In short
Andrea Palacio and her husband buy a “boring” South Florida landscaping business using an SBA loan, face key-person/employee risk and revenue collapse, then rebuild using Google Ads, process changes, and AI automations (Make.com + Jobber + an AI receptionist/phone agent). They later stabilize operations, briefly consider selling, and learn leadership/KPI discipline.
Guest backgrounds
Andrea is an e-commerce entrepreneur (Amazon, Shopify) who and her husband lived full-time on a sailboat; her husband is hands-on (plumber/electrician/handyman). They later pivoted into landscaping operations and marketing/customer success.
Key claims
You can’t rely on YouTube “buy a boring business” advice; seller/manager handoff and financing terms matter. Automations can replace owner-heavy call handling and improve retention. Leadership and KPI dashboards prevent theft and operational drift.
Notable examples
Manager quits after not being able to sell; revenue drops from ~$70k/month to ~$40k/month; they lose commercial plaza clients and shift to residential recurring work. AI handles phone calls/booking and post-service picture/review/complaint workflows; husband later works ~1 day/week. A trusted manager later steals and equipment is stolen (~$10k–$15k), prompting tighter access controls and KPI tracking.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOThe Bumpy Start of the Landscaping Business
0:28 to 1:24
Andrea shares the challenges faced shortly after acquiring the landscaping business.
“So we're going to take a little bit of a trip back in the time machine.”
Facing Unexpected Pressures
1:24 to 2:10
Andrea discusses the personal and professional pressures during the initial struggles.
“The marketing, the admin work, the customer service.”
The Reality of Ownership and Risk
2:10 to 3:26
Exploration of the risks involved in small business ownership and employee loyalty issues.
“revenue from the business, a certain level of stability.”
The Motivation to Acquire a Business
3:26 to 5:38
Andrea explains their motivations for switching from e-commerce to a local service business.
“So we were living on a sailboat for four years.”
Acquisition and Transition Challenges
5:38 to 6:58
Discussion about the challenges faced during the transition after acquiring the landscaping business.
“But as we go through it, we're like, well, maybe a landscaping company is more recession-proof.”
Rebuilding the Business After Losses
6:58 to 11:34
Andrea details their strategies to rebuild the business after significant revenue drops.
“Step into a cash flow that's already happening rather than trying to create something completely from scratch.”
Navigating the New Business Landscape
11:34 to 14:02
The difficulties of managing customer relations and service delivery in the new business.
“We have bought a company that we have no idea how to even sell a palm.”
Transitioning to a Service-Based Business
14:02 to 15:10
Learn about the challenges faced when switching from e-commerce to a service-based business.
“And I think that's the point where we're now working 80 hour weeks, right?”
Rebuilding Revenue and Efficiency
17:23 to 20:51
Discuss strategies for rebuilding recurring revenue and improving operational efficiency.
“Yeah, there's a lot of moving parts here.”
Implementing AI for Business Efficiency
20:51 to 24:59
Learn how AI can streamline operations and reduce workload in a service business.
“So at that point, my sister had mentioned, hey, Chagipity was just released.”
Show all 20 chapters
Personal and Professional Trade-offs
24:59 to 28:00
Understand the balance between business demands and personal life in entrepreneurship.
“People would call up and be able to say like, yeah, I need you to come by next Thursday afternoon.”
The Journey of Business Ownership
28:00 to 29:44
Learn about the transition and challenges faced in running a business.
“just feeling the sense of freedom of just living life on our terms.”
Hiring a Manager and Initial Success
29:44 to 31:34
Discover the process of hiring a manager and the initial success of the business.
“He had married one of my really good friends and we would go to their birthday parties and they would come to our birthday parties for the kids.”
The Downfall: Mismanagement and Theft
31:34 to 33:58
Understand the impact of mismanagement and theft on the business's revenue.
“We're like, the whole time we need to build the systems and the team and get it into a place where we'd even be attractive to the next buyer.”
Lessons Learned in Leadership
33:58 to 36:09
Explore the lessons learned about leadership and managing a business effectively.
“We were so focused on like at that point, it was like, well, now we're prioritizing our family.”
Automating Business Operations
36:55 to 39:51
Learn how automation and streamlined operations helped the business recover.
“They were asking for like a hundred, a hundred and something to get paid per year, right?”
Future Plans and Growth Strategies
39:51 to 42:01
Discuss future plans for growth and the importance of understanding business metrics.
“And we wanted to ultimately the goal is to grow the business.”
Challenges and Strategies in Business Acquisition
42:01 to 45:36
Learn about the challenges faced in acquiring a new business and the strategies to stabilize revenue.
“Our nervous system was at complete capacity, right?”
Leveraging AI for Business Efficiency
45:37 to 48:19
Discover how AI tools can automate tasks, improve efficiency, and free up time for business owners.
“So AI, for me, has just changed everything for me.”
Overcoming Business Challenges and Mindset Shifts
48:20 to 51:56
Explore mindset shifts that can help entrepreneurs overcome obstacles and view challenges as learning opportunities.
“still the one organizing files, then you just don't know what AI is capable of.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Buy a boring business, they said. It'll be easy, they said. It'll be fun. Well, it's time for a little bit of a reality check. Today's guest bought a South Florida landscaping business that checked all their boxes, but the road got pretty bumpy pretty fast. Stick around to learn what happened and how she and her husband ultimately added$300 ,000 in equity value to the business in just a couple years. from andreapalacio.ai. Andrea Palacio, welcome to the Side Hustle Show. Thank you, Nick. I'm so excited to be here. Well, me as well. So we're going to take a little bit of a trip back in the time machine.
0:37You're a month into owning this landscaping business thinking it's going to be relatively hands-off because after all, it's got a good reputation. It's got a good track record. But then the manager leaves and with him go like 80 % of the employees. And now you're in a tough spot. So what's going on then? We had watched all the videos that you can think of on mergers and acquisitions. We had done the thing of learning everything there was on YouTube to try to get this right. And like you said, it checked all the boxes. The CPA said it was a good one. We thought it was a good one. And next thing we know, we are in a situation where the pressure, I have a seven month old, I am pregnant with my second son.
1:20My husband is now doing the labor because we don't have any employees. The manager just leaves and I am at home answering 50 calls a day, trying to do it all at once. The marketing, the admin work, the customer service. We have lost half of our revenue. We have gone from 12 employees down to maybe two employees. Our top clients have dropped. So we are in the most difficult situation that we've ever been, especially because we had purchased a business using an SBA loan. We put all of our personal assets as collateral. So quitting was never an option because we would lose our home. I can tell you that it was the hardest moment of our lives and that the pressure was, it got a few tears, a lot of tears out of us.
2:03Yeah. This is not what you expected to happen. You put a down payment down, you've mortgaged your personal assets as collateral on this loan, and you're kind of banking on a certain level of revenue from the business, a certain level of stability. And then almost immediately, the rug gets pulled out. And this is kind of the case for a lot of small businesses where it's kind of this key person or key employee risk. And if the employees are more loyal to them than they are to you, the new people coming in, it's like, oh, it can turn south in a hurry. Yeah, it wasn't even that he took the employees to work with them.
2:39It was just he said, these two are not going to make it and you guys are better off finding another job. and so everybody started leaving we couldn't retain our clients and that's when my husband started having to do the labor you watch all these videos and like yeah just buy a boring business and we were thinking to ourselves how hard can a landscaping company be you know it's just pushing them over how hard can it be and we end up facing ourselves with this reality of the complete opposite we got into this business thinking that we're going to be these investors that we're going to acquire the companies and just eventually exit for millions of dollars.
3:12And I end up just driving the landscaping truck that's old without air conditioner. It smells awful. And I'm just like, why am I here? What happened? It was a rough reality. Yeah, you do what you need to do to kind of push through in those moments. But I want to peel it back one layer and talk about kind of what attracted you to acquisitions in the first place and then why local service versus something online and we can talk through the purchasing process if you don't mind. Yeah, of course. So we were living on a sailboat for four years. We had an e-commerce business that allowed us to travel full time and we had all the freedom that people just dream of having.
3:52We were selling on Amazon, we were selling on Shopify, but we were in a situation where our growth had stalled and we just felt like in order for us to continue growing, because it was a thing of just selling a lot of volume of pet supplies, we needed to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in order for us to compete with the big companies. And we weren't willing to do that. It was a big risk that we didn't want to assume. So we decided to just sell the business and focus on a new business. So we started thinking about what to do. And just like I did when I came up with the idea of putting together an e-commerce business, I started just watching on YouTube.
4:29I'm Like, well, let's see what people are doing, what people are saying. I come across a lot of YouTubers and people that are doing great, right? And they are now taking this investor seat where they've purchased several companies, acquired different businesses, and what you would say, they've made it, right? And it seemed like, okay, this is something that we can do. We start looking into different companies, but while living on the sailboat, I find that my strengths are very aligned with everything that's online. I was building the website. I was doing the Amazon thing. And my husband, he just finds himself being very hands-on because when you're in the middle of the ocean, nobody can help you, right?
5:05You've got to be resourceful and find a solution on your own. So he becomes a plumber, an electrician, a handyman. He learns to do all these things and fix everything. And he loves that. He finds the strength inside of him. So we are like, okay, the second business, because we're partners, let's find something that aligns with both of us, right? So I told him, listen, we could go into boats. We were thinking of buying a company of boat repairs. And at the end of the day, I am going to do the same thing. I'm going to focus on the marketing, the customer acquisition, the customer success side of things.
5:40But as we go through it, we're like, well, maybe a landscaping company is more recession-proof. At the time, it was like, well, a recession must be coming. Something might be happening. And so we end up thinking, a landscaping company, everybody needs to mow their lawn. Everybody needs to cut their grass. It's a must. Or you would get a fine in Florida, right? So he was like, okay, let's do that. And we end up going with a landscaping company. So he's able to manage employees and like with the equipments and vehicles and whatnot. He's very hands-on. And that's the reason we decided to go that path.
6:10And even as a service business, so it's, I imagine, sold on like a 2, 3x multiple of net income or how was it valued? Yep, correct. So you look at the net income and I think we paid like 2.3, the multiple that we paid. It was a good business. Like I'm telling you, the owner seems fine. And just five days after it disappears, we have no training. He's supposed to train us, give us, let us know about the sales. Let us introduce us to the suppliers, the vendors, the clients. We don't do any of that. So we are navigating on our own from day five. And then that's when the manager says that thing about like, hey, you guys won't make it.
6:47And that's kind of how things start going downhill all the way after that. Yeah, not the smooth handoff you were hoping for. Definitely not. The pitch behind acquisitions is let somebody else have taken care of the hard part. Step into a cash flow that's already happening rather than trying to create something completely from scratch. And you pay a little bit of a premium for that in terms of the acquisition or buying the business, but it's supposed to be less risky. And what you're learning is that, well, there are still lots of risks involved because now you're trying to steer an airplane that's already in flight, essentially.
7:22And if you have never taken the controls before, even though, yeah, we've got experience on the e-commerce and online business side, this is maybe a little bit of a different beast. So what do you guys start to do to rebuild the business or kind of dig yourself out of this hole? When you acquire a company, you're hoping that the people that are the employees of the business are going to stay on board, right? You can never expect that the manager is going to quit, that the seller is going to completely leave. Like one of the things that I would say to anybody is do not ever buy a company because the seller is not willing to finance at least a portion of it.
7:55Right. They need to have some stake in the game. Right. OK. Now, we went through a situation where after we lost everybody, we started rebuilding the business and we start thinking to ourselves, you know, we're in this really tight situation. The pressure of having two babies and and feeling like you're now overworked, exhausted. You have very little energy left. You don't have any space to even think, right? I think at those times, the most important thing is to just, my dad has the saying, just climb up the highest tree you can possibly find and look at things from a different perspective. Look down and see how you can come out of the maze that you've gotten yourself inside of.
8:32And so for us, it was like, okay, let's start running Google ads. Let's try to get back the people that we have lost the site, increasing the revenue again so that we can hire people to do the work and we won't be losing more clients. Okay. One of the hardest things for a local business is just finding the labor, finding the employees that are actually going to care about the company, about the clients. It's very difficult. That's interesting to hear because it's basically this you're running an agency, essentially, and you've got to kind of balance the supply side, the people who want to go out and cut the grass, do the landscaping with the demand side, with the client acquisition side.
9:10And from similar businesses, we've heard in the residential cleaning space, for example, they said, because I was like, well, what comes first, you know, the client or the cleaner? And they're like, you got to find the cleaners first, because if you get the client and you don't have anybody to go out and do the job, then it looks really bad. So you're trying to build the roster of workers first. Was it similar here? Yeah, 100%. But it was so hard. Like you would interview 100 people, maybe five would show up. Wow. Out of the five, maybe one was decent. Like the other people that you would find are just, it's just not the people that you want to have working in your company.
9:45Yeah. We're talking about cutting grass for, I don't know, 50 bucks. And so it's kind of a volume type of business. And it is labor reliant. And the more people you have involved, the more different complexities and personalities that go into all of this. Like even if it pencils out great on paper and if everything goes okay, you're still going to have these different operational complexities. Yeah. Yeah, 100%. And so for us, it was just like, okay, we're now running the Google Ads. Let's try to find more people. So we lose a bunch of money on Google Ads as we're trying to learn exactly how to run it without losing a bunch of money, right?
10:20Because it's so easy to run ads and just waste, literally throw in the garbage a bunch of money. Yeah, Google's happy to take your money. So rebuilding was just trying to find the clients, trying not to lose the clients that we had gotten. Because at the end of the day, one of the issues that we went through is that we didn't just lose the employees that were doing the labor, right? The ones that remained, they were now overworked because they were trying to do the work of maybe we needed five, seven people. After losing all those clients, we still had more work than they could do. So if they're running, you know, 16 properties per day, these guys were exhausted.
10:56So they start doing a poor job. So we lose more customers. So it's this circle that you end up going in where you don't really know, just like you mentioned, you know, what goes first, the chicken or the egg, right? It's like, what do you do? For a sense of scale, are you comfortable sharing where the business was at at the point of acquisition and then what it kind of dipped to at this point? Yeah, yeah. We were at$70 ,000 per month when we acquired the company and we went down to$40 ,000 per month. Okay, so there's still revenue coming in, but you have way fewer people able to do the fulfillment side.
11:28And so everybody is overworked and stressed out. Not just the fulfillment side of things. You also have that we don't know anything about landscaping, Nick. We have bought a company that we have no idea how to even sell a palm. Like I had no idea a palm tree was called a palm tree. It sounds stupid, but I had no idea the names of the different brands like Royal Palm and Christmas Palm and all these things that matter when you're going to be in a business of landscaping. Like we learned that through the three years, tough situations that we end up going through. Yeah. So the question that might come up is, well, when one manager leaves, is the instinct to find someone else with landscaping experience and plug them into that role?
12:08You would if your revenue remained consistent. But because our revenue dropped, our sales dropped significantly. So we end up thinking it's not revenue that's coming in that's reoccurring, right? The majority of the money that was coming in, it was like a 50-50 share where 50 % was reoccurring. the other 50 % was from custom and enhancements, like enhancement jobs. So what ends up happening is that we don't know how to sell this type of large jobs that were being sold before, right? We don't know anything about landscape design. We take on this company and the manager, the person that has the most knowledge, which at first we told him like, hey, you do the sales because you know a lot more than we do.
12:47He doesn't sell anything. And I think that's what triggers him to quit because he realizes that, hey, I wasn't doing sales before. I was just managing before the owner, the previous seller was the one doing the sales. Okay. Okay. So he quit because he feels like, hey, I'm ultimately going to fail. I'm not a salesman. I don't know what this is, what I should do. So my husband is now doing the sales. There's a process between when you actually learn a product and you learn exactly what your customer wants and you start learning to become a good salesperson understanding. You have to understand what you're selling, right?
13:19In order for you to be able to sell it in the first place. Yeah, you got to speak that language. You got to speak the language. So at first it was like the situation of like fake it until you make it. Then he starts getting better. And then ultimately at some point we actually start making sales. We have already lost the largest customers, like the ones that were paying two, three thousand dollars a month. We lose those customers. They were large shopping plazas, all the commercial properties we lose. And so now we're trying to get back up by getting a bunch of residential properties. that lasted for a good six months.
13:51And then I think we start like, oh my God, things are starting to look better. We're starting to close those enhancement jobs. We start the reoccurring starts. We are not dropping as many clients as we were before. And I think that's the point where we're now working 80 hour weeks, right? Like he's working, he's now doing, not doing that much labor, but still helping on the side, doing mostly sales, driving around, doing all of that. And I'm at home with the kids working 80 hour weeks. just trying to answer every single phone call. We have over, you know, maybe 200 customers that are calling. I'm getting 50 calls a day.
14:26I have to handle the scheduling for the cruise. I have to handle chasing clients for the payments because that's one of the things that was difficult is just the people that wouldn't pay is calling them. Hey, why haven't you paid? What's going on? So all of this is part of managing a company that when we were in an e-commerce business, we weren't dealing with that before. We didn't have to deal with customer service. We didn't have to deal with chasing people for payments because they would just pay automatically, right? They buy, they pay, then the shipping was done by a third party. We didn't have to worry about the shipping or delivery of anything.
14:57It was just a complete change, right? When you go from a product-based business. Right, right. Everything's prepaid. You don't have to worry about that. More with Andrea in just a moment, including rebuilding that recurring revenue and starting to layer on some AI tools to get out of those brutal 80-hour work weeks. All that and more coming up right after this. You know that feeling when you finally finish a cleanup project you've been putting off? That's what switching to our partner Gusto feels like. Payroll, HR, benefits, all that admin chaos that's been piling up, finally organized in one place.
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16:56Then add another 0.25 % APY increase by direct depositing$1 ,000 a month and maintaining a funded investing account. Claim your boost today at Wealthfront.com slash hustle. Terms and conditions apply. This is a paid Wealthfront non-client endorsement, creating a conflict of interest. Client experiences vary. Wealthfront brokerage is not a bank. Base APY as of January 30th, 2026 and subject to change. Please see details in the episode description. Yeah, there's a lot of moving parts here. And to continue that airplane metaphor, it's like now we're trying to rebuild the plane in midair and not crash.
17:31This is a really interesting one. So the commercial properties, those clients get dropped, even though they were accounting for big chunks of recurring predictable revenue. And so it sounds like the focus was, we're going to bid these one-off jobs and we're going to start to win those. And then we're also going to really focus on recurring residential deals. Correct. So we start just trying to find more recurring jobs and, and slowly we start building back up. We're like back at like 50, 55 per month. Then slowly, you know, we go back up to 65 within, I would say like 60, I would say within a good year, right?
18:07But what we learn, everything that we had not, we just didn't know what we didn't know. And so that's the thing I would say. To clarify, we're talking$60 ,000 revenue per month, not like 60 jobs. Correct,$65 ,000 revenue per month. And I think it's one of the things that I look back and for so many years, I'm like, oh my God, how could I be so dumb to believe everything that's being said on YouTube? And I think the problem is not what is said. It's just that everyone speaks out of their experience and what they know, right? And so for someone that was making those kind of videos saying like, hey, just buy a boring business.
18:42You put a manager in place. It's done. To them, it's easy because they have been through that maybe 10 times, 20 times, 30 times. Yeah. Right. It's easy when you already know what you're doing. You already know how things can go wrong and you take like certain you prevent things from happening. I remember I was sharing my story on Instagram and I had someone from high school message me. She's like, yeah, I heard we were listening with my husband to the same people. We bought a business and we lost everything and we had to go bankrupt. And we had little girls and we lost everything. We could barely have money to feed our girls.
19:13So I share this because I think it's important for people to know that you can't listen to everything and take that as in as in they have the same level of expertise that I do. Right. Like this people that have been investors for years, they've gone through a lot of learning that you don't have at all. And so you have to take every possible precaution that you can. Think of every single way that thing could go bad. What ways could it go wrong? And things that can go bad are things that you can't even imagine. Yeah, this is definitely a challenging point to be. And now you've kind of built it back up through some serious sweat equity at this point.
19:52Does this afford you the margin and breathing room now to bring in a management layer or a salesperson layer to kind of relieve yourself from some of these 80-hour weeks? Yeah. So what ends up happening is, you know, we build the business back up to like a good 60, 65. Some months we were hitting 70 already again. We just realized that we're working a lot, right? We're barely present for our kids. I start feeling this guilt of I didn't want to be a mom anymore. Like I had these kids in front of me and I just felt like I had to focus on the business. I was it just felt like the kids were pulling to one side.
20:29My business was pulling to the other side. I didn't know how to be a good mom. I was just exhausted. My cup was very empty from everything that we had gone through and from the continuous 80 hour weeks to keep up with everything that we had going on. And I just said to my husband, we either sell the business or we find a way for this to run on its own because I can't do this anymore. Right. So at that point, my sister had mentioned, hey, Chagipity was just released. Maybe this is a good idea for you guys. Just try it out. And I just start playing with it. I'm a tech curious person. So I naturally just enjoy doing that.
21:06And I started having this vision of like, okay, the thing that's the most time consuming right now is handling every single phone call, booking appointments in our calendar. So I start thinking of how can AI help us handle the phone calls? How can I help us call people with pass-through invoices and chase them for payments, right? So I don't have to personally do that because it's draining to me. It's not something that gives me energy. Yeah, which you can definitely do now. But two, three years ago, like, I don't know. Yeah. So I tried hiring someone up and I gave them the diagram, the vision of what I had.
21:41And he said he could do it, right? So I believed him. I'm like, okay, let's do it. Five months later, I've got nothing. Like nothing, absolutely nothing. He just completely failed. But I knew there was something there. And so I tried hiring a second freelancer and I say, OK, we're still losing a bunch of customers. How do we fix the retention problem? And I just think maybe if we send pictures to every single customer after every service automatically with notes from the crew on how the property looks right now, we could potentially not have so many people drop us. So that's when I tried hiring a second freelancer and I let her just automate that process.
22:22She ends up doing the automation on a platform that's called make.com where you can just have a trigger or something that happens. In this case, we complete a property and automatically we send the email, pull the picture from our CRM and send the email over to our clients. On top of that, we send a text message. Hey, how was your service? Are you satisfied? If they were satisfied, it would take them to a Google review. If they weren't, it would automatically take them to a form where they would file a complaint. And we could now handle it before things became an issue and they were frustrated from different services of things not looking good.
22:58When she does that, I'm like, wow. Can we just pause there? Because this is really cool because there are other software companies that will do this for you for$200 a month or something. But it's like, no, we can build our own version of that in-house with this Make tool. And I'm a fan of Make as well. Yeah, I mean, let me tell you, we had already changed because when we bought the company, the previous owner, he told us that they were using a CRM where they were keeping track of the schedule. And when we actually got into the business and to the operations, the manager was still writing on paper Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and writing the address of every single person where the crew had to go.
23:32So they were manually putting on a paper. So we go from that into getting a real CRM. So we start using Jobber. and jobber it's supposed it's specific for anything that's cleaning services landscaping services anything like that but they didn't have that feature of sending an automated picture after every single service i don't know why so that's what i end up building on make well i don't build it she builds it and so then i look at it and i'm like let me dissect this whole thing like what is this right how is this even possible that you can do this and so i start dissecting it and i look at the thing i'm like what i don't need to know how to code to do this this is crazy means I could actually learn this myself.
Read the full transcript
24:09I'm like, I've already learned how to do Photoshop. I've learned how to do like edit videos, do all these different things by learning on YouTube. Let me just, someone must be teaching this on YouTube. So I started diving into how to use make, how to connect that with chat GPT. And then I ended up building the voice agent, the receptionist that I was thinking from the beginning, right? I ended up building that agent that called, that handled every phone call and booked that appointment directly inside of Jabber just by like putting pieces together. Now it's a lot easier because now you have Cloud Code.
24:41You just tell Cloud Code what you want. It's going to build it for you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So when that happens, we're like, wow, I suddenly start literally getting my time back, right? Now I can actually, I have more peace of mind to be more present with the kids. I'm now able to just, oh my God, I just felt more peace. Was it good? People would call up and be able to say like, yeah, I need you to come by next Thursday afternoon. And it would, you know, cross-reference the available calendar and like sound relatively human-like and book it? Yeah, for sure. When we started it, my husband was like, I don't know that I like this.
25:14I'm like, wait, I need you to give me a chance. And I would just start playing with it, like calling, testing it. Obviously, it was a lot of trial and error, right? Because you come across situations where the AI is not prepared for a situation like, and that's where the fine tuning and the training really comes in, right? It's really easy to put together an AI receptionist by just going to retail AI or VAPI. But it's not about how easy it is to put it together. It's like, okay, now train it so that it says exactly what you need it to say in every single situation, regardless of the call that's coming in.
25:44What did that training process look like for you? Because I think this is probably the most important piece in getting it to sound somewhat intelligent. Of course. And not just go off the rails. Nick, I have to listen to every single phone call. And I was like, okay, what happened here? What was the problem? Okay, now let's go back to AI and change the prompt and fix it so that anytime someone says this, then this happens, right? When it comes to AI, you have to start thinking of things in terms of steps or systems or processes, right? Yeah, I think like a computer, I guess. Exactly. So normally, you don't think of like, okay, well, if this happens, then this happens.
26:20You just do things, right? And you expect everybody to do them the same exact way. And I think that's why I wasn't good at leadership before, because I would just hire someone and I'm like, okay, just do this. And I would expect them to do the job just like I was doing it because I already knew how to do it. When I started training AI and learned that you have to train AI just like you would train a junior executive, right? You have to give them the step-by-step process that they need to follow in order for their job to look good. So if a client calls and they're complaining because things look bad, I don't want you to try to handle it.
26:52I want you to transfer it to me, right? Yeah, yeah. That's how we want that piece handle oh a client is calling and they want to request an estimate but they're asking for a price okay perfect we can drop by today at 5 p.m would that work for you mr customer yeah okay cool book it directly in our calendar and set it up for the person that's going to drive by and and go provide that estimate right so that in itself just gave us so much time back because i wasn't now at home trying to handle calls and my husband wasn't in the car just trying to you know drop plants and supplies or manage the crew or do all these things as he was trying to handle calls.
27:28Okay. Super cool. Yeah, I love that. Even if it's only 80 % as good as you, but it's 50 calls a day that you're no longer having to handle or 40 calls, maybe 10 of them still get routed to you at some point, but it's a huge burden off your shoulders. Huge. Huge. With just those two automations, I got at least 20 hours per month back, at least, like minimum. So that in itself, it was like, okay, we're in a much better place. and I remembered, you know, we ended up doing a trip with our family to baptize the kids and whatnot. And we're like, we really just want to go back to feeling like we were feeling before, just feeling the sense of freedom of just living life on our terms.
28:04For me, that has always been the most important thing since I think since ever, you know, it's just living life on my terms. That's when we listed the company for sale and now the business is running on its own. Well, not on its own. We're still doing the work, but my husband is now at least coming home at 3 p.m. At least he's spending Fridays with us, right? Before that, he was leaving at 6 a.m. and coming back at 7 p.m. just to sit down on the computer and send estimates. He wasn't with us. So that changed completely. Okay. So at this point, the business, like revenue-wise, it's roughly at the same level it was at the acquisition.
28:38What are we, a year? We're two years deep into it? Give me a sense of the timeline. Yeah, that's 2024. Since acquiring the company. It's been a year and eight months, 10 months, but maybe less. Okay. And so the thought at this point is we can at least recoup what we paid for the business. Maybe it's not going to be a huge profit per se, but it's better than it was. And we can kind of get out and try the next thing. Yep. Exactly. We just thought we can move to another country with the kids. So they're raised the same way we were raised. We can just have them get that experience that we had and we'll just sell the company.
29:12We didn't make any money. We didn't lose any money, but things are fine. Yeah. Lessons learned along the way. Lessons learned. Exactly. At least we'll move forward. Right. So we do that and we list the company for sale. The calls are already being handled and we're now having time back. We are now able to just be like a normal family like before. And we just said, OK, we don't know if the company is going to sell. Let's just try to hire a manager that can run the business and run the operations and we can actually step back. So I had met a friend back in middle school, right? He had married one of my really good friends and we would go to their birthday parties and they would come to our birthday parties for the kids.
29:53Their kids were the same age, whatnot. So he was in construction. So we're like, well, he might be a good fit. We know each other. I think it would be a good opportunity. So we meet with him. We present the opportunity there. He's also going through a transition in his life. So it just kind of made sense. It clicks. It's like, yeah, of course I could do it. And he takes on the position of being the operations manager. That's back in December, 2024. Takes on that rule. And that's when we get an offer for the company for$750 ,000. When we get the offer for $750 ,000, we just think to ourselves like, oh my God, like we can actually sell the business now.
30:28You know, this is what we wanted. We would actually be making money. We're able to pay the alone, we are able to just do things. And your purchase price was like$450 ,000,$500 ,000? $470 ,000. Okay. $470 ,000. So in October, I forgot to mention this, but we had acquired a fertilization and pest control company. It's a way smaller company. And we're just trying to figure out how to add revenue and add services. In our pauses of trying to figure out how to make the company grow, it was$170 ,000 that we acquired that company for and the seller financed half of it. And I remember in December 2024, when they're offering, you know, the$750 ,000, we're like, okay, this is great.
31:04We could sell the business, but we realized we're like, yeah, we sell it, but we would have to figure out what to do again because we don't have a source of income. We don't have another source of income. Like now we have to figure out whether we buy another company, whether we start another business. And the company is finally stabilized to the point where we now have a manager. He was running things. My husband's no longer going to the sales appointment and we decide not to sell the company because now it's running on its own. We're not handling calls. We're not handling anything. And things are solid.
31:33That's crazy. Isn't that funny? We're like, the whole time we need to build the systems and the team and get it into a place where we'd even be attractive to the next buyer. And then once those things are in place, you're like, baby, we don't need to sell it anymore. Yeah. Honestly, it was crazy. It was kind of relieving. Like, thank God we're here, right? Thank God things worked out. So we end up moving. We leave the country in January 2025. We leave the country for six months. We don't even come back to Miami. And the manager's running everything. And we are thinking, you know, we know this person.
32:05He's reliable. He's trustworthy. So my husband starts traveling back. And we start noticing that the business starts going down, right? At that point, when we left the business, the business was going up. Like we were having consistent 70K months. It was a good situation to be in. The business starts going down with the manager. and we were like, okay, what's going on? What's going on? He starts traveling back and forth every month. And when we go back, I remember it was right before New Year. We look at our bank accounts and there's$2.50 in our bank account. I'm like, what is going on? Like, why is this happening again?
32:41Going back and looking at things. The issue I think was that I left Angler. I decided to completely step away from the company in around September of 2025. Because I said, hey, the business is now running on its own. I want to focus on my own thing. I want to start my AI company where I'm going to help other business owners do exactly the same thing that I did for this company. So I step away and I have been doing that leadership, right? And when we go back to Miami, he starts talking to a bunch of customers and he finds that the manager has been stealing from the company. I'm like, how is this possible?
33:15We have known this guy for 20 years. Like, how could someone do that? Yeah. And then I'm like, why does this keep happening to us? Clearly, there's something that we haven't learned. Like, what have we not learned here? And so I think in those situations, it's just asking yourself, what do I not know yet? It's not why is this happening, but what for? Right. And I kid you not. And I swear it sounds like I'm lying. But five days after we get a whole truck's worth of equipment stolen. That's over$10 ,000,$15 ,000 worth of equipment stolen. Just getting punched while you're down here. Yep. And I say to my husband, there's something that we don't know.
33:54It's something that we haven't learned. And the lesson was we just didn't know how to lead a company. We were not good leaders. We were so focused on like at that point, it was like, well, now we're prioritizing our family. The thing that we had kind of like left behind all those years since we did the acquisition, we wanted to prioritize that. And we did that for 2025. But then the results were naturally that the company started going down and a person that we trusted, he got way too much access to things that he shouldn't have gotten access to. Right. And I think that's why that happened. Yeah.
34:28Thank God we are now, you know, in a completely different place. At this stage, Andrea and her husband are at a crossroads. Do they hire a new manager? Do they try and sell the business again? or do they lean harder into what's already been working to right the ship? Find out which path they chose coming up right after this. Starting a business is a big deal, but our partner Shopify makes it simpler with all the tools you need to launch included and ready from day one. When you're setting up your site, you don't need to start from scratch or reinvent the wheel here. Just use Shopify's proven templates and AI tools to get a great looking site up and running fast with no coding needed.
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35:58Hear that? That's the sound of your marketing working. And as an entrepreneur, you know that every call is an opportunity. But if you miss it, potential customers don't wait. They'll just call the next business on their list. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q-U-O. It's the business phone system built so you never miss a call. You can set it up in minutes on any device. You can keep your existing phone number and you can add teammates as you grow. No IT, no hassle. Once you do, all your calls, texts, and voicemails live in one place. so anyone on your team can pick up a conversation, see the full history, and respond fast.
36:36Plus, Quo integrates with the tools you're already using. HubSpot, Zapier, Cloud, and tons more so you can save time and stay organized. Money is on the line. Always say hello with Quo. Try Quo for free. Plus, get 20 % off your first six months when you go to Quo.com slash hustle. That's Quo, Q-U-O dot com slash hustle. so what happened obviously i imagine he gets let go and then you got to figure out somebody else to step in in this role so what ends up happening funny enough is that we terminate him and the company is like 60 65 000 so we're like my husband just tells me like this is not going to happen to me again because we could hire somebody again and we did a bunch of interviews but the people that were really, really good.
37:25They were asking for like a hundred, a hundred and something to get paid per year, right? For us to pay that to a person, like the company couldn't afford to pay somebody that much, or at least we wouldn't be in zeros, right? My company wasn't making money yet at that point. So the decision was, okay, we are not going to hire anybody, but because the company has been automated, like let's just automate additional things so that my husband can just work one day per week. So he now just goes to the office once a week. We had AI handle the marketing. So now we have a lot of leads coming in. We had the biggest month that we've ever had in May.
38:06And my company now is doing really good, thank God as well. I think it was just a matter of you have to know your numbers, right? We now have a system. We now have a dashboard where we know exactly which crew is being efficient. We know exactly how much time they should be spending at a property. We know exactly how much we're paying them versus what the customer's paying. And those are the little things that I think sometimes when we're focused on different things, we don't pay attention to. And that's the difference between being a good leader and not being a good leader. It's like, are you able to see all of the relevant, the real important information, the real KPIs on your dashboard?
38:43Do you have those numbers? Are you keeping track of the key metrics? And we weren't doing that. And that's why people stole from us and we had no idea. So it sounds like the company becomes a lot leaner through these automations and maybe removing a management layer that with the help of all these different tools and systems like becomes less necessary. And then it's almost like a ghost kitchen and stuff. People just, they go where they need to go and the machines are kind of doing a lot of the routing that normally a dispatch or crew chief might do. Exactly. So when it comes to the people, we just promoted the person that had been with us the longest.
39:19We said, OK, you are now going to make sure that everybody knows what they need. If they need anything in the mornings, you make sure that that's done. So he now handles the teams in the morning and just lets them know, hey, you three are going this on this truck. You three are going on this truck and you three are going on this truck. Right. So he organizes people. My husband just goes once a week, just does all the sales appointments, make sure that they're still good. Everything's up to date. And so far, like it has been working great for us. And I think we just needed to get the business back up before we could bring somebody on board that was going to, again, handle all the operations in a way.
39:57And we wanted to ultimately the goal is to grow the business. Right. And so we can't grow the company if we are not stabilized and in a way where we know what's going on. Like we need to know our numbers better than anybody else. Yeah, the dream of passive management or what's, you know, an absentee owner is maybe not sustainable at this scale of business where you really need to kind of have your pulse on what's happening. You know, I think once we're making 100K per month, which I don't think we're far from that, when it comes to just a landscaping company, we'll be able to bring someone on board, but someone that's really qualified, like a real A player that can manage a company that knows exactly how to grow it.
40:35And it's somebody that has already worked for a larger landscaping company in the past and has helped them grow. Right. That's the ultimate goal. And that's what we're aiming for. But we just need to be at that place where we can afford someone like that. Yeah. We've had guests call it kind of the trough of despair, where you're really running up against the ceiling of your own capacity. But also you don't have the margins or the scale quite yet to bring in another top tier person. And it's like almost this sprint and hope nothing breaks in the meantime. Yeah, but then you get there and then you can kind of like relax and breathe a little bit.
41:07Yeah. But hopefully you'll get there. And then the acquisition, you mentioned earlier, like buying a smaller company. This was with the idea of, well, we can go out and get customers onesie-twosie through Google Ads, through social media, through traditional methods. Or we can just acquire a book of business from somebody else and like add that revenue. Maybe there's some economies of scale or some operational efficiencies. It makes that more attractive to a potential buyer was the thought there. Yeah, for sure. When we thought of acquiring the landscaping company, we knew that we weren't just going to acquire one.
41:38We wanted to acquire multiple companies. And that was the whole goal from the beginning, right? Is buy a lot of companies, put them together, and then you exit the big package, right? Not the little, like you put a bunch of little ones together. Yeah, that's the playbook anyway. They make it sound easy on YouTube. Exactly. That's what you're supposed to do. And so we follow that through the second company. And I think for a good year, just because we went through so much, we just felt like, oh, my God. Our nervous system was at complete capacity, right? And I don't think we could take on more.
42:14And that's why we stopped putting the foot on the gas. Yeah. I think once we stabilized, we just went through another company that we were going to acquire. It wasn't a good deal. It wasn't the deal that we were looking for. Like, for instance, this particular company that we had analyzed, it had clients that were paying three months later. The minimum we charge when we go out to a property is at least$60 per visit, right? That company had it at like$25 per visit. Ooh, okay. Yeah. Now, when you acquire a company, you're going to lose clients. It's very likely to happen, right? Yeah. But then when you come in and double somebody's lawn mowing rate, they're more likely to bail.
42:53Or on the flip side, you could see, oh, they're so far below market. Like if I want to acquire an apartment building, look, it's below market rent. It's valued at X, you know, rent roll. But now I can bring it up to market and then it's going to be worth, you know, this time's more. Does that go into it? Or is it like I don't want to deal with it because I know all these clients are going to bail? Yeah. No, for us, it was like, well, we know that we have to raise the prices. But that wasn't just the problem, right? On top of that, if you have people that are paying you three months later, it's a nightmare.
43:21Like I don't want to be chasing clients. I'm done with that. In fact, in our company, we bill people on the first of the month before we do anything, right? They are paying on the first of each month before we even mow their lawn. So they know that we're reliably, we're going to show up. We tell them exactly what dates we're going to be there. They have their client portal with the access and know what the services, when the services are happening. So it's a completely different agreement. And when you're changing not just the pricing, but you're also changing the terms and conditions, that customer is not going to be happy and they're going to find somebody else.
43:54I guarantee you that. And so for the time being, the sailing is smooth. It may not last forever, but is the game plan to just kind of keep the landscaping business despite the offer that you had a year, year and a half ago and say like, we're going to continue to run this because it doesn't take up a ton of our time right now. And it does spin off some cash flow. Yeah, 100%. The company right now is doing really well. And the good thing with this company is that when you put work into the company, you see it right there. You see the money coming in. You see the sales coming in. So it's a really good company.
44:29I just think we didn't have the right systems in place. And when we started implementing the right systems, right, automations, the right marketing strategy, because now we have AI handling the marketing, which has increased our leads by like 20%. And on top of that, like we are now, you know, we were spending like three, four thousand dollars before in ads. And now we're at fifteen hundred. And they're way more profitable. So just fixing all those little things that may seem like insignificant things have made a world of a difference. And on top of that, just learning about us, learning about how we can become better leaders has also made a huge difference because the people in the team.
45:06My husband has been building this culture where now everybody say hi to each other. They're happy to be there. They're happy to really focus on providing quality work. The guy that's the supervisor, that's where all the other crew members, he's really focused on making sure that he knows what's going on between everybody in the trucks. And so that has changed the company drastically. Yeah. And it's freed up some of your time to work on AndreaPalacio.ai, helping other businesses implement some of these AI wins that you've had. Talk to me a little bit about that, a little bit, maybe some of your favorite tools or systems that you find maybe apply across the board to different industries.
45:44That's my favorite topic. So AI, for me, has just changed everything for me. It's the tool that allowed me to get my freedom back and really stop wearing so many hats as a business owner. You can delegate all these little tasks that you haven't even thought of, that you weren't just, you know, when you're spending, I was just going through it with my executive assistant this morning, right? he was doing all this little task of like helping me with the content and just helping me read through the scripts and just moving from one place to the other the files right all these things are now automated right i told him i'm like i need you to start thinking of this in terms of systems and not in terms of tasks when we're focused on thinking in terms of tasks you're like okay what do i have to do today and your brain automatically goes to the 10 20 things that you need to accomplish that day.
46:34Instead, you can literally ask AI, hey, what can you help me with from this list? And AI can take so many things off your plate that you didn't even know of. So personally, for me, my favorite tool is Anthropic. Cloud Code is my number one. It's what I use on a daily basis. That's where I live. And that's what helps me automate all of the systems for different business owners that I work with. That's what I started doing when I left the company. I just started doing this on a consulting and implementations, just helping business owners implement that. It was very difficult at first until I started, until I grew my personal brand on social media.
47:11I went from like 7 ,000 followers all the way to 44 ,000 in just like a matter of three months. And that just changed lead generation for me completely. I started just, again, helping people with consulting, different projects. And then I realized that I was still capped by my time. I could only do so much, even though, even though Cloud Code was doing the whole thing, I still had to just kind of like direct it and put in my time there. Right. So I then launched a program for business owners where they could go at their own pace. We have weekly calls. I helped them strategize on how they could completely go take their business from all this mess, right?
47:50All this chaos, all this different things that they have to do on a daily basis to running an AI first company. And an AI first company is simply when you as the founder, you know exactly what AI can do. You have expanded your possibilities and you now direct your team so that they use AI to delegate all the to do's to AI. Like if your team is still typing data in computer instead of speaking to it, right? If you're still just doing all the Excel sheets, the financial statements, if you're still the one organizing files, then you just don't know what AI is capable of. And the reality is that majority of people still think that Chagipity is just a tool that you just ask questions and it answers like you're treating it as a Google, where if you start learning about AI, you'll see that AI can actually do work on your behalf.
48:39And that's really where it gets really powerful. And that's where you start getting your time back. So the AI receptionist that I mentioned that was handling our calls and answering frequently asked questions and booking appointments, That's just scratching the surface of everything that we have built now. Yeah. For the program, are you focused mainly on local service businesses or is it more broad than that? So we help local services, but we also mainly focus on people that do have coaching programs, consulting. I see that this helps them a lot because they have a lot going on. So this is really mostly for the solo entrepreneur that is, again, wearing five different hats, right?
49:14But they're doing the delivery, the admin, the marketing. So for me, it's like, how do I teach them and show them what's possible? How do I show them that you can get more leads? Like if you're struggling with leads right now, you need to use AI to help you run your ads on whether it's meta ads or Google ads. And it's going to help you be more profitable instead of paying an ad agency. Or you can grow your social media and showing them the strategies of how I've grown my social media so they can get more leads and they can have more people knowing about their business. So it's just those different things that change everything for a business owner.
49:50Is that where you recommend people start either by uploading the to-do list and asking, like you said, how can you help me with this? Or maybe doing a time audit. Like this is where my hours are going. What can you help me out with? Something like that? Yeah, 100 % doing a time audit. So if you go to my Instagram, I have this really cool personalized business plan for business owners where they can answer three different questions. And it will know exactly what, because every business is very different, right? If you're in a stage of building your business, you're focused 100 % on leads. When you're in the stage of dominating as a business, you're in a stage where you now need to automate the delivery and you actually need to build systems to increase your capacity.
50:31So each business, depending on the dates they're in and the phase they're in, it looks very different. You could just tap the link in bio or just message me the word, let's do side hustle. Perfect. They can DM me the word side hustle and it will automatically send them that questionnaire. And it will send them a full document on how to implement AI, like step by step on what the things that you need to do are, where you need to focus on your business. Awesome. We'll link that up again. And Andrea Palacio at Instagram. We'll link up the YouTube channel and the website as well. This has been awesome.
51:04This has been a roller coaster. I'm like, oh, we're high, we're low. Now we're getting punched in the gut again because somebody's stealing from us. It's been a wild ride here. But appreciate you stopping by. Let's wrap this thing up with your number one tip for Side Hustle Nation. Don't quit on your goals and dreams. The process can feel long. It can feel exhausting sometimes. It can feel like you just want to throw the towel, right, a lot of times. But just know that the process is where it's at because I wouldn't be here had I not gone through everything that I've went through. So it sounds really cliche, but everything really does happen for a reason.
51:41Everything that you're going through is really setting you up for the next level and the next version of where you want to be. So don't quit. Just keep going. Push through those hard times. Don't ask yourself, why is this happening to me? But ask yourself, what do I need to learn from this? and just keep going because things will get better. Yeah, that was one of the lines that I wrote down in this question of, you know, why is this happening? Why me, this pity party to flip it around and say, what do I not know? And I think that's a really powerful reframe. I loved your attitude of, I can figure this out.
52:16Everything is figureoutable. I can learn this kind of this positive thing. I don't know how to do it now, but I'm confident enough that I can figure it out. I'm confident that I can learn really cool stuff. Again, AndreaPalacio.ai. Check her out over there. If you're wondering what to listen to next, we've got a few other fun business acquisition stories, episodes that you might like. Episode 571 is a cool story with Hannah Ingram actually buying a self-service car wash with owner financing. And she said it was like buying a$5 ,000 a month income stream with no money out of pocket. I thought that was pretty inspiring.
52:50And then we recently re-aired our episode with Jono Santa Maria about his laundromat purchase in Melbourne, Australia, and then some of the actions that he took to increase revenue after he took over. And in this entrepreneurial game, it's this cool game of cash flow in the near term, plus I'm building long-term equity at a 2-3x multiple for the business. So you'll find both of those in your favorite podcast app. I can link them up in the show notes as well. big thanks to Andrea for stopping by sharing her insight big thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone side hustle nation.com slash deals is where you'll find all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place that is it for me thank you so much for tuning in if you're finding value in the show make sure to text a friend let them know about it that's the greatest compliment for me as the host until next time let's go out there and make something happen and I'll catch you in the next edition of the side hustle show hustle on
From the publisher
Buy a boring business, they said. It’ll be easy. It’ll be fun.
That’s the dream Andrea Palacio and her husband chased when they bought a landscaping company.
The road got bumpy fast, but they still added around $300,000 in equity value in just a couple of years.
Andrea Palacio runs AndreaPalacio.ai, where she helps other business owners put AI to work.
But before that, she and her husband lived on a sailboat for 4 years while running an e-commerce business selling pet supplies on Amazon and Shopify.
When that business stalled, they sold it and went looking for something new. They landed on a South Florida landscaping company, thinking it would be steady and mostly hands-off. Instead, almost everything went wrong at once.
Tune in to Episode 750 of the Side Hustle Show to learn:
how Andrea rebuilt after losing most of her team and clients
how simple AI tools gave her back 20+ hours a month
what buying a business taught her about leadership
Full Show Notes: We Bought a “Boring” Business … Then Revenue Tanked
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About The Side Hustle Show
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Hosted by Nick Loper of Side Hustle Nation.
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This experience may not be representative of other Wealthfront clients, and there is no guarantee of future performance or success. Experiences will vary. Nicholas Loper and Side Hustle Show podcast (collectively "Media Partner") are not clients of Wealthfront. The Media Partner receives cash compensation from Wealthfront Brokerage for this paid endorsement placed in their podcast, creating a conflict of interest. More details available via the referral link. The Direct Deposit Plus Investing Program from Wealthfront Advisers LLC and Wealthfront Brokerage LLC provides eligible clients a 0.25% APY increase above the base APY on eligible Cash Account balances (up to an overall boosted rate of 4.30% for a limited time when including the three month 0.75% APY boost for new clients) when you direct deposit $1,000 a month, plus open, fund, and maintain an investing account. Wealthfront may change or end the program at any time and determine eligibility at its discretion. Terms apply. Full details at wealthfront.com/promo-terms.
The Cash Account, which is not a deposit account, is offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC, member FINRA/SIPC. Wealthfront Brokerage is not a bank. The base APY is 3.30% on cash deposits as of January 30, 2026, is representative, subject to change, and requires no minimum. Funds in the Cash Account are swept to program banks, where it earns the variable APY. Same-day withdrawal or instant payment transfers may be limited by destination institutions, daily transaction caps, and by participating entities such as Wells Fargo, the RTP® Network, and FedNow® Service. New Cash Account deposits are subject to a 2-4 day holding period before becoming available for transfer.
Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal. Securities investments are not bank deposits, bank-guaranteed or FDIC-insured, and may lose value. Investment advisory services are provided by Wealthfront Advisers LLC, an SEC-registered investment adviser.
