays and Fridays we touch base with everybody because that's just what works. You can do once a week on Wednesday, you can do bi weekly on Wednesday. Don't know, don't care. My point is, have a process to follow up with on these invoices, especially for commercial, so they don't get exhausted and they don't get forgotten and they don't get fallen through the cracks and paid out on a net 30 basis on day 45, 50, 60, 70, 90 days later. That's preposterous. It's absurd. You can't. You are not people's bank. You're not people's bank and you need that cash. Last but not least, here's one that I'll just leave the leave you guys with. And this is a. Well, no Sherlock, price your work profitably enough to be able to put cash in the bank so you don't have to go hand to mouth, fire to fire, waiting for your cash. Well, it sounds kind of counterintuitive to the urgency that I just put on from number one to five or whatever I just listed. But you know what also helps? Having a reserve. Having 20, 30, 50, 100, 250,000. A half a million. A million dollars in the bank, depending on your size. Business. No bullshit. Everybody is going to live and die on their receivables. I don't know what your magical burn rate number is. Three weeks, six weeks, eight weeks, three months. Six months. Everybody's number is different. I've heard Dave Ramsey quote this, I've heard that guy quote that. I've heard this guy say pre. Covid. We did this. Post Covid. We did that. Pre pandemic. Getting locked down. We did this. Pre. Post. Pandemic. We did that. Look, dude, I don't know and I don't care. You want to keep 30 days cash on hand, God bless you. You want to keep 60 days cash on hand, God bless you. You wanna keep six months operating expenses, cash on hand in a savings account for your landscaping company. God bless you all. I will just tell you, you can't do that unless you're obviously profitable. So stop sucking money out of your fricking business and leave some in the damn account for once. Pad stats. You know, it's so easy to walk away from unprofitable work when you have money in the bank. Well, that's easy for you to say. You've got money in the bank. I will tell you, just like many things in life, the sooner you act as if the sooner you will materialize that and it'll come to fruition. And when you stop taking on low work, low bid work, and low price work, and you stop going, you know, grasping for straws and just trying to make anything happen, when you start being, I don't need anything from anybody. I don't need to do this. You need me. I don't need you. You play a little hard to get, etcetera, etcetera. Like, you will not only be able to choose the work that you want, but you'll get it at the price that you deserve. And that's a fact. And it's kind of hard for you to conceptualize that when you're 18, 20, 25 years old. You've only been doing this thing for three or four years, but once you have been doing this for four, five, six, seven, eight, nine years, you get it. You know what I'm trying to say? When somebody says, hey, how much for the lawn? And you're like 60 bucks. And they go, how about 50? You go, how about no? How about I freaking leave? And if you say something stupid again and insult me, I'm leaving because that's what you're doing. This isn't. Name your price, lawn care. I gave you a price based on the actual tangible numbers that I need to not only charge, but not only for my cost, for my break even, plus my 20% net. I know where I need to be. It's absurdly rude for you to just lob out a number at me. So if you want to be. Continue to be rude, I will not stand here on your property any longer. You need me. I don't need you. Well, lawn care is a commodity. Not my business. It's not. Not my skilled guys, that's not. Not my guys that actually care and show up. Not. Not the plow trucks that we have are not. You want to go find commodity lawn care, go ahead. I'll give you the phone number to every single gas station that has a stupid yard sign in the corner, mowing grass and, you know, a black permanent mark on a white three by, you know, four sign with, you know, Chuck in the truck. You want somebody like that, go call that dude. We don't need anything from anybody. We're solid. We're fiscally solvent. We have cash. We don't need anything from anybody. My guys know we don't beg and sell. We don't need an ounce of work from anybody. The customers that we have love us and we love those customers. And I'M not going to dull my sword or, you know, extend myself over my skis more than I need to be to go take on some unappreciative customer. Quick pro tip. Put some cash in the bank. You'll walk differently. It's a lot easier to walk up to a site and then, you know, ask about. Pricing is fine, but the haggling and the nickel and diming, I don't do that. I haven't done that, and I won't do that. And by the way, I don't do that to other people. Do I want a good deal? Sure. Do you want a good value? Of course. But if the. If the truck is $85,000, the truck is $85,000. Can you give me your best price? Is that the best price? If I find out later it's not the best price, I'm going to come back to you or not buy from you again. You only got one shot to make this right. You want to build a relationship? I'm going to buy 25 more trucks from you in the next 10 years. Don't mess with me. Put some cash in the bank. Stop robbing the bank. It's not an or your business. It's not an atm. It's a business, okay? And the sooner you can put 10, 20, $50,000 of cash in the bank and start walking away, the better you will feel about your business, and most of these problems will subside. Keep the urgency with the first five or six things that I proposed, but keep some cash on hand so you don't have to worry about dropping your prices and earning the next patio and earning the next lawn job and earning the next snow client. Like, dude, you need us. We don't need you. And I'm dead serious about all that. All right, that's where I'll leave you guys today. This is an exciting conversation. This is very practical stuff. If you're new. I know you probably took a page of notes and you're like, dude, I got a bunch of stuff to work on and to navigate and to fix. If you've never heard any of this before, holy freaking cow. Hopefully this helps you out. I'll tell you what, this took me probably a good six, seven, eight years to really round out and get it to where it is today. We didn't fix all this in one day or one night or one week or one month or in one year. We fix a lot of these processes year over year over year over year. Took me 60 days to get everybody's charge card on File. Took me another, you know, year to mentally make the pivot to charge cards on file at the end of month, to charge card on files at the beginning or at the end of the week. Took me another year to, you know, build my commercial bidding to billing end of month. And, you know, not 32, no, we build on the first of the month. So that way when all the work's done that we've done, we're already getting paid for the work that we've completed. And took another year to hire an office admin and then three to six months to get her trained to not only know how to invoice on the first of the month for commercial work, but the charge cards on file on the end is on Friday. That's a five year process. So give yourself some slack. If you haven't have it all figured out just yet, like, it's no big deal. Dude, neither did I. So don't let me fool you that this was all stuff that I figured out and, you know, accomplished in the last six days while putting down a couple hundred yards of mulch and mowing a couple hundred freaking lawns, hardly from it. But this is just the whole ball of wax. This is the macro for what you're trying to, what I would propose you would want to do to have great cash, great cash flow, and to operate from a position of strength, not from a position of weakness. And who doesn't like the sound of that? Amen. All right, that's what I want to leave you guys today. I really appreciate y' all listening in. This is just kicking it with you guys for just a quick minute on a Monday morning here, shooting from the hip. Had a couple notes, like I said, written down that I really wanted to spend some time expressing this because when I had that great conversation from cycle cpa, I was like, hey, it's expensive. But to be honest with you, our account balance has not shrunk lower than where it was three and a half weeks ago. And we paid off about 20 to 25 thousand dollars worth of one time bills. 12 grand mulch job, 3 grand for a gas tank, another thousand dollars for the install, $3,000 for the hand tools, $2,000 for grass flaps. Like, dude, we've made a sizable investment and our checking account has not gone backwards, which makes me even more pumped to know that we're going to catch all that up in May, June, July, August, and it'll swell and continue to grow from there. And that makes me even more of a believer in what we're Doing and what I'm saying, because if it's working for me, I know it can work for you guys. All right, plugged a couple different folks here today. If you're struggling with any of this, give them a shout cycle, CPA mention code, Brian. They'll save you a couple of hundred bucks. Now is still a fantastic time to sign up with a bookkeeper lmn. Fantastic platform. If you want to do a demo, I've got a great guy, Troy, that I refer folks to. He's awesome. He doesn't bite, you know, awesome dude. You can get implemented element implemented in your business in, you know, 90 or 100 or so days. If you have questions, let me know. I'll help you out. I won't let anybody that uses our code die on the vine. I'm here for you. What else we got beyond that? You know the rest, folks. Brian's 10 worldwide. I don't know. But, you know, try it. Try it at Walmart. In fact, don't do that, because some of you guys have. And then the manager's like, I have no idea what this is, but let's just give it to him anyway. And I'm like, no freaking way. If you know, you know. So some of you guys were around seven, eight, nine years ago when that went viral. That was ridiculous. But other than that, I just genuinely just want to say I love you guys. I appreciate you listening in. New podcast Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Check out the SOP bundle. I know a couple of you guys scooped that up over the weekend. Thank you for your investment into us. 70 plus training videos launched, 50 plus documents, 12 plus office admin videos. Fact. Okay, I know a lot of you guys are trying to wrap your head around, like, deploying and rolling all this out. It's awesome. The training videos are stellar. Put them on an iPad, put them in green. Yes. Take all the SOP documents instantly. Merge them into Lana. Okay, a lot of great options there if you guys are really being forefront, you know, tech savvy with everything that's being available to your fingertips these days. If you have questions on anything, let me know. I'm gonna do another podcast episode on the SOP bundle. Explicitly, what's inside? I've had a lot of folks say, sounds good. What videos? What documents? Like, what do I need? I'm going to go over probably the line, item by line on every single thing in that bundle. Not to sell or convince you on it, but just to let you know what's in it. And then also, if you're Trying to grow from, you know, 100, 203 grand in revenue to half million, million. Like you don't know what you don't know. You don't know what you need. I'm going to explain it the whole breath. And if you want to build every single one of these and then some, dude, awesome. Save yourself, you know, a thousand bucks, go for it. You're going to put in about $10,000 and about 250 hours to build all this. But if you want to put in the hard sweat equity, dude, God bless you. I'll give you the roadmap and let you know what we've built over the last 12 to 15 months doing all this and we'll show you guys exactly what's inside it. So more on that. But if you want to check it out, launchtrepreneuracademy.com store and you can get the SOP bundle here today. All right, folks, I really do. I sincerely love hanging with you. I appreciate this was helpful or I hope that this was helpful. I hope you guys appreciate it. If it is, feel free to share the show. Let somebody else know that this thing exists. And that's why I'll leave you guys today. Over and out. Have a great rest of the day, guys. We look forward to catching up with all of y' all here on the next one. Folks, now is the time to get registered for equip Expo 2026. You can use promo code Brian to save half off your registration and come join 30,000 industry peers as we descend onto Louisville, Kentucky for the super bowl of green industry trade shows and expos. There's over a million square feet of exhibit space on the inside where you can see all of your favorite brands and all the equipment that they have the offer. And also 40 acres of outdoor demo where you can test before you invest and you can try before you buy. There's education, there's community, and there's training, all available for you at no extra cost. Come check it all out and we hope to see you guys there again. Save 50 with promo code Brian and register today and we look forward to seeing you guys in Louisville October 20th through the 23rd this fall.
