Being a Landscape Business Owner is STRESSFUL!!! How I Cope...

Hey everyone, it's Mike and you're listening to the Business Bootcamp podcast today. This episode is for the small business owner that feels stressed and needs to alleviate that stress by doing one thing and that's staying focused. Before we get in today's show though, a big thank you. Today's sponsor, which is Gusto, if you haven't already, go to gusto.combootcamp it's gonna run all your payroll for you, have automatic payments going directly into the bank account of your employees. And it's six bucks a month. You can't beat it. It's cheaper than an accountant and it's a whole lot better than you trying to do it yourself, doing it wrong and getting in trouble with the labor department. So check it out. Today, go to gusto, that's G-U-S-T-O.com Bootcamp and try out for 90 days completely free. Alright, so I don't want to make this episode long because I just want. I wanted you to hear it in its entirety. It. If you're actually in this position and if you are in this position, I wanna hear from you in the comments below, not so much for me, but for someone else that might be watching this. And they are stressed. They are in their small business and they feel overwhelmed, completely in and above their heads and this message speaks to them. So as a small business owner, we've talked about it before, the level of stress that is on you as a small business owner, especially if you're just starting out, especially if you're struggling, especially if you have family, if you have dependents that you are providing for and the business is struggling financially, or maybe it's not struggling, maybe you're just growing so quickly, it's sucking all the cash into the business and you are still struggling on a personal level to make ends meet. Or maybe your spouse, their job, they lose their job and now you are the sole provider or there's a gap of time where there's not two incomes and it starts to be a lot of pressure on you. And so there's a lot of stress. And there's really two things I want to talk about today that's going to alleviate that stress. I have been there and I'm in that position quite frequently of stress. As a small business owner, I don't really care how like established, even financially you get. When you are in the game of business and you love business and you love people and you love your employees and you love your customers, there is always going to be levels of stress that, that happen within the business. So let's take off the whole financial stress. There's a whole lot of other types of stress that come into play as a business owner that you do not shut down when you leave the office at 5pm that you do not shut down. And it's not something that you can just walk away from. As an employee, you are always like, you sign the checks. If something goes wrong with that business, it's gonna be on your record, it's going to be on your financial. Your credit score is gonna get whacked, you're gonna be on the hook for the loan. So there's a lot of stress, a lot of things riding on your business. And whether it be personal pride, whether it be financial success, whether it be familial, like being able to have a family, have kids, maybe you're waiting to have that financial security to be able to move, to be able to really start your life. And so there's a lot of pressure and stress. Being a small business owner, We've talked about that before, so that's been established. How do we deal with that? From two different angles. One, on the business level, and two, yourself personally, like, what can you do in your role within the business? When you look at the business and your role within it, how can you alleviate the stress? And how can you focus in order to alleviate the stress? And then two, from the business standpoint, the business model standpoint, how can we focus? How can we use focus, the ability to focus to reduce the amount of stress that you have in the business? So let's first talk about the business, the business model. If you are stressed out in your business, I guarantee you by focusing more, you are going to alleviate stress. What I mean by that is if you focus on the services that you do really well at and cut out everything and you reduce your services, you reduce the amount of skus that you create in your product line, you reduce the number of departments in your business because you take out the unprofitable ones, or you take away the 20% of your products that are literally doing like 3% of your sales, and you focus on the bulk of where your revenue is coming at. Maybe it's the other way around. Maybe 20% of your products drive 80% of revenue. If you cut out the other 80% of products and focus your time and energy on that 20%, I guarantee you the growth of your business would be tremendous. You'd become much, much more efficient because you no longer have to worry about all those extraneous things and you will become more profitable. But when it comes to stress, how does that help? By removing complexities out of your business. You are therefore going to release dependencies off of you. The more moving parts. In a small business, we're not talking about big Fortune 500s where there's multiple levels of hierarchy, managers and departments. I'm talking about where the small business owner is in the trenches, hand to hand combat. They know every single person on their payroll. They, they write the check. They are the ones where everything stops on their desk and they are the sole owner of the business. So when we talk about them, the level of stress is alleviated. When there's less moving parts and complexity in the business. For example, lawn care and landscaping services. I see it time and time again where people just continually add services to grow their business and before they know it, they have 15 different services from artificial turf, to cutting grass, to spraying, to, to weed control, to trimming bushes, to. Let's see here, there's a whole bunch artificial tur we already talked about. Maybe they install sod, maybe they do seeding, maybe they do dethatching corporation. Maybe they start doing water features, maybe they start doing patios, maybe they start doing retaining walls. Now let's start doing excavation. All of a sudden they've completely built so much complexity in the business. There's so many moving parts. And I promise you that person gets stressed. Now people look at someone like Amazon who has so many different lines and departments. Like you have Amazon Echo, you had Amazon Fire, you have Amazon web services, you have Amazon where you buy things online, you have Amazon fulfillment centers, you have, they have so many different, different business. But guess what, there's hundreds of thousands of people working for them. They are not a small business. So for you to try to think you're going to diversify, diversify services and offer every single product in the world, you are not going to be able to do that as a small business owner. Okay? You have to start thinking about if I have stress in my life, the less complexity in the business model, I am going to reduce the stress on me. Because when there's less complexity and less moving parts, it puts less and less stress on you as the owner. Because now you can start to delegate things within the business. Which leads us to part two, which is how do you reduce the stress on you? You start to delegate. So how do we take stress off the business model? We simplify services. We focus on the 25% of things that are driving the revenue. We take out services, we Take out products and we focus on the things that are core competencies, the things we're really, really good at. And we double down on those things and we focus our marketing efforts on those services and on those products instead of trying to be everything to everybody. And when we start simplifying the business model, it reduces the stress on the business because no longer do you need super highly skilled people. The no longer does it take six months to train someone on all the facets of your business. No longer. Now you can be what the McDonald's model is. They've simplified the business model so much that they can get a 14, a 15 year old into their production line and start making burgers just the way they want them to. They can start making fries just the way they want them to in a matter of hours and days instead of weeks, months and years. That we're expecting our employees to be trained to the point of knowing all the complexities in the business, knowing how everything operates, knowing all the different moving parts. It's very, very unscalable. And it creates a huge amount of stress. When you are vulnerable to those people leaving due to the fact that you've stored so much intellectual property and put so much trust in that they are gonna stay with you. There's a lot of stress and you've created a huge amount of vulnerability and stress on the business by doing that. So when you reduce and you focus, you focus on the products, you focus on the services that bring in the revenue, you focus on the people that are gonna actually stay with you, and you focus on, start focusing on developing them for future success instead of trying to garner your entire team into these executives. It's not likely, it's probably not possible. And so by focusing, whether it be on your key staff members, on your key products, your key services, your key customers, not all of your customers are created equal. You might need to cut out 50% of them to focus on the ones that are actually driving revenue. What's that doing? That's focusing on elements of the business model, simplifying them and reducing the stress on you, which goes to the next level, which if you're stressed personally, you've got to start figuring out how to delegate things within the business. And this is part two, because you have to simplify the business model. You have to focus the business model to the things you're really good at, the core competencies, the services or products and customers that you really want to focus on. And then by doing that, you can then reduce the stress on you. How you are the bottleneck to everything that's going on in the business. You know, if you look, when you think about bottleneck, we all know what it means, but you think about when you take a 2 liter pop and you flip it over and then you take that, the cap off, the amount of pressure, it's all coming through at once. There's, there's foam everywhere, there's pressure, there's, it's like you literally feel the bottle because all that water is trying to get through that tiny little bottleneck, that tiny little opening. And that's what's happening in your business. What if you just cut off the bottleneck and removed it immediately? The amount of water, the volume of water that would be able to get through would be much, much, much faster. If you can remove yourself from the business, remove you as being the bottleneck to every decision. I'm not saying be removed. I'm not saying being absentee. I'm not saying you can't be in your business. I'm saying removing you as the bottleneck, as the person that is creating all the stress. And in the framework of the business, when you look at that model of a pop bottle being tipped over, all the stress is being pointed down towards one point. And at that point is where all the confusion, all the stress is happening because all these molecules of the soda is trying to get through this little spout. In your business, if you have all these employees and all these problems and all these issues that are trying to all funnel through you, there's gonna be stress that builds up, there's gonna be fizz and there's gonna be a lot of carbonation, there's gonna be a mess that's created by all of these things trying to be funneled down and being a stress point in you, on you, in your business, what do you do? You delegate. You take that bottleneck, you remove it, you literally take an ax, you slice off that bottleneck off of a 2 liter pop, and immediately things can flow faster, your business can scale quicker. Does it cost money? Is it scary to be removed, to take yourself out of the bottleneck, to allow decisions to be made without you being involved, to allow things to be done without your direct involvement in every single aspect of the business? Yes, it's freaky. It kills a small business owner that has been for a long time involved in day to day operations and involved in every decision and every single customer acquisition, customer interaction, involved in every single sale. Like, if you can remove that, though the amount of the volume of water, the Amount of productivity, the efficiencies, the scalability is so much greater, and it will alleviate the stress off of you, which currently you are the bottleneck. What do you need to do? You need to focus. Focus on the things that you're good at. You need to focus on. Maybe it's sales. If you're really good at sales, you need to focus on sales. You don't need to be the bottleneck for everything else in the business and for the merchandising and for the employing people and hiring and interviewing. If you're good at sales, focus on sales, it's going to reduce the stress on you because no longer you have to worry about all these other things that you're really not that good at. So delegation leads to you being able to focus on the things that are actually gonna drive the business forward, are actually gonna build the company. They're actually going to support your employees in a better way, and it's going to alleviate the stress on you because you're doing a bunch of stuff that you're actually not really that great at. Okay? So if you're good at sales, focus on it. If you're good at HR and you just love hiring people and you're good at it and people get along with you, then focus on that and go get someone to hire. Delegate out someone to sales, but focus on your strengths, Cover your weaknesses using delegation. I hope something was said in all of that. If you're in a position of stress, either from a business standpoint, where you need to focus on the services, focus on the employees, focus on the customers, focus on the products that are actually driving revenue, and completely eliminate 50, 60, 70% of all the extraneous things around them, then you need to do that. If you're having stress because you, in your business are the pressure point, you are the bottleneck for every decision, every single transaction, every. If that's the case, you need to delegate so that you can focus on the things you're actually good at. You've been listening to Mike Andes on the Business Boot Camp podcast. Until next time, be great, because nothing else pays.