10 Years of Brutally Honest Business Advice in 43 Minutes

Ten years ago, I dropped out of medical school to start a lawn care business. And now fast forward to the day we have over 150 locations around the world, do over $50 million in annual revenue, and today I'm going to be sharing the lessons that I learned over the past 10 years that I really wish I would have learned back then. I would have saved me years of time, millions of dollars, and I hope that over the next several minutes I can share those with you so you don't have to make the same mistakes that I made. The very first thing is that as I grew the business, I realized I had to move up the value stack and up the skill stack that is required to grow a business. At the very beginning, the skill that is required is to be a crazy hard worker. And this is the lowest level, though, of scalability and leverage that you have is simply your time and your sweat. And when you're getting started, this is potentially all you have because you don't have a lot of skill and you don't have the capital to actually use as levers in the business. The only thing you do have is time, but it also has the least returns. And that's why it's so demoralizing at the beginning of your success and the beginning of your business journey is that you don't have a lot of evidence of success due to the fact that you're using the least levered type of skill. And that is just labor. Say I'm really skilled, but if you're actually doing the work, it's just you, it's just one person. As you begin to go up the value stack, though, and you begin to go up the amount of skills that you're, you're starting to. As you grow the business, you start to go from having the skill of labor, where it's just you, to having the skill of management. And now you have multiple labors underneath you, and they're at that first level, that first, first rung of the ladder, but you are managing their labor. And so instead of having just yourself doing the work for 8, 10, 12 hours a day, you now have 5, 10, 15 other people that you're managing, and they're doing labor. But the skill that you really have to hone in is really management. And the reason I'm talking about these different levels of skill and levels of value is, is the fact that if I would have known this, I would have realized that there's a big shift that has to happen. There's a shift that has to go from When I'm the labor, I am doing the work and my day is optimized around how do I make sure that I produce the labor at the most efficient amount possible? And that will get you through making 2, $300,000 in annual revenue just being awesome labor. Maybe you have a sidekick to help you out, but like, you just have to work crazy, ridiculous amounts of hours and you have to be like laser, like focused on getting YouTube videos and books and podcasts about how just to do the actual work better. That alone will be enough skills to get you past that level. But if you're going to upgrade your skills and go up the value stack and actually pull the lever of being able to duplicate yourself, instead of just you doing the work, you actually have other people doing the work. And the skill that is required now for you to achieve is management. So you'll still have to improve your skills, but instead of listening to books about the actual work that you're doing, you'll just simply have to change it to books that are going to help you learn how to manage. Because if you can now learn how to manage, instead of just you working, you have all these other individuals doing labor underneath you. And so Instead of just 10, 12 hours a day of productivity, you can actually produce 50, 100 plus hours, hours every single day simply by managing other people that are putting in eight to 10 hours a day of their own labor. But that's not the, that's not the only step because you, you will have to manage the business. And this is usually going to be able to carry you almost a million dollars in annual revenue. And if you want to stop at 1 to 2 million dollars in annual revenue, typically you can just stay as a great manager because you just need to be a, you know, person that people want to work for. The you want to be able to make it a safe place where people feel like they can achieve, they can make good money, give them performance based pay, give them good benefits. Like, you could absolutely be a great manager and run a 1, $2 million business. But if you're going to keep growing quickly and you're going to grow past a million dollars, usually you have to upgrade your skill set again to being that of a builder. So I like to think of it like labor manager and architect. And these are the three skills. I wish I would have known this because I stayed in manager mode way too long because the manager has to actually manage the labors. And if you fail to make the step from being a manager to being a builder or an Architect, usually you start to micromanage. And if you start to grow a business past 10, 15 employees, typically you now need another person to help manage the business, maybe an office manager or an operations manager. And if you are still stuck in the manager mindset and the manager skill and that lever, it's better than being one person working on the field because now you have maybe 10 or 15 employees. But if you're going to keep growing past that 10 to 15 employee level, usually you need to focus now on the skill of being an architect, a builder, and then you step back and you stop micromanaging, you delegate to mid level managers. And that is a different skill because when you're building the business now you're thinking about acquisition, you're thinking about upgrading your talent in terms of your general managers, you're thinking about different level types of management inside your business in terms of operations, admin and sales. And you're trying to figure out like how to create systems and procedures to take someone that's entry level and upgrade their talent to be able to fill in these mid level manager roles that you've now created because you have over 15 plus employees. And so if I would have known that, I probably would have not got some people mad at me that were my mid level managers because I was stuck in manager mode. And so I thought I needed to know everything about the business. I thought I need to manage every single email, every single phone call, and if one customer got mad because of any of my crew, I was the one that had to therefore jump into the the arena and work at the size that I was at. And as you go from manager into a builder, you have to realize that the coach stays on the sidelines even when the team is getting beat up. As much as they might want to step on the field and even if they are capable, they still need to stay on the sidelines. They need to be able to lead from the sidelines and not step on and lead by example. Because that kind of worked when you were a laborer. Definitely worked. When you're a laborer and even when you're a manager, leading by example is usually looked on as like super admirable and your team will like it. But as you begin to grow the business, for you to go back into the field or go back into leadership by showing how it's done and you know, just getting in there and getting your hands dirty can be super detrimental because your team's like, what are you doing? Like you, you empowered us to do this job. You've put management in place, let us do our job. And so you actually have to step back away from the building and the management of the labor and step back again, architect, and actually start to diagnose and start to think about the systems and the procedures and the angles and look at the geometry of building the building from afar. And if I would have known that I would have negated the pain that came with having to deal with mid level managers, that I was just stepping on their toes all the time. When they are super capable, I should just let them figure things out and let make, let them make mistakes because then they would also figure out the solutions to those mistakes. And that was the big transfer of labor to manager to architect. That if I would have known that, I would have saved myself a lot of headache. And speaking of headache, you're going to have a lot of headaches when you're first getting started. Like one thing that's really helped me, in a phrase that I've come up recently is get, dig, build, bury. And this comes back to the fact that I believe the first three to five years in business is like building the foundation to a house or building a foundation to a skyscraper. When you go to a skyscraper, everyone looks up and admires the glass and the cement and all of the windows and everything that's above the ground. What they don't see is the foundation. Nobody walks up to a skyscraper, look, looks down and admires the foundation. The fact of the matter.