Ep. 127 - Planning Out Q4 2024 with Andy Barten

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Here we go, episode one twenty seven of the trash talk business podcast. This is our weekly opportunity to grow, scale and build our junk mobile dreams. As always, as promised, the man of the hour, the quarterly business update with Mr. Andrew Barton, USA, proud American with a new. Is it a piece of paper or is it a step and repeat? What's going on with this Barton media? Oh, it's a step and repeat, bro. I don't know. I thought it was kind of understood you don't fold these things, but apparently somebody missed the memo, so... I spent a few minutes with a heat gun trying to stretch it out and make it look a little nicer than it is, but it's going to do the trick for today. It did not work. Making things look nice, you know? Okay, so now I'm sure we'll talk Junker Bull as one point. You're like quasi-filming for Casey with the beard and the Hawaiian shirt. So this feels like a very normal, natural setting. What's with Barton Media? What the hell is that all about? Barton Media is our digital marketing, I should just say marketing arm of Barton Enterprises, Barton Brothers. I started in two thousand nineteen as we started to transition away from hiring outside people to do our marketing. I think we've spoke about it before on the show, but It was kind of a natural extension, man. If you really want to market heavy and spend a lot of money, there's no point to be paying that middleman, in my opinion. I don't know if this is the right answer for everybody, but I think when you get to a certain size and scale, it begins to make sense to bring some of that stuff in-house. But why Brenton's Barton Media? Why not just have director of marketing? Well, because my intention is, or was back then, to continue to sell it to other companies. So we focus on service-based businesses here locally. The company... I started in two thousand nineteen. I probably drastically overestimated how much people are willing to pay for marketing. But I'm essentially selling these people here locally with the services that we run our business on and how we're going to be successful. So we have six customers. Barton Media has six customers. It's not it's not a super awesome business. It also doesn't get a ton of my time. But you know what it does at six is it does pay for the staff. You know, we we essentially have seven people on our marketing staff. So I think it's very important to have that. If you're going to pay all those people, you might as well sell it. Eventually, I think we'd also like to maybe outsource the call center. Really? Outsource your call center to other service-based businesses locally? Yep. All right. Well, that's an interesting take. I did that. So I took my marketing company, did a lot of videography, and I built it out. It was Green Up Media, which turned into Antidote Media Group, which was your cure for shitty content. So I've gone down that road before. What I like about your model is you're talking about service-based businesses, Uh, that are local. So you're essentially repeating what you already are doing. That's working. Um, one of the reasons we were unsuccessful with antidote media group, um, was, was videography only. Right. So it was very niche high end. Um, And a lot of local companies, you know, they can go get the guy that'll do, you know, ten videos for five hundred dollars. And I'm like, yeah, we'll do one video for twenty five hundred. And they're like, well, they didn't see the value there. And videography is inconsistent while marketing is consistent. The other challenge we had was. We weren't selling the ads. It was the videography only. So there was no residual repeat income from even the individual customers. That and then the third thing was people, there are a lot of local people that want to be on social media and then you put a camera in front of them and they forget their name. So not me. I see a camera and I'm like, hey, I'm Andy. What are we doing talking about today? I love it. And I think it's basically the same sort of thing. So Where I made my mistakes in the media business, let's get back to junk here. You know, we're asking for fifty fifty thousand dollars, give or take annually for our service. And I got so much pushback when I was out selling it initially. And I was like, guys, you can't hire a person to do this for you at that price. It sounds like a lot of money was not is not really a lot of money. And what I just like what you said, I think what's important is the proof is in the pudding. I'm literally selling you what we use. I'm showing you how we do it. You know, I'm willing to guarantee some results. We get a tremendous amount of general contractors and other businesses to call and ask us for a service. And I do. I quite frankly, I don't know how to market that. You know, I'm trying to make my phone ring a hundred times a day. You guys need your phone to ring about a hundred times a month or a hundred times a year rather. Yeah, well, it's different. Yeah, we're in the churn business. You know, I mean, we yeah, I work with GCs. They're like, what do you mean your average project price is five hundred dollars? I'm like, yeah, about that. Like, you've got to do like fifty projects a week. I'm like, yeah, that's minimal. Like that keeps me in business minimally. You know, well, those guys, you know, they got seven or eight projects going on at once. They're like, oh, we got so much going on. And it's just a different scope and scale. So, yeah, that's one of the things about junk removal is we are We are low price if you think about other home services, right? Like you need a new furnace, it's five grand or, you know, HVAC, right? You know, you want an electrician to show up at your house, it's five hundred dollars for him to pick up the phone, let alone show up and actually do some work and buy some stuff, you know? So we're relatively low cost there. But then if you look at us versus your residual types of home businesses, cleaning, lawn, you know, lawn cutting, you know, more maintenance-y stuff, we're extremely high price, right? Cleaning is, what, a hundred, a hundred and fifty dollars, you know, for a decent cleaner. You know, lawn care, what, fifty bucks? I don't even know what people pay to cut the grass, right? But it's not five hundred to a thousand dollars, you know, average entry price. And so, yeah, we're unique in that way that we are expensive-ish businesses. And we have to churn customers because at the end of the day, we can't afford to have our trucks sitting out in the yard not making us money. So, yeah, I would say other home businesses, if they're into that, if you can sell them the marketing package. Also, I will say, I'll announce it right here on episode one hundred twenty seven. Right after doing this for two and a half years, we've had marketing companies on the past and people often are like or in our data reflects it. Our marketing episodes historically do the best. And yet I've also heard some major issues with the people we've had on that have sold marketing programs and SEO and Google AdWords and all that shit. Because when people are not hyperlocal, they generally fail. And again, that's a very broad statement, very broad stroke. I believe in local marketing very much so. Um, so like with you, it's like, I would love to find a, you and my market that could pick up and do my spend. That's also, uh, exercising those same processes and, and, you know, hinges his livelihood on it. Yeah. And that's, you know, I think you hit the nail on the head and unfortunately, you know, that, that, that critique goes both ways. I, my guess is half the customers of those people running those marketing companies are not really willing to invest in the longterm. They want a quick hit. They want to get in, get out and they don't understand the value of it. And quite frankly, you need to have the owner involved and participate. If you're going to do really good SEO, you have to be, you have to be writing the blogs and there's nobody better to write the blogs than the boss himself or somebody directly involved with the company. You know, you can farm some of that stuff out for a period of time, but, If you're not involved with it personally, it's going to show through right off the bat. So are you writing blogs for Barton Brothers? I'm sorry, Andy, I lost you. Oh, do you write blogs for Barton Brothers? Yeah, we write blogs once a week, maybe once a month, depending on how fast we get them out. But we are pretty diligent about keeping those things posted and up to date. I think we actually just posted one today, to be honest with you. And are you writing those, or Raven, or who's writing them? I'm not writing them. Raven may write one. I write one on occasion. The media team is doing it, but we do review them, and we try to keep them very local. Raven and I do provide a lot of the context, and then we go out and hammer it out. But that whole world's changing so much with the chat GPT and the AI. It's amazing what you can accomplish with it. Some of it's good, some of it's bad. Yeah, I do my Andy Wines live show and that we use, we lean in on AI to take my fifteen, twenty minute show and rip it down and do a shorter read, a blog read, you know, just a high level overview. It's still my voice. It's not like write the whole damn thing. Right. It takes my voice and takes out the best part. So there's a way to do it efficiently. Certainly. We've never got into blog writing for Camo Crew before. never have and you know like this morning I was on a local tv show uh talking about our rebrand so we officially are camo crew responsible junk removal rebranded effective uh october one so today was the announcement yep uh and now the thing about that is that segment will turn into a blog because I talk about what does it mean to be responsible in our business and what can homeowners do to reduce their environmental impact so we're having that conversation so I see the power in blogs and the seo and the retargeting and all that stuff um never thought about doing it myself or I've thought about I never have executed uh doing it regularly well in this day and age you literally can you can pick up your phone you know use that chat gpt shortcut on your iphone you can talk into it it'll literally spit it out for you and it'll format it I would love to show you guys and talk to you guys about the deep rabbit hole I went down on chat gpt the other day I I've asked this thing a series of questions I had it written code for the website the other night but I asked it to tell me the top three junk removal companies what do you think they are andy I mean, Hillbilly Mass says, eight hundred got junk, junk king, junk luggers. Okay, so one eight hundred got junk, junk king, and Jedi junk. Andrew Thompson came up as number three. Do you believe that? Out of the whole fucking internet. I don't know how he pulled it off or what he did. I mean, obviously the man's doing a lot right on the internet side of things. He's kicking ass. I had him on the podcast like six months ago. He was talking about his new software and yeah, he's an IT guy. That's That's pretty good. And he never got sued for it. He never got sued for Jedi jungle, which I was like, yeah, not yet. Yeah. Maybe, you know, top three jungle companies in the country. Yeah, maybe. Well, then he's, he's just working the backend of chat GPT, man. He's that's interesting. Right. Well, I got two out of three. I'll, I'll, I'll take that action. I mean, I know the market. I was honestly surprised about junk King too. uh junk king yeah I mean mathematics the challenge like like eight hundred god junk is the behemoth college hunks has more sites I want to say then junk king I'll have to google this shit um however you mix in the movie that's where it's different right you know um Yeah. Well, you know what? As I'm typing this in, I'm like, I don't want to type this in. I'm not going to. Because if I type in top junk removal companies or top junk removal franchises, it's going to shit out fucking Thumbtack and Angie's List and Nextdoor and they're going to start spamming me. Um... Because unless it's a publicly traded company, it's not like the data is actually available. And the FTD, the Franchise Disclosure Documents that come out every year releases a number of sites and things like that. They don't always do revenue reporting. I remember that was one of the issues with J-Dog when I was part of J-Dog. They lied about their numbers all the time. We had over three hundred locations. It's like, no, you had a bunch of territories that were like pre-sold that never opened. And they're like, oh, we're operating in twenty seven states. It's like, yeah, not really. Like you have one county that somebody covers in a state doesn't mean you're operating that state. So I get twitchy about that. Anecdotally, you know, it's eight hundred got John College, John King, John Cluggers. What's it like? I think of his name, John Cluggers, brand president. Come on, Brian. Yeah, Justin Waltz. My brain was not brain in there. Good dude, smart dude, and they're doing well. And Drunk King and Luggers, both in the last two years, got brought out by PE firms. So they obviously did well enough to have an exit. The original founders and leadership and management staff that worked at the corporate level had an exit and done well for themselves. So good on them. Anyways, now I'm talking about my pay grade. I'm more boots on ground, local business owner, less macro version. So let's talk macro. You're the macro guy. You're the guy that comes on once a quarter to talk about where you see the industry and where you see your business. So let's get some high level Q three. How did it finish? Where do you see the industry going? What are you looking forward to in Q four? Q three finished strong for us. I think Q four can be even a little bit better. I really think we keep harping on this, but I think we're gonna harp on it again. You really gotta stay out there. You gotta stay top of mind. You gotta keep yourself in front of your customers. It's still not easy to get the business. They had that half point rate reduction from Fed. I saw some data from one of our local real estate trade groups the other day. purchasing power for a first-time home buyer with a hundred thousand dollar annual income and ten percent down payment went up almost twenty percent with that with that half point reduction there by the fed so that's really something to think about that's gonna start to open the market up here in the northeast the market has been super stagnant um but I do think we're gonna start to see it opening just a little bit we have seen signs of it already it's nowhere near what it was but I tell you That number really astounds me. And it makes you realize how important those rates are to keeping the real estate transactions moving. And if you're serious about junk removal, they need to be in those real estate transactions. They got to be involved in those. So one year ago, that same homeowner with the same income could afford a house for two hundred thirty five thousand. Now, with a half point reduction, they can afford a house two hundred eighty three thousand. That's that's significant. Yeah. And when that happens, that's going to allow people the opportunity to purchase and to put that in perspective here in New Jersey. I don't know if you're buying a house in Jersey for less than three or three fifty. So we still see a little rate reduction to really get that market going. But we're moving in the right direction. I do think we're going to see another another quarter point reduction here before the year ends. So I think that's really important. You know, I continue to push the idea of keeping your people busy, figuring out how to diversify, where to where to move people around, where your core competencies are. You know, I tell people all the time we're a marketing company first and foremost, and our core competencies are really labor and equipment, labor and trucks. We added that moving division, and that's been very successful for us. We actually haven't had to advertise it. We've done no paid ads, no paid marketing for that yet, and it's bringing in some extra money. You know, when we decided to really pour some gasoline on it and let it rip, I think it's going to be another great division for us. But in general, I think it's just you're still hunkered down. You're still working really hard to catch that customer. I do think it's going to sound counterintuitive, but I really think people need to start thinking about raising their rates. Everything has become more expensive. Your labor, your fuel, your tipping fees. I'm pretty sure that's across the board from the guys I talk to on a regular basis. I literally just got a rate increase in the landfill here five minutes before we came on the show. Yeah. We're looking at bumping it up. I do love it. If you guys aren't on it and aren't looking at it, I think it really puts things in mind for you. They have that United States government website, Bureau of Labor and Statistics. They have an inflation calculator. Go plug your stuff in there. Take a look at it. Henry, look at this. This is how much your money is worth in twenty twenty two. This is how much your money is worth in twenty twenty four. And that'll essentially tell you how much you need to raise your rates. You know, that inflationary number is not changing. And even as inflation subsides, it's important to realize that that the price points are not going to not going to come down. Simply your wages and everything else are going to adjust, you know? Yeah. Taylor, why don't you get that website up there for everybody and put it in the chat there, too? Yeah, it's a. It's not counterintuitive at all. It's math. So last year we did a seven percent raise on Jan one. This year we looked into it. We did not do a raise increase in July one. And I'm glad we did it because July ended up being a shit month. And it was like, all right, you know. I didn't want to push away any business potentially. However, I have all intentions of doing a January first raise, you know, price increase, you know, like right now the tech is like two point three percent inflation over the last twelve. However, if you look over the last thirty six months, it's a twenty two percent inflation. Right. So it's like your spending power is, you know, seventy eight percent what it was two and a half years ago. Right. you know what, maybe people should talk about that in the election coming up. Instead of, I hate this person or I hate that person. Every day you see the memes like, oh, it's a hundred hours in groceries. A hundred hours in groceries is nothing these days. And then you think about us, it's like everything for us has gone up. It's like, of course our prices have to adjust accordingly. The power of your dollar doesn't go that far. And so you can thank your local and See, I'm still in the Army Reserve, so I can tell you who to vote for. I can't say negative things about the current... I think if you're a business owner, I think what's really important to look at is I think you have to understand the economy is a lagging indicator. It's not moving fast. Guys, I've been building my business for twelve or thirteen years now. We're not done. We're not even close to where I want to be. What makes you think you can turn a country around that fast? So you've got to look at it and figure out what policies have really impacted the economy and what generates of this. And, you know, quite frankly, I believe a lot of it was the COVID money that got spent and how we decided to spend money during that period. And I'm not calling it right or wrong. Yeah, that is what it is. I'm not trying to get a political conversation going here. I'm simply, you know, look at the economy, look at the cause and effect and figure out where you can draw correlations and what's impacting that economy and how do we fix that moving forward. You know, you're going to see a lot of political promises from both parties right now. And I think it's really important to just apply some common sense and really think about it, you know? Yeah, no, I am all about – like we said, it's a lagging indicator, right? There's leading and lagging indicators. If we want to talk about micro and macroeconomics, often what I see in the – the groups is this microeconomic standpoint. Like, Hey, this is what's happening in my very local area. This is how much I charge. And this is how I got screwed last week. Right. Versus like, well, macro let's look at leading indicators, lagging indicators. Right. And what's going to happen. Like, so a leading indicator is new home sales, right? When new home sales start to slip, That's a leading indicator, right? And when they start to pick up, it's a leading indicator. Oh, the economy is recovering. It might not hit your sector for six to eighteen months. It's an indicator. Because for our industry, when there's less new homes being built, that means the demand for new homes has gone down. Well, then the demand for existing houses is going to go down. The demand for remodeling is going to go down. And those things will now all trickle down. So it's like, well, yeah, new homes don't affect my business necessarily. Right? However, remodeling and people moving in current houses absolutely impact my business. And then on the flip side, when you see those new home sales starting to pick up again, you're like, oh, the next six to eighteen months, whatever the number might be, things are going to pick up again. The key is staying consistent with what works. You have to have the baseline. This is what I do from a marketing standpoint, operations standpoint. And as you grow, your baseline gets bigger and bigger. And then when you have those auxiliary dollars, do you risk them? Do you put them on the table? Or do you hold those and button down the hatch? You know, those are, those are the decisions to be made when you're planning out. Like I said, last week I did quarterly planning on Thursday, a full day quarterly session. We're talking about how do we finish the year and what do we need to do this quarter to set ourselves up for success next year? We're not talking about, you know, what do I got to do this week to make the phone ring? Like what you did It's already the last quarter of the year. I'm thinking ninety days out. My head, right now, I know ninety days from today, I'm going to be at our annual two-day retreat, January seventh and eighth, planning for and executing on what we need to get done next year. So my brain is, what do I need to do between now and then? What needs to get done between now and then to set ourselves up for success January seventh so that we're successful in twenty twenty five? That's where I'll challenge our listeners right now. It's October. It's already Q four. It's time to grind. It's time to figure out what the hell happened this year. And what are you going to do about it to go into next, to set yourself up to finish this year, to get ready for next year. Yeah. And I think the conversation about new home sales, I think is really interesting too. And it ties in with the state of the real estate market in general and And this is Justin Waltz's thinking, not mine, but I think it's really important to just put it out there so people can think about it. If homes are not selling, if new home sales are down, there's a very good opportunity that more and more people, instead of moving or looking to buy a new house, are going to be remodeling. So those should be targets for marketing. How do we target those companies? How do we reach them? And what do you have to offer them? And I think there's a lot of opportunity and stuff like that. But these are the thought processes as a small business owner I really think you need to be having constantly. You know, you should be turning these ideas over in your mind. You should be turning them under your ear. You should be trying to figure out where their opportunity is because there's always opportunity. It's just a matter of figuring out where it's located and what it looks like. So, Andy, in the quarterly planning, what's up for next year? Anything new and exciting? One thing we are looking into this quarter going into next year, I mean, a couple of things. ZoomInfo, that's one thing we're looking into. Are you familiar with ZoomInfo? I've looked at the site many times. Tell me more about it. I know nothing. I know we're looking into it. I know this quarter we're doing the research for a potential January one launch of ZoomInfo. Essentially, it's a two to three thousand dollar monthly investment to get people Best way I can put it, leads lists of people that are actively looking for the service you have. So it's an opportunity to go after commercial work. So we're looking into that. The other thing we're looking into is a subscription-based service for some of our apartments and condos associations. So we can begin on a regular cadence with them, which will allow us to impact the cash flows at the beginning of the month and then offer special pricing for them. So those are the two things from a marketing standpoint. The other thing that we need to do as a company is lean in more on me. um, our implementer or integrator, internet or business. He joined us in June. So he's been here about a hundred, twenty days. He's like, we need to get someone to follow you around with a camera all day and talk about recycling and talk about your passion for this industry. Like that's what makes great content. And we had that in the past years ago. We had that. So bringing that back. So those are three things like from a marketing standpoint, um, our biggest challenge in our business is recruiting and retention, recruiting the right people and having the right people stay. And it's really a recruiting issue. We're retaining guys. We, for the most part, keep the guys we want to keep. We are, we've been struggling all years with recruiting, um, not doing a great job of recruiting. So our fix is training. Make the best out of the guys we got, and then also offer such great training that other individuals will see how professional our guys are and then want to be part of this team. So, you know, I look at you, Taylor, over there, up, up, and way down in Atlanta. Some of these other guys have fantastic retention numbers, and we're not there. We need to get there. Yeah, I'll tell you, Taylor takes a very innovative approach to it. I enjoy talking to him. He actually had a great conversation with him a while back about the difference between how a GC makes money and how we make money and how much more effort goes into what we do. And I thought it was a very insightful conversation. But I'll tell you, I'm working on retention all the time, same as you. And for me, it's just trying to scale. I want to get to a point where I can offer better benefits. Do you guys offer health insurance? We do not offer health insurance. We, we, we offer a lot of paid time off the health insurance thing still eludes us. It's just, I can't figure out how people do it cost effectively. So that's my thing. That's my big, that's my big goal for twenty, twenty five. So that's, so that's one thing we're wrapping up this. We are making a decision this quarter, what health insurance we're going to offer our guys. Um, That that's the we fix that. Maybe that helps us and allows us to recruit better. I mean, that's the we want to get more professional guys. We got to offer more professional benefits. Like I also went to a seminar earlier this year that was like, oh, yeah, people under thirty don't give a shit about health insurance because if they're up until twenty six, they're probably on mom and dads. And, you know, up until thirty, they're not thinking about it. So it's like, well, shit, those are the guys I want to hire. Eighteen to twenty. thirty-year-olds you know so it's like does it make a difference and even with our guys currently like we've we've we this is like our fourth or fifth time offering health insurance all the other times we've offered it we didn't have enough people that were interested in it for us to even rule the program out or even get to the point of how cost effective it we didn't get to that point so at least we're at the point now where we got six or eight guys this last year to fill it out to give us an idea of what it may cost us um Yeah, so we're going to make a decision this quarter as to what direction we go. We've had the exact same experience, and so we – our family buys our insurance for our family on the open market. And most of my guys that need insurance do it the same way. And I'll tell you, it's really, it's really not a bad, a bad option. It works out well. We've, we've considered offering stipends and stuff like this for it. The problem is, you know, you hand out a stipend, it's not used for that. Then it's useless because it's important to me as an employer. I want my, I want my people staying healthy. I'm not, I'm not throwing the extra couple hundred dollars a month. So you can go blow it on cigarettes. Cause that's working exactly the opposite direction of what I want to do. So I want you to have health insurance. I want you to go get your checkups, get your physicals, take care of illnesses and injuries when you need to. So, I mean, we're really my, my thought process and discussing with Raven is I'm looking for the opportunity to just buy it outright and provide it to people, you know, and maybe I offer a baseline plan and then those that want to can jump in. But, I want my guys to be insured. That's my mission. And if I can find the best way to accomplish it and, you know, to listeners out there, I know we always get some comments. People are putting information out there. Anybody has any good ideas? We'd love to hear them too. Yeah, absolutely. There was a guy I talked to this last week. He pays sixty bucks an employee a month for a local doctor. It's a cash doctor. He's like, yeah, it's sixty bucks a month. So it's seven hundred dollars a year for him to do it. And it's enough for guys to go in, get checked up and have them write up a prescription. Right. I mean, that's it. And because, again, all those most of his guys are under thirty. It's like. you know, you only need to be seen in ten, fifteen minutes. Like, oh, yep, you got a thing, go ahead. Hell, I smashed up my finger a while back. I went to the doctor today for my checkup. I was there for ten minutes. He's like, yep, another six weeks of PT. All right, sounds good. Like, that's it. Like, the seat wasn't even warm by the time he got up. He's like, all right, this is what we're doing. Sounds good. I'm like, man, that's how you f***ing churn. Right? There's some doctor that'll sit there and they're like, this guy had me out the door, you know, I put aside an hour and I was there for five minutes. I was like, all right, I guess I'm gonna go do some more PT. Like, So, yeah. And again, he could have also been like, hey, here's a script, you know, like right now I'm feeling a little under the weather. I'd love to be a walk into a doctor or primary and be like, hey, I'm just feeling a little under the weather. Give me a Z-Pack, write a script. I'll be at Walgreens in ten minutes. Like, yep, that'd be dope. I'm in love with telehealth, buddy. Telehealth all day. Really? You just call them and they're like, yeah, oh, you got that? Cool. Here's your script. For me personally, my primary care is the VA. The telehealth is not a bad option for them. Really? What do you tell them? You tell them what you want? You tell them your symptoms and they figure it out or what? I think it depends on who you are as a person. I'm very confident. I can diagnose myself and know the severity of it. I do personally usually tend to tell them what I want. Depending on the doctor, sometimes they're more agreeable than others. Like you said, common sense. I don't feel good. The Z-Pack's worked for me in the past. Unless there's a reason I can't use it, send it over. Let me get started here. Maybe I'll do that today. I wait until I'm half dead before I go to the doctor. They're always like, why didn't you call earlier? I'm like, I don't know. I figured I could just tough it out. It's like, yeah, that was stupid. Well, that's exactly what I do. You know, they're seeing me once every couple of years. So I don't think they're too concerned about a drug problem. I'm asking for antibiotics. I'm not asking for opioids, you know. Yeah, no, and I'm pretty diligent. That's the thing. I'm still in the Army Reserve. That's the other issue. I've had health insurance this whole fucking time. I barely use it, right? However, in twenty years, basically as an adult, I joined the UPS Union when I was eighteen, like a week after I graduated high school. So I've always had health insurance of some sort. I've never had to think about it. um so I I don't I do not can empathize or sympathize where the right word is here uh with people that don't have health insurance because I never I've never been there and it's not like a knock it's not you know it's just yeah I joined the military I've been in the army twenty years and yeah I go to the va and even even uh if I didn't have tricare I go to the va and get myself fixed um and my daughter's always had tricare or her her mom provides insurance so it's like I've worked for big companies that allowed it. And when I did work for small companies, I had the army. So it's like, I, I've always had a solution and, you know, never had a major issue. Well, I think that the important part of that is personal responsibility, you know, figure out how to cover your own ass. You know, like, you know, the army, the army is within reach for probably nine percent of the population, I would guess. Yeah. You know, it's something you can do if you want to. The National Guard, these places really do offer a lot of benefits. I agree. Well, then it's also personal responsibility. Like, I don't smoke. I don't drink. I take care of myself. I work a physical job. Like, when I get sick, I'm down and out for two days, not two weeks. Like, it's, again, now we're going, man, we went political. Now we're getting social issues. Let's go back to junk removal. That seems to be the thing. All right. What about you? What do you have on the docket for the rest of this year and going into next year? What are you looking into? I mean, for us, from the inside the office perspective, I just want to continue to learn and understand SEO and the new SEO integrating with the AI stuff. I spent a lot of time on that chat GPT asking questions, trying to better understand it. I was trying to figure out how you get involved with that. And so I don't know if it looked it up or not, but I asked chat GPT about me and I didn't know who I was. So then I gave it my bio. And then when I asked it, Again, for a local junk removal company near me, it recommended my company and me and basically listed the bio I gave it. So I don't know exactly how this stuff works, but, you know, the AI world is really, I think it's going to be important to pay attention to. And so from a marketing standpoint and making sure our relevance on the web stays up to date and as powerful as it can be, that's where I'm kind of putting my time and focus at the moment. I do think it's important to jump back to that question. That comment I made about counter-intuitiveness and price increases. If you're fighting for your business, it doesn't mean your price is right. It just means the market right now is not awesome. And it's to be expected. But I think the important thing, again, as I said before, is junk removal is a commodity. Nobody knows what it costs. You have to explain to people what it costs, show them how you do it. We do that through a price book. But there's a lot of different ways you can go about selling it to people. But I also think you got to look at your close percentage. I think you raise your rates until, you know, my opinion, if you can close seven percent of your sales, your rates are right. If you're closing only six percent of your sales, your rates might be too high. If you're closing eight percent of your sales, your rates are too low. Yeah, that's interesting. So we are, our historical average is sixty four percent and we were at sixty six percent all year. And when I talk to five oh five, they say their numbers are different. They say anything north of sixty is you're at the right price. So, you know, they're at. they're more like fifty, sixty, seventy. Fifty or too much, sixty, seventy, they say you can actually raise your rates. Seventy or above. But in that same ballpark, it comes down to tracking your data. What percentage are you actually closing? Yeah, tracking your data, and I think it's also important to understand where you're positioned in the marketplace. We tend to be an industry leader in our market, and therefore people call us and they want to spend money with us because they're confident. So our close rate does tend to be a little bit higher, even with higher rates, but Where are you price-wise in your market? Historically, we're at the top. And if we're not at the top, we will be at the top again soon. Yeah, same here. Dude, it's the service you offer. We have an excellent staff of people. We have really nice trucks. And what I think is really important is we are extremely reliable and dependable. I don't know if we've ever missed an appointment in thirteen years, knock on wood. That came up like a month ago. Someone's like, we're not going to get to these appointments. I go, that's not a thing we can do. That's not a thing. What do you mean we're not going to get to these? No. Sometimes you have a two-day job that takes three or, hey, we might be able to get it done in one, but it's going to take two. But not a, we didn't show up the day of service. We might be late. We might have to send extra trucks. It may be a shit show. I can't ever remember. Yeah, oh, when I read about that, like, actually, Russ, Russ Berry had a fucking post this weekend. Showed up to a fifteen trailer job because the big, the national company never showed up. It ended up being twenty trailers. He's like, yeah, they didn't show up on a Saturday. He's like, we banged out five trailers. Also, he's got an old ass crew. His crew is all forty-six plus. There we go. Shout out to Russ Berry. I follow his ass on Facebook. Gotta have him back on the show. well and russ russ is just a great example though man that's that's that type of attitude you gotta have it's can do if you're a given we're gonna make it happen and I think that's so important and that's that's where your opportunity is as a small business versus a franchise location um you know I think I think and I mean no knock the franchisees there's a lot of franchisees out there working their ass off building good businesses um but you know that's that's a downside for the consumer you know you're calling somebody who really has skin in the game or somebody who doesn't you know if you If you've got a franchisee with a kind of a crappy location or a lack of discipline or a combination thereof, and they don't care, the customer's not gonna have a good experience, right? And with somebody that owns their own business and they're responsible for those bills, you know, through and through top to bottom, your odds are much better. Yeah, I just looked it up real quick because I knew the number was over fourteen hundred. So as of last week, we hit up fourteen hundred reviews. We're at fourteen oh five. Perfect five star rating. And our goal is fifteen hundred reviews by the end of the year. So ninety five reviews is not great. It's like, oh, let's get to it. You know, let's let's make it happen. Because to your point about and I ran the numbers last week, we're at thirteen ninety and ninety. And I looked, it was like, or I looked, I just did a math. Ninety eight percent of our reviews are five star. Two percent are, you know, one, two, three, four. And I've read up until up until about about thirteen reviews, twelve hundred fifty or so. I read every single review. I stopped doing that because I realized it's not busy work. It's not actually helping me. And I got after twelve hundred reviews, I got a pretty good idea of where we're at. And my guys read them. Every time the emails come in, our operations team is reading them, so they're addressing them. We had a one-star review from some rando last week, and it was like, oh, don't work for this company. They're terrible, blah, blah, blah. And it's like no idea who this person is. So we thankfully got that one removed because that's what prompted me. Because that one-star review knocked us down to a four point nine. Cause that's how much a one-star review, you know, when you're at five stars, it's an outlier. It's outlier, you know, because I'm proud, you know, this morning I was on the local TV channel here talking about our, our rebrand and I want to go there confidently. Yep. We deliver five-star service, not four point nine-star service, five-star, you know, and that is the expectation. So it's interesting to say we never missed an appointment. It's like, that's the permission to play. That's the, that's the bare minimum. What are we even doing? And yet, Like Ross Perry talked about this weekend, hey, man, big guys didn't show up. And we've had jobs where realtors were like, oh, we went with cheap truck and a truck, and he bailed on us. It's like, okay, right, your problem just became our problem kind of. We'll knock it out, you know. So, yes, there are people who are going to take care of it. Yeah, cheap truck and a truck demonstrates how much he cares about his business, you know. He's about as invested as any other Joe Blow is. And I remember when I was trucking a truck, right? It wasn't that even if I was invested, I didn't have the capacity. If I had a one trailer job turning into a trailer and I had another job afterwards, I had no, there was no, like, I remember, I remember this was years ago. We took on a job, a whole house clean out. I don't remember what we used to charge back then. And I was at drill that weekend, so I had Army. So it was like a Saturday, Sunday job. The job got bigger. Something happened. I don't remember. All I know is my best friend Eric and my brother did the job. They unloaded the entire trailer onto tarps in my backyard. and did more. And it was like, I got back on Sunday, Sunday night after a drill week. And I go, what the fuck? And of course it rained. So now we have to repick up all the, it was, I was so irritated. And it was like, not that we didn't care. We just know what we were doing. It's like, Oh, it's Saturday. The landfill's closed and we have a full trailer of shit and they have more stuff. It's like, Oh fuck. Right. So it's like, I wouldn't even say a truck and a truck doesn't care. Truck and a truck doesn't have the resources. Right. Yeah, it might be a combination thereof, you know? Yeah, a core combination. Exactly. So for the truck and the trucks of the world, right? It's like, well, yeah, you're not scaling. I mean, look at you. You said, I'm twelve years into it and I'm still growing. We sat here today and I was telling earlier today, I was talking to Crum. He's our integrator. And I go, we're growing. We grew fifty. We grew forty percent this year, year over year. Forty percent this year. And our growth was thirty eight and a half percent. We grew forty so far. So we're we're had a goal on revenue. And I go, Our goal next year is twenty five percent growth. I go, what stops us from growing fifty percent next year? Like legitimately. And of course, he goes staffing. I go, that's good. That's OK. We got to solve that problem. Right. So it's like, why not keep scaling? You know, the challenge is the people that get to a point. And then they don't want to grow anymore. It's not always a sweet spot. Sometimes you can find a sweet spot. In junk removal, you can get to like, I don't know, the numbers probably like one point to one point five with a very small leadership team and a small overhead. Right. You know, five, five trucks, four or five trucks. and nice and tight, you could probably make good money. Two fifty three hundred take home. I've had, you know, I've had two sweet spots in my my one point five was a sweet spot for us. I remember that. And I'll tell you what, I go to bed some nights. I dream about going back there. What was the number? Well, I can tell you our sweetest spot was our first twelve months in business. We were running out of the backyard. We didn't know what the fuck we were doing. And Werner's Comp was this thing that we never heard of. Yeah, that was a sweet spot. Unsustainable. So what was the number? What was the top line revenue number that was a sweet spot? Most recently, it was the one point eight to the two. That was a pretty nice spot to be in. I don't know if that's typical for a lot of people. I think it is. But the problem is, dude, growth sucks cash. I know. It's miserable. I hate it. So, one point five was a sweet spot. Getting from one point five to two, that sucked. Sucked as in it sucked cash. Yeah, if I look at, so at one point five, we had twenty eight and a half percent profitability. We had twenty and a half percent EBITDA because we were tight. We had five trucks. I remember that year we went back and ran the math. We ran three point nine eight trucks on average a day. So they went six total six or seven total vehicles. But we could run like five consistently in the summer. That's kind of five. You know, six would be like a truck running along with another truck. You know, that one point five, though, that was we were right where we needed to be. And that was also nineteen when we ran that. And what's your what's your definition of sweet spot, Andy? I think that's important to qualify. Even a north of twenty five. If you can run your business, even a north of twenty five. That's. That's that's it. Like I only answer that question right now because that's the gun to head. Yes, that is. And I think it's a very fair answer. I think we're essentially the same spot. But what I would tell you for me is it's it's getting my personal freedom back. Oh yeah. Now, now I love where we're at, right? Like we made more money in nineteen bottom line than we'll make this year more than likely. And yet I've gone on vacations. I don't stress about the business. I don't work weekends. I do this fucking podcast like. I've read six books in the last six weeks. For me, Ten X is easier than Two X. It's a book I read about a month ago, and it talks about the four freedoms. It's the freedom of time, freedom of money, freedom of relationships, freedom of purpose. I'll take that action over. If you said, hey, Andy, you can make twenty percent or twenty five percent. But in order to make twenty five percent, you know, you can't do anything else. That's it. You can make twenty five percent. But cool. Also, I watched a video from Jordan Peterson last earlier. No, yesterday, yesterday, this weekend. And Jordan Peterson said that for people, this money, this video is dated. You can tell probably ten years ago. eight to ten years ago he said that statistically speaking money-wise after you make sixty thousand dollars a year there's rust berry shout out rust berry he's in the chat rust berry twenty trailers taken from the big boys with a bunch of geriatrics north of the age forty six shout out rust berry he is my hero this is first ever episode episode hundred twenty seven my hero of the week is rust berry Knocking the workout on the weekend and talking shit on Facebook because that's my guy. Whenever I'm like, I'm taking the weekends off, Russ is like, let me tell you what I took from my other customers. Anyways, three old fuckers in a U-Haul in a junk truck. There we go. I call that running in tandem with experience. He calls it three old fuckers in a U-Haul. Now I lost track. I was making a point. We're talking about Jordan Peterson, ten-year-old video. Jordan Peterson. Thank you. See? There we go. That's why Andy Barton's an integrator. I'm the visionary here. All right. So what Peterson said, not his argument, but the data shows that your happiness increases every like four to five thousand dollars you make until you get to sixty thousand dollars. And after sixty, it does not increase. Like nothing significant until there's like the five hundred thousand dollars of your fuck you money. Right, like, so let's just say that's a hundred, right? Let's just say from inflation sakes, right? Build back better, no big deal, right? Let's say the number's a hundred, right? So if I can make five hundred thousand dollars a year and I clear a hundred, right? I'm feeling good about myself, life is good. Now, would I rather... I'm going to make it twenty percent EBITDA. Would I rather go twenty five percent EBITDA and make one twenty five? Right. Will that make my life that much better? It's like, OK, would I rather have twenty five thousand dollars or freedom of movement? I'll take freedom of movement. Right. Two thousand dollars a month does not change the way I live my life enough. to take away my weekends, to take away my time with my daughter, to take away my time at the beach. My time. For me, you talk about the four freedoms, freedom of time, money, purpose, and relationships. My time. That's it. My hundred and sixty-eight hours a week, fourteen hundred and forty minutes a day. I choose how I use them. That, to me, is where it's at. Twenty percent is... That is sustainable junk removal. I say if you're under ten, you're dying. Ten to twenty, you're growing. And north of twenty, you're fucking... rock and roll. I agree with you a hundred percent. I think everything you said is right. Um, uh, but I can't help myself. You know, I don't know. I know. I know. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I, I've given him my weekends like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, I think that's literally the definition of entrepreneurship. That's the difference between a business owner and entrepreneur. I don't know where my ceiling is, but it's a ways up there. I don't think I can see it yet. So that's the thing. That's a difference between you and me, and I love this healthy difference. I remember one of our last episodes, you were like, Yeah, it's fucking Saturday, four o'clock. You call. I'm picking up. Me? I'm not. I'm not picking up. And I don't expect my team to pick up because my operation is we run Monday through Friday. Actually, so I stopped the shop yesterday. So if I do work on the weekends, it's because I choose to. So I stopped the shop yesterday to drop something off. And as I'm leaving, I saw college hunks. They were unloading. tables and stuff from a race, this place right across the street from me, they do races like marathons and shit. Right. And so years ago we did, we did a couple like races with them where we'd bring the table, we'd bring our trucks, we set up tables, they do the race, we pack it all up. We take it, we take the trash, whatever. We hated it. We sucked at it. Our guys weren't good at it. We didn't like it. No part of it. Right. So then they did them themselves for a year or two. And then we would get the cleanup afterwards. We would do the cleanup. Well, this year we lost it all. I think earlier in the year we did a cleanup or two for him and we haven't touched. I have not thought about them at all. So as I'm leaving, I see the college hunks guy. Then I met him at networking events, nice enough guy, right? And he's helping them and it's his truck. I go, all right, it's Saturday. I'm sitting here in flip-flops. All my guys are off. I'm going to go watch a Packer game. If he wants that business, whatever. He can have it. Right? Like, that's not my business. Where an older mindset of me would have been like, fuck that guy. That's my fucking customer. I got to do whatever it takes to win that fucking job. It's like, no. Even in our fundamentals, I have about fifty fundamentals we run our business by. we don't roll on Shabbos, right? Sundays, we don't fuck around. That's it, right? That's the fundamentals. We don't roll on Shabbos. And it's like, okay, you know what? If Jesus is chicken, if Chick-fil-A can get by without rolling on Sunday, why can't I, right? And that's my principle. You can a hundred percent do it. I don't think there's anything wrong with it either. No, and it's a personal choice. But you're right. There's a difference between do you own your business or does your business own you? There's this woman I've been doing consulting work with. She owns a cleaning and organizing and decorating company. And when I first met her, I'm like, you don't work that much. Like, I'm looking at your hours. Like, you're busy, but you don't really work that much. Let's get you efficient. So then we dialed her up and got her efficient. Well, now that she's efficient, she can take on more customers. So instead of averaging like one and a half customers a day, she's now averaging two and a half customers a day and sometimes up to five customers a day. But she went from averaging probably about four to five billable hours a day to closer to eight or nine billable hours a day. So then she got overworked or, you know, we found a new ceiling. We had to break through a new ceiling, not overworked, but broke through a new ceiling. And then all of a sudden on Saturday, she was off because she was working six days. I'm like, no, no, no. Don't work six days. Have six days of availability. And as soon as you book up your Saturday, you don't work one of the other days that you don't have booked up yet because it's project based. I was like, work five days. We don't know which five days yet. We know three days a week you're booked up with residual and you have three days you can book with other shit. So like two weeks in a row, she worked six days a week. And then last week she worked five days. She goes, well, I may or may not book on Saturday. I go, no, do not book on Saturday. You've got your five days. Don't book on Saturday. And then she told me I was so productive on Saturday because I finally realized the importance of time. Because I was so used to having all this time during the week to fuck around. I was like, oh, I'll just do whatever. And now all of a sudden it's like she put a constraint on our business. First off, by getting efficient. And then she said, I'm only going to work five days a week. She earned it. Now she was super productive on that sixth reset, you know, practice, whatever you want to call it, day because she was intentional about the day she worked. And now she's like, fuck, I can work five days, ten hours a day every week because I've conditioned myself to do so and be more productive on my days off. So it's a mindset shift depending on how people operate and what's important to them. That's ultimately what comes down to. I agree. One hundred percent. I don't remember what the question was. Where's my dissertation? Oh, yeah, it was about... It was about you, grind, grind, grind, grind, grind. Now, I love growth, right? The key for me is sustainable growth. It is what makes sense, not growth for growth's sake. Because I did growth for growth's sake in the past. I mean, I had ten franchises across the country in an eighteen-month period. That was growth for growth's sake, and that was unsustainable, and hence why it failed. I saw the writing on the wall after nine months. I was like, oh, this is disastrous. This is going nowhere. I think that's an important distinction. I'll tell you, I don't think I'm at growth for growth's sake. I do really enjoy what I'm doing. I have my days where I have these fleeting moments that I decided I'm out of my mind and I can't do anything about it now, so I have to just deal with it. I want to build a company where I have people that can spend a career there if they choose to. Real jobs, real benefits. You start out at a truck. You can move into the office. You can start making real decisions, informed decisions, using your brain, educating yourself, and just being smart. I think we all know it, right? You can sit there and kind of be as purposeful as you want to, or you can be as dumb as you want to. If you just want to sit there and throw junk on the truck all day, you do that. And that's never been who I was. Even when I was employed by people, I was always like, okay, how can I do this better? How can I make it better? What am I really trying to accomplish here? And if I really want to impress my boss, how would I do it? And those are the guys I want to maintain. I want to keep them on board. And you're not going to be able to do that unless you have positions for them. And right now, we're just flat out not that big. We're not big enough to do that. Here in the Northeast, we have that Wegmans grocery store. What I love about Wegmans is, A, their service is amazing. Their prices are not cheap. So I like that, too, as a capitalist. But they're family-owned. They're privately owned and operated. And there's a tremendous amount there of opportunity. Universities are studying them. That's always my model. In the world of franchisees, I want to be Wegmans, you know? Yeah. What is your employee headcount at right now? You know, I was trying to figure that out the other day. I think we've been talking long enough to know that I don't spend a lot of time worried about that type of shit. But I think we're sitting somewhere between eighteen and twenty. I can tell you all their names. Yeah, between both locations, you're saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, no, I know. I'm a data guy. I know you're a... Yeah, when you said, hey, I went to this rabbit hole and chat GTPT, I'm like, I could fucking care less. Actually, I pulled up chat GTPT in another window. I was going to chat GTPT as a demo, my name, to see what it knows about me. Yeah. Here, shit some giggles. Let's do that. We're going to have some fun. Let's see how we can do this. All right, here we go. Actually, I'm going to put Where are we at the stage? There we go. All right, chat to you. Okay, so what did you ask it? What can you tell me about? I said, one of the questions I asked it was, who offers the best junk removal service near me? No, no, I was going to ask you when you said about yourself. I knew nothing about you. I asked her, I said, what can you tell me about Andrew Barton? And hopefully it'll ask you to tell it about you. Yeah, let's just see. I'm going to find out how good my marketing team is or what it knows about for shits and giggles. What can you tell about Andy Wines? Nothing. Guy sucks. All right. There you go. Yeah, nothing. Yeah, so give it the context. This is exactly the same prompt I followed. Let's see if it knows anything about My book. There we go. I'm trying to think. There it is. See? All right. So I have to teach it what this all means now. I think you do. Yes, sir. All right. I'm not sure how it employs it after that. I was trying to figure that out. If you get bored, ask who knows about me and tell me what comes back with. There you go. I still have that window open of things I wanted to test. Not that I need people to chat GP team and they can find me in real life. Here on the Trash Talk Business Podcast. Uh, also before I forget, before I forget, uh, later this month, we are moving the trash talk business podcast to Tuesdays, Tuesdays, starting the twenty ninth of October. So two, three weeks, three weeks from today, uh, we will not be here three weeks from today. We will be tomorrow. Uh, so moving it to Tuesdays, uh, works out better. My schedule Mondays are my man. Mondays are meaningful Mondays. That's what we call them. So I do a lot of meaningful things like meetings. And what I realized is I have. three and a half to four hours of meetings. And then I go and do two podcasts. Like I am not as mentally sharp as I can be. Um, So yeah, that's it. I'm moving on. That's it. That is the catalyst behind it. And when Casey and I were both doing the show, Mondays was a day that worked out for both of us. And now things have changed and evolved. And it's like anything else in life, right? I like to evaluate and question and look at my calendar, look at opportunities, look at things from a different angle and see how we can improve life. So there you go. Tuesdays. So I also found out your wife, Raven, who was on the show two weeks ago, had nine pages of notes. And I don't know if we got to even a half a page. Did you have any notes? Yeah. I did the math. She had enough notes for thirteen episodes. I want to see her back on the show. She's probably going to try to kill me for that. You did great. It was good. I don't think you got the full effect. I want you to see her in her element there. I know Raven. I know her. It was her first one. We will have her back on the show because I want to talk more marketing with her. I loved her story, though, about the ice rink and getting late to the game, digital marketing, and also recognizing, hey, the land was more... The acreage was worth more than the business. Yeah, you've got to cut... you know, uh, cut your losses or, you know, grab your gains while you can. Um, so no, I love hearing that origin story. She told me a little bit more in depth about you and how it became Barton brothers. So no, it was a great show. Um, no, we got about five minutes here left. Are there any things that we didn't did not cover here on the quarterly Barton update that need to be covered? No, I think, uh, You know, it's kind of cliche, but we're coming into a fourth quarter. Now is the time. If you want to be successful in twenty twenty five, you've got to start spending your money now. And I don't care how much money you have or don't have, you know, spend the money. It's the only way you're going to make money, figure out how to pay the bill, figure out how to push it off till you can pay the bill. That's that's the difference, I think, between entrepreneurship and and management is having to manage that cash flow and figure out how to do it. And most of us I know are doing it with little or nothing. That's where I started. I think that's probably where you started, Andy. You know, I've always been a hard worker. It's difficult to get paid what you're worth though. And so if you want to have success, you got to go out and spend that money. You got to figure out how to make things happen. I'll share this post with you one time here, but I really like the idea of doing simple math. And we've talked about that before too. Don't do an extensive spreadsheet. You're going to talk yourself out of doing whatever good idea you have. Go out and do the good idea for the sake of doing a good idea. And if it really turns out to be a bad idea, then fuck it. You know, shit happens. Life moves on. You know, you can recover from that mistake and you go out and try it again. You learn from it. But I think there's so much opportunity in the space. And I think there's so many guys that have a ton to offer people. And they're just hamstrung by their own fears, insecurities, and concerns about some sort of financial stability that probably doesn't exist and maybe never will. So that's my two minutes of two cents, you know. Well, what you said, so when you spend money in your business, you're spending it on one of three things. It's either an asset, an investment, or an expense. So the difference between people like you and I and other people is we will spend money right now while we have it and invest it so it comes back with more friends come January, February, March. Other guys will sit on it, and then they'll just spend the money on the expense. Like, oh, I got to pay my guys to keep them busy. It's like, why don't you spend the money right now. So your phone rings in January, right? Why not buy the piece of equipment you need right now? So you can save money on renting shit, or you can do more jobs in the next three months. So then you have an asset and you have that revenue for those next three months. So I am all about investing into investments and assets. Otherwise you're gonna spend the money on expenses. You're spending the money either way, right? Also is now the time, get training, train your guys, come up with training plans so you can train them over the winter and Because the complaint always in the summer is, oh, we don't have enough time for training. And then in winter, it's like, oh, we don't have enough money for training. It's like, put the money aside, spend it, invest it, earmark it, do something with the money to take the time to train the guys now so they're ready for April, right? It's... you know, even we're, we're both military, right? Like you come home from a deployment. First thing they do, you go back to the basics, go back to training. Like, that's it. You go back to marching. It sounds as stupid as it is. It's like, well, you haven't marched in two years. Well, we're going to get back to marching, bring it back to PT. It's like, I just fought a war. It's like, great. Let's get back to the basics because the seasonality is no different than this industry, right? Like seasonally. Yeah. Your guys are probably beat up and broken this time. You know, I remember when I worked construction by October, November, we were shot. Our bodies were shot. And it's like, well, we spent the whole winter resting. Right now, before you guys rest, get them training. Keep those bodies lubricated. Keep them moving. Have them focus more on their mind and taking care of their body than physically making you money. So invest, invest, invest. So I agree with you there. Top takeaways. We covered what you wanted to cover. Any top takeaways you got? I mean, I would like just expound on what you said there a little bit. You know, the training, it doesn't have to be anything exorbitant. What's the word? Not exorbitant. Doesn't have to be anything that spectacular is my point. You know, you got a slideshow, you know, you can talk to that guy, Kevin Hess. Kevin's the man. He's got a great class on rapport and customer service and satisfaction, but I'm telling you what, having been doing this as long as I've done it, you can always just have a class on what the price points are in your truck and how to go about addressing it with the customer and how to explain to the customer what the fee is going to be and how to not back yourself into a corner. it sounds redundant. It sounds extremely simple. And I guarantee if you take the half an hour to give that class, your guys or gals are going to walk away. Somebody's going to benefit from it. Maybe not everybody, but somebody. And what happens to me is my guys usually walk out of the room feeling pretty good because there's an unintentional humor in there. When you find that one guy that needs a class and you start role-playing with him a little bit and it becomes a little bit embarrassing, everybody gets a good chuckle out of it. But listen, we're in the family. We want to be embarrassing now inside of our conference room, now they're in front of the customers. So I think it's really important, you know, to your point, just, you know, train, train, train. Yeah, you know, ground guiding, getting out and looking, right? A thirty minute class is a lot cheaper than paying for a mailbox, you know, if not more than a mailbox. A couple of things of note, Recycling Summit, October twenty fifth and twenty sixth. Coming up here in just a few weeks. Still got tickets available. Free. That's it. Get to Milwaukee. Learn about our warehousing operations. Learn about the way we run our operations, how we unload our trucks, how we schedule our trucks, how we route our trucks. All things operations. Also a little bit of networking in there. And a fish fry. We're going to go for fish fry on Friday. Taylor shot me a text. I completely forgot about this. This guy, Ty. Ty sent me a message the other day. And I never even emailed him back or texted him back. I need to. Hey, Andy, just wanted to reach out and say your podcast motivated me to quit my job and, in quotes, do the fucking thing. I'm nineteen years old and I've been getting a decent amount of junk removal work here in mid-Michigan. I also do carpentry on the side with my cousin. Thanks for the inspiration and knowledge. So Taylor has a running list of how many people have quit their jobs because of this podcast. Then we're up to five or six. uh that's it that that is when you ask me why I've done a hundred twenty seven episodes is because of that because at nineteen years old had I found a podcast or inspiration or motivation or education whatever the word is maybe I would have jumped into my junk removal dream earlier in my career and so now instead of regretting what I didn't do it's an opportunity for me to be the change I want to see in the world so shout out for ty out there in saginaw michigan I do owe him a response you know what Speaking of Taylor, let's get him on the podcast. Let's get him on the podcast. And I want to talk to a nineteen year old, right? Mentor you have that's ten years older than you. You need one that's ten years younger than you. And so he's twenty years younger than me. So I can only imagine what he can share with me and teach me from his perspective. So thank you for that little listener. Quit your job because of things you heard here from great guys like Andy Barton. Any last words, Mr. Burton, before we let you go? No, excellent show. I appreciate it. Awesome. Appreciate your time as always. Andy Barton will be back in early January. His wife might be back sooner. Sounds like we got nine pages of notes, thirteen episodes with Raven Barton coming up over the next couple of years. Looking forward to it. On behalf of Taylor, our producers and Andy Barton, our guest, I'm Andy Wines. And this has been another great episode of the Trash Talk Business Podcast. We will see you next week. Thanks for listening. Tap subscribe or follow to get the latest episode. And if you enjoyed this episode, be sure to leave us a review and tell a friend to listen. To learn more, visit Trash Talk Business Podcast dot com. Bye now.