Copper Creek Cuts Drops ODDLY SATISFYING Knowledge Bombs!

Hello, everyone.

Welcome to another edition, another episode of Roundup. Today I'm very excited we're going to be having Brad from Copper Creek Cuts coming on the show. But a big thank you to everyone that has come on live. And if you're watching this in the future, get ready for some knowledge bombs. Oddly satisfying knowledge bombs, what we're dropping here today. And so please welcome from the, the king of oddly satisfying HQ, Mr. Brad Baer. Thanks for coming on, Brad. I appreciate it.

Hello, everyone. Hey, Mike. Thank you so much. It's always fun when I can get on with you. I think we've done this once before and it was fun then, too.

I was so disappointed. Today you made a YouTube poll and you asked what people wanted more from you and only 3% of people said business advice. I literally went into a different YouTube account just to be able to pull twice on the pole and say, no, no, no.

So, yeah, business is not. It's not popular. It's a. It's a subset of a subset of a subset of a subset of a subset who actually care about that.

Yeah, well, I know.

Well, I'm.

I guess I'm a subset of a subset of a. Let me make a new shirt.

I enjoy mowing and business. Oh, man. Cool. Well, thanks for coming on. I think for most people have watched, they have seen plenty of your videos in terms of mowing grass and doing pressure washing and tons of videos that are oddly satisfying. Today I want to talk a little bit more from a business angle as well as, you know, your advice for someone getting started and obviously we've talked before, kind of your unique angle in terms of having the YouTube side and being more of a media company really than anything. But I wanted to talk today. How did you get started with mowing in the lawn care, Actual Copper Creek cuts, where the logos, like, how did you get started with Copper Creek cuts?

Sure. So the quick background story on me is I started working for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida, an insurance company, in 2004 when I was a junior in high school through a program we had on out at our high school. I stayed on with them through graduating all the way up until 2015.

And.

And at that point, my wife and I just had our second kid and she's got a master's. And at that point I didn't have any kind of degree. So we looked at her earning potential versus mine and she could make more than I could. And so I said, well, if you don't mind being the breadwinner, I don't mind being stay at home mom. So I did that from 2015 till 2017. And then at that point she was working from home a few days, I think my mom and dad were helping out a day or two. And, you know, our son, who was the newest, wasn't a little baby anymore, so you didn't have to be right there all the time. So I was like, man, I kind of miss working and contribute into the household, so what can I do? Well, I'm still mainly a stay at home dad, so I can't really work for anybody, right, because the schedule just doesn't work. So lawn care is one of those things where, I mean, as long as you get it pretty much done on the day that they're expecting, I mean, that's really as strict as you have to be. So lawn care is perfect. A perfect job that you can do on your own. You can be your own boss, you can set your own schedule. So that's kind of how I got into it as far as like the nitty gritty of the business. I registered as a sole proprietorship. That was January 2017. So I think in Florida that costs like 20 bucks and it's good for five years. You sign up a fictitious name. So technically, my business is Bradley Bear, dba, doing business as Copper Creek Cuts. Now, the good thing about that is it's very simple. I don't have to keep my business finances and my personal finances separate. I mean, I've got a business account, a business credit card, but, like, one thing is my personal Amazon account gets 5% off of stuff. So I'll order office supplies from there. Where if I was an LLC or a corporation or whatever the other options are, that'd be a big no, no. And then there's also no annual filing. The downside is if, like, I decided to drink a beer at lunch and kill somebody, they can come after my house, my retirement accounts, you know, because everything, I am the business. So that's the legal side of it. That was all January. I got insurance that same month.

What else did I do? The logo. I don't think the logo was until.

Either 2018, maybe like a year into it. So at first it was just a little stylized Copper Creek Cuts. It was like a cursive font that I thought looked fancy. And it kind of matched the, you know, like when you drive into a neighborhood and it's kind of a fancy looking sign that it the font match, which was real stupid. You couldn't even hardly read it. So anyways, I went on Fiverr. And for a hundred bucks, I think there was a guy who did this logo. He did the little, the little mascot on the mower. He made business cards, he made letterhead, he made Twitter banners, Facegram, Facegram, Facebook banners. You know, he did like all this stuff. He was based out of Sri Lanka or she. I don't even know if it was a he or she. But it was, it was amazing. He did really good work. So anyways, that's kind of the real quick of, of the whole business and everything.

And then at the time were you using that Colorado that you now recently split with or what'd you start with?

So at. What I started with was our 2015 Dodge Grand Caravan, which we bought in expectation of my son because then there was gonna be four of us and I lived across the street from my mom and dad. So if we ever want to go anywhere, all together. So it was a 2015 Dodge Grand Caravan with a V6 so it can tow up to 3,500 pounds. I went and got a Harbor freight trailer for. What do they sell those for? Like two or three hundred dollars. One of the four by eights. And I spent like six hundred dollars putting wood fence, picket, sidings all on it, making it look real, stained it and everything. And it was so sketchy because those harbor freight trailers, they don't have a ramp. So I got some like some ATV ramps and I, I would drive my zero turn up and down this, you know, those little ATV ramps. It was really sketchy. So I did, I used that until I think I upgraded the trailer to a five by 10 enclosed. And then in the fall of 2017, or no, 18 is when I got that Colorado. But yeah, before that I was just rocking the family minivan.

And at the beginning it was more of a part time thing. Did you do any advertising? What did you do to get the first like 5, 10 customers at the very beginning?

So it was mainly because I was online. So I live in a pretty rural area and there are about three dozen different guys or firefighters or police officers who cut grass or real businesses that do. But not many of them have a good online presence. And so what would happen is as people would start looking for, for new guys, their guy would quit or they want something new or they just move in, they would just type into Google. And because I did the Facebook, the free Facebook, I did the Google my business for free. I had a free wix site. I still have a free one. So it's like, it's not coppercreekcuts. Dot com. It's coppercreekcuts dot wixla. You know, some really stupid long. So I just tell people, just Google me. But really that's, that's the main way that I got started was just by being online and people would find me that way.

Did you create that WIX site yourself then, to get started?

I did. It does. It did not look very good. I went back and redid it. So I think it looks a little bit more modern now, but just so I could have something where, you know, when people would.