40 Harsh Lessons That Made Me Rich in My 20s

At the time of this recording, I'm 30 years old and run a 50 million dollar lawn care business. If I could go back and talk to my 20 year old self and give some advice on how to get rich a lot faster, here's what I would say. Number one, pick the game mode. There's either growth mode or profit mode. Choose one or the other. I'm either in growth mode, buying more trucks, hiring more employees, getting more customers or or I'm in profit mode where I cut down on my spending for marketing and when I hit capacity, I do not hire more people. I do not buy more trucks by simply raise my prices. If you're trying to say I'm going to grow a whole bunch but also be profitable, very difficult. Stop mixing the two and wondering why you feel broke and busy. You're either in profit mode or you're in growth mode. Number two is move up the value chain. In every home service business there is seven sales operations and admin. As I like to think about it, it is getting the work, doing the work and getting paid for the work. All the grease into the gears, like answering the phone that needs to get done is admin. And a lot of us get caught up and the reason we don't grow our business is because we focus on those lower leverage tasks like answering the phone, answering text messages, sending out invoices and estimates. At an admin level, to grow the business, we've got to move up that ladder and eventually even, even hand off sales. Number three is sleep like a pro. Operate like a pro. Owners don't find discipline, they schedule it. And so when it comes to your sleep schedule and making sure you actually get good rest, super valuable. Especially if you're in the grind phase and you're doing a lot of physical work, making sure you have a dependable sleep schedule and you're not on the weekends completely blowing it up by staying up all night long. Super valuable to be able to stay concentrated and focused throughout the entire week. Number four, Cash is oxygen. Keep enough cash on hand in your business to outlast slow weeks and scary months. Especially when it comes to your off season. In home services where you might have leads that drop off a cliff or your revenue drops dramatically, liquidity or cash beats bravado. One month of revenue in the bank is the goal. If you have above one month of revenue in the bank, I give you the green light to continue growing the business and investing back into growth. That leads me to number five, which is know your four Ls. There are only four reasons why a home service business will stop growing. A lack of liquidity, a lack of leads, a lack of labor, or a lack of leadership. And as you grow the business, the next constraint to the next stage of growth continues to move. So I might make man, I need a bunch of customers leads and I get a bunch of leads. And then what? Now I need a bunch more labors and I get a bunch of labors. Now I need someone to help me manage or lead the team. And so your constraint continues to move. But knowing which constraint you're currently working on in the 4L framework allow you to focus and solve that one problem. Number six is price with math, not moods. I want you have a target hourly rate that you're trying to shoot for 80, $100 per hour. That's your target hourly rate that you're trying to earn on the customer's property when you're doing the work. And I want you to multiply that by the budget hours or estimated hours that you think the job is going to take. And then I want you to add any materials along with the material markup. Now we actually have a pricing strategy. We're making sure that we have our labor and it's accurate based on how long the job will take. And then we're adding in our material cost along with an additional markup to those materials so we are able to recover the overhead attached to that job. There's no more driveway guesses, you sitting in the driveway, just kind of ballparking a number based upon jobs you've done in the past. Number seven is speed to lead wins. There was a study recently by Angie and Invoca where they said that 70% of homeowners take the first estimate that they get. In other words, you can have all the fancy whiz bangs and strategies for sales and marketing, but if you just get the customer the estimate as fast as possible, the likelihood of success is much greater. The first clean estimate usually gets the job, text it, email it, and then follow up with purpose. Number eight, move up the estimate ladder. There are four different ways to do an estimate in person, drive by over the phone, and instant quotes. And as you move from meeting the customer in person all the way to having instant quote form on your website, accuracy decreases slightly. However, speed goes through the roof. An instant quote is when, well, literally instant. It can take a matter of a couple seconds for someone to get a price, accept the job, and put their credit card on file. And it's right from my website without anyone answering the phone. And no admin costs. Whereas an in person estimate on the other side of the continuum might take a day or two for you to get to the customer and then you send them the pricing once you get back to the office. And now all of a sudden 72 hours have gone by since the time the customer actually wanted to make a purchase. And so I'm willing to take a little bit less accuracy for a lot more speed and, and a whole lot less overhead. Because when I'm driving to customer's houses or when I am even answering the phone and having someone answer and give a quote over the phone, it's better than in person. But either way I'm willing to trade a little accuracy for a lot of speed and a lot less overhead. By getting to the customer faster, I'm able to focus on not having overhead people answering the phone, let alone an estimator. My most experienced expensive person driving to the customer's house just to see the property. Number nine is boil the puddle. I really believe that tight routes beat big territories. Get big in a small area before expanding your service area. Geographic expansion or how far you service is the fastest way to grow revenue in home services. But it's also the least profitable because it leads to way more drive time, windshield time, and when things break or you have to go get get tools and supplies. Now your crew is so far away from your warehouse or from your shop space, it leads to a massive amount of waste. Focus on when you're getting started. Just a neighborhood, a hundred houses, a thousand houses, maybe a 1 mile radius. Really penetrate that area with all sorts of marketing. Door hangers, door knocking, Facebook ads, Google Ads, yard signs, your trucks. And all of a sudden they start to see your trucks and your team in their area all the time and they think you're a big business. That's how you boil the puddle. Number 10 is go premium. You got to have a great website. You got to have branded trucks, clean uniforms, mobile friendly estimates and cards on file. Everyone always looks to big businesses and says, well, when I become big, I will wrap my trucks or I will get uniforms or I'll get my website redone. But in reality, what made those big companies big is the fact that they have all those things. For example, I look at your website as sort of like your storefront. Now compare Ross storefront versus Louis Vuitton. Ross is kind of dark, dingy. You can't really see inside the windows. You walk in, there's stuff everywhere, it's disorganized, a whole bunch of very Discounted products and services. Now when you walk into a Louis Vuitton, there's less services, less products that are being shown, but they're very, very high end, they're very prestigious. They have a nice storefront, it's clean, it's professional, the staff is well mannered and very well trained. This is the same thing when it comes to your website. And the reason that Ross is a $10 product and Louis Vuitton is a thousand dollar product, it's is because they're storefront. And so I highly recommend the very first thing you do when you go premium is get a great looking website. It's the storefront. And if you can't get people to walk in the door and be impressed with the professionalism and the premium nature of your business, they're not going to buy. And if they do, you're going to attract the wrong type of buyer. Cause at Ross there's a very different type of customer than someone that's going to Louis Vuitton. And so if you have all your customers constantly bargaining with you, trying to whittle you down on price, complain about very minor pricing things, it could be potentially because your brand, your website, your trucks, your uniforms all scream that you are the lowest price competitor. Instead of a premium service. At homeservicewebdesign.com we develop those websites, that nice storefront that is premium, that attracts premium customers. And within 12 months of our customers working with us, the vast majority of them on average double the amount of leads coming through that website. Before I allow my general manager spend 1 $1 in advertising, they have to do a couple things. Number one, we have to make sure we follow up on every single pending quote. There's no way I'm going to go after new quotes when I haven't even followed up on the quotes I've already sent. The second thing is they've got to send a text and email blast from homeworks to all my existing customers. Why would I pay for new leads when the people that already know like and trust me, I can just upsell more to them. And then, and only then do I focus on my website conversion before I spend a dollar on ads. I'm focusing on all these things because if I am driving traffic to my website and it doesn't convert well, there's no use in paying for Facebook ads or Google Ads. If you would like us to look at your search engine optimization and your web design, make sure it's optimized for a mobile device and that when people show up they actually convert into a paying customer. Go to homeservice web design.com call and book your free 15 minute consultation with the team. Number 11 is Automate Collections cards on file deposits for large one time projects. Auto reminders charging overdue fees. Having options for your customers who pay in full with a click of a button. You're not a bill collector, you're a builder. You build a business. You're an operator. You manage your team. Don't become a bank that gives out interest free loans. So if people aren't paying you and you're not having fees or you don't have some way of penalizing them, you, you are acting as a bank, you are giving free loans and you're not charging any interest. Prevent any overdue invoices by having cards on file and great deposits up front before a project even gets started. But if you're going to send someone an invoice, make sure you get paid within seven days, not 30, not 60 and definitely not 90. This is a big reason why we don't like to do commercial because I don't want to be doing the work and then getting paid months down the road. Number 12 is stopped discounting. Rescope or reschedule. If a customer wants the job done cheaper, I will reduce the price, but I'm going to reduce the scope of work or I'm going to schedule the job for my off season. So it's kind of like any negotiation. Do you want price or do you want terms? Because if you want price, I can give you a lower price, but the terms are it's going to be done in three months when I don't have a lot of work during my off season. Now if you don't care about price, fantastic. We'll get it done tomorrow. We can. In fact, if you're willing to pay a premium price, we are willing to increase the terms to where you get on the schedule right away. Don't be afraid of doing surge pricing. When you're really busy, price goes up. When you're not as busy, it comes down. If a customer asks for a price to be reduced, I'm not going to say no. I'm simply going to ask them what they want removed from the scope of work to be able to fit within that budget. Or do you want to reschedule this job for this date? That's in my off season when number 13 close rate is your speedometer. If you're closing more than 70% of the estimates that you send out to customers and they're Accepting you're too cheap, raise the price immediately. If you're between 50 and 70%, I would consider you in growth mode. You're optimizing to grow the business knowing that you could probably raise price a little bit more, but you're trying to get more customers and increase your top line revenue. If you're between 30 and 50% close rate, I would consider you in profit mode. This is when you're maximizing for profit and you're needing to keep enough customers coming in to replace your churn. If you have less than 30% of your close rate, something in the sales process is broken. A lot of times I'm looking at like how fast you're getting the customers. Are you following up? Because ultimately I don't want to have to lower prices. That's the last thing I would do. Most of the time your sales process is broken and you fix those to get back above 30%. Number 14 kill shiny service syndrome. Go deep on a few services. When you go into the medical field and you're a general practitioner, you might get paid $200 an hour, but you could take that same hour and go get 800 or thousand dollars per hour by being a specialist in a very specific part of health mastery scales. Dabbling detonates. Many people have 10 businesses in one entity. It's like well, I do lawn care services, but really you do tree service, you do mulch installation, you do hardscaping, you do ice inst snow removal, you do gutter clean outs, you do pressure washing and you actually have 10 different businesses. I would rather have one business that has $500,000 in annual revenue that just does one single basic simple service than a business that does $2 million in annual revenue but consists of 25 services. Because I have to train my team on all of those services. I have to buy equipment for all of those services. I have to get insurance for all of those services. And it's very difficult to scale. Everyone always thinks the next service is somehow going to unlock this, their potential in their business and make it more profitable. But once they get into it, they realize there's also problems, issues and skeletons in that service too. Number 15 is marketing before metal. Don't buy nicer equipment until you've bought more leads, customers and contracts builds enterprise value. Trucks and equipment is super easy to buy. It's not like buying more trucks adds value to the business like it's an asset. No, it's a tool that allows you to provide the service to customers. And that customer list, that contract List that recurring revenue that you're building up. That's where the real value of the business is at. And so stop thinking that buying more trucks and equipment somehow needs a bigger business. It just means more metal. I want to spend my attention and my marketing dollars to go get more customers. And building that customer list is where the real value lies. Number 16, simplify and standardize to scale. And so when we talk about creating systems, everyone says that terminology. I like to think of it as I just simplify and standardize. And what's the opposite of simplify and standardize? It is complex and custom. So I want to avoid things that are really complex and difficult because it's hard to train people. And I want to avoid things that are really, really custom, which means every single time I do them, they're different. It's very hard to systematize that. I'm going to use videos, checklists and templates to be able to get my office workers, my operations managers, my team leads, my salespeople. Everyone should have a system in place. And to make system easier to create, I'm going to simplify and standardize everything. By doing that, I'll be able to scale the business. Number 17, run P4P or watch profit leak pay for performance aligns incentives better than wishes and warnings. The harder they work, the more money they make. It's really simple to explain this to a technician. You don't need to micromanage them. And so if you're tired of driving and then senior crew at like a gas station, wondering if they're slacking off, if they're wasting time on the clock, you don't have to worry about it. When you've simply made it where if you want to work harder, you will make more money. And if you want to work less and you don't want to pack a lunch, if you want to take 5,000 smoke breaks, if you want a little lollygag for 30 minutes with drinking coffee before you jump in the truck for the day, then you're going to make less money. Number 18, measure efficiency. Like rent is due budgeted hours versus actual hours. In other words, when I estimate for a job, am I actually completing it on time? I'm going to track my load time. So how fast did my crew get out in the morning, My drive time, how many callbacks and customer complaints do I have? By having scoreboards, you can change behavior of your team. I'm always tracking budget hours divided by clocked hours. That's what we call our efficiency score. If that efficiency score is above 70%. Great. If it's above 90%. That is the elite team that many times will be the most profitable businesses. That means that less than 10% of their day is wasted on loading things up, driving around and wasting time at the gas station or at the hardware store. Number 19 yellow slips, not yellow anger. When quality slips capture the lesson, not the ego. One person learns a lesson for the team and then teaches the entire team how to prevent that from repeating again. It affects their paycheck because on P4P, that yellow slip gets deducted from their P4P bonus. But now when there's a yellow slip, I'm not running around chasing everyone's problems and mistakes and fixing up after them. They're taking accountability and ownership of their job, which means if they go faster, they make more money. But if they make mistakes and if there's quality that starts to slip, they're not going to make that money because that bonus will get removed. And not only is the bonus going to be removed, they're going to take that yellow slip and read it to the entire team at the next meeting so the entire team can learn from that mistake and not have to replicate it and in their own route. Number 20 qualify or die Red flag leads. These are the customers are like needy, vague, hunting for freebies all the time. They will drain your margin and the morale of the team. You'll lose good people. If you don't qualify customers, you have to say no politely and early. The earlier you can get rid of them, the better because the longer they stick around like a leech, just sucking the blood of your team. It's like when you go to a store and says no shirt, no shoes, no service. In my opinion, when it comes to home services like no credit card on file, no deposit, no service. It's a very good way to be able to measure whether or not a customer is going to be qualified to work with your team and be a great customer for the long term. Number 21 protect your calendar Founder time. Especially as you grow, the business is worth more and more. And at the beginning, maybe you charge 80 to $100 per hour for your time to be on a customer's property, you doing the work. But as you have technicians and you start to grow the organization, the time of the founder could very well be over $200 per hour in value. So the first thing I want to do is create more time, remove email from your phone, and stop being the company's receptionist. It's amazing to me that someone running a $2 million company will do the task they could hire someone to do for 20 or $30 an hour. Answering the phone, sending texts to customers, sending out estimates, or running automations or running the software. In my opinion, when you're between 250,000 in annual revenue and 500,000 annual revenue, we're trying to delegate that admin level of the business. As we grow the business from 500,000 to a million dollars. That's a lot of times when you start needing operational help. That's someone out in the field, a team lead that is helping the crew and being an operations manager from 1 million to 3 million, that's when you go after sales. So we have admin operations and sales. And as we grow the organization, we need to delegate those things. Going from 1 to 3 million, we're going to delegate sales and usually get a SAL sales manager. Number 22 is admin overhead. Under 15%. That's the goal. Under 15% of my revenue, I want to be spending on admin related expenses. That includes salaries, rent, utilities and everything that goes into the admin side or office side of the business. Ideally until I'm doing over seven figures in annual revenue. I want to use a remote virtual assistant or someone that is charged me by the minute, but or even as much as possible use software to reduce the amount of fixed expenses that I have for an office space or for a whole bunch of office equipment or for salaries that I have to keep paying on even during the winter. Like my landlord's not going to somehow for three or four months during the off season not charge me rent. So it's a fixed expense that can absolutely crush your seasonal business during the winter. I want to reduce this as much as possible and all the time keep my admin expenses, including everything under 15% of revenue. Number 23 is weekly finance ritual. Every single week. You've got to track just a few KPIs around the numbers of the business. What's our revenue, what's our expenses, how much we have in profit and how much do we have on cash? Liquidity is the first L of the 4L framework. And if you run out of cash, you run out of oxygen. If you won't look at the numbers, the numbers will punish you. Number 24, define capacity. Raise prices when you hit it. Capacity is when you need to turn away customers. If you're not going to hire more employees or buy more equipment. By hiring more employees and buying more equipment, we increase capacity. We're not going to do that if we're going to raise prices, we're going to not hire more people, we're going to not buy more equipment, and we're simply going to raise prices, therefore reducing our close ratio. And so when people start asking, when should I raise prices? The thing about what does the weather have to line up or the season of the year? In my opinion, those things don't matter. If I have so much work coming in and I'm not spending a bunch of money on ads and leads are just pouring in and I've hit capacity, I'm either going to have to buy trucks and hire more people and stay in growth mode or go into profit mode and raise prices. And so if you're wanting to raise prices, hit capacity, grow there as quickly as possible, and once you get there, raise prices. But to be able to do that, I've got defined capacity, which is how many customers can I serve, how much revenue can I do? Where is the capacity limit by which I will know I need to raise prices? Number 25, stop being the hero. If the business only works when you show up, you didn't build a business, you built a dependency. Our goal is to become the spare tire, which means if you're there, great. If not, the car can kind of keep going pretty much all the time. We get used to solving problems as entrepreneurs and giving answers for every little thing, and it actually becomes a sense of pride, a piece of our identity. The goal is that the business runs without you. And especially as the business grows and you've delegated to other managers, you're actually going to need to get out of daily operations and out of the decision making process and not be the constraint and the bottleneck to every single decision. And that for some is very difficult because you're used to being the hero and always saving the day. Number 26 is use seasons on purpose. So when it comes to the off season, it's the worst part about any home service business. I want to try to push demand from the end of my busy season into my off season. So I might have promotions that give people the ability to be able to book three or four weeks from now because it's really, really busy right before the end of the season. And I also want to pull demand forward from when my busy season starts. So like the spring rush. So I might give discounts or promotions to my existing customers to get on the schedule an additional one or two months early. And I'm going to do this to only fill my off season. This also means that I'm not going to schedule on a first come, first serve basis. I'm going to prioritize time sensitive and recurring jobs and jobs that are time insensitive so they can wait a while or jobs that are one time. I'm going to try to push them into my off season as much as possible. Number 27 is install instant credibility. This means getting online reviews, whether it be on Facebook, Google and a host of other review services. But number one, Google. I want to get before and after photos and make sure I give those to Google on my listing. I'm going to keep all of my Google listing updated and respond to all of my Google reviews. This social proof allows you to close deals to customers you've never even spoke to. They go to your website when they see your trucks, that's where they go first. After they see a flyer or a door hanger or their friend at the office gives them a referral, they go to your website first and from there they're going to be looking for reviews. To be able to find that social proof, they need to make a buying decision. So make sure you're constantly keeping your Google listing updated as well as inserting all the data necessary on local service ads. If you're spending money on local services, you make sure when the calls come in, you actually insert the information. Google is a beast of data and so feed it all the information it needs in terms of hours of operations, your photos, and all the services that you offer. Number 28 free can still pay. Now, we talked about reviews, but there's actually three ways for a customer to pay you without giving you any money. This is really beneficial, especially if you're getting started and you have no customers, or even during the off season when you're twiddling your thumbs up. A customer can pay you with an online review, a referral, or you can upsell them something. And so don't worry about working for free or very discounted. When you're first getting started, you don't have a lot of expenses, you have a lot of time. Get on the customer's property, ask them for a review. When you're done, ask them to introduce you to all of their neighbors and get a referral and sell them four or five other services that you offer when you're on their property. Number 29 is the 40% rule is very basic. All wages, including your admin, your sales, and all of your operations and all of your technicians. I want as a very dirty rule and rule of thumb to be 40% or less. I've just consistently seen businesses that are 30%, 25%, 35% be very, very profitable in home services. Whereas when I take all the wages, all the money paid out to employees, when it's 60, 70%, those businesses almost never make money. The 40% rule continues to hold strong. Number 30 is that leads aren't your bottleneck. Follow up is most bad. Leads are actually just unfollowed up leads. Follow up after your estimate and call them, text them, email them, make sure that they actually got the quote and if they have questions and whether or not that scheduling works out for them. But even if they don't turn out to accept your estimate, keep them inside of your CRM and keep the leads warm. Every single month from homeworks, I'm going to send email and a text message to all of my customers. They could buy in at one time. Where a customer for four years opened up the emails that we were sending on a monthly basis and then all of a sudden accepted a $35,000 project. Why? Because we followed up not on just their first estimate they received years ago, but every single month giving them information to keep that lead warm. Number 31. Different size, different role, different stress. In my opinion, when you're growing a home service business, there are three different sizes of business that come with a different role for you as the owner and different types of stress as a laborer out in the field, you're going to have a lot of physical stress. As you grow the business and you get other laborers and you hire them, you're going to become a manager. That's now your role. And that comes with financial stress because now your margins dip because you're no longer producing revenue for the business. You're managing other people. And then as you begin to grow the business even more and you actually hire managers, your role becomes architect. And now your stress is actually psychological because every single day, something wrong is happening. A customer's complaining, an employee is calling out, an equipment is going down, something crazy happening, a lawsuit's coming in, emails, text message, something bad is happening all the time. The reason I say this is because at every different size of business, you're playing a different role. You'll have to change as the business owner. And also along with that new role comes a different type of stress. Don't just think that bigger is better, it's just simply a different type of stress that you'll be having. Number 32, don't underspend on marketing. A shiny mower or shiny piece of equipment won't fix an empty schedule. Get attention. The reason people aren't buying from you is because they don't know about you. In order for them to give you money, they got to know about you first. Whether it be advertising on Facebook or on Google, or making videos for YouTube, making signage, truck wraps, a great looking website. I truly believe that the vast majority of small businesses and home services stay small because they underspend on marketing. I don't even sell marketing services. We only build websites. And what I will say is if you're gonna spend money on marketing and drive people to your website through Facebook ads, Google Ads, door hangers, all the rest of it, make sure your website looks good. It's amazing to me that people will spend thousands and thousands of dollars on ads and drive people with that money to a website that looks horrible and converts very poorly. The best way to get more leads is to increase the conversion of your website. And we've taken sites at home service web design where they had a 1 out of 400 conversion and we moved that to 1 out of 100 and that 4x the amount of leads they got from that website. Most people will simply underspend on marketing and therefore never get big. Number 33 turn pain into process. Whenever there's a mistake that comes in, that becomes the next thing you've got to work on. As the architect of the business. Remember, we are not in the service business, we are in the systems business. And so when a system breaks and something fails, our goal is to resolve that. Every delay, every single callback, every single yellow slip becomes an opportunity to fix the system. If you just take all the yellow slips, all the callbacks that you get in a given week, month or year in your business and you just fix all those problems, the underlying cause as to why that yellow slip happened, why that callback happened, you will fix the business. And you might be asking, well, I don't know what's wrong with my business. Like I don't get a lot of callbacks. Great. Survey your customers. Figure out where their pain is at and where you can improve. Trust me, they will tell you how you can serve them better. And if you do those things, you will continue to grow and get more referrals. Number 34. Use your camera. You can have job notes, you can have pictures of job sites. But using video unlocks a ton of of capabilities. For example, instead of going and showing a crew a project, I'm going to take a video when I as the estimator on the property and then send it to him the night before. So I don't have to drive the property, walk them around, show them things from a job I was at months ago and they get updated fresh information. They can go back and scrub through the video later on as the estimator. When I'm at the property and meeting the customer, right after I'm making that video, I'm attaching it inside of the app and I'm making sure that it's attached to the customer's profile forever. The team at the office can see it, my crew can see it. Everyone's speaking the same language. And if my crew's on a project for two, three, four weeks, I'm simply going to have them make a quick video update at the end of every day. The office is able to see that. So when the customer calls, they're right on the same page and we can actually attach it to the customer portal. So even if that customer is out of town, the customer is able to see a video update of their big project every single day. You can also use your camera and use video to be able to do upsells. So when your crew is on the job site from the mobile app, be able to make a video, it attaches and compresses it down, attaches the customer's profile and now the office, the admin, or you as the estimator can just see the video and immediately send the customer quote before the crew is even finished on the property. Number 35. Route your life like your trucks. The same way that when it comes to a route based job, you're trying to put them in a very tight or condensed route and you're trying to optimize that route. I want you to think about your calendar as the exact same way batch tasks theme. Certain days like hey, this is a labor day, this is an architect day, this is a manager day. You can time block deep work like if you need to do all your invoices or you're trying to create a system for training or onboarding new team members. Because you got to remember that context switching is a silent tax. Every single time you switch from one role to another in the business, you are wasting time. When you switch from salesperson to now I'm a manager, then I'm the mechanic, then all of a sudden I'm trying to be hr. Every single time you switch, there is a tax of time that is being wasted. Just like if you're doing a multi stop route, every single time your guys get out of the truck, in and out, there's wasted time because they're waiting on someone else, they don't exactly end at the same time. And so the same thing is true with your life and your calendar. Whenever you're switching from task to task, it is causing you to waste time. Batch your calendar in a way where you're spending two to four hours on specific tasks and if it's distracting you during that time block, it doesn't matter. Notifications, apps that are dinging and bells that are going off, distractions, all of those things are keeping you from the most important tasks that if you just lock in on them, you'd get done much faster. Number 36. Don't confuse motion for margin. Being busy isn't profitable. If the math doesn't work, the hustle won't matter. Hard work will get you so far. And when you're a laborer and you're getting started as a solo operator, working 10, 14, 16 hour days will serve you well. Especially when you don't have money and hard work and grit is the only thing you have. But once you've grown the business, then you will need a new skill. It's going to be metrics and management. And so the hard work and grit and the sweat that you expended to get to 500,000amillion dollars in revenue will not be the skill you need to get to 3 million. You'll need numbers, metrics and how to manage people. And these are skills that you can learn and even like I don't really know software, I'm not good with the computer stuff or I don't really like working with people. If you want to grow your business, this will be a new skill you must learn. And a lot of times we don't want to learn that. So what do you do? We just stay in a constant state of motion, being busy and getting caught up in the day to day operations instead of focusing on the actual skill that will move the needle for the business to grow. Number 37. Use profit to buy freedom. I always say that growth creates chaos and that growth sucks cash. Once you go into profit mode and the business is profitable, use it. By using that profit to buy back your time instead of toys, you will be able to grow the business so much faster. Instead of being paycheck to paycheck, now you have a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand dollars a year to actually put towards growing the business. But instead of buying a new truck, instead of buying a piece of equipment, I want you to actually go buy your time back by hiring people to do lower leverage tasks in your day to day life. At home and in the business. This could be an office worker. This could be a virtual assistant. This could be a personal assistant that takes care of your chores or around the house or does cleaning. By doing this, it buys back your time, buys you freedom. And it's amazing to me how quickly you can do this if you just don't get distracted by buying a fancy truck or piece of equipment or once you finally get profit in the business. Number 38, build a bench. This is subcontractors, backups and cross training your existing team to be able to do different things inside the business. This makes sure that one flu shouldn't cancel an entire week of revenue. Or a couple employees walking off a job doesn't crush you for the entire year. And so when I have a bunch of applications come in and I maybe hire one or two people, there might be three or four really good applicants. I just announced with them like, hey, I'm going to put you on the bench. Which means we can't use you now, but there's a very good chance that if you stay available, we'll be able to reach out to you in the future. I'm also going to do the same thing as subcontractors. So if I really am in a pinch, someone can step in and help me. Especially for seasonal services or hazardous services like snow plowing. I'm going to make sure I have subcontractors just in case equipment goes down. I don't want to lose customers. I don't want that to wreck my entire season. Also, I can build a bench just with my internal team by training them on other things inside the business as backup to in case one person leaves. I never want key man risk where if one person leaves, the business stops. Number 39, know the major KPIs. Now, I've talked about sales, operations and admin as the three big departments inside of every home service business. And there's a lot of metrics you can know for every single one of those. But I keep my eye on just a few for sales or getting the work. I like to think of customer acquisition cost and close rate as really the most important metrics. So customer acquisition cost is how much do I need to spend to get one new customer? How much do I have to spend on Facebook ads, Google Ads, door hangers, how much do I have to spend? And then how many of those leads actually become paying customers? That's my close rate. If I know those two numbers, I'm doing pretty good for sales and I can run the business even If I'm not there physically. Now operations, I'm really focused on efficiency score. Like, are we actually getting the work done in efficient manner? That's budget hours divided by clock hours. So that's is the work getting done efficiently. And I'm also wanting to make sure my customer satisfaction score is high. Are good reviews coming in? Are customers happy? So the work operations getting done is efficient and to a high quality standard. And the third department of every home service business is admin. And that's where I'm getting paid. And so I'm going to make sure that I have profit margin and cash in the bank. And if I just measure those couple metrics in sales, operations and admin, I could run this business on the other side of the world, but still know whether or not the business is in a healthy spot. Number 40. Your business is capped by the leader. So realize that if you're the founder, the CEO, that you have to level up your health, your habits and your work ethic in order for the company to follow. If you're disappointed by your entire team not showing up on time, not putting in the extra effort, not fully dedicating themselves to the business, look at yourself first. Look inwardly and ask, are you actually putting in levels of effort to make sure that you're exercising, that you're eating healthily, that you're having healthy relationships? Because if you're not, how can we expect that of the people that we lead?