A follow up to post 1: redacted And post 2: redacted A few months ago I wrote about closing on my first deal, a residential and commercial landscaping company in Fortuna, CA. That post covered everything up to close. This one covers what came after. I'm about 4.5 months in now. Some of what follows is tactical, like how the 90-day true-up actually worked, how we cleaned up the books after a stock sale, and how we rebuilt our intake process. Some of it is about people, which has turned out to be the biggest part of the job. It's long. I didn't cut the details, because the details are what I was looking for when I was searching. 1. Hold your plan loosely Before I took over, I was advised not to walk in with a rigid plan that I was going to implement no matter what. I still started with a list of things I wanted to think about in the first 90 days, the second 90 days, and the third 90 days. That was helpful context to have. What I learned is that how I thought about the business before I started, and how I thought about it after a month, a month and a half, and two months, shifted dramatically. That flexibility let me focus on the core issues the team wanted fixed, not just my own priorities. Fixing the things that frustrated them every day built trust inside the organization, and that trust has let us get a lot more done. 2. The seller relationship after close My experience with the seller has been very, very good. I worked closely with him for about 2 or 3 weeks after close. Then he started showing up to the office less and let me run my thing. At 4.5 months in, I still call or text him a couple of times a week. Some weeks not at all, other weeks more often, depending on what comes up and when I need his opinion on how to handle something. He has been very helpful every time. Two weeks ago I had him come in for a couple of hours to work through an analysis I had done on the organization and get his input. It was super helpful. We've maintained a high level of trust. In my first post I said a bad seller is hard to diligence around. The flip side is also true. A good seller who stays available after close is worth a lot. 3. The 90-day true-up took much longer than I expected If your deal has a working capital true-up, plan for it to take real time. Mine did. Here are the components I worked through: 1. Bills and expenses. I reviewed every bill and expense I had paid over the prior 90 days to sort out which ones should have been paid by the seller because they fell in the seller's time, and which ones were mine. I did two full passes on all of our expenses. 2. Accounts receivable. I looked at every invoice and when the work was actually done. If the work happened before the close date, it belonged to the seller. If it happened after, it was mine. We adjusted the month-end billing between the seller and me accordingly. 3. Work in progress. For each open job, I looked at the expenses tied to it and how much had been billed before the close date versus after. 4. Payroll. I checked whether the payroll payment made to me covered the seller's payroll liabilities versus mine, and there was a true-up there. 5. Bad debt. Receivables that weren't going to be collected. There were quite a few uncollectable debts that were more than 6+ months old. 6. Net working capital, rerun. Once all of those adjustments were made, I reran the net working capital calculation. 7. Functional equipment. You also need to go onsite with someone who knows all of the equipment and verify that it works. Don't just check it off a list. Have someone start it, run it, and look at it. I found a handful of items that my SPA required were in good shape that were not so charged the seller to fix. Here's what I found: • Many, many unpaid bills. • Some equipment that wasn't functional, either gutted or with blown engines. In the end, the working capital came in about 10% under the target. I'm very grateful it was a simple process with the sellers. After about a month, they just sent me a check. 4. Have a CPA ready on week one This is the one I'd do differently if I could go back. I assumed I'd keep working with the same accountant the prior owner used. In reality, the seller's dad had been managing AP and AR. Because his dad was stepping out of the company, they had trained other employees to do AP and AR. When I got there, I assumed those employees could keep it going. Once I realized they had only been doing it for a month or two and were by no means experienced accountants, I learned we needed to both formalize it and outsource parts of it. That's not a knock on them. They had AP and AR dropped on them, and figuring out how to record an acquisition isn't simple work. The bigger issue was the acquisition cleanup. This was a stock sale, so the whole transaction needed to be captured in the company's books. People were paid out at close. I had fees that I was reimbursed for. The seller paid for things and I paid for things that weren't captured anywhere in the books. All of that has to get recorded. Nobody wanted to touch it. The seller's CPA wanted to retire and didn't want to do this work. Nobody inside the organization had the experience to do it. So I brought in another CPA firm to do the cleanup after about 6 weeks. When I had a second CPA review that work, they found several holes, and they're going through it a second time to fix it now. My advice: identify a CPA before close who knows acquisition accounting. Once the books close, hand them your acquisition accounting documents and have them do the full true-up in the books. 5. Measure net working capital at its peak I got much deeper into understanding what net working capital really means and how to track it over time. We bill once a month, on the last day of the month. If I look at net working capital on the 25th, my requirement looks very low. On the last day of the month, it's at its peak. The number you need to plan around is the peak, not whatever day you happen to check. I learned this through a lot of back and forth with Claude. To truly understand your net working capital requirement, you have to find where it peaks in any given month. If you bill throughout the month, that could mean checking it every day. For us, it peaks on the last day of the month, so that's the day I need to account for. On the cash side, we're using the Profit First method for paying bills. What I've learned is that I need to make transfers between accounts more often. Right now I'm pulling from savings when I shouldn't have to. I have enough cash, it's just not in the right accounts at the right time. It's a timing issue, not a cash issue, and more frequent transfers will fix it. 6. "How does this place make money?" There was a point in the first couple of months where I looked around at everything that was broken and thought, "Holy crap, I can't believe this place makes money. How does it make money? Which projects make me money? Which ones cost me money?" We had no data on how much each customer makes us. There was no job costing that tied revenue and expenses back to a specific customer. When we service over 800 customers a year, and some days serviceredactedcustomers, that calculation isn't simple. Even without good data, some of it was obvious once I looked. We had an area that was 2 hours away, and another customer 2.5 hours away where we were charging for onsite time but not drive time. For the one 2 hours away, I had a crew of 5 driving a total of 4.5 hours in a day to make roughly $500. My cost was about $1,100. I was spending $1,100 to make $500. We cut both. Some revenue isn't worth having. Getting real customer-level profitability is a big reason behind the systems changes I talk about below, like moving crew purchases to Ramp cards and implementing LMN. 7. You're the head of IT now Nobody told me I'd be the chief IT officer and the fixer of everything that's broken, but that's the job for a while. When a team has done a lot of things manually, technology is new to them. Upgrading it doesn't mean everything works right away. It takes active involvement from the owner. The phone system. When I got there, we were on a standard landline with two phone lines. Getting off the landline was very hard. Getting data on how many incoming calls we actually received was even harder. It took me almost a month just to get access to the reports. When I did, the reports said we received between 2 and 6 calls a day, and some days none. I knew that was wrong. I'd sit in a meeting with my staff and hear the phone ring and go to voicemail 3 to 7 times in a single meeting. We moved to Quo within about a month. The move was bumpy, but it has been super helpful. Here's how we set it up: • When someone calls, they hear a message: "Press 1 if you're a new customer, or 2 if you're an existing customer." • Existing customers can dial straight through to individuals in the organization. • New customer calls ring 2 people at the front desk, then roll to an overflow call center. We use Blazeo as our call center, and they're doing great. Email and file storage. A lot of the team was using personal email accounts to log into data storage platforms like OneDrive. That's a real risk when you own the business and the data. I brought in an IT guy to get our whole team onto company OneDrive accounts, then back up all of our computers. Claude Teams setup. More on that below. 8. Leads and intake Google LSA. Before closing, I heard on several podcasts that Google Local Services Ads (LSA) are a really effective way to drive leads. I've found the same thing. LSA is where most of our marketing dollars go now. It took us 2 to 3 weeks, or longer, to get our Google account and LSA set up. My recommendation is to get your Google account and LSA set up as soon as you get into the business. That way, when you're ready to pull the trigger, you aren't waiting another few weeks. Booking estimate appointments. The old process for setting an estimate meeting was complicated and messy. There was a OneDrive folder, and every time we needed a new estimate, the person at the front desk would: 1. Create a new Word doc. 2. Set up the meeting. 3. Book the meeting on the estimator's calendar. 4. Print out the estimate sheet. 5. Save the estimate sheet to the estimator's calendar. That took 10 or 15 minutes on the phone with the customer. I used Claude to build a new intake form in Google Sheets. It asks all the same basic questions the front desk was asking, but now they're fill-ins and drop-downs. We have two salespeople, one focused on maintenance and one on construction and renovation. Depending on the project type, the form pulls up the right salesperson's calendar below it, through our Microsoft 365 connection. Claude showed me how to set that up. When you hit Save, the form: • Emails the two people in our office so one of them can print it and put it on the salesperson's desk. • Automatically puts the meeting on the salesperson's calendar. • Includes a link to the form in that calendar event, so the salesperson can pull it up when they're out and about. There's no variability now. Whether it's one of our two front desk people, a salesperson, or our call center booking the meeting, it gets done the same way every time. 9. Auditing why we stopped closing construction jobs Our construction jobs dropped off quite a bit. I wanted to know why, so I connected Claude to Quo, Microsoft 365, and QuickBooks. That gave it access to: • Phone records • Text messages • Estimates sent through QuickBooks • Email • Calendar • Estimate appointments I had it run a full audit while I was out working in the garage. On top of the overall findings, it created one section for every lead we'd received in the last 2 months. That way, I could do a deep dive on individual customers and see if I arrived at the same conclusions it did. It gave us a number of areas to improve, and we're systematically working through each of them right now. 10. Ramp and LMN Ramp. We moved accounts payable to Ramp. Before that, AP was in disorder and we were paying bills pretty sporadically. Ramp has automated a lot of our AP cycle. We're also moving expenses to Ramp, specifically by giving our crews Ramp credit cards to pay with. Today we get a bill at the end of the month from Ace, other hardware stores, or the lumber store, and none of the receipts are tied to a particular customer. With Ramp cards, each transaction gets tied to a customer. We're just starting that transition, and the team is pretty excited about it. LMN. This part is specific to landscaping. We looked at a few "ERP-light" systems, and the two most popular in our industry are LMN and Aspire. We went with LMN because it's simpler to implement and costs much less. We know it doesn't need to be our long-term solution, but it will serve us well for at least the next few years. We started implementing it last week. 11. Raises, review apps, and what I got wrong about expectations As soon as I got there, people started asking for raises. I told the team I needed 90 days, and then I'd plan to do a cost-of-living adjustment. I didn't want to give everybody the same raise. That didn't seem fair to the people who were exceptional. The problem was that I didn't know many of our field people yet. So I built two apps in Claude for our crew leads: 1. Crew member ratings. Each crew lead picked the crew members they'd worked with for at least 3 days. They rated each one on our four company values and on overall performance. Then they had to stack rank everyone they'd worked with, best to worst. 2. Crew lead peer ratings. Each crew lead rated every other crew lead. This wasn't on job performance. It was on leadership, measured against our four core values. I had Claude take all of that data, analyze it, and build a report for me. It showed who was ranked at the top, who was ranked at the bottom, and who was in the middle. I used that to set a percent increase for each person. I also used it to identify my field leaders. My top leaders got a bigger pay bump and moved to a quarterly bonus plan, based on specific targets I set each quarter. Then I made one sheet per person, put each in an envelope, and handed them out to the crews in the field. Here's what I learned. Expectations for raises were much higher than I expected. A 4% or 5% increase would be relatively significant in a white-collar environment, but to our crews it was very small. The raises I gave went as low as 3% for my lowest performers, and some people got pretty upset. It has created some natural turnover in the organization. That hasn't been ideal, but it also hasn't been all bad. I've worked hardest to keep my top performers. 12. Values, communication, and honoring what came before Define your values and purpose early. I've implemented the Rockefeller Habits and EOS in the past. Both taught me that defining your company values and purpose is extremely important. They build the culture, and they define what gets promoted and what gets disciplined. We defined ours inside the first 90 days. Every week at our company meeting, there's a section where each person has to call out a fellow employee for living out one of our values in the last week. It has created a positive reinforcement cycle, and it keeps the values and purpose of the organization in front of us every single week. Find a way to reach everyone. Our team is never all in the same place at the same time. When I needed to communicate something to everyone, I recorded an 8-minute video from the front seat of my car and had our front desk person send it out to the whole team. It doesn't need to be polished. It needs to reach people. Honor the company's traditions. The company has customs, like our quarterly breakfast and our donations to the county fair and the county rodeo. We've always shown up to events like that, and I wanted to keep it going. I did wonder whether we made money doing it. This company has historically run on a lot of branding and very little advertising, at least paid advertising in the traditional sense. Those events are part of that branding, and they matter to the team and to the community. 13. Claude has been like having a business advisor on staff If you haven't set up a Claude Teams account for your business yet, I found this guide extremely helpful: Claude for Business Owners — A Practical Setup Guide. The initial setup took me about 4 to 6 hours, so plan on one day to sit down and get it in place. We've rolled it out across the organization, and it has had a massive impact on how fast we get work done. Our setup knows a ton about our business, including each individual in the organization. When I ask it questions, its recommendations name the specific people on our team who should handle something. It's like having a great business advisor. At any given time, I have a set of threads I'm actively working in and go back to over and over. Here are the pinned sessions I use most: • New customer intake form. Claude built the intake form I described above in Google Sheets. Every time I need a change, it gives me new code to paste in. • J&G weekly dashboard update. It pulls from several places, including the intake form and QuickBooks estimates, to build an overview dashboard for me. • Employee review apps. The apps I built for the raise process. I go back to make changes and build new review apps. • J&G Claude files. The session where I built all of our initial company files that give Claude context on the business. • HR and labor law expert. A thread I go back to whenever I have a labor law question. • Sales audit. An audit of one of our salespeople. It made recommendations and built a proposal template we now use with customers. • Sales coach. I had it research sales material specific to landscaping and home services, so it can answer specific sales questions. • 90-day true-up. The thread I used for the whole true-up process. • Herbicide safety training. I fed in all of my base information and it built a training script. I walked my team through it, and our team is now officially certified to spray pesticides. I have many others, but these are the ones I've been going back to for months. Wispr Flow is the other tool I'd recommend. It lets you talk to Claude conversationally, so at the start of every new project you can do a massive brain dump and let Claude make sense of it. It's much faster than typing out three or four paragraphs. This post started that way. I used Wispr Flow to dump everything I've learned into a Google Doc. I fed those notes into Claude, which cleaned them up and turned them into the article you're reading. Then I went back through it to make sure it captured what I wanted to say. What would normally take 6 or 8 hours took an hour or two. 14. Caring for the people As a Christian leader, this has been an incredible experience of pastoring a group of people. The burden I've felt for the people in this organization has been pretty intense. It wouldn't be fair to my team to share specifics, but there are a lot of hurting people here who have gone through very difficult things. It has given me a lot of opportunities to pray for and with my employees, and to sit with them while they cry and while they hurt. One employee came into my office and sat across the desk from me for about 3 hours, at many points sobbing, sharing things he said he had never shared with anybody before. It's an awesome opportunity to be there for my employees, and I feel a tremendous responsibility to care for them. That doesn't mean I'm not watching the overall finances of the organization, or that people don't need to work for the money they make. I firmly believe that. But I also want the best for every one of my employees. About 6 weeks ago, I hired Corporate Chaplains of America, and they're working on hiring a corporate chaplain for us now. This is a very cool organization. Once they've hired someone, the chaplain will come by our shop in the mornings once a week to talk with employees, and stop by the office once a week to check in with people briefly. The point is to let people know someone is there if and when they run into something and want to talk after work. What I really like about Corporate Chaplains of America is that they don't just support our employees. They also support our employees' families, if they need a chaplain. They support our suppliers and our customers too. If one of our employees is onsite talking with a customer who's going through something, with that customer's approval, the chaplain can reach out and go have coffee with them. I'm super excited to offer this as a benefit, and as a way to support our team with something deeper than just their financial needs. 15. CEO and Chief Steward My business card and my email signature both say the same thing: CEO and Chief Steward. I very much see my role in this organization as a steward, and I don't take that lightly. • I'm a steward of the financial resources my family has allowed me to use to make this acquisition. • I'm a steward of the time my employees give me. • I'm a steward of the company's assets, and of using them well. • I'm a steward of the hearts and minds of each of my employees. • I'm a steward of my employees' families, who rely on their paychecks, and of my employees' safety, so they can care for those families well. • I'm a steward of the resources we have to help the broader community we operate in, and to help each of our customers and vendors to the best of my ability. Wrapping up If you're about to close, here's the short version of what I'd tell you: • Hold your plan loosely and fix what your team wants fixed first. • Line up a CPA who knows acquisition accounting before you close. • Plan for the working capital true-up to take real time, and have someone who knows the equipment verify it all works. • Measure net working capital on the day it peaks. • Get your Google account and LSA set up early. • Expect to be the head of IT for a while. • Define your values early and talk about them every week. • Take care of your people. I hope this was helpful.