Hi All! Just wanted to update and wrap up my long saga on here for everyone. I know it's a lot to read through, but if you're in the position I was a few months ago, wondering if this is all possible, I hope you can find a little motivation in this to give it a try. - April 10th I took possession of my new CAT 275xe. I finally got out of the dealer at around Noon and drove straight to my first job. Risky not having ran it before, but you gotta learn somehow! - spent almost every week day in the machine on jobs up until today trying to get caught up on all the work I booked before even having the machine (thanks to facebook ads) - have just a couple jobs left with paid deposits, finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. - grabbed some good before/after pics and vids to start creating new content for updating socials and new ads - 5 5-Star Reviews achieved on new Google Business Profile and counting Since April 10th, I have completed and received payment on $23,875 worth of work with an average job ticket of $3,410. The rest of this week and next week will be spent finishing up the final 2 jobs with deposits which will be for $9,875 worth of work. I hope someone gets a little value out of all this to see what is possible. A month ago, I was working a $90k a year W2 behind a computer all day. Miserable. Now, I'm in woods all day tearing things up and enjoying life so much more and making a great living. While I don't plan to run this wide open all the time, it is nice to see what is possible if you truly wanted to grind away and make hay when you can. Just don't get burned out! I am posting before/after vids of one of my favorite jobs I completed on a random Tuesday, and the rewarding joy you can bring with this work. I did this job for a couple who had inherited this property from a passing parent. They wanted to build their retirement home on this property. Both husband and wife were in tears after seeing the finished property (in a good way!) He said "I haven't been able to walk this property like this since I was a 6 year old boy. If it was Friday, I'd pack the kids and tent up and we'd camp out here all weekend."

Just wanted to share what following the process looks like! If people in here are on the fence about making this their full time job, I made the jump in early March to go full time into this. We had our first baby in October and my wife was very skeptical/nervous, dare I say excited, about the whole idea of me quitting. I have been bouncing between jobs about every 8-10 months, and this last job was 90k salary with killer benefits, but I was battling depression, low energy, and just wasn’t myself. I sat down with my wife, showed her my plan, and I went all in. In Austin’s starter scorecard I had a goal of my first 3 months going 10, 20, 30k in revenue. Currently, around 3 weeks into April I will hit 60k in revenue, which is 6 weeks ahead of my plan. Long story short, it works. I look in this group every day for motivation and I see some great people doing amazing things. Asking questions. Taking feedback. Moving forward. Generating results. @Austin Gray ’s community here is fantastic, and I can’t help but feel thankful and alive this Easter weekend! I feel that we are all hard nosed, hard working individuals, and I pray that we all find peace, success and something to pour our work ethic into! Big things coming in 2026 for this group!

2nd Week Business Update! TL:DR Metrics Ad Spend $400.67 Leads total - 18 CPL - $30.12 Closed - 4 Sales - $8,300 🙏✨️ Potential Client of 40 Acres And my current client waiting for me to do the 1 Acre job before giving me his 9 acre property to do! Long story short, by the grace of God I quit my job today. I promised them I'll finish my 12 hr shift and I resigned. I love the people I worked with, I really do. But I love my family more and I had shifts that switched to days then evenings then back to days and it seemed very unstable for my family's schedule. Also I have made more money for my family in 2 weeks worth of business than a job has ever given me! The goal now is to reach capacity where I can focus on my next 3 steps: 1. Buy basic equipment (chain saw, cutter, chipper) + rent forestry mulcher 2. Work 4 days and have 1 day estimates / admin 3. Buy the forestry mulcher (Kubota + loftness) Ive been so dependent on the Lord these past 2 weeks of business because he has really showed me his Glory and his greatness time after time and I needed to see him work in this in my weakness, and as always he shows up! Praise the Lord oh My Soul! How did quitting your job go over when you jumped full time? And how was the change?

First job booked today. Two weeks after starting ads. 25K in estimates sent out and the jobs are starting to book.

So this season is going gang busters. I now have over $100k of jobs on the books and my schedule is full almost to the end of June. Today I did another 10 estimate appointments, have another 10 next Friday, another 6 the Friday after that and another 10 leads I'm still chasing down and more coming in each day! For all of today's estimates I had to tell them I was booking new jobs in June. I booked 8 of those jobs with the other 2 being strong maybes. When I told each of them that my first available dates were in June they were all a little shocked but were already sold on the work so it wasn't a deal killer. Here's my dilemma; when I do next week's estimates I'll be telling some of them that I'm booking new jobs in *JULY* which is 3+ months away. In the past I've observed that jobs booked out too far are subject to more cancellations when the time gets closer to the job date. I'm considering pausing my ads for a bit (or maybe reducing the daily spend from $50 down to $10 or something?) So, has anyone else run into this problem? Am I crazy to think about pausing/slowing the ads down for 4-6 weeks? Any other suggestions/opinions? Before you suggest it, I'm just not at a place where I feel like I could or even want to find/train/equip other employees. Being the boss that just drives ads & estimates is a future goal but not yet.