Mike Andes (from landscapebusinesscourse.com) advises small business owners that the two priority activities that will actually grow a company are hiring (finding and training people) and marketing (growing top-line revenue). He emphasizes that owners, especially those with 0–20 employees, often let daily operational tasks (scheduling, invoicing, answering phones, uniforms, etc.) — the "sand" — crowd out the "big rocks" of hiring and marketing. Uses the bottle/rocks-and-sand analogy to recommend auditing how you spend each hour and shifting time toward hiring and marketing. Closes with social media CTA (Facebook, TikTok, Instagram).
Chapters
Hey everyone, It's Mike Andes, landscapebusinesscourse.com and today I'm talking about the two things you need to focus on to actually grow your business. And the reason I want to talk about this is because I find that so many people say, hey, I want to grow my company, I want to grow my business, but they don't actually focus on the things that are actually going to move the needle. So let me just break the news right off the bat and say the two things that are going to actually move your business forward and grow your company is hiring and marketing. And really the reason for that is because hiring right now, especially finding good people, is extremely difficult. And in order to be able to grow your business, you're going to need to find more people. And that's what you should be focused on as the owner. Especially if you're between 0 employees and 20 employees, hiring people is extremely important. The next thing is marketing. Selling growing top line revenue is extremely important. Whether it's building your website, creating your social media presence, to be able to make sure you keep selling more jobs, keep selling more services to, to your clients and grow top line revenue. That's really the goal and really the main objective as you, the owner, if you're gonna grow the business. Now the reason I say that is because we always know from an ethereal standpoint that that's what we're supposed to do to grow the business is grow top line revenue. Focus on employing training my team. But the thing is that I wanna ask you today is what percentage of your day is actually spent on those things? Because what I find with so many small business owners, we, we get wrapped up in everything but those two major things. And I like to use the analogy of the bottle. And if you take a bottle and you try to have a whole bunch of rocks, take a bunch of big rocks, like this size, for example. If you go ahead and put a bunch of sand halfway half full of that bottle, it's just a bunch of sand. And then you try to put all the rocks in, you're not gonna be able to fit all of those things in because there's gonna be a bunch of space. What you do is you put the rocks in first and then when you pour the sand in, you can get a whole lot more volume inside that bottle. And that's kind of how I want you to look at your day, the big rocks. The most important things in your day are gonna be marketing, selling top line revenue as well as hiring. Those are the two things you've gotta focus on if you wanna grow your business. And then all the other sand, the little things, the tiny little things that you do in your day, every single day, the minutia of getting things started, figuring out your time clocks and your uniforms. And then you gotta answer the phones and send out emails and you got an unhappy customer and you gotta send out the invoices, you gotta do the scheduling and the billing. All of those things, you, that's all the sand of the business. But if you focus on those things and you let those things fill up your day, you're not gonna be able to fit in the most important things of the business. And that is the rocks, that is the marketing, that is the hiring. And so I'd encourage you to do is look at your day, take, assess, assess your day and ask yourself, okay, every hour, what was I focused on? Was I focused on just daily operations or was I focused on the rocks? The things that actually move the business to the next level. Now, it's not to say that the sales or those little things are unimportant. The scheduling or the invoicing or the billing or answering the phone or quickly answering back to emails, those things are important, but they're not going to move the business forward. They're necessary to be profitable and keep the business running, but they are not going to move the business and grow the business in terms of size. So if you're wanting to focus on growth and size, marketing and hiring is what you must focus on. And I encourage you ask yourself, is what I'm working on right now the rocks of the business or, or the sand and what's going to actually move the business forward 10 years, 20 years down the road? It's going to be the rocks, it's going to be hiring and it's going to be marketing and growing top line revenue. Thank you so much for watching the video. I really appreciate it. Make sure you check us out on Facebook, TikTok and Instagram for daily posts about lawn care, landscaping and making money doing those things.
