Roadmap to $1M: Mark Bradley’s Playbook for Contractors

In this episode of the Growing Green Podcast, Jeremiah shares a full keynote from January 2025 featuring Mark Bradley from the Roadmap to $1M online event. Mark explains why most contractors never reach $1M in revenue, starting with a lack of true financial awareness and control of the numbers. He walks through the importance of budgeting, estimating correctly, and job costing so business owners know exactly where profit is made or lost. Mark also breaks down why systems and SOPs are a continuous process and how documenting what success looks like makes hiring, training, and scaling far more manageable. The conversation highlights the importance of focusing on high margin services and revenue per hour rather than chasing all revenue. The keynote wraps with practical guidance on sales pipelines, key performance indicators, and what fundamentally changes when a business grows from $1M to $3M.

Chapters

• 2:30 The #1 reason people don’t reach $1M: financial awareness
• 6:29 Building a budget: predicting the year before it happens
• 12:00 Estimating correctly: break-even pricing, overhead recovery, profit
• 16:00 Job costing: where you think you make money vs. reality
• 20:58 Systems + SOPs: “repeatable processes” and training accountability
• 26:22 Using training libraries (video SOPs) to speed ramp-up + reduce mistakes
• 30:10 High-margin services + revenue-per-hour: why “all revenue isn’t equal”
• 40:15 Live Q&A: subcontractors—markup guidance + why subs can accelerate growth
• 47:08 Mission, vision, goals, strategies, measures: how to build a real plan
• 56:06 “Getting to $1M”: hustle focus areas (sales, ops, people, CS, finances)
• 1:05:59 Sales pipeline explained: estimate volume × close rate = revenue
• 1:18:05 Going $1M → $3M: delegation, managers, deeper SOPs, scale the playbook

Transcript

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Jeremiah, hello and welcome to the growing green podcast. Your host, Jeremiah Jennings is the owner of growing green landscapes in Birmingham, Alabama, and has a passion for growing the entrepreneurship community. For those who are young in business, being a business owner isn't easy, especially in the early years, and that's why, in this show, we dive into a wide range of topics, covering all the challenges small business owners deal with, even if your company is generating a million dollars or more, the stories from our great guest and Jeremiah's own firsthand experiences will propel your business forward. And now here's your host, Jeremiah Jennings, what's going on, everybody? Thank you so much tuning the Yan tub day here on the rotary podcast. Boy, do we have a treat for you today. We are throwing it back to January of 2025, to the very, very beginning of this year for our roadmap to 1 million event that we hosted online with an absolutely amazing turnout. We had great speakers. People were very engaged. And I'm gonna go ahead and give you guys for free here today, the keynote by Mark Bradley. It's an hour and a half, guys. I hope you listen to the entire thing. Everything that he was doing, he was literally teaching the principles of getting to 1 million. And he has was prefacing what the accelerator program was going to be for 2025 with leanscaper. Well, guys, we are at the end of that, and it is exactly what he was talking about. And more. This is in prep for leanscaper 2026 guys, you don't want to miss what is happening inside the accelerator program there. If you can tune in once a week to on Wednesdays for an hour, you will not have the same business as you have now. At the end of 2026 I can guarantee it, Mark's pouring his heart and soul into it. He wants to see you when he wants to you succeed, but it does take a little bit of effort and responsibility and dedication on your side. So anyway, that's enough rambling from me again. My treat to you here is the keynote from roadmap to a million event last year. Stay tuned for details coming on this year's event, when how to sign up and the speakers are going to have this year. It's gonna be a great, event. Let's hop in and hear more from Mark, from the roadmap to Maine event last in January, I thought I'd start just kind of open up with three big points that I always like to really reiterate, reiterate, and we can kind of have a little conversation as we go after each slide. I've only got a handful of slides, so I thought I'd make this super conversational. So I'm going to hop right in here and just say, start with I think the most common reason why people don't get to a million is typically just a lack of financial awareness. And we all start out in this business the same way, you know, generally, very little working capital, very little experience on the financial side or the business side, and hopefully a little bit of experience doing the work, at the very least. And for me, it was very much that way, probably the same as everybody here I was, you know, first started doing some landscape projects in high school, and then I went and did an apprenticeship program. And at 23 I decided to quit my$175,000 a year job in nuclear and start a landscape business, which seemed a little crazy to everybody around me. And I was young, I did not have a lot of cash or anything to go start a business with. I was more or less really just looking for something with a little bit more purpose, and I wasn't really enjoying what I was doing. I knew that I had the trade skills to go and start a business, but I was very nervous about the business side of things, and rightfully so. I think a lot of the problems that I experienced in my first four or five years were really focused more around pricing, understanding how to budget, understanding how to plan the business, how to hire people, how to train people effectively. And I think those things really held me back more than anything. My business did grow really quickly. I think because I knew how to do the work I had, luckily, at 23 I had already 10 years of extensive experience just working in the family business and and then going and doing that apprenticeship. So the skills piece, I'll not talk much about today, the trade skills. I'll just assume that everybody here is either capable or working on their trade skills. I'm just going to kind of talk more about the business side of the business, because I think that is where most of us suffer. So. The first piece of advice that I always try to give people is to create a budget. When you try to operate the business without a budget, you're really just truly guessing whether or not you're going to make money at the end of the year. And I think for me, this was a hard lesson learned. I was a few years in business before I learned how to write a budget properly again, I had a grade 12 education. I started up without any money in my 600 square foot apartment. My first shop was under the front porch of my the stairs on the on the way into my apartment, and I had a pickup truck and some hand tools and a wheelbarrow, and I was renting everything else, and the business outgrew my capability to price the work, to plan the cash flow, and as the business started to grow, I found myself really almost ready To give up, because I just didn't understand the financial component of the business. It felt like I was turning over lots of money. I was collecting money and spending money just as fast as I was collecting it. And naturally that would be the case, because when your business is growing like mine was, you're constantly buying tools, you're buying equipment, you're putting down payments on trucks, you're cash flowing your jobs. You're paying people before you've been paid many times. And you know, then there's government bills to pay and all kinds of overhead costs like cell phones and insurance and uniforms, and the list is endless. And I think when you learn to create a budget. And by the way, that only really takes about four or five hours to learn how to do and Steven was kind of joking around that he wasn't the star of the show here today, but Steven is an expert at teaching people how to budget, and there are other experts at LMN as well, but when you are using the LMN product, there's a very simple budgeting tool that I built way back when I decided to build software as the first thing to build. And we built that because I needed it, because I wanted my crews to have it, but most importantly, I really wanted to see the whole industry advance together, and that was why I built the budgeting software first. And all that budgeting software does, it's very simple. It just helps you learn how to create a sales goal for the year, how to attach an expense budget for labor, material, equipment and subs and overhead. And this way, at the start of the year, you can kind of figure out how much money you're going to make. At the end of the year, you can make sure that you actually pay yourself first, because when you put your wage for the year in the budget that dictates the future. And so I always try to tell people, the budget is your opportunity to decide how much money you want to pay yourself and how much profit your company is going to earn, how much you can afford to pay your staff, how much you should be spending on material, what equipment you can afford to buy all before the year starts. We really don't need to go through the whole year only to realize that there's no money in the bank in the fall, or that you didn't have enough money to make a viable business or a viable paycheck at the end of the year. The budget really allows you to predict the future, and so I can't stress enough how valuable it is to do that now we'll also make sure we give everybody here contact info for myself and Steven here today, but I sold LMN and no longer work or operate at LMN and all But Stephen can certainly help you out. I would strongly recommend that you email Steven and get access to some of the free budgeting workshops that we hold. Those are completely free. We have budgeting classes every week of the year. You can learn how to budget. We have online courses that teach you how to do it. And, of course, the software kind of walks you through creating a budget as well. So if, if it seems like something that's daunting, you know you're in good company. I felt the same at one point in time in my career, but after learning how to budget from a really good business coach, I ended up building software and and an entire business off of that. But I'll tell you my my budget that I started out with. The process of budgeting was no different when I in, when I first budgeted, as it was when I was doing 50 million a year in sales, when I was I. The highest revenue per hour company in on the top 100 list. The budget was literally the framework that dictated everything in my career. So I love to talk about budgets, and I can't tell you enough how much stress it really relieves in your life when you've got a budget, when you can understand at the start of the year what your sales will be, at the end of the year, what your what your expenses should be, and what ratios you can look at spending in accordance with your labor, material, equipment. It just really gives you that understanding of the business, so that you can make decisions around paying your staff, buying equipment, and then just monthly looking at at the business and understanding whether or not it's going well. And if you combine that with a great accounting service if you're not experienced with accounting, if you're using cycle CPA or somebody like that, to help out with your accounting, I think having that budget and a monthly statement allows you just to stay on track throughout the year, and then the stress starts to dissipate, and you can kind of focus on growing the business instead of worrying about cash flow and worrying about numbers. And I think all too often, people that don't get to a million dollars just failed to learn how to budget. They just don't understand the financial component of the business. And I think that's kind of a shame, because it really is, you know, a one day exercise to build a budget and understand the business, particularly when you're when you're scaling up and you're less than a million in sales, it really is not that big of a project. And once you know how to do it, you know how to do it for life. And I think that's a skill worth knowing how to do, no different than you know, changing the blades on a mower or servicing the the oil and filters. It's it's something you learn how to do once, and you know how to do it forever. And so and I and to be honest, I think it's about equal in terms of complexity. They're just numbers. They're just numbers. I think sometimes people need to remember that no different than numbers that are anywhere else in life, we're gathering up some numbers, putting them into a template, and then understanding the business from a new perspective. So I always try to tell people you know, make sure that you understand your numbers and then you find a way to track them on an ongoing basis. And so once you've got that budget, now you can go ahead and build estimates using labor plus material, plus equipment plus subs to understand the direct costs of a job which most people are pretty good at. Like I always say that I don't meet many contractors that don't know roughly how long the job should take, what materials they're going to need, what the ideal equipment is. And if you're getting a subcontractor to do some work, they're usually quoting it. So building your quote up that way, rather than using unit pricing like square footage or multiplier on the cost of plants. You know, there's all kinds of wacky ways that people price jobs. Ultimately, you just want to find a way to create these estimates using a system to add up the actual costs that it's going to take to build the job. And then you want to add overhead and overhead recovery. Specifically, it's just a markup that is a byproduct of having a budget. See, when you build a budget, you understand how much your overhead is as a percentage of your overall sales, which then allows you to mark up the direct costs on a job, which is always labor, material, equipment and subs with an overhead markup. And once you do that, then you actually have the break even price for the job. Now, then we add profit, and then you've got a price. Now, I think what happens a lot, and we all have lived through this. We've got customers that often low ball or tell us there's a better price, or want us to cut the price. And this happens more when you're smaller and when you're getting started. It used to happen to me almost every time I priced a job in my early years, and it's totally natural. And what you want to be able to do is understand exactly what your break even is, so that when somebody tries to suggest that there's a better price, you have the confidence to say no. And I think this is really important. It's a major byproduct of using a. Budgeting and estimating system. If you're pricing a job that's $10,000 and the customer comes along and tells you that there's another price for 8500 you'll know that your break even on that $10,000 job is actually right around 8500 and you're only actually going to make 1500 in true profit after you've paid your overhead. And if that's true, then why would you go do the job for 8500 but the problem is, is a lot of times when people don't have the true insight into the cost of the job and the overhead recovery and the profit all separate, they tend to say yes when customers come up with these offers, or when they start to tell you that there's a cheaper price, and I think often that's why people end up working for free as much as they do. They're not getting a proper pay, they're not getting company profit, and they're certainly not making enough money to reinvest in the business. So always really eager to make sure that people start with a budget and an estimate when they go to scale the business soon as you kind of go past working as a solopreneur, I think you ultimately have to start every year with a budget, and then you want to connect that into your estimating by creating an overhead and a profit markup that serves that budget. And then the next step to knowing your numbers is Job Costing. And you know, Job Costing is a relatively simple process that can be just embedded in your accounting, and if you are using a third party accounting service like cycle CPA or someone similar, what you'll find is they'll do your job costing for you and give you job costing reports. And I think that's really important, because as you start to bid more and more jobs, and the jobs get bigger and bigger, and you've got a few projects going on at the same time or overlapping. I think it's really common for people to misunderstand what profitability they're always actually achieving, and they don't really understand how many hours it took to produce the work versus what they expected it to take. And that's a big risk, because what we want to learn from Job Costing is how long things are taking us to perform, so that we get better at pricing them in the future. So when we realize that 1000 square foot driveway takes us 180 hours, we can benchmark ourselves against the industry, and realize that maybe the average is more like 150 so we're a little slow, or maybe we can realize that we're getting it done in 140 because, you know, you're on the job yourself. You're working super hard. You're making up extra time because of, you know, maybe the extra effort you're putting in, but that's probably not going to be achievable for every other crew that you might hire in the future, so you'll bid with some some fluff or some extra hours. So I always try to just say that Job Costing gives you an understanding of where you're making money where you're not, and it just allows you to make adjustments to your pricing in the future, so that you don't keep pricing work losing money doing certain things while maybe making money elsewhere. Because what I've noticed with 1000s of companies that have started using LMN over the years is they'll usually tell me afterward that half their work wasn't making any money. Half of their work was making incredible money, and the balance of the two unfortunately, just kind of ends up being a less than ideal profit margin. So you're actually kind of doing really well on some jobs, and then, because you're losing money on jobs without knowing it, at the end of the year, you don't have much left, but the truth is, half the work you did all year, you were practically paying those people to go and work on their properties, just because your pricing system and your job costing wasn't accurate. And I think that's kind of a shame in the industry to see people work as hard as we work in this business out doing work for people that you know can't afford, in most cases, to pay a little more, and we're out there working for free, or even worse, we may even be paying them to go to work on their properties. So I always really try to stress the importance of knowing your numbers and really just tracking what's happening. I just don't think you can over invest here. That's why I always recommend for early stage companies to outsource accounting and to look at using software like LMN for budgeting and estimating. Um. Now this hitting five ignore the hitting 500k that she was supposed to say 1,000,001 thing I like to really say is building systems for the business is a never ending process, like when you hear people talk about systems, I think sometimes people almost blank out because they don't know what that means, or what systems, or when do I need them, or what type of systems. Ultimately, what I like to say is, you're always going to be building systems that just never ends. In my career, from startup to 50 million, I was building systems every day of my career just never ends. There's always something that needs to be systemized or corrected with a repeatable process. And so I like to just kind of almost describe systems as that systems are just repeatable processes. It's just identifying the best way to do something to get a consistent result, and then documenting it in a way where you can share that with other people, so they understand what good looks like. And so what good looks like is really important. You know, first off, you have to figure that out as a business owner, and particularly as a startup, your job is to go out there and figure out the most effective way of doing the work, and then what you need to do is document it. And when you hear the term standard operating procedures or SOPs, that's really all that means, it's just, let's document what good looks like. Let's create a document that can be shared with other people, used as a training tool or as a guide for other people to succeed in doing these day to day tasks that we're already good at doing, and so things that seem obvious to you, like, you know how you fuel your vehicles or how you maintain your mowers, or how you follow up on sales, or how you estimate or schedule your work or order and manage materials or get things delivered to job sites. All of these things are maybe kind of standard to you, but soon as you go to hire a second, third, fourth person, they need to know what the standard way of doing that is as well. And therefore you need standard operating procedures to train people to give them copies of those standard operating procedures. And you know, I always recommend even have them sign off and keep those in their employment file, so that if there is a problem and they're not following the procedures later, you can kind of remind them that you agreed, read, you were trained, you signed off, and you're just not following some of these procedures. So what it does is it creates accountability when you create these systems. Now, obviously using software tools like LMN helps streamline operations, and it gives you that awareness of how long things are taking, because you can see in real time how the timelines are working out. But I would say probably one of the most important things as you start to scale, is training your staff to do things more systematically, making sure that your staff understand your SOPs, understand exactly how you want to run the business and get the work done. And what we did with greenness. Shortly after we acquired that company, we really invested heavily in the product to allow small business owners to create their own video library of standard operating procedures so that their employees could automatically be assigned training pathways where they would actually take the training on a on an Automated assignment basis, and as they take the training, green use is logging the training and logging the time spent doing the training so you can reimburse them for the hours spent training. But more importantly, what we're trying to do here is just get those standard operating procedures away from pen and paper and binders and really putting them into the hands of the workforce through the app and have them deployed using video training, which you know this day and age. Everybody here can point and shoot a short sop video describing a simple procedure. Could be the way that you want to have your vehicles fueled. It could be the way that you want to store the equipment at night, or the way that you want to manage your covered tool trailers, or, you know, basically any field procedure that you might be wanting to standardize. You shoot that video, upload it into green, yes, embed it. In the work or the training pathway for that specific role or person, and everybody in that role or that person that you've assigned it to will then be assigned that course. They take the course, and you've got some records that they took it. You can even give them little tests, if you like. But ultimately, what I always try to tell people is investing your time in documenting your systems and procedures, building up your own training library, and then really teaching staff how to focus on getting better and improving their skills, I think, is the best use of your time. Now, naturally, if your business is smaller and you're a solopreneur, or you've got one crew and you're sort of leading it, you only have so much time. But I always try to tell people, put a few hours into this every week, and when you look back at the end of the year, you'll have an incredible library of SOPs that allow you to scale the business next year with less effort. And so if this year, if you think about it, if you spend 40 hours producing training videos and uploading them, and next year, you hire three people, four people, you save 120 hours of training next year for yourself, but more importantly, all of that training that you're giving to those people has a multiplier effect, and what happens is they end up ramping a little faster. When you hire them, they start adding value quicker, and there's a lot less mistakes, a lot more efficiency and a lot more productivity. And more importantly, I think employees these days that you're hiring are looking to be part of a professional company. And when you hire them, and you give them a training password, and they start into a career pathway with greenness, it feels like a legitimate company. It feels like they've hired on with a company who actually wants to invest in them and help them get better as an individual and increase their skills and know how? So I think being a small company, having access to a product like green Yes, is wildly valuable. It's only $120 a year per employee, which makes it super affordable, and it definitely has a couple 100 industry standard courses already in the library that you can tap into and really utilize top level the crew immediately. But then again, you can build your own courses as well, and really, as you start to get upward over three, $400,000 I think what tends to happen is you need to start delegating as much as you can. You can't do it all yourself anymore. It's just impossible to scale that way. So you start trying to delegate. And I think we've all lived the pain of delegating to people who are untrained and don't have the basic information. And I think that's where a lot of the frustration in business comes from. At least in my experience, most of my frustration day to day came from untrained staff. When you really look at the true root cause of a lot of your headaches, it's just not being surrounded by people who have as much insight and experience as you have into how to do the work. And I think that's really what makes training so important. So I always try to say this, you know, at the end of the day, scaling is definitely not about working harder. In fact, scaling should actually reduce your workload over time. It's really about working smarter. And if you if you focus on working smarter, you're constantly saving wasted time for yourself and wasted time for everybody else in the business. And what we're always doing when we're creating systems is we're making tomorrow a little bit easier, which frees up time to focus on the next problem. And I'll tell you right now, running a landscape business, or any business, once you overcome one problem, there's always another one to fix, that's that's the journey, that's the journey you're on that never goes away. And so oftentimes people think that the grass is greener on the other side, so to speak. No pun intended, but the reality is is it just keeps changing. You fix a problem, you scale a little bit. There's something else to fix, and so when you actually systemize the problems that are right in front of you, you get the opportunity to scale up to the next level, and then you've got some more problems to fix, but you've got time to fix them, because your team is already working more systematically on the things that used to hold you back. The third thing that I'd talk about, finally, my reaching. A million is right? The third thing that I wanted to talk about is focusing on high margin services and customers. This one I always try to coach earlier stage or growing companies to really rethink because I think what I've seen over the years teaching hundreds of workshops, 1000s and 1000s of companies, every single time somebody kind of comes to a realization in their second or third year of coming to some of these workshops that I've taught, every time they come to the realization of why they started to become so much more profitable after using LMN, what they've always come back and said to me is I didn't realize that I was working for free so much because I wasn't using a system to estimate and when I started using LMN, I thought you were crazy. Like I've had so many people tell me they thought I was crazy, because they said when I first put my numbers in and I started pricing some of my smaller jobs or some of my weekly maintenance accounts, my first thought was, I'll never get a job again because LMN is telling me to charge too much. But what they quickly realize is LMN is actually telling them what they need to charge. And if you can't sell the job for what it's worth, then you should change what you're selling or change who you're selling it to. And I think that's really important thing to be aware of. This happens to all of us. This has happened to me over and over throughout my career, not all revenue is created equal. We can all go out and sell, and sometimes we think of revenue as being equal, but it's not $100 sale is not the same. It's only a top line number. The bottom line, number is what matters, and if so, if we go sell $100 project and it costs us $80 we make 20, and that's not a bad job. But if we go sell $100 project and it costs us 110 then we sold the wrong thing to the wrong person for the wrong amount of money, and it's really just that simple. It just scales as you go. And so when you think about focusing on the right customers, you got to know what the right customers look like, and that's why Job Costing and estimating is so important. When we have higher revenue per hour work, we make more profit per hour. And so revenue per hour is a really, really important metric that I always try to remind people to get comfortable with. Now this is a metric that LMN estimating serves up every time you estimate, so you get really good at understanding it. But I'll give you a couple of examples. When I go out and do a landscape lighting job it, let's say it's a $5,000 job with 15 fixtures and a transformer, and two people go out and do that job in a day, and at the end of the day, let's say we spent 20 hours out doing that job, and We run the numbers and we look at the revenue per hour. If we were to take the $5,000 and divide it by 20, we're going to come up with revenue per hour now in the same day. We could take two people and go out and work 10 hours, and we could go out and do a weekly mowing route and maybe only produce $1,200 with the same 20 hours. Now, everybody here would much rather have the lighting job, obviously, because there's much higher profits in going out and doing $5,000 in the day with two people instead of 1200 but the question is, how much more profit is there in doing that extra job? Because, well, we've got to buy some expensive materials, and sometimes people that don't do the math clearly enough don't see just how big of a difference there is. Now if we were pricing at 20% net profit on that $1,200 day. Let's say we did make 20% which I think we all know is very difficult just going around doing mow and blow type work, but at the end of the day, we made a 20% profit. And keep in mind, this is after paying the owner's wages, so not not including your wage, we would on that $1,200 day, we'd make 220 bucks. We'll say maybe 240 to be more accurate. But on that $5,000 day, if we had a 20% profit, well, then we would have actually made $1,000 and. So it's much, much different day. So profit margin on its own doesn't actually tell you the full story. Sometimes people say, Well, I don't know why I'm not making a lot of money at the end of the year, because every time I price a job, I price it for 20% profit or 10% profit, but at the end of the year, I don't really have any profit. And oftentimes, when I look a little bit deeper, I always have to kind of point out to people that they're selling really, really low revenue per hour work. And if you're selling work that is only producing 50 to $60 per hour with a 10% profit, that's only $5 per hour at the end of the day. That's, you know, 40 bucks. And if you're off by an hour or two with your startup at the yard, or you're shut down at the yard, or maybe the jobs are taking a touch too long, well, that 40 bucks in profit that you were going to make on that that individual is quickly gone. Anytime jobs take too long, it immediately comes out of profit. And when you have low revenue per hour work, if the time takes a little bit longer, 10% longer, all your profits gone. Where on that lighting job that I just talked about, if we were there an extra four hours at the end of the day, we'd still make 900 bucks instead of 1000 bucks. And so therefore, it's always going to be easier to accommodate for some labor overruns on high revenue per hour work than it will be on really low revenue per hour work, and most of us lose money when jobs take too long. That's the that's where we lose money, whether we're wasteful in the way that we produce the work or the way that we load up in the morning or unload at the end of the day or the using the wrong tools or forgetting equipment or forgetting gas or whatever it might be at the end of the day, we lose money because the production hours take too long to do a job. And when it's low revenue per hour work, that immediately comes out of profit. When it's high revenue per hour work, you at least have a little bit of a cushion before you start to lose money. And so I always try to recommend that you focus on selling higher revenue per hour work. And then, like some ideas around that, if you're thinking of, if you're in the landscape maintenance business, a good way to get that revenue per hour average up on your customers would be adding mulching programs, doing more planting. Even the example I just gave landscape lighting, I think it's a great thing to offer to maintenance accounts. Landscape lighting is very easy to learn. It's you don't need a lot of tools and equipment, and it's extremely high profit, high revenue per hour work that I think most people who may have a mo route with 100 properties underestimate that there might be 20 of those properties that would love to have a landscape lighting system, and that's an easy way to go get an extra 100,000 in revenue off of a route like that. So definitely always worth considering how to get higher revenue per hour, work out of existing clients, or focus on marketing and selling to different customers who are likely to have higher revenue per hour. So anything with expensive materials, anything that you can install really quickly, like if, for example, if you've got topsoil being delivered and dumped on a front lawn, and you're spreading it with a skid steer, if that load of soil is, let's say, a $500 load of soil, and it takes an hour to spread with the skid steer because the access is so good and it's just dump and go, that One person hops on the skid steer for an hour, spreads that load. That's $500 in revenue just for the soil, plus the profit, plus the time with the machine and the labor, you may very well be looking at seven or$800 an hour. And you know, if you're just out mowing lawns, that may take all day to produce that same amount of revenue. So again, it just gives you a lot more revenue in a lot shorter period of time. You recover your overhead a lot faster, and you start making profit a lot earlier in the day, and you just end up with more profit at the end of the day. Any questions on on these first three slides before I move on. If anybody has questions, ask away now. Now's the now's the opportunity that was that was amazing stuff. I. Buy a group here. Somebody would jump in here is on here. I'm looking around here, Lucas. Lucas's cameras off. Where's he? There he is. I got. How much percentage would you recommend using subs, subcontractors, where we sub out all of our fertilizer and irrigation work with bigger accounts and whatnot, like, what's a good healthy percentage with that, would you say, or a markup on them, or a percentage of your revenue. Maybe both, okay, percentage of revenue. I always tell people, sub as much work as you can, provided you're getting a good markup on it. So don't really worry about what percentage of your revenue is, you know, I've seen companies self perform a million dollars worth of work and sub out $20 million worth of work, and they've got a great business. So there's really no right and wrong there. You need to be aware of it, and you need to kind of plan for it and structure the business accordingly. But the bigger question, I think that you had was what the markups should look like. And generally, what I try to say is you're going to need at least 5% for overhead recovery, at least, and that's them contributing to your overhead because you've got the job, because you run a business, and your business costs you money to run, so you have to get overhead from their work to contribute to your overhead because they're tapping into your network. And so I usually say charge 5% at minimum for overhead recovery, and then I like to try to get 20% profit. So I'm looking for a 25% markup over their price to me, now they should be giving me a little bit better pricing than they'd give to a homeowner, because I'm a trade and I'm giving them more work, and then my customer should be willing to pay a little bit of a premium to have us manage it and coordinate it so that they've got one stop shopping, because we're saving them a lot of time as well. So irrigation is a great example. I subbed my irrigation for my entire career. We, we, we were probably doing one to 2 million a year in irrigation on on an average year, and I made 20% on it. I didn't even think about starting my own irrigation cruise, because I'm already making 20% they're kicking in 5% toward my overhead. Customers are happy. They're great at what they do, and we're focused on doing things that we're really good at doing, that we're well equipped to do, well trained to do, and things we like to do that serve our goals, and they're just kind of coming in as partners. And so I think subcontracting is huge opportunity for smaller companies to grow quickly. And sometimes you replace them, and sometimes you don't, like I didn't, I didn't ever replace that sub, but other subs that I was using, like stone masons or hardscape crews in my early years, I quickly decided it made sense for us to take those in house and make more margin. And so provided you're getting that 5% overhead recovery and no less than 10% profit on top of that, then you're safe. So I always kind of say 15 to 25% total markup on subs. Cool, yeah, it's definitely taking us to the next level with revenue, with utilizing them. So you said so you don't really like recommend, or, I guess you encourage to allow subs to do their thing and just take a percentage off that, rather than try to have everything in house. Yeah, generally, like, I found trying to do everything in house, particularly when you're getting started, is kind of impossible, right? Like when you're doing less than a million dollars, you can't have an amazing carpenter crew, an amazing irrigation crew, stonemason crew, hardscape crew, maintenance crew, planting crew. And so what ends up happening is you kind of operate as a jack of all, master of none, kind of company. And what happens is you screw up a lot of jobs, and that hurts your reputation, and you don't make a lot of money at stuff you're not really well equipped and well trained to do, because you're not efficient yet, and so you end up kind of wasting your time doing things that aren't really your specialty, when you should have. Doing stuff that you're really good at doing, where you make a lot of money. And so I always think that when I sub, I save that all of that risk, I save my reputation. We get the job done right. We're focused on doing the high value stuff that we're really good at, and everybody wins in the end. And I think you end up with a happier customer. You certainly end up with a bigger bank account. And I think for sure, even your team, they're happier too, because there's nothing worse than being on a crew where you're mustering along trying to do stuff that you just don't know what the hell you're doing. It's just frustrating. So I think it's good all around cool. What were some of the ways that you found? Sam was asking, How did you find the good subs you worked with? Like and figure out which ones to stick with? Yeah, that's good question. I mean, I think you're wise to work with people who have a good reputation, like market leaders. Now you're not going to call up Yellowstone to come and do your irrigation so I don't when I say a market leader, I'm not talking about massive companies. Find smaller people in your region that are have a good reputation, that have been around for a couple of years, that know how to do the work, that have some certifications. Make sure that you check out some of their projects. Generally, you know, Google reviews don't lie. We all know that, as frustrating as it is sometimes when when you get a bad one, the truth is, they do tell a story, right? If that contractor has lots of bad reviews, they're probably going to be a nightmare. But if they've got a couple, no big deal. And I think generally taking the time to have a conversation with the sub, making sure your values align, and then agreeing on using detailed estimates with written contracts. You know, I always say that a written contract is like protecting the friendship or the relationship in the sense that they might have an expectation, the customer might have an expectation, and you might have an expectation. And so now there's three expectations, and somebody's probably not going to end up happy. And in my experience, without a contract, it's usually me that's not happy, because I make sure my customers are happy no matter what it costs me. And oftentimes, when we had a problem with a sub, it was because we didn't have the scope detailed. We didn't have a very good document or contract to rely on. We didn't have a detailed enough estimate, and all the ambiguity, ends up landing on me. I end up paying extra and not wanting to charge the customer more. So generally, I always just try to say, make sure that they're trustworthy and transparent in the way that they're operating, and let them know that you want them to make money and you're going to charge a markup. You're going to make a little money, they're going to make a little money, and the customer needs to be happy at the end of the day. And I think that's a healthy way to work with subs. Thank you. All right, I'll jump ahead if there's no more questions there. So those of you that have ever spent any time in a room with me are probably tired of seeing this image. I talk about this image non stop getting super clear on your mission and vision for your business. I think is a great place to start. What we want to do here is want to know where are we going to be five years from now, or 10 years from now, in business? And I think this is an exercise that's just worth doing in life as a person and as a business owner. There's frameworks for this in the leanscaper library that you can download for free if if you need some help setting mission and vision. But what I'm really always trying to suggest people do here is get the mission clear. Like, where are you headed this year? Where are you Where do you want to be in five years? Where do you want to be in 10 now? If five years from now, you want to own a $3 million business, and today you're a $300,000 business, you're going to have to have a plan to get there, and that plan involves setting goals. And the annual goals, I think, really dictate the future. So if this year you did 300,000 and next year you want to do 500,000 the goals have to be really specific, and they have to really outline how you're actually going to get there. And I think the desired outcomes are often what people focus on, like, I want to be a $600,000 company, but they don't actually create goals and strategies that make it. Somatic to get there, and this is really important learning how to set goals and learning how to set goals that sort of allow you to walk before you run or transition into that future state. I think is pretty important, because I think sometimes people get overwhelmed thinking they need to change everything overnight. And business isn't that way. It's, it's an evolution. So want to be clear on setting goals. We want to create a few strategies on how to get there, and strategies, you know, to boil that down. It's just, you know, these are just the how, how are we actually going to increase our sales this year. What are we going to do? Are we going to do more marketing? Are we going to go knock on more doors? Those are strategies. You know, door knocking to grow the business is a strategy. Maybe it's a good one. Maybe it's not, but it is a strategy. And when people just simply say, I'm going to grow the business to 600,000 and they can't say how they're going to do it, then they don't have a strategy. And so we want to always have a strategy for everything that we say we're going to do. So when we create a mission and we've got some desired outcomes, we create strategies to make sure it happens, and then for every strategy, we want to figure out if it's working. So we want to set some measures and targets, and that's why I think it's so important to build a budget. Is we, we know what our sales goal is, that becomes the measure. And you know, if we say we're going to do 500,000 in 2025 and last year we did 300 we have a$200,000 gap to fill, so we're going to need to do more of something in order to get more revenue. And so the desired outcomes of the strategies tell us what the more looks like. The measures tell us along the way if we're actually doing that, and an example here would be estimates if last year to get 300,000 in sales, I put out 600,000 in estimates at a 50% close rate. And so this year, if I want to get 500,000 in sales at that same close rate, I would need to put out a million dollars in estimates, which means I need the phone to ring more so I need to do more marketing and more sales in order to grow the business. Or I could focus on getting better at selling and increase my conversion rate so that I actually sell 80% of the jobs that I go look at. That means getting a little better at sales, a little bit smoother with the proposal writing, a little bit better at explaining value, and maybe a little bit more confident in the sales approach. And all these things just happen over time. This, you know, none of us get out of bed and we're perfect at this stuff. It's just an evolution. And so the measures just allow us to look at things like that, and I could say, well, last year, I bid 600,000 and I got 50% close rate, and I got 300,000 in work. This year, if I could just get us an 80% close rate, I'd actually get $480,000 worth of work from actually doing the same amount of estimates. And so like we start to think about, do we want to go around and price every job that calls the office? Or do we want to get a little better at screening and then go out and sell people who are more likely to be buying what it is that we're selling and get a higher close rate. And that way we're not like burning our tires off the truck going from house to house, just lobbing estimates. We're actually being thoughtful about how we take the proposals, or take the meetings and then prepare proposals to get a much higher close rate, selling higher margin work to better customers who are more likely to buy what we're selling. And so I think, I always think that that's an important thing to think of when you're looking at measures and targets. It's allowing us to figure out what works better. And so the more that we double down on introducing metrics into the business, the more aware we are of what's working and what isn't, and then we start doing more of what works and less of what doesn't, and the business just starts to grow and grow and grow, and so does the profitability, and so does the wages for everybody that is working with You. And this just becomes a cycle. It never ends. You're just always working the cycle. You're just honing the wheel. You're trying to get a little bit better every single day, every single week, every single month, every year. And you kind of turn around three to five years later, and you've got that business that you thought you. Uh, wanted five years back instead of, you know, kind of getting stuck in a rut, which I see a lot people end up, kind of stuck at that four to $600,000 range for life. And those are usually people that don't have budgets, don't have good estimating systems, don't have good accounting, don't have good feedback loops. There's no metrics, no clear goals, and they just kind of keep doing things the way they always did it, expecting a different result, which I think we all know is the definition of insanity. And there's nothing worse than working as hard as we do and getting the same result over and over and over. It's just, it's, it's the work is too, too physically demanding and too mentally demanding to not try to make it easier. Any questions on that before I move on? Looks good. All right, so getting to a million, I think it's really important to just know what you should be working on and what you should be really like honing as far as your skills. When you're on your way to a million, I always try to think about the most difficult things first in my days, and kind of generally, what I've done as long as I can remember is take all the hard stuff and put it in the first half of the day, because by the afternoon, I'm usually a little bit more drained and I'm starting to get lazy. I think us humans are all the same. And so what I like to think about here, when actually getting to a million is the hustle. There's just an endless amount of hustle needed as an entrepreneur to break that Million Dollar Point, which means there's a lot of hard stuff that you have to do and master and get it done every day without ever having that sort of natural urge to put things off or procrastinate, which, you know, I think everybody here can probably agree, is not easy to do. You know, when you're self employed, you've got that opportunity to take the easy road or to take the shortcut, or to keep doing the stuff that you always like doing, and maybe avoid some of the stuff that you're just not crazy about doing. And I am the first to admit that I'm that way, and still that way to this day, as much as I've tried to fight it, it's it's just human nature. We gravitate toward things that we know, like and trust, and when we don't understand something, we avoid it, and the numbers, the sales, the operational efficiencies, the people management, the hard conversations with customers and staff and managing cash flow and payroll and paying bills and dealing with all this stuff. It might not be your favorite thing to do, but the reality is, is when you sign up to run a business, you kind of have to take the good with the bad, and you might like half of the things I just talked about. You might like two thirds of them, or you might not like many at all. And you know, you may just like doing the work, and really, you know, be passionate about getting out there on the on the mower or behind the the wheel of a tractor or in a skid steer or behind the wheel of a plow truck, and you just love doing the work. And that's cool. I'm very much that way. If you find me on the weekend, it's not uncommon for me to be sitting in a machine working around my own farm, because that's what I like doing. And you know, I could be just about anywhere in the world, but I'd probably be happier sitting in a machine doing some odd jobs around home, and that's cool, but the reality is, this stuff has to happen, and if you're not going to focus on learning how to optimize yourself, to grow sales, to run an efficient operation, to build people, to replace yourself, to offer customer service that is at the level of the expectation of the general public. And then, of course, manage the finances in a way where you understand exactly what's happening in the business at all times, then you're going to have to make some decisions. And the decisions are kind of simple. Number one, don't run a business at all. Number two, delegate the stuff that you don't like doing to somebody who likes doing that stuff, or someone who's good at that stuff. Or, you know, the other one I often try to tell people to do wherever possible is, like, eliminate some of the fluff or the stuff that's not really adding value. So. I oftentimes. You know, those of you that have spent some time around me know that I talk a lot about eliminate everything possible, Delegate everything possible, and automate everything possible. And so this list, when you figure out what you like doing, focus on doing that and doing it well, the stuff you don't like doing, you need to either eliminate it, if you can delegate it to somebody who likes doing it and is really good at doing it. And that could mean outsourcing it, like in the case of accounting, maybe using a cycle CPA, or, you know, at the at the very worst, automate as much of this as possible. There's a lot of mundane tasks that we don't need to do. And so sales, you're just really learning how to sell. You're creating good talking points, good questions. You know, in that getting to a million, you're you're honing your sales skills, you're becoming a professional salesperson. So I think sales is a good one for every business owner to focus on getting really involved in. Personally, I think that's a never ending job. Like at 50 million I was still out selling. There was no way that I was going to stop selling. There was many things I wasn't doing. I wasn't running finances. I wasn't doing the hiring and firing. I was sitting in on meetings for hiring and doing final approvals. But there was other people running those processes because that wasn't my thing, and so sales focus heavily on sales. Focus really heavily on refining the operation, making sure that things are as efficiently done as as possible. Make sure that you've created those standard operating procedures. And those are two big areas, I think, for owner operators, sales and ops. Then once you've got the jobs because of the sales and you've got the operations documented, then you can hire people more effectively, and you can put more effort into hiring the right people, and then a little extra time into training the staff. Hiring is not easy. At the end of the day, hiring the right people is probably the hardest thing to learn. If you can make it out to one of the mastermind sessions that I'm doing here in January. I've got a expanded area of the of the mastermind specific to hiring and developing staff, because clearly that's a big problem in the industry. I think this year is going to be a much bigger problem for a lot of companies, because the HTB program is very limited this year, which I think has a trickle down effect. So even if you're not using the HTB program, some of the bigger companies in your market are going to be aggressively hiring, which is going to make it a little bit harder to find people, I think, than it has been traditionally. Typically, there's around 70,000 HTTP visas, and from what I understand, it's going to be significantly impacted this year, customer service. You know, it's much easier to keep a customer than it is to lose one. Now, that said, if the customer was under priced and you sold them the wrong stuff, and you're never going to make money let them go. But if you've got customers that are profitable, that are buying high value work. You really do have to focus on making them happy. I always say that your customers problems should be your biggest problems. We want to make sure that we build a product or we maintain somebody's property the way they expected. And Word travels fast. I think referrals come fast and furious, and customer service in this business has to be at the forefront, and it has to be something that the owner is always focused on, regardless of the size of the company. Finances. You know, understanding how to manage cash flow and payroll and pay the bills is important. But again, this is something that I always recommend outsourcing. It's not worth getting bogged down in the office doing all kinds of accounting activity when you could hire somebody out to do that for you, and at the same time as you're paying them, you're likely out producing a lot higher revenue per hour, and so you're ahead when you outsource it. Sorry, I gotta pause for a minute here. One sec. I actually it's interesting for me to sit here and think about what Mark's talking about. The thing that runs through my head is all. This is 100% accurate, right? Like we're having to, we're having to put these things in place, take the steps to get to the next levels. You want to call it gets a million. And it's actually a question we're going to ask Mark when he comes back, is the process of the selling and what that looks like? Because when I think sales pipeline Mark, I don't even know how to even necessarily direct the question or even the right question to ask. It may be a common thing amongst everybody in this group is maybe about the questions I'm asked, but like, I don't even know the question sales pipeline as a whole, though. Like, what does that? What does that look like? What does that? What are things that we need to be doing to to increase sales pipeline so we can accurately forecast the revenue and the growth in our budgets to hit a million plus? Because that's where I feel like I struggle the most. Is that, that forecasting and then saying, well, where's the sales going to come from? Yeah. And you know, most people are hyper fixated on trying to book business in the moment, and that is, you know, natural when you're getting started, you're just trying to keep the business moving. And you know, you don't think about pipeline much until the business starts to scale. And all pipeline is when you think about it, no different than oil pipelines. We're putting revenue in one end of the pipe, and it's coming out the other end of the pipe. And what we're trying to do it with a with a revenue pipeline, is put as much opportunity into the pipeline as possible so that we get more revenue out of the other end, and the close rate dictates how much comes through. So as I said earlier, if we put a million dollars worth of estimates into the pipeline and we have an 80% close rate, then we're going to have 800,000 in sold revenue come out the bottom of the pipe. And so it's kind of a simple way to look at it is the total estimate volume multiplied by the close rate is going to dictate our sales for the year. And so if you look back at last year and say, last year, I did 600,000 in estimates to get 300,000 in revenue. You know, you have a 50% close rate. Now if you don't think you can make that close rate better, which I always argue that it can always get better, but then you need more estimates. And so you got to ask yourself, Where are those opportunities going to come from? Like, what am I doing this year that's miraculously going to give me more leads? This is a really important question when you start to think about pipeline. Is, what am I going to do this year to generate more pipeline? And more pipeline is more opportunities to put proposals out, and then once I put those proposals out, what am I going to do to get better at increasing my close rate? Because if I get more proposals out and more opportunities, and I improve my close rate, then my sales will go up exponentially, and that's really what managing a pipeline is all about. I want to increase the volume that I'm putting into the pipeline, and I want to optimize the close rate of the work that I do put in the pipeline, so that I end up with much, much higher revenue. And that is pipeline. That's it. It's it's a lot simpler than it sounds. I think sometimes people get hung up on some of the the acronyms and short forms and the wordiness of things, but pipeline is nothing more than your volume of estimates that are going in as opportunities, and then that close rate as they go through the sales process is dictating how much sales you end up with. I have one I have one more question, yeah, for sure. Do you mind sharing some KPIs that are huge during this stage of growth, like this stage of business, I know estimating versus actual hours is is definitely a leader, but some real, actionable KPIs that guys can start managing and looking over and tracking to get to this next phase. Yeah, for sure. I can let me get into the chat. I'll put them in the chat so you want your labor ratio, which is this is dictated from your budget, your labor ratio, you're going to want that to be between 20 and 35% if you're just doing maintenance only, but 20 to 25% if you're doing install. All and so this is of sales. So this is taking our total labor spend, and we're saying 20 to 35% of our total revenue is going to be spent on labor. So if I do $1,000 job, I'm going to spend between 203$150 on labor, and so that's a really important metric to get familiar with. Then my material ratio, again, these vary a lot company to company, and that's why it's so important to have a budget. But my material ratio to sales, again, is probably going to be somewhere between 15 and 25% depending on if I'm doing a lot of hardscape install or planting versus a lot of maintenance only work. That's another really important ratio. And next up, I always try to tell people equipment ratio is a really important metric at this size, and equipment ratio is, again, how much are we spending on equipment as a percentage of our total sales? And oftentimes smaller companies, ironically, are not spending enough on equipment. A lot of times the odd time they're gearheads and they're just spending way too much. But what I see most often is almost an aversion to payments or leases, and so they're not really spending much on equipment, and as a result, they're not really working very efficiently, either because they've got less than ideal equipment and they're spending too much time producing the work, or there's too much downtime, or they just don't have actual efficiency in anything they're doing because they're using the wrong tool for the job. And so the equipment ratio, I like to tell people, you know, 10 to 15% of revenue, ideally, is pretty healthy. It creeps up a little bit in maintenance only companies, but generally shouldn't really be higher than 15% of sales. Again. The next big one that I like to really talk about is overhead. Overhead is largely misunderstood in the industry. Overhead is not your equipment. Overhead is just expenses that are never actually used on a job site. These are things like insurance, your cell phone, uniforms, computers, the internet could be your accounting fees, your legal fees, any staff that might be working in your office or your accounting team, if you're outsourcing it, your software is overhead. Could be if you ever have a mechanic that's working at your shop, that person could be partially overhead. I like to kind of apply them to to equipment, if, if the company gets bigger, but smaller companies typically, it gets lumped into overhead. So overhead ratio. I like to tell people 20 to 30% max at your size, and over time, it actually comes down. So oftentimes people think that these big, giant companies like Brightview have really high overhead because they're huge companies, but the reality is is they have really low overhead as a ratio to sales, because they've spread their overhead out over a huge number of employees. And so as a ratio, it ends up being very small. Those companies typically operate at five to 8% but for companies that are less than a million, I try to tell people, try to keep that overhead between 20 and 30% and so when you start to think about it, if it, if it ends up looking a bit like this, if I've got sales, let's say, of 100,000 and I've got labor, of 25,000 now I'm down to 75,000 and then I've got my equipment, let's say at 15,000 Now I'm down to 60,000 and then I've got my materials. Let's say that's 20,000 now I'm down to 40,000 and now I've got my overhead, and let's say that's another 20,000 Now I'm left with profit of 20,000 now my paycheck is up here in labor or partially split in my overhead budget, my my labor, my wages for being out working in the business are not coming out of profit. That's the company profit. And so we want to see a breakdown that looks something like that. Now, if you're a worker in the field and you're the business owner, sometimes you split part of your wages in field labor, some in overhead, and that's the stuff that you learn when you do proper budgeting workshop and when you work with someone like Steven, I just noticed he actually threw a note in there. They can really help you understand how to allocate your wage to the labor and the overhead, so that every time you price a job, you're being paid a fair wage for being out there working in the field, or you're being paid every time you're out there doing what you do to run the business, whether it's working on the equipment or selling jobs or doing the banking or sitting around creating a budget that all takes time, and you need to be paid for it. And when you learn how to budget and estimate the way that they teach you at LMN, it'll it'll make all the difference. So those are some key KPIs. The next big one is estimated versus actual hours. So those first few allow you to create good budgets. This one allows you to create good prices, and so estimated versus actual hours allows you to price your jobs accurately, because we start to understand how long things take when we track them, and then we get better and better and better at pricing in the future. And while we're doing jobs, we can tell people how long it's expected. If you go sell a backyard patio and you think it's going to take 100 hours, and it's a three person crew, you can say to the crew, hey, listen, you guys can only be over there for four days. If this job takes more than four days, we're not going to make any money. And the reason why is because that's how we estimated it. We estimated 100 hours, and we're going to burn up those 100 hours in four days with the crew. So we need to be out of there in four days. And then you can break the job down and create job plans around those estimated versus actual hours. So if I had to pick one number that really matters most, once you've got a sound budget, it's always going to be estimated versus actual hours. And at at this size, getting to a million, getting really good at managing estimated versus actual hours, I think, is the single most important thing for the owner operator to get right, because then you can teach other people to do it, then you can duplicate it. And if you can manage jobs and get them priced and done on time, then you can teach other people to do the same. And so that's always the most important metric. Well, Mark, that's amazing. I we, got you for as long as I asked you for. I don't want to hold you any longer. I know you are a very, very busy man. Do you have more that you wanted or you Yeah, there's, I want to just show you one more slide, and then we'll wrap up as long as you are. Yeah. The next slide is, is getting going from 1 million to three. I think it's always important to look ahead, right? We should all be playing the long game. There's a lot of young guys here on the call. I Every day I start feeling older and older. I'm going to be 50 in a couple of weeks. So there's lots of young guys. Brian would say you're getting up to the dinosaur age. Oh, yeah. Brian called me a dinosaur, that's right. But the truth is is, you know, you got to begin everything in life with the end in mind. And so I try to say, like, I want to know where I'm going to be five years or 10 years from now, and I want to be doing the right things today, so that that even becomes possible. And that's what we were talking about earlier with that mission and goal setting diagram. When we go to look at what's next, it's really important at this scale. We're focusing on learning how to sell, how to operate efficiently, how to hire and train staff, how to keep customers happy and run the run the finances when we get this right, what this allows us to do is it allows us to scale the business to the next scale, which is one to 3 million. And oftentimes people don't realize getting to a million is definitely the hardest. But. Stage, but once you get there to do it three more times is really not that hard, because you figured out how to do it right while getting to a million and if you did focus on systemizing it, now all you need to do is get other people, hire the right people with the right mindset to do what you did three more times, and so your role really transitions here. This is where you go from doing the work and figuring out how to do it most effectively to now managing a team of people who are doing the work, and you're actually systemizing and training others and then monitoring the metrics, those estimated versus actual hours, to make sure that what they're doing is being done right, and that the customers are still happy. You're still profitable, and everything's running smoothly. And so here what you end up doing is your role changes at a million. You start to really focus on delegation. You're still out there in the field and but it's more of a decision maker role. And you're building a team. You're expanding your team. You might be even starting to add managers to manage in your absence, so you can be in many places at once, and you're out selling, but you're also teaching others to sell and then helping them get better at selling over time. And you're always implementing software and standard operating procedures. And I think standard operating procedures really should be something you're working on to get to a million and then what starts to happen is you start developing a lot more detailed SOPs when you're going from one to 3 million. So if you kind of think about it, you're doing the same thing, but you're just doing it at scale by actually delegating and enabling other people to follow all the things that you learned getting to a million. And so if you don't really focus enough on getting good at sales, ops, people and finances, and if you don't create the basic SOPs for others to follow while you're getting to a million, then it gets really hard to keep scaling. And so I always try to really advise people, take the extra time to document your processes, to refine your processes, spend lots of time training, get get green, you set up, make sure that the team is that you're building depth in the team, that they know how to do the work. They know how to use the equipment to how to maintain the equipment, how to do the work properly, whether it's pruning or fertilizing or hardscaping, they need the training in order to get that work done right. And so really important to focus there. Last I'll just note there is quite a few standard operating procedures in leanscaper. Now, we just went live a couple weeks ago. We are adding daily content in there a lot of turnkey systems. There's going to be some free webinars on an ongoing basis. Every month, the leanscape or accelerator programs are kicking off in a couple of weeks. Those are paid programs where you actually do a 50 week Continuous Improvement Program with me. I'm leading those personally picture doing what we just did once a week, and you being handed turnkey systems to implement in the business each week, so that every week, the business is just getting a little bit better and you're focused on the right things at the right times. It's kind of like having a virtual CEO coaching you how to become a CEO. But again, leanscaper.com the community is completely free. We will have hundreds and hundreds of frameworks and training tools and standard operating procedures in there for free. We I'm more or less giving away my my life's work in creating those systems to the industry, to give back to the industry that is given me more than I could ever imagine. So we're, we're going to be populating that every day there's new content going in. So join up there, and you'll, you'll definitely get your money's worth, since it's free. LinkedIn, I post daily Instagram. I'm few times a week on Instagram, but daily content every morning on LinkedIn, if you'd like to follow along with anything else, and you can always hit me up on LinkedIn or inside the leanscaper. Our community with with questions, and I do answer them all personally. So anytime you've got a question and you get an answer, it's actually coming from me. It's not a bot or or a hired person, it's it's actually me answering. So feel free to throw some questions out in either of those forums anytime as well. Mark I thank you, and hopefully get to catch up in Orlando next week. It's going to be a great, great time down there. And hope the one in Toronto goes well. All right. Well, thanks again, everybody, and good luck this year. If I can be of service or help anytime again, just reach out always happy to to share a little bit of my experience, if I can help you avoid some of the mistakes I made, then, then that's a good thing. So feel free to reach out anytime, but best of luck and hope the year goes extremely well for everybody here, if I don't see it, thanks for tuning in to the growing green podcast. It is an honor to have you listening, and we hope you receive valuable advice to help take your business to the next level. Don't forget to follow the podcast so you'll be notified when our next episode drops you you.