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0:00I sell landscape lighting and exterior lighting basically to homeowners north of half a million dollars for the value of their home. Well done. Seriously. [laughter] I'm at three 10 revenue, 310k, 142 EBITDA. And what's stopping me is I literally make all of that money from that lighting division, temporary lighting, so holiday lighting. So now I know I need to add on landscape lighting, permanent lighting to be sustainable all year round. Okay. I haven't started advertising for landscape lighting except for the warm outreach I've done to my temporary lighting customers. So now I need to start working on a proven acquisition channel for new customers.

0:41And that's what's stopping me. Okay, and it's usually like Christmas lighting type stuff? Yeah. Okay. When you when you spin that up every year, do you just hire a bunch of temps and then you guys put them all up and then you fire everybody kind of thing? Unfortunately, yeah, but we we also have a washing side. I talked to Ed about that. We we might kill that. Okay. So I didn't really want to get into the weeds about that, but I keep a couple on that do washing with me. Washing? Exterior cleaning, concrete, house washing, gutter cleaning.

1:09That's actually pretty decent business, side note. But um okay. You're like, I'm selling water, you know? [laughter] Like, not a bad not a bad gig. Um okay, but you prefer the lighting business cuz it has higher margins and okay. So two potential ways to think about this. So one way is you look at the Halloween store, which you probably heard of, and they you know they run for 90 days or two months whatever it is leading into Halloween, and they every year just do more and more of it, and that's the model. And he just sticks to that and he just takes off the rest of the year. And so then the question becomes how do I continue to gain access to a scalable workforce that is that I can basically turn on overnight and train up in a weekend to do all you know basically to to deliver all these services. So that is not an unattractive business, to be clear. I mean a lot of people would love to own a business that they only have to work 90 days a year, uh and they just I don't want to say chill, but like kind of, right?

2:01>> sure. And so uh the other 9 months of the year for that business would be you building out the the inroads and laying in all of the basically building out the rapid work infrastructure so that when people come in it's just like boom, this is the training or like boom, we we sent our messages out, you guys have 14 days to respond, and you know that every year you get verbal commitments around the year from 100 people, and you know that that translates into 20 people who are actually proficient in work. And so then you just work your your basically work backwards from the model. Does that make sense? Yes. So that's the Halloween store path, which I don't think is necessarily a bad path. Like when I have something you're like, okay, I'm making 310 on 500, I'm like, cool, let's do like 5 million and make 3 million. Like that sounds chill, right? Rather than like how do I start another business to like give my people something to do in the meantime. So if I'm you, I would probably try and say like and Leila has a great frame on this, which is when I when we're looking at two business decisions, there's always problems on either side, and so we ask the question, which problem would we rather solve or which problem do we feel like we're more equipped or more likely to solve given our current resources, skill sets, etc. And so if we're looking at this path, path one would be like, do I believe it's within my skill set to build the network 9 months a year and build the training out so that when people when I send the the mass blast out like we're about to go into high season, uh ready to rock and roll, I can get this percentage of people and I can get them trained up in a weekend, and then we're off and running. Do I want to solve that problem or do I want to build out basically the ascension path from temporary lighting to permanent lighting and kind of build that whole other business?

3:37Okay. The way I asked the question seemed one-sided, but like that's that's a that's a that's a real question. >> Yeah, no, it's it's a real question cuz I could spend 9 months doing that, but I'm not going to lie, I think I may just get like a little bored, you know, through the rest of the 9 months. Yeah. [laughter] Get a dog, you know? Well, one of the things you can do and like okay, so okay. So I define patience as figuring out what to do in the meantime. Right? So we have to figure out something for you to do in the meantime. And so the question is, what can I do in the meantime that could make my core business money during that high season? Yeah. Well, I could probably pre-sell that season all year.

4:14So I did do pre-sales basically last month. We do our pre-sales just to you know get cash flow. And just real quick side tangent, basically I went to a permanent lighting training in the last month. They actually said you can lease that permanent lighting essentially, you know, year round lighting if for all y'all that don't really know. >> [laughter] >> Uh yeah, year round lighting, but basically, you know, have that just recurring every single year. So they're leasing it basically, and then if they want they could buy it out. So I was thinking about upselling those customers. We have 1-year, 3-year, 5-year contracts, and then upselling the people that are on those contracts for just year round lighting and say, "Hey, do you want this thing all year? And it's not going to cost you the 6 to 10k if you don't want to pay that up front.

4:58Of course we'd like that, but then offer that same exact price every single year. I don't think it's a bad model. Which one would you rather do? I think both will work. Honestly, I'm leaning towards just figuring out the landscape lighting because I don't think it's that hard, great margins to add on to the business. In my long-term play of making this scalable potentially to other markets, I would like a full year round business instead of just seasonal. So I'll say this, it's not that it's not a year round business in the first This is me trying to convince you of this. This is kind of for everybody else, too.

5:33Um it's not that it's not a year round business, it's just that you do delivery for 90 days. You're right. The fact that you're not working the other 9 months is the problem. You're right. Cuz could we take 500k and make it 5 million if you worked the other 75% of the year? Yeah. Rather than kind of like creating this other business to keep yourself busy. Okay. Like that's how I think about it. Like you're like, man, I if I work I work a little bit, I make I make 500 I make 300 grand in a quarter. I'm like, work a lot of it, maybe make 1.2 million in the next year. That's with zero changes in like current capacity. Yeah.

6:08And honestly, you answered my question. If Sammy's in the room, really sorry. I tried to ask her a question, she's like, I need literally 98 other data points, but you >> [laughter] >> just figured it out. Cuz that's literally the problem I run into is like I had to pull all my advertising, all that stuff last season because I hired on all these people. Half the people don't know what they're doing all the way. There's no time to train, so that makes a lot of sense. What will happen What would happen next is like if you went the other path of if you decide to do the the temporary leasing thing, um the demand that you'll be able to generate for temporary lighting will still exceed your capacity with your existing workforce on the recurring work.

6:46So you're going to have the problem either way. Yeah. So which problem would you rather have? Okay. That's a you problem. Business-wise, either model works. I would recommend not doing both. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Thank you. Yeah, you're up. Thank you. If you are a business owner and you are not growing as fast as you'd like, I'd like to give you a free gift. So my team and I put together the $100 scaling roadmap, which is basically 200 hours of us looking over all the portfolio companies we've had and what stages of growth they went through, and more importantly, where they got stuck and how they got past it. And so we broke it into these 10 stages, and we made this little kind of quiz thing where if you put in your business information, it'll tell you where you're at, and the most important part for you, what to do for each of functions of the business across product, marketing, sales, customer success, recruiting, IT, human resources, and finance. And so no matter what you're struggling with, someone else has already struggled with it and solved it. And so I'd like to give you this thing absolutely free. You can go to acquisition.com/roadmap, plug in your business information, and if you want us to actually help you decon train the business and you're trying to scale, we'd love to help you out. On the thank you page, you can just book a call with my team, and we will look at the business, see if we can help, and if we can, we'll invite you out to Vegas, and we'll do this in person live.