The #1 number I watch every week
Labor cost as a % of revenue. By department.
Not "are we paying people less"
It's "are we getting more done for every dollar we pay"
And remember leverage..
Saving 1% on labor efficiency is worth more than cutting the office coffee and fridge drinks in half
Find your biggest expenses and work on those. Stop fixating on the stuff that's a tiny % of revenue
Second lever is overhead. Is revenue growing faster than the office? I check that quarterly, you can't move it every week
What's the one number you look at every week?
I run a lawn and landscaping business, and my fuel bill is projected to be 40% higher than budgeted for 2026.
Screw this entire administration all the way to H-E-double hockey sticks.
@NolanGore Your Dad is a wise man.
Calling a spade a spade, laborers are laborers for a reason.
Very few can connect the dots past the present.
K.I.S.S.
My first home service business went from $100k to $300k to $500k to $750k in 3 years
The marketing wasn’t the hardest part
The hardest part was having $20k in the bank while customers owed me $25k and I owed another $10k on credit cards
Revenue growth looks great from the outside
Cash flow is what keeps you alive
My wife has been a stay-at-home mom our whole marriage (except for last year when we both had part-time teaching jobs at a Christian school).
And I don’t like this. Stop the socialism programs. You can help us by cutting taxes and ending the IRS like Trump said he would.
🚨 BREAKING: The Trump administration is reportedly drafting a plan pushed by JD Vance to give federal child care funds to married couples with a STAY-AT-HOME SPOUSE while the other parent works — NYT
The program could be $9K per year for these families
The goal: make it easier for married Americans to let one parent take care of the children, rather than both work and pay others to take care of the children
This could create an incentive for parents to "stay at home with their children"
Apparently, this is similar to a MARCO RUBIO proposal when he was Senator 👀
It sounds like this would be under current federal programs, not new laws passed by Congress
Fannie Mae blocks every investor in America from bidding on thousands of foreclosed houses for the first 20 days they're listed. Then it pays up to 3% of your closing costs when you buy one
Fannie Mae is one of the two government-backed companies standing behind most American mortgages. When it takes a house back, it has a rule: regular families get first shot. People like me are locked out
I'm the one being blocked. I'm telling you anyway, because in most cities the houses sit through the whole 20 days with no offers:
The program is called First Look. Fannie Mae puts every house it owns on its own website, HomePath. com. For the first 20 days a listing is live, only three kinds of buyers can make an offer: people who will live in the house, nonprofits, and public agencies. Investors can't submit. Not a low offer, not a cash offer, nothing. Day 21, we're allowed in. Freddie Mac, the other government-backed company, runs the exact same window on its houses
Why they do it: after 2008, the government decided its mortgage companies should put families in the foreclosed houses, not landlords. So they built a head start and gave it a name. Almost nobody outside the industry has heard it
Then the money. Fannie Mae runs a second program called HomePath Ready Buyer. You take their free online homebuyer course before you make an offer. When you close, they pay up to 3% of the purchase price toward your closing costs
Stack it:
House: $160,000
FHA down payment at 3.5%: $5,600
Closing costs: about $5,000
Fannie Mae pays: up to $4,800 of that
You're into a house for roughly $6,000, with no investor bidding against you, on a property that's already priced like a foreclosure
Why the houses sit for 20 days: they're foreclosures. Somebody stopped paying and stopped maintaining. Brown carpet, a dead lawn, a kitchen from another decade. They're sold as-is, Fannie won't fix anything, and first-time buyers hear "as-is" and run. You can still inspect it. You should. Then you look at the clean house on the same street and do the subtraction
The playbook:
1. HomePath. com. Filter your city. First Look listings show the countdown
2. Get an agent registered with HomePath. Any agent can register. Most haven't
3. Inspect BEFORE you offer. As-is means as-is
4. Finish the Ready Buyer course before you submit. No certificate, no 3%
5. If the house needs work, the same FHA loan that buys it can fund the renovation
6. Offer on day 3, not day 19. If it's clean it'll have competition from other families. If it's ugly, you'll be alone
"Foreclosures are wrecks"
Some are. That's the discount. The clean ones get six offers on day one. The one that needs $18,000 of paint and floors sits for three weeks because nobody can picture it finished. That's the one
Here's the confession: on day 21 I bid on the ones you didn't. Every 20-day window a family didn't use is a house I got at a foreclosure price
The government built a 20-day head start for you and put your name on it. I hear the countdown every day
I will teach you how to flip houses. Link in my bio, fill out the form and I'll hit you back
Someone is selling a house right now with a $250,000 mortgage at 2.99% attached to it, and you are allowed to take over their payments
Not refinance it. Not match it. Take it. Same rate, same balance, same 26 years left on the clock. Today's rate is 6.89%, the highest in a year. The difference on that one loan is $592 a month
It's called a mortgage assumption and the bank has to let you do it if you qualify. Here's how it works:
Every FHA and VA loan in America was written so it can be transferred to the next buyer. That's millions of mortgages. As of this spring, 40% of the money sitting in government-backed home loans still carries a rate under 4%. Those houses are on the market like any other house. The rate travels with the deed if you know to ask for it
You don't have to be a veteran to take over a VA loan. You don't have to have had an FHA loan before. You qualify the way the seller qualified: credit, income, debt. The loan's servicer processes it. The seller is released. The rate never moves
The math on that $250,000 balance:
At 2.99%, the payment is about $1,053
A new loan for the same $250,000 at 6.89%: about $1,645
Difference: $592 a month
Over the 26 years left: about $184,000
Now the part that stops most people, so it doesn't stop you:
The seller owes $250,000. The house is worth $400,000. The $150,000 gap is your down payment. Cash, a second loan, or a mix. Even if you borrowed the entire gap at 9%, your combined payment lands around $2,260. A brand-new loan on that same house with 3.5% down is about $2,540. Every dollar of the gap you cover with cash instead of a second loan drops it further
"Why isn't everyone doing this?"
Because nobody can find them. There is no Zillow filter for "seller has a 2.99% FHA loan." A startup called Roam built exactly that marketplace in 2023. It shut the service down last month. Your realtor has probably never closed one. The servicer makes almost nothing on it compared to writing a new loan, so nobody in the transaction is motivated to bring it up
So you bring it up:
1. Search listing remarks for the word "assumable." Some agents know to list it
2. For every house you like, ask one question: "What kind of loan does the seller have and when did they get it?" An FHA or VA loan from 2020 or 2021 is the jackpot
3. Mortgages are public record. Your county recorder's website shows the loan type and date on any address. Pull it before you offer
4. Write the assumption into the offer. Plan on 2 to 3 months instead of 30 days. The agencies cap the fees and there's usually no appraisal
The catches, in full. FHA loans written after 2013 carry mortgage insurance for the life of the loan, so run the payment with it included. If you take a VA loan from a veteran, part of their VA benefit stays tied up in your house until it's paid off, so some veterans want extra money for it. And a few sellers know exactly what that rate is worth and price it in. Most don't
A stranger locked in a rate three years ago that you will not see again in your lifetime. The law says you can have it. You just have to ask before the house sells to someone who didn't
I will teach you how to flip houses. Link in my bio, fill out the form and I'll hit you back
🔥 BREAKING OVERNIGHT: President Trump drops this absolute banger where — by stroke of pen — he personally CROSSES OUT “Lake Ontario” in the Oval Office to name it Lake America
🤣🤣
“We're going to make a little change. We're going to call it something different than Lake Ontario. We're going to call it Lake America, and all it takes is a good pen and some intelligence.”
“So Lake Ontario, that's gone. Lake America. So now we have a lake, and now we have a Gulf, because we have the Gulf of America.”
“Now we have Lake America, without the of. Thank you very much, everybody. Enjoy Lake America!”
He’s pure gold! 😂
We understand why beef prices are a problem right now. Ground beef is averaging $6.89 a pound, up 57% since 2021, and that's real pressure on American families.
But flooding the market with 300,000 metric tons of imported ground beef with no tariff for 90 days is not a solution for American ranchers. It's a short-term price fix that puts more downward pressure on the cattle producers who are already struggling to stay viable. Trump has not said which countries this beef is coming from or who committed to the 25% price reduction he's promising.
American cattle ranchers have been dealing with years of drought, high feed costs, and a shrinking herd. The answer to that is not more cheap imported beef with lower standards competing against them on shelves with no country of origin label required to tell you the difference.
We will continue to source 100% American. That is not changing.
@Owen0to1 Either 3 or 4. I pick 4, but make "Tree Care" larger so *what you do* stands out more.
Keep it super simple and easy to read.
Getting fancy only makes it harder to read at a passing glance.