Episode 18: Job Satisfaction and Profitability with Stan Genadek

From the studios of fractal Recording, this is the profit first podcast, episode 18.

Did you hear that? Was it loud enough? Yes, it was.

18.

18. You're gonna start playing 18.

18 in life. I give you 18 in life to go 18 something with skid row, dude. I got it right here. What a horrible life this kid had. I can just keep going.

It'll kill the whole show.

There we go. 18 in life.

So welcome, everyone.

I used to listen to the 18 in life and, like, get so, like, angry. And then I'd be like, I'm gonna take my math book and, like, tear this ap. I like.

That was my violent outlet, Lou Ferrigno style.

Yeah. And then I'd be like, oh, my God, I'm such an 18 pound weakling. I can't even tear a page on this thing. And then that was my outlet. I listen. I thought I was Ricky.

Wow.

Yeah. But in my fantasy world, this is.

Starting to sound like therapy, Christina. Yeah.

You know, that was your inner truth here.

I was such a nerd. I still am, but I am such a nerd to think I was anything like Ricky.

Just let him go, Christina. Just let him go. So welcome, everyone, to the profit first.

Oh, shoot.

Experience. It's not just a podcast show. It's an experience. I'm Chris Curran, the founder of fractal.

Recording and a therapist. And I'm Mike Michalowicz, author of profit first. And we have a special guest or goose.

I have your special goose.

Our special goose is here laying golden eg.

Thanks, Christina.

Christina. Christina.

Four weeks in a row, I can't get enough of you guys. What can I say?

It's gotten better and better. The first episode that you came onto, we were struggling. Chris and I were trying to show off for you how great we were, but now we got a rhythm going.

The second episode, that's when we made fun of Canada.

Oh, right. Oh, goodness.

We took a whole episode to overcome that.

An email came in, a request for her to visit Canada to sing the national anthem. I am there no pay. You have to give on your own dollar. And no audience. It was just someone said, why don't you come up and sing it? There wasn't like, an event worth it.

Worth it.

Yeah. But you're really a great singer.

Thank you.

So I just love that you sang that.

Right.

Dude, on this show, we talk about profitability. We talk about my therapeutic issues. Therapeutic issues. That sound.

That's okay.

Yeah, that, you know, like, I want to be Ricky, but we really talk about businesses and getting Businesses to a level of profitability they haven't experienced before. Most businesses are check by check and our job is to get you out of that check by check. Lifestyle and growing the bottom line.

That's right. And we're available on itunes and Stitcher. Those are the two big podcast directories. And our website, profitfirstpodcast.com we have all kinds of guests who've been on there. We've had some great guests. It's been a great ride.

Yeah, it's been a great ride. And actually one of the most common comments we get is actually the variety of our guests. It's not the typical, oh, here's the biggest name in the industry kind of authors, which is very common for podcasts. And it's a great thing. But we're bringing on a full spectrum of entrepreneurs investors. Today we have a landscaper who's turned into a business of teaching other landscapers. His name is Stan Genetic and it's going to be a fascinating interview. It's all these different perspectives on profitability. Before we do it, I want to thank our sponsors. 18 episodes. Nextiva is still with us. Fundera is still with us. T sheets is still with us. The Core 3 just keeps coming back, Right?

They're great. We'll talk about our sponsors a little bit more later.

Yeah. Coincidentally, no sponsors from Canada have stepped up or not.

So we'll see. Hey, I walked out of my apartment the other morning.

Yeah.

Without my keys, without my phone, without my wallet. Nothing. Locked the door behind me and I was like turned around. I was like, let me in. It was like a moment of panic. I was like, no way. I was like, I'll get in my car. I don't have my car keys.

Are you still driving the Prius? Yeah. How's that thing working out, you guys smack down? This is like episode two. You took like a head on collision in your parking lot. It was like an 18 wheeler versus a Prius.

Oh, my.

Yeah, he lost.

No, no, I just got hit in the side. It was repairable.

It's called poetic license. I just use poetic license.

Tractor trailer hit me. The car crumpled into a 12 inch by 12 inch cube, but I was fine.

This really is therapy, is it?

Right. Oh, you want to, you want to really go to therapy here?

Oh, I got a therapy thing. I. I went to the restroom here at your studio and above the urinals it says, do not throw sanitary napkins in the urinals. What is up with that?

How does that make you feel?

I gotta stop using sanitary napkins in the first place, but for me to throw them in the urinals. I'm.

I'm sorry, our guest is on hold. Like, what the hell's going on?

Yeah. Wow. Oh, my God. Okay, we did the five minute kill. Oh, oh, could you put him on mute so he can't hear us? Oh, I'm sorry, Stan, if you hear his, you don't. Or at least pretend you don't hear us.

No, he. He can't hear us now.

Okay, we're not gonna do a word of the day, but we're gonna ask him what the word of the day was. That's the whole thing. Oh, okay. Is that cool?

I love it.

Okay, that was it. Come back, laugh. Does he hear us yet?

Oh, no.

Oh, come back laughing.

Go ahead.

Okay.

No, but can he hear us now? He can, yeah.

Oh, okay. That worked out perfect. Okay, who I'm about to introduce is Stan Genetic. He grew up in the country doing, like, the hard, heavy working life of a country boy. Excavating stuff, moving rocks around, and all these things. So what does he do when he goes to college? He starts a landscaping business to get through college he was so successful at. Now he runs his own business teaching other people how to move rocks around at their country homes and landscape. And he even has a podcast, and his, ironically, is popular.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, unlike this one, it's called the Landscape Business Pro podcast. With no further ado, Let me introduce Mr. Stan Genetics. Come on down.

Can you guys hear me okay?

Oh, tremendous.

Perfect. Mike, I got a little bit of advice for you. Next time you go to the bathroom, you might want to check the front door before you walk in and make sure you're in the right room.

No, it says men's on the door, which is funny. It doesn't say men apostrophe S. It says mens. I mean s. And there's no such word as men's, is there?

Unless it's, like, Latin.

That's. That's. That's deep. So, you know. Well, thanks for having me on, guys. I appreciate it.

Thanks for getting us back on track. I appreciate it. Where. Where are you calling in from today, Stan?

Minnesota yacht. Don't you know?

Cool. Home.

Home of the casserole. And hockey.

I had no idea. Do you play hockey?

No, I snowplow for a living. I don't have the luxury of going outside and playing when it snows. I've got to be working to make a living. That's where we come from.

Did you play as a kid?

Nope. Little bit. But I fell down too much, so I slid down the hills, went behind snowmobiles, skied, did stuff like that.

So tell us a little bit about your business. What do you do for a living?

So the journey started when I was 13. I'm 43 right now, Mike. And like you said, I worked my way through college doing the only thing I knew, run equipment. So, you know, I was going to college and excusing myself from the college courses because I had trucks to schedule jobs that line up. And one of the courses, the professor looks at me and says, you know, there goes a real business person. And it was at that moment that I realized I'm paying, like $12,000 per semester to do something that I'm already doing. And so then I refocused and started to build a landscaping company. And, you know, I thought I fell into that trap that almost everybody falls into bigger, and it really is not the way. But I didn't know any better. I was just a young kid going through college, reading the books and seeing the appeal of all these big corporations and all the equipment they had. And, you know, that was the avenue that I decided to pursue. So I started to build the company, focused on growth alone. And what happened is we grew like crazy. It's easy in landscaping to grow because there's a lot of work. And once you kind of get the gist of how to bid jobs and how to run jobs, you can keep building yourself booked for at least four to six months in advance pretty easily with solid work. And so we grew from doing maybe $100,000 to. We quickly grew to between 1.5 and $2 million per year.

Well, let's rewind a little bit. When you say we. Did you have a business partner or did you do this solo?

Well, it was my father and I, so it was a family business at that point.

And where were you going to college?

St. Thomas University of St. Thomas and the University of Minnesota.

And did you. You drop out of school?

Yes, I did. What that professor say when I dropped out? Nothing. Because I wasn't there anymore.

Did you ever talk to him again and, like, say, hey, man, you helped inspire me dropping out of college? Or have you ever talked to him?

You know, when you get that busy, Mike, you don't have time to go back and reflect and to ponder, maybe I should. That would be a great thing. But no, I didn't. So, you know, we focused on growth alone at that point. And like I said, we got to that. That level of achievement where I thought we were supposed to be successful, but it never came to fruition, so.

What do you mean, didn't come to fruition? I hear you're doing $2 million in annual revenue. Was that profitable?

No. That's the issue. So we had 20 guys out working in the fields. We had five different crews going. We were booked out months and months in advance, but the profits really didn't reflect the effort that went into it.

Why?

And so? Well, it was because with landscaping, you and in contracting in general, not just landscaping, but as a contractor in general, you have the opportunity to be the jack of all trades and master of none. But what I tell people is you have to do is you have to do what I call strategic diversification. So in 2007, we were doing the typical jack of all trades, doing every job that came our way. It could be a grading job. We could be knocking down a car wash. We could be building a retaining wall. We could be putting in the African hooped animal exhibit for the Minnesota Zoo. It did.

Just for example. Just for example, yes. Yeah.

So we were doing everything that came our way, but we weren't doing any of it really good. We really weren't doing it with the maximum amount of profits that we possibly could achieve. And so in 2007, at the peak of our business, and by sheer luck alone. Now, you got to remember, the crash came in 2008. So in 2007, I had no idea the big crash was coming. Right.

Right.

But I sat down with my crew and I says, we are going to intentionally cut all of our business by 50% the next year.

Did your father slap you?

As you said that by that time, my father had passed away, but.

Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

That's okay. No, no big deal then.

Well, let me. Let me rewind. How did you reach this decision to. Why would you do such a big cutback? I mean, was that your way to get the profitability you believe?

Mike, Chris, Christina. It wasn't about just the profitability. It was about job satisfaction. I was flipping miserable. The bigger we grew, the more headaches we got, the more problems arose. And as the owner of the business, you're putting out more fires. And if you're not making the money to make it worthwhile, why continue to do it? I said, life is worth more than just being this major problem solver and having everybody's issues come my way.

Let me rewind, because I think this is a very important spot. It sounds like you have a business from the outside world. It's doing 2 million. Wow, that's amazing. But you sound, like, very stressed. Were you married at the time, Children, so forth?

I was married with children, and my wife is a saint for putting up with me then and now.

Yeah, I agree. What was the experience like with your family as you were going through this $2 million? The outside world. Here's your financial success. What's your family going through?

You're feeling stress.

Give me some details.

Pure hell. You know, you don't ever leave your job at home. Okay. You don't ever leave your job at work. I apologize. You always bring it home with you. So I would come home and instead of going to, like, my daughter's soccer games, I would physically be there, but mentally I wasn't there. And you could see it. You can see it in a person's eyes when they're tuned out and they're into something else. Or your phone. You can never leave that. You can never drop that and put it behind you. You've got to carry it with you. And it's ringing, and every time it rings, something comes up and it just stresses you out. So really, you can physically be there, but it doesn't mean emotionally you're going to be supportive for your family. They are going to be the ones that are hurt in this process.

Were they saying something to you? Was your wife getting angry? Or were they trying to bear and support granite and support you?

Well, like I said, my wife is a saint, and so she would tolerate it. She wasn't overly supportive of it, but she understood it's what we had to do to make a living.

Did you tell her that you had this idea of cutting back on the business before you actually told your employees?

You know, my wife is one of those people that trusts my judgment sometimes a little bit too much because I wish she would slap me and say, what the heck are you thinking? Yeah, so. But. So she trusts my judgment, and we went ahead and started to implement the plan. So in 2007, I sat down and I said, we're going to cut our business by 50% intentionally. The next year, we're going to implement this policy of what I call strategic diversification. Or instead of being the jack of all trades and master of none, we are now going to do what I call being the jack of all trades and master of two.

I've heard that before.

Everybody can do two things really well. I know that there's people that can be super good authors and awesome speakers. I know that there's guys.

Yes. And awfully handsome that's three.

Well, I don't know about that.

He said two, not three.

How did you pick your two, Stan?

All right, that's what I'm gonna get into.

Sorry.

So that's. No, no problem, Mike. You just. You're putting the cart in front of the horse. That's all right, bro. Just settle down. Calm down.

Settle down now.

We got, like, 15 more minutes.

No, we don't. We have. We've got a lot of bits coming. We gotta move.

Oh, man. All right. So anyway, the point is, we picked two niches that we wanted to absolutely dominate, and we strategically picked them. We didn't throw a dart at the board. We said we have to master two specific areas.

And.

And what we chose was one very small niche which doesn't have a high level of competition. In our case, it was swimming pool removal. We weren't digging swimming pools. We weren't repairing swimming pools. We were just physically removing them. Why? Because nobody else was really mastering that market. Easy to come in, easy to dominate it. Easy to make your name as the company to go to for swimming pool removal. Are you still with me?

Yeah, but I got a question. Do I have permission to ask you a question? What about the guy who installs the swimming pools? Doesn't he also do removal? Isn't that the natural choice for customers?

No.

Why not?

They focus on installing them. They. Sometimes. They may. I don't know. I've actually gotten referrals from companies that install swimming pools to us to do the removal, but maybe they do, maybe they don't. There are some people that do swimming pool removal, Mike, don't get me wrong. But what I'm saying is there's less people that do swimming pool removal.

What I'm hearing from you, and tell me if this is accurate, that specialists. You're a swimming pool removal specialist, match up with other specialists. You have installer specialists, and you're referring business to each other. Is that true?

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Once you get into that niche, people can recognize you as the expert. They're going to want their customers to go to you because, well, why not? You're the best at what you do, and if you do a bad job, it looks bad on them. So whenever you do a referral program, you always want to give your customers to somebody that you can trust, that knows what they're doing, that has a proven track record of success.

I gotcha.

So we went into this niche and we dominated it very quickly. But that is the small niche. Those jobs aren't knocking down, beating down on the door. And I want you, if you're a contractor, if you're a landscape, you're an excavator, if you're a tradesman or a craftsman, I want you to understand that you pick these two niches that are strengths within your company, within your belief system. The second niche is a harder niche to dominate, so it's a bigger niche. So in this case, we chose retaining walls. Now, you got to understand, Mike, Chris, Christina, there is a. Everybody and their brother can install a retaining wall. Concrete guys can do them, landscapers can do them. So to become a specialist in this field takes a longer learning curve. It takes longer to achieve that notoriety, and you may have to put more effort into it, but when it does, you're going to have the ability to take on more jobs. You got more jobs coming your way, and you're still the specialist. So you've learned and you've refined the process. You've put a plan and system in place that allows you to build profits into every step of the game as installing retaining walls, a big niche, mastering it, becoming known for it, and then your smaller niche removing swimming pools.

Do these two niches need to be complementary?

Exactly. That really helps. So just like I was getting into with you, Mike. Yeah. You write books. Yeah. So you can speak those two things. Have a. Christine, is that true?

No comment.

Come on.

This is true. This is true.

Of course, you must say, shockingly true. Shocking.

The key is to have that common thread. You've got to have that connector between the two. Just like Chris runs this podcast for focusing on business, his other podcast focuses on mystical encounters, endeavors or whatever. It's still a podcast.

We have no idea either, quite frankly.

It still has a common thread between the two, which gives him the ability to master those two things, but still be able to do it and go back and forth between the two without a whole lot of switching around. It's not like being a dentist and being a baker. You can't do two complete different things at the same time.

Before we go into our little piece, we want to do with you, Stan, one final question around this. What were the numbers? Like, you went from 2 million down to what? And what was the profitability like, though?

All right, this is going to blow you away. Okay. We went down from between 1.5 to 2 million down to 500,000 because. So not only did we cut our business in half, but the economy helped us along even further. Right. So we went down to half a million dollars that year and had the Exact same profit margin.

Wow. So did your stress drop from a $2 million stress level to a $500,000 stress level? Less. Cause less panic.

So let's look at that real quick. When you're doing a $90,000 job and you're worried about the contractor paying you, and you're worried about getting all the lines right, and you're worried about where this has got to go, and that's got to go, and you go down to doing a $9,000 job, and your profit margins are closer to 30 or 40%. And you know that, hey, you know, worst case scenario, this guy flakes out on me, I lose $9,000 and not $90,000. Do you think my stress level went down a little bit, Mike?

Yeah, absolutely. But now we're gonna get your stress back up.

Yes.

We want to talk about. You dig up pools. You probably find some crazy, scary stuff in there. I want to go around real quick and share scary stories from excavation moments. What have you found in your backyard? So, Chris. Stan, we're starting this out with Chris. Chris, scariest thing ever you found in your backyard.

Well, I was letting the music play a little bit there.

I understand.

I actually. I interviewed someone who has a ghost in their house, and they ended up communicating with this ghost through a Ouija board. And. And the Ouija board told him, look under the dining room. So this guy broke out a circular saw and cut a hole in his dining room floor, and he looked under there, and he could see a mound in the dirt. There was a body buried under his dining room.

Well, wow.

Christina, you're up. Stan, get ready. You're coming up, dude.

Okay.

Christine is next, though.

Speaking of circular saws, I will say the strangest thing that's happened to me in my backyard was losing and then finding a portion of my own finger.

Look, dude.

It's a small finger.

She's missing his finger. She's missing a finger. Chris, look at your eyes.

Have a great day.

She's missing a finger.

Not a full one. It's, like, just right below the nail.

A piece of a tip.

So I gave her a prosthetic at the office. I have, like, one of those, Matt. I do. I have a magic finger like you used to hide and conceal stuff. So I gave it to her, and for a couple days, she's like, this is better than my real prosthetic. Until her fingers started bleeding and said, this thing's like torture.

It's not a true story.

I gave you the prosthetic.

He did. He gave me. He Gave me the magic finger.

Really?

Yeah.

Oh, boy. Christine, I'm glad you got the magic finger.

Okay.

All right, Stan, your turn. Scariest thing ever found.

Scariest thing I ever found. Boy, digging in the dirt you find a lot of fun stuff. But we call them butt clencher moments. And I'm sure you do. What we, what we get into is some pretty dangerous things. The scariest thing that's ever happened. I was driving down the road and watched my excavator, 36,000 pound 100,000 dollar excavator flip off from my trailer, barely miss a car and slide upside down on the freeway.

Oh my gosh. Oh my God. God.

Wow.

So yeah, that's my butt clincher.

Yeah, that's okay.

And I got to ride one sideways off a trailer as well. So we get into a lot of fun things when we do these. This kind of work.

So my scariest moment, I was digging around my backyard as a kid and I found one of those Stretch Armstrong things. You remember that Stretch Armstrong, you pull his arms and stuff. But it was like covered with mud and disgusting. So I started playing with them and so forth. And my mom's like, never play with that. It's been dirty, it's been crazy and got me all freaked out, right. So I threw it back down that night I went to bed, woke up next morning, he's laying right next to me. My father. Moral of the story is my father thought he was my own toy and that I loved playing with him. So he put him next to me while I was sleeping. But I woke up to date, I am terrified of Stretch Armstrong. I will pee myself if I see a Stretch Armstrong especially laying next to, to me. Muddy.

Oh my goodness.

Well, now I know what to bring into the studio.

Totally not, dude. Heart attack.

Okay. Mailing you a dirty stretch arms.

Yeah, thank you. That sounds crazy. Oh, we're back. We're back. Okay. Well, that freaked out a lot of audience members. So Stan, you have a business that's 500,000. The profit is the same. What happened the following years continue the story on for us.

So then after we learn to concentrate and refocus. It takes a while to dominate these markets, guys. It just doesn't happen overnight. So as we refine the process. So let's go back to swimming pool removal. We learned over the years how to eke out and squeeze every single penny out of each one of those niches that we decided that we were going to dominate was going to be our wheelhouse is going to be what we were Known for. And so we were able to every year keep our prices exactly the same. So we didn't have to raise our prices in these. We were actually kept them right where they were at for 10 years running straight. And from now to 10 years ago, all of my guys, their wages have gone up, the cost of fuel has gone up, the price to the customer has stayed the same, and my profit margins to the company have increased.

So can you give us an example of maybe one of the things that you discovered that maybe was kind of like an oh, my God, I wish I thought of this earlier moment when it came to pool removal.

Oh, yeah, for sure. So let's just talk about the process. The reason how we sell these things is we have it right down where I can sell a job right over the phone. So that eliminated a step. I didn't know I had no longer had to run out and take a look at people's pool removal projects. I gave a flat rate quote. Almost everybody was exactly the same. If they accepted it, then I would go out to the job site. If they said, ah, you know what, I'll think about it, well, you know what? I just saved three hours of my time and labor. But that isn't really where the big differences lie. It actually lies. Now, this is going to be very specific. And so this may not work for the general audience, but in this case, we were able to learn a way to get all the fill soil, structural fill soil, soil for free on these job sites. So instead of going out and paying $100 per load for the dirt, we were able to put together a system called dirtmonkey.net which allowed us to connect with other excavators, which allowed us to connect with other contractors. And if they had dirt on a site, we could verify what kind of dirt it was, if it was structural dirt, how far away it was. And when you're an excavating company and you're trying to get rid of dirt and somebody's calling you up saying, hey, I'll come over and get it. It, nine times out of 10, you're willing to throw it in their dump truck and let it haul it away.

That's amazing. I didn't realize you developed that software. And Chris, you got to check out dirtmonkey.net it is really cool. It's like uber for dirt. But, Stan, you developed that for yourself initially. Now you made it publicly available, right?

Yes, I did. So, yeah, it's designed specifically for landscapers and excavators to help them do the same Darn thing that I did with it. And it's an amazing system, but that's just one of those little things that I focused on that made a huge difference for my company. And it was steps like that that I continued to develop and refine that allowed me to increase my profit margins while then growing the company. And now we've gotten to the point where not only do we dominate that market, but we get calls. Now, you know, we're in Minnesota, but we get calls from Nevada. We get calls from California. We get calls from all over. Hey, how do I demo these swimming pools? And it's at that point, of course, I can't service the customers, but I can walk them through the process step by step, step. So when they hire a contractor in their local area, they feel real comfortable about the process and know what has to happen and how it has to be done.

So. And I assume you charge a fee for that? Of course.

Yep. Free.

Free. You do it for free?

Well, yeah, it's just a conversation, Mike. I just let them know, hey, you know what? This is what you do. This is how you do it. And if it can help them spread some goodwill, whatever you, you know, whatever you give away will come back to you twofold.

Yeah, I do believe that. But I mean, you're becoming a. Obviously a nationally recognized expert in pool. Pool remover, pool removal, or poo.

So for all 100 people that need it done.

Yeah, yeah, but. But you need. A lot of people need on a national level. Are you looking to turn that into a national level business? Or is that. Or should a business stop growing a certain point? And you.

You're well positioned right now, Mike. We're. We're doing okay. We just. If we service our local area, obviously never even actually thought about doing it nationally. You can. You can spread it. I've seen companies that do the retaining walls, and they spread out and do it nationally. And I find that when you start to spread out, you've got to really have all the systems in place for each area, because then it gets specific to the area. You've got to know the conditions you're moving into, where you can buy the materials and how that can work. And then instead of, you know, increasing the profits, it decreases the profits. And again, it gets into that. That point where, you know, maybe I should just master what I'm really good at in an area that I'm really comfortable in. And so that's why we focus just to stay within our local area and dominate it.

I think it makes a Ton of sense. I mean, you already learned the lesson of being a jack of all trades and master of none before. That's why you ratcheted back. Now you're in your niche, you're staying there and it sounds like you've learned that lesson. Stay in your niche and just dominate it.

Exactly.

Yeah. Because if he had to charge people for the advice, you know, the long, the advice for people in other cities, that's another product he has to sell.

It's a whole new business right now.

He's got to justify, well, this is why you should pay me X dollars to talk with me on the phone. And then it's again, the guy's gonna be like, oh, I don't know.

Yeah, yeah. And then those folks in those other places are pushing business back towards Stan. Like, oh, this guy helped me out. He's up in Minnesota. Oh, great. And he's getting business back that way. Stan, as you look back at your business career, anything else you would change that you could suggest to our listeners on increasing profitability?

Oh, for sure. Start early, don't be afraid. That's the one thing about landscaping that I absolutely love. It's an entry level job. You have a truck, you have a shovel, you have a rake, you have a wheelbarrow, you're in business. Excuse me, but it's also a very lucrative business. I know local companies around here that they do 10, $15 million per year. They have outside investors coming in, not understanding the intricacies of landscaping and they invest into it as a tax write off and then they find out that you can make a lot of money it and then all of a sudden they invest even more and become full fledged partners and grow the business. So that's what I love about it. It's the opportunity for anyone to get in, get started and get going. But you got to be able to run it like a business. You can't just go in and think that you're going to do it because you're going to make mistakes that are going to kill you in the beginning. And so, you know, you've really got to learn how to do it the right way to be safe and to grow and to make money.

Stan, we want to learn more about you. Where do we go?

You know, check out our podcast. It's specifically what we do is we help guys that are getting started, help establish businesses, refine their process. It's called the Landscape Business Pro podcast. You can search for it in itunes, go to podcasts, just type in landscaping. We should come up we have amazing interviews with some pretty incredible people. Mike, we had you on. Your podcast was awesome. I thank you for that. And that's really what I want people to go to. I want people out there that are just trying to get started to learn how to do this, to refine their processes, and to make the absolute most they can for themselves.

And also go to dirtmonkey.net I was checking that out. It's a really cool business app, I.

Was going to say. Is that where. Is that where he found you, Mike?

Through Dirt Monkey.

Trolling on Dirt Monkey.

Someone want to dump dirt. You know, I'm still looking for the Stretch Armstrongs buried in dirt. Now I feel like I got to recover these things. Stan, absolute pleasure having you on. Thanks, brother.

Thanks, Mike. Thanks, Chris. Thanks. Appreciate it. You guys have a great day now.

You too.

Great job, man.

Thank you.

Stay warm, all right.

Wow. Breather. Everyone's like.

You know, here's the deal. He put me in my place. You know, I. I was getting a little bit jumping, putting the cart before the horse or the horse before the cart or some kind of cart, horse analogy. And he ratcheted it back in. I think I got a real issue. We were talking earlier. I get a little too hyper. I get uber hyper. I got chill a little bit.

You just get fast forward. You need to learn to go at a normal.

Yeah, yeah, slow down.

But the thing is about you that's not so bad, because you're not like a big, arrogant egomaniac who starts yelling at people. You know what I mean? Like, if you're going too fast and someone says, hey, let's relax, you're open to hearing that.

Oh, yeah. But thank you. Thank you for saying that.

I'm just saying that it's not. Not. You know, it might be something that you want to reign in, but it's. It's not out of hand.

No, no, no.

Thanks, guys. Guess what? We're gonna do a recap. But before we do the recap, I want to talk about our sponsors.

The recap's gonna be awesome, by the way.

Oh, I got a page of notes, a half page of notes. You can see them right here. Yeah, I got about 100 pages of different questions we could ask him about weird things buried in backyards. I mean, listen. Look at that. All these pages.

Wow.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But I want to. Thanks. First, Nextiva. Next. Chris. You can't see, but he's throwing his hands up in the air. He's like, of course.

Diva is. Wow.

Voip. What? Voip.

Stand for voice over.

I don't know Internet protocol.

Internet protocol. Thank you.

Voiceover ip. Voiceover Internet protocols with IP stands for Right.

And Next Diva is like a business phone system. It's like, you know, everyone has their own extension. There's all voicemails.

Yeah.

It's a powerful phone system and it's on the cloud. So you say your office goes down, say you lose power at your office. Voice system still runs. People can't call your phone if your phone has no power. But it goes to voicemail. It's all managed. So you never miss a message. You're always able to communicate. We had Hurricane Sandy come through here in New Jersey. Remember that? We were out of business for almost two weeks. There was no power anywhere. I went to the shelter, went to the shelter in Mountain Lakes, New Jersey and set up at the shelter. And I was on my phone system there. Just plugged it right into my laptop. Whoop. Customers didn't notice and customers don't care if you're out of business. They want their services.

And call forwarding, and call forwarding.

Christina gets calls. She's at home Saturday night, nine o' clock, she puts on a great movie. She's watching Breaking Bad. I'm trying to get her into Breaking Bad, watching the TV show and phone rings, customer. And it's usually me actually testing Christina. Are you answering the phone? Other sponsors? I spent well.

Fundera. What they do Fundera, if a company, if you need, if you have a business and you want to borrow money, you need funding.

Yep.

For anything, right?

Yep.

To cover payroll, to grow your business. Yep. You go to once a one stop shop, Fundera, you go there and you, you put in all your info and they shop around and find you money.

Yeah. They outsource all these different funding sources. So instead of the old school way that Walt Disney, you know, he went to 90 banks and got rejected by all. Well, now Fundera will take care of those rejections for you. You'll get rejected by 90 and then the 90 first one will fund you. But Fundera does all that groundwork for you. So you'll get funded like that.

That's it.

And then T Sheets. T Sheets.

I just like the way that sounds.

That is the coolest company we actually isn't. Matt joining us from T Sheets. Coming up next.

Yes. I'm not sure when, but I know very soon.

Yeah, we're trying to schedule time with a CEO mattress, Matt Risso. Risle, I think. Matt, sure. Yeah.

Matt from T Sheets.

Yeah, Matt. He's the CEO of T Sheets. He's gonna come on, explain what they got going on and how this stuff works. And the guy's cool. I've met him a couple times now. He's just a fun guy and a jokester.

So we should have him track our. The show when we should have.

We should. Yeah, we should do that. We should totally f with him. All right. So what'd you learn from the show today?

Wow. A lot. I like how he said that he's.

The.

Jack of all trades and master of two. Very cool. And one of them, swimming pool removal. One was retaining walls, and it's good. And he said you have to pick your niches strategically.

Yeah. Yep. What I heard is you can do 2 million or you can do 500,000 and make the exact same level of profit, but the stress drops. And, you know, why are we as business owners so gung ho on bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger, and not addressing the profit? All we do is get more and more stress. Like, dude, it's cool. Just get a healthy freaking business.

Yeah. And he even mentioned his one, the swimming pool removal. He's had the same pricing for 10 years because he eliminated steps and he found out how to get free filler soil the free dirt.

Yeah. Yeah. He's finding all these ways to make more money, and customers don't feel any price bump. It's awesome.

That's proof that if you're listening to this and you have a business, there's probably 10 ways in your business that right now that you could figure out an interesting way around it and save money and boost your profit.

Yeah, it's true for every business. Just got to make the effort and do that. Christina, what'd you learn?

No, I was actually going to say the same thing, but what I just found interesting was he said it's about job satisfaction and not profit. Even though you want to become profitable, if you're focusing on your job satisfaction, ultimately that will result in profit.

Yeah. Love it. Is Stan still on the call with us? Do we lose him?

Stan, are you still there?

I am still here.

You're listening in. All right. Thank God. Hey. We do a little trick called the word of the day, and we may put you on mute in the beginning to do a little word of the day.

Stretch Armstrong.

All right, close. What's your second guess?

That circular saw.

Third guess.

Magic finger.

It was none of those. We actually. We set you up. You were the first person ever to get no word of the day.

Nice. Thank you. I'm half polish. Does that ring a Bell with you, Mike.

I'm 3/4 Polish. Actually, I'm 6/4 Polish. That's a polish.

And it's funny because Mike just said you put him in his place and now he's playing jokes on you here.

How was our summary? Did you. Did we do a good job?

It hit the nail on the head.

All right, brother. It was really a joy having you. Thanks for joining us.

Yeah, thank you, guys. I totally appreciate it.

All right, man. Later on, dude. That's our episode for today.

Yeah.

Oh, I got one last tip.

Yes. The. Wow.

Oh, my God.

You okay?

I just got bitch slapped by my microphone.

She swung her head to the rug.

Her nose just got ripped off. No finger, no nose.

Everything's good.

You're losing body parts here. Okay, here's the tip of the day. Do we have a fortune cookie we need to crack open? Ew.

Did you do yours?

There it is. Okay, that was a gross fortune cookie. Here's what we found inside. Interesting. Look at what it says here. Stop asking how big your business is and start asking how healthy your business is. That matches what Stan was saying.

Wow.

All right, brother.

All right, man.

We are officially out here.

This has been great.

This has been fun.

Thanks.

Awesome. Thank you, guys.

Christina, we hope you come back four weeks in a row. We should make it now eight weeks in a row. Six or two.

I'm happy to.

Okay, there you go. And check out the website for all our other episodes and also a little information about me and fractal recording and.

Also profit first professionals. Go to our website and check it out.

Yeah. Thanks, everybody. Thanks to our sponsors. We'll see you next time.

Thanks, everybody. 18 in life. I give you 18 in life to go. 18 and something else. 18 episode.