Austin Gray: You're cooking tacos for your guys. You're out there. What was the profit like at that point? I mean, we've been going for about eight years now. At that point, the company was doing 1.6 million. This past year, we just did—[Applause]—seven!

Hey, welcome back to another episode of the OWNR OPS podcast, where we talk all about starting and growing local service businesses. We're on a mission to help 10,000 listeners start and grow seven-figure service businesses by 2030.

In this episode, I'm hosting Nolan Gore, the owner and operator of Top Choice Lawn Care in Austin, Texas. Nolan took over a lawn care business at the 1 million mark and has since grown it to about 7 million bucks in annual revenue. So stick around if you want to hear how Nolan took a 1 million dollar lawn care business to the 7 million mark. We'll see you in the episode!

I just want to have some fun with this episode. I'm super excited to have you on, Nolan. I have been wanting to meet you and just have business and life conversations because as I followed you and in our text, I just knew you were going to be a good dude. You're cooking tacos for your guys; you're out there, and you're talking about leadership principles.

So, for our listeners, Nolan Gore with Top Choice Lawn Care, do you want to tell us when you bought the business, why you bought the business, the deal size, and let's start there? Then I'll have some questions about growing it from there.

Nolan Gore: Yeah, so I bought into the business at the very end of 2016. Leading up to that, I was born and raised in Austin, Texas. My dad is a small business guy, and I was the kid running around the office growing up. I went to Texas A&M, joined the Marine Corps, and did four years in the Marine Corps. As I was getting out, I didn't know what I was going to do. I was doing the classic apply for business school type thing, and someone came to my dad and said, "Hey, here's this little landscaping business that I don't want to own anymore." He was a lawyer. "Do you want to buy it? You're a landscaping guy." My dad's in the industry as well; he's in commercial and residential.

So my dad called me—I don't remember this all that clearly, honestly—and was like, "Hey, do you want to put your life savings into a small business that is losing money?" And I said, "That sounds like a great idea!" I didn't overanalyze it. I looked at some spreadsheets, but I mean, they were not really that reflective of how the business was doing. Forecasting was not very useful.

I looked at the website once. I remember looking at the website. I came down and looked at it maybe one time before, but I actually don't— I think that was after I agreed to do the thing. Honestly, I don't know the deal size. So here we are. It was basically a deal of like, "Take over the debt, and you can have it." So it was a couple hundred thousand, but it was also like I got in there, and I was like, "Oh, there's another credit card. Oh, there's another thing." It was not a clean deal. I do not recommend this to people, but it was a small company, and I also had the unique situation of my business partner being in the business. He didn't own any of it at the time, and part of the deal was we gave him equal ownership with me.

He had the right to earn equal ownership through sweat equity over a certain number of years with benchmarks and stuff like that. So that was the end of '16. Over on that wall over there, I've got the letter of the bank account being empty and the bank emailing us or sending us a letter every day being like, "Hey, you don't have any money. Stop doing things." Because we were transitioning banks and getting Atlantic credit and all that stuff.

But I keep it on the wall because you know that happens. We've been going for about eight years now, and at that point, the company was doing 1.6 million. This past year, we just did seven. We did an acquisition a little over a year ago, and that was hard. So we're going and having fun, but it's really hard to run a business.

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So we're just— we’re just done with the podcast right there. Really hard to run the business. Thank you guys for listening. I appreciate it. Sign up for the newsletter—no!

Let's unpack this. So you buy into this business, and I guess what I've seen on X is maybe some tweets about the acquisition that happened more recently. But initially, you bought in in 2016, and it was doing 1.6 million in revenue. What was the profit like at that point?

Nolan Gore: Zero, maybe negative.

Austin Gray: Yeah, let's talk about what you understand. There's this weird point in a business when the operator, OWNR OPS, or not, is really the delta on making money or not. If that person wants to accept making 50,000, then yes, you're a profitable business. If that person wants to take all of it, then you're making zero, right? You can cook the books whatever way you want at that point.

So for a lot of small businesses, until you scale past five—I'm making that number up, but somewhere in there, depending on the size and type of business, the profitability is not really that useful of a number. SD is actually probably legitimately better, even though you can cook that as well. Because that person is the business, in a lot of ways, and how much they pay themselves is really a direction you can argue either way.

My business partner was taking and deserved to take all of the money. There was no money for me to pay myself when I came in. So like goal number one was, "How do we pay for Nolan this year without losing more money?" And that's what I did. I just figured that out.

Then number two was, "How do we make some money with both of us getting some money?" We did that eventually, you know. The first couple of years was kind of tricky, and I still don't take away that much from a W-2 perspective on the business. Last year, I took away 50%—40% less than I did the year before that because it was just a hard year. Like, that happens.

I have employees that make more than me last year.

Austin Gray: Can we unpack that initial phase? Because you brought up something that's so important; the owner-operator in that like 1.5 or below revenue business. I mean, you're likely handling estimating, sales, project management, HR—you're handling a lot of roles. So how did you personally come into that business and unpack that situation to answer the question of how Nolan is going to get paid in the years ahead?

Nolan Gore: I think I'm going to take that in two different directions: one, in psychology; and then two, in tactics. So psychologically, I am fortunate to kind of have a miserly brain where I just don't feel like I need to take away that much money. More importantly, my wife feels the same way, and so we just naturally don't spend that much money. I mean, that's all relative, obviously. But that part of it is really important for us, especially in those first years and this last year.

I naturally want to build, and I did a really good job of psychologically separating my finances from the business's finances. Like, the business money is not my money, which makes it easier to keep the money in the business for growing or hiring, or whatever you want to put it towards. If you're mixing those monies, that's obviously a business practice, but it's also really hard psychologically.

If that bank account is something that you pull from whenever you need it, then whatever you need is going to continue to grow. It's going to be harder and harder to keep the money in to justify hiring that other person. Your spouse is going to get used to being able to pull from that, and understandably so. That's not a bad thing or a character issue at all; it just ends up being an additional difficulty that you can put on yourself.

So one, the business money was not my money. We chose a salary that we thought was fair to a little bit light: “Can we survive? Let's keep going.” And then it was like, I know that I can make more money if we grow, so go grow and put that money into figuring out how to grow.

Specifically from a people perspective, because I also care about being able to do the parts of the business that I enjoy the most.

Now, from the tactical perspective, dude I don't know. I can tell you what I did early in the business to figure out how to pay for myself. There were like three big things that I did early on that were really important, but that may only—sure, I'll walk through this a little bit.

So one, I repriced everything. We had 500-600 customers at that point—mowing customers—and then a bunch of routine or one-time services. I basically just did the math and really did a whole bunch of Excel work to figure out who was priced well and who wasn't. Fortunately, my business partner is a crazy human being, very different from me, and had been hand-entering the data on every lawn for the entire two years prior. So I had all the data, and because he had typed in the start and stop time of every mow, I knew how to price everything and who was priceable and who wasn't.

So we made a bunch of uncomfortable phone calls, and that probably made us an extra 40 grand in the first year. Then I went through every line item on the P&L from an expense perspective, which is a great practice when you first go into a business. I just asked my business partner, "Do we need this?" And he'd go, "Yeah, don't be stupid." Okay, cool, let's keep it. Then I'd ask, "Do we need this?" He'd say, "Maybe not at that level. Go see if we can go down a level on that."

Every single vendor, I just asked for discounts or pretended like I was going to leave. "Hey, I'm sorry, that's hard to justify this expense. Y, Y, Y." You can get a lot out of that practice, whether you do it annually or biannually, or you can change terms on payments. I just did this internally—I don't know, last month— as well and went through every single one of them. I was like, "Okay, that thing is $66,000. Let's see if we can pay it all year instead of once."

So, I ended up getting us a discount and better terms just by setting up the conversation and doing four minutes of research on who their competitors are and saying, "I'm going to set up a time to talk to the competitors." That's not entirely dishonest either; I'd tell them, “I don’t want to leave, make it really easy for me to stay so that I don’t have to tell my business partner or the owners of the business—I'm one of the owners, but you get it."

I didn't want to have to tell them that I needed to go look for a different vendor for this thing. So I saved us a bunch of money there. And then we just grew. I just worked really hard to grow, and that's how we paid for ourselves in the first year—myself, the first year.

Then it was a different set of problems after that.

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Okay, can we unpack the "we just grew" statement? You say that so naturally, it came really easy. I know that you put in a lot of work, but there are a lot of listeners right now who want to know: "Man, how do I grow the business?" So what actionable steps did you take to grow?

Nolan Gore: Oh man, I was just—I think you and I were both just interacting on Twitter in the last week about—

Austin Gray: Bod!

Nolan Gore: Oh, here's your insert commercial here for Striker Digital!

Austin Gray: Striker Digital?

Nolan Gore: Yeah, yeah, yeah! Striker ad! I don't use them, but I did have a great conversation with them this week. The thing I tweeted that was quasi-funny, at least to me, was like, "You can be incompetent and still make it a long ways in business." Here's an example: I sent my ad stuff over to someone that knows what they're talking about, and they said, "Dude, you're doing a one out of ten job." I said, "Fantastic, room for improvement!" But that’s ads; that’s what you grow off of, right?

In a home service residential business, one of the ways—I sincerely do not consider myself an expert in digital marketing. I have a track record of growing a business now for eight years pretty regularly. We've averaged something like 20% plus every year. But clearly, I don't know what I'm doing based on one conversation with someone that really does. It's not to say Google Ads is all of our stuff, but it was certainly a big part of the online piece.

So, all that being said, I think that you work really hard over a long period of time on SEO—not like I don't; I think people mostly misview that. So I redid our website, not in a very sophisticated way. I went and found a template and like pasted everything over to it in a more modern template.

Really, what SEO is, is give Google what it wants. What Google wants is when someone asks for something, they can give them a really good answer—that's the entire search business model. If the good answer is an ad, all the better for them.

When people search for something online—specifically for mowing—they want a company that is good and a website that can prove that. So we worked really, really hard to get good reviews, which makes your website look good. It makes customers buy from you or interact with your website. So when we do anything—my team hears me ask about reviews not every week, but lots of times a year. We work really hard to manage that.

Then, I write to our customers almost, if not every single week, and I use that as content on the website. So, "What is happening in the world of landscaping in Austin, Texas this week?" I write something about that. "This is the thing you should be thinking about in your yard. If you want us to do it, we'll do it; otherwise, here’s how you can do it."

It's a useful newsletter—newsletter is probably too strong a word, but a useful email to our customers. I add funny memes at the end because that makes me get to look up memes during the work week, and I think it probably increases our open rate. Then I take the content from the email and put it on our website, or I expand it on our website.

That just means that I've had an article or two a week every week for eight years that are pretty good, and that means that our website is pretty robust.

So when Bod looked at our website, he was like, "Hey, this SEO is fantastic. The ads suck." I don't think it's because I'm particularly excellent at SEO, as much as I just did the work over a long period of time, and I'm continuing to do the work over time.

We are starting to use more AI to try to make that faster and figure out what more I need to write and how to write more of it. But generally, it’s just do the work over a long time.

More importantly, what Google knows—because they can see the interactions on their system, on the people on the Internet—is when people have a good experience.

So if they call, that means Google wins. If someone said, "Good mow near me," and that person called somebody, and it was a good interaction, Google can tell that. The real trick to growth is just like, be good at what you do, and over time, that starts to work.

So we generally— we're not great at this right now—our answer rate is like 80%, which is better than it used to be, but it's not extraordinary. Really, really good folks can get their answer rates up to 95% plus.

So our answer—we answer the phone, we call people back, we generally do what we're saying we're going to do. When we don't, we fix it, and that compounds over time.

Additionally, I added services; I figured out how to get more dollars per customer. We haven't—whatever that is—5X our number of customers. We've only 3X it, but we figured out how to get more dollars per customer with more services that are already naturally aligned with what we're doing.

Austin Gray: This is awesome! When did you start writing that email to your customers?

Nolan Gore: Probably in the second year—first year. First year, maybe. Yeah, it was definitely first year, but it’s evolved a lot. In the first year, we were already doing kind of like discount emails. "Hey, we don’t have enough work, so if you want us to do bed and shrubs at X and hourly rate, we'd love to do it for you."

That’s always effective, right? People look for that. But we still do some stuff like that in our emails. Over time, I allowed it to become less corporate, more brand voice, which is a lot of my voice. I go back and forth between whether or not I want the customers to think it's from me or from the company, because me is not scalable; company is. But I hold that pretty close.

Last year, I think I did send 50— that was kind of my goal—like have a couple weeks maybe of unique. In those two weeks that I was off, I still sent something to a specific group of customers that I thought I could sell a specific thing to or that needed a specific service.

One thing we're going to double down on—I'm not answering your question; I’m answering a different question, I'm sorry—but one thing we're going to double down on this year is just really only spend marketing ad dollars toward gaining mowing maintenance customers. Then, only sell the additional services to our maintenance customers.

Let me rephrase that: we're going to sell other services to everybody, but the marketing towards landscaping projects is only going to go towards our current customers because they’re likely...

It's hard in the data—side note again! I'm side noting a side note; please forgive me! I can really sound like I know what I'm talking about if I want to, but oftentimes I don't actually.

I can tell in the data—I love it!—I can tell in the data that a customer is far more likely to buy than a non-customer. That makes sense; we know that like someone that’s got their credit card on file is going to buy more often than someone who hasn't, because they've already interacted with us and had a good experience.

But I can't tell how much more likely—is it like four times more likely, or three times more likely, or eight times more likely? I don’t know.

So that being said, even if it's three times more likely, I'm going to put a lot of effort towards those people knowing exactly what we do and how we can do it for them, as opposed to going out and trying to get leads for mulch, which is a $400 service, and paying $100 for that lead and then converting a third of them.

I’ve paid $300 for a $400 job, which, if you're wondering, doesn't work from a math perspective. I don’t know my gross margins that well, but I know it’s not good.

So, to be clear—sorry!

Austin Gray: No, you’re good! So, I’m following you—at least I think I am—but I want to make sure that we have it for the listeners. Your marketing spend is going to be spent on getting maintenance lawn care customers. Once you get that customer in your system and their credit card on file, you are going to remarket to them just with your personal voice and the weekly emails, and you'll plug additional services that way. Do I have it right?

Nolan Gore: Yes.

Austin Gray: Okay. And in the onboarding process, make sure to educate on what we can do and have an internal sales team that can call everyone and just say, "Hey, we wanted to make sure you knew that this time of year is the right time for winterizing your irrigation system. We'd love to do that for you. If you're interested, if not, totally get it! Let us know what the next thing is!"

Nolan Gore: Love it! Striker Digital specializes in SEO services specifically for local service businesses. Bod and Andy, the two co-founders, have helped me get Bearclaw Land Services to the number one spot on Google inside my state for my specific search term. If you want to learn more, visit stryker-digital.com. That's S-T-R-Y-K-R-Digital.com.

Now, you're choosing to spend your marketing dollars on that mowing customer. One, I'm making the assumption because it's recurring revenue. But two, you probably have the most experience or the most data to back that up, and you probably have a converting ad set?

This is where I can sound like I know what I'm talking about, and I will, but the truth is, I just am figuring it out!

Nolan Gore: Okay, okay! Up to this point, we have not only focused on maintenance customers; we've sent ads at everything.

Austin Gray: This is a new thing?

Nolan Gore: Secondly, remember I just got told by—insert the best digital marketing firm here—that my ads sucked! He saw a different set than I’ve used in the past, but I don't know if those ads were actually converting at a rate that is useful.

You are correct around the idea that I have the best understanding of my business model because it’s the most consistent on maintenance.

So, the thing is, if somebody needs mulch and they go and search for mulch, you could have a big house that needs, I think I literally did a $21,000 mulch job one time—that's a very different job than a $400 mulch job, and those ads are not going to cost any different. I can’t ask Google to only send me the $21,000 mulch jobs, so because of that, our one-time services are so divergent. I don’t do—if I was doing outdoor kitchens, that would be a different thing, right? Because it's a $75,000 project.

But I don’t do that, so my one-time products are so divergent, and some of them on the bottom end are so cheap that it can't justify paying for an ad that doesn't always convert.

A lead at that point is too expensive from a gross profit perspective to justify. So because of that, I'm focusing on the maintenance side.

I'm just now wrapping my head around this thing. I tweeted, and it was a tweet that was not useful for you to learn based on what I said; it was useful based on what everyone replied to me. Go find my "lifetime value customer acquisition cost" tweet because I actually go back and reference it pretty regularly for my own brain based on the comments.

I can tell on the very conservative end—because if you're very conservative, you are safe—that if every lawn mowing customer mows every other week (so it could be better because it's weekly) and everyone is paying $60, which is on the low end for our average, that, and my gross profit is 50%, which is on the low end (I think I can get that a little higher), then you can do the math and go look at it. Each customer is worth like $2,800 because they churn every three or four years.

So if it's $2,800 and you want— and I was like, "So, should I pay $2,800?" Everyone was like, "No, you idiot, pay a percentage of that." The higher that percentage is, the better your business is going to be and the faster you can grow.

So basically, I’ve gotten down to the point where I feel very comfortable and confident that I can pay $300 for a mowing customer. And that’s only if they're going to do mowing, but if they do all these other services, then I can pay a lot more for them. Or if they’re weekly, I can do a lot more for them. If they stick around a lot longer, I can do a lot more for them. But no matter what, I can pay $300— or 350 bucks! Actually, I think I have it written up here to remind myself.

That gives me a lot more confidence than I've ever had on what I should be spending to acquire a customer and how to do that.

Now, Striker, blow my mind, and I got to call him here a little bit and ask Bod, "So should I not do any Google Ads? What should I do?" I'm lost, so that’s where I’m at currently.

So, all the way back to your original question: we just grew! The good news is you can stumble forward or fall up or whatever phrase you want, as long as you stay alive and just keep doing good work.

Austin Gray: So, specifically outside of writing that email early on, did you go knock doors? Did you hand out cards? What were some ways that you got other customers? A big reason I'm asking right now, Nolan, is like we launched snow removal this year, and I see them very similar. We're doing residential recurring services, and I'm sure we're thinking about the same things. It's like, "I've got 50 accounts in this area. I want to fill that in as much as I possibly can to make that route as efficient as I possibly can." How did you grow at that point?

Nolan Gore: I enjoyed your episode with the snow removal firefighting guy. I don't remember his name, but it was good.

Austin Gray: Sam!

Nolan Gore: Sam's awesome! Yeah, he's a good guy!

So, let's break this down a little bit more on this idea. Yes, we’ve done all the things. I’ve knocked doors—not a ton, but some. We’ve done a lot of flyers. We still do a lot of flyers. We will do a lot of flyers this year. We've done those mailers—those mailer ads things—which I hate and do not recommend.

They work for some people; otherwise, they wouldn’t do it. But we have paid Google; we have paid Yelp. I no longer pay Yelp if that tells you—I like Yelp and I want them to succeed, but I no longer pay them, unfortunately.

One of the things that happens—and Sam talks about this a little bit—is that like a next-door neighbor is worth actually like three times more than someone even a street over because loading up and driving even three minutes is like 30% of the time it took you to do the work on some of those smaller houses. And if you do the math on what that is from a percentage of profit perspective, that’s how you can get to it being so much more valuable.

So, I always do the five round, which is like if you got a street with people on both sides, you do the two next-door neighbors and the three across the street. Or you can do nine around—two on each side and five across the street.

Again, it depends on the neighborhood and all that stuff, but we do a lot of that. I go back and forth on whether or not I want fancy flyers or simple flyers because some customers actually prefer not to have a fancy flyer. They feel like they’re overpaying if you have a shiny, glossy whatever. A piece of paper written out being like, "Hey, we're the local guys, and we'd love to do this for you."

That's kind of Sam's shtick, you know? That’s kind of how he went as far as he did. I think that's a really good model. If you think about your own interaction, like, "Which company would I like? I know I can trust, but I also don't really want a PE-backed firm."

How do I find that? You try to—that's the brand model flyer you want.

Austin Gray: Yeah, for sure! I have a take on PE firms if you want to hear it a little bit!

Nolan Gore: So, we do a lot of flyers. Then one thing we're trying this year, which I'm really excited about when it comes to hyper focus, is we’re going to do robot-written handwritten notes specifically to the next-door neighbors of our current customers.

Have you seen these? You know what I'm talking about?

Austin Gray: I have!

Nolan Gore: So, it's just—I mean, it’s a direct mailer piece, but I think it’s pretty cool that the robots can use a pen and write it in handwriting that looks legitimate. So the open rate is significantly better. I’m not saying it’s better, because otherwise, everyone would do it, but I’m going to try it.

What I like specifically about this one is because the next-door neighbors—or the proximity is so important—being able to specifically target addresses as opposed to mailing routes or zip codes makes it a little bit more focused.

So, like yesterday, we went through—we chose five routes that we are going to work really hard to grow in quarter one. We focused on these five—call them the focus five routes. So what we did then is we went and pulled our CRM up and pulled every single house in that neighborhood we've ever interacted with.

We’re going to go and call, email, text, and send a letter to every single one of those with a price come mid-February to early March when things start growing.

We went and made leads in our CRM across the street from every single current mow client as well, and we’re going to send them all a letter with a specific price because we're going to go measure every one of those lawns via imagery and just do the work to know what the price would be.

That way, we don’t have to—we can skip the step of trying to get them to say, "This is cool! How much?" We’re going to be like, "This much! We’re just going to skip that step and send every one of those five or seven people per customer we currently have a letter with the price as well."

You could do that if your pricing is flexible enough.

I mean, Sam did a good job of articulating how each house—even if it’s a big driveway—really depends on the specifics, but if you were to go through, you could try working through every house you currently have going and writing up, "This is what it would cost for your house. I'd love to do it for you, and I’ll do the first one for free," or the first month for free, whatever you think the hook is that gets them to start signing up.

Then drop that on every door. Knock on the door, whatever is most effective for you.

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What CRM system do you use?

Nolan Gore: We use Service Autopilot, which is a holistic software originally designed for residential landscaping companies. A guy out of Dallas that did landscaping built his own software and then turned that into a big business and sold it.

I hesitate to recommend it just because it hasn't felt like in the last four years—once they sold to a SaaS company—it hasn't felt like they've put the development into it like I would like to see. I think that there are some software options in the industry that are running away with it.

I haven't played with Jobber. I know you like Jobber, and obviously, Jobber should pay you to be talked about on this show, so whoever you are out there!

But there’s, you know, like ServiceTitan—that's a bunch of companies underneath ServiceTitan that are going public right now or about to.

Those guys put a ton of money into development. Unfortunately for me, the lawn/landscaping piece of that Aspire is almost entirely directed at commercial, and so because of that, it doesn't quite do the things I need to talk to a residential customer.

Additionally—and everyone knows this about SaaS, but it is so sticky—once you’ve got ten years of data in our CRM, we can go back and look at stuff. Even though it's an 80% solution instead of a 95% solution, and it's got some limitations, that data in there is super valuable.

So we’re pretty stuck right now, and maybe someday I’ll have the balls to switch, but it's not going to be this year.

Austin Gray: And what was the name of that? It cut out.

Nolan Gore: Service Autopilot.

Austin Gray: Okay, and it is great. I mean, we like to complain about software or technology or whatever. These things can do amazing stuff, right? It does our routing; it does our credit card processing; it writes my marketing emails; it’s a CRM.

I mean, we can build the jobs; it is amazing! I'm on the edge—like there's the edge stuff. The stuff that annoys me is the reporting is not quite good enough; there's no API, so I can't connect some of these other things that should be connected.

There’s like four clicks when it could be one. Like, guys, if you put me in charge for—and I know it's not this easy—but you put me in charge for two weeks, like, we're going to make a much better user experience, I promise.

My team literally clicks on that button, then that button, then that button, and that button. If you just did this thing, it would make us faster, and everyone would be happy with that kind of stuff!

Nolan Gore: Yeah, you're right! I found myself doing that too when I was building this snow service. I was like, "This isn't 100% ideal for snow." But then you go back and look at it, and you're like, "Oh my gosh! This is doing all of these things!"

Austin, just do the work to figure out the workaround right here. We did—we figured out how to optimize our recurring billing and whatnot for snow accounts.

This is not a unique take to me; this is something my brother says a lot—who's Matt Gore. I love my brother; he's amazing! He builds fancy pitch decks, so if you need to raise money, go find Matt Gore on Twitter. He's just a smart guy!

But I could still take him to fight—let me be clear! Unless it's not a fair fight, then I might lose!

One thing that my brother says about software, which I agree with, is that we're about to enter—whether it's the next one year or the next ten years—we're going to enter an interesting phase, I think, where we've been building our businesses around software.

We're going to get to where we build software around businesses because development is getting so fast and so cheap. Instead of you paying whatever, hundreds or thousands of dollars a month for software and then literally changing all of your business processes to work within that, you’re going to say, "I want to do it just like this," and you’re going to be able to pay someone to develop the software exactly how you want.

That's going to be really—some people are going to be able to do that really fast, some people are going to be able to do that really slow.

I'm not saying the legacy software is all going to die, but I think that’s going to be a thing. I mean, we’re not that far away from—and some people are already capable of doing this—basically dropping a software tool onto their tools that they've custom-made with AI and saying, “Give me the code, go hit it so many times and figure out what every single button does.”

We’re not going to steal their code; we can basically replicate the code, and then we can adjust off of that. If that’s the case, and I could pay someone 10 grand to fix—to have my own Service Autopilot that is basically the exact same thing, except I get to go make the changes I want, I would pay 10 grand tomorrow—like easy!

That is going to be a thing. People are going to figure that out, and there are going to be a whole bunch of fights around whether or not that’s legal. Good luck going after the guy in Ukraine that can do it!

Austin Gray: Right!

Nolan Gore: I think it’s going to be a really interesting thing as we see it in the next decade!