DO NOT Run a Owner-Operator Operation... Here's why

Hey everyone, this is Mike Andes and you're listening to landscape businesscourse.com I have two big announcements for you today. Number one, I'm going to be writing a book. The book is already in progress. We are halfway through writing it. It's going to be launching in about two months and it's a little bit about what I'm talking about today. And I'm really excited for this book because it's going to be very similar to the E myth and how it's written. Basically it's gonna be a real story of a business that starts incorrectly. I'm gonna walk you through all the steps of how it starts. The climax is really the turnaround, really the demise of the company. And then the turnaround is how to build real landscaping and lawn care business correctly. And it's more of like a story type of a book. But it's all very core business elements and principles. So it's gonna be coming out, it's called Zero Turn. Cause we're gonna be turning the business around and I'm really looking forward to it. And at about the same time we'll be launching the Zero Turn video series which is a compilation of some of the work I've been doing with consulting and things. So you can see actual businesses being turned around. So that's gonna be a lot of fun. That's the first announcement, second announcement, the conference, it's coming up in January. We, we're only a few months away. Alright. So right now we are rolling into October. We got November, December and then January is when we are having the conference. It's three days long and you can go to landscapebusinesscourse.com conference and get more information. We changed the whole setup of the conference to be much more seminar based. So instead of just a bunch of speeches that are kind of sporadic about different topics, we're going to be doing workshops of two to three hours on different topics. And using your financials, using your website, using different avenues and aspects of your business to actually personalize the content just for your company. So if we're talking about hiring, we're actually going to create your hiring process right then and there. And I'm going to help you do it personally. There's not going to be millions of people there and thousands even, not even hundreds. So I'll be able to specifically help you with your personalized issues. And so we'll go right to that hiring plan. We will create a marketing plan for your company. We will create an actual step by step of how you create the systems within your business. We're going to be talking about your website. We'll actually go through your website and actually dissect every single aspect of what you can do differently to make sure it's the top on Google. So that's going to be a lot of fun. You definitely want to be there. The 99 bucks I'm charging is not even going to cover our cost. We are going to lose money on this event. But I want you to be there. It's a great event for your managers to come to make. Make it a three or four person event. You'll come out for the three days. It's going to be fantastic. It's Thursday, Friday and Saturday. You can fly directly into the Bellingham airport or you can fly into Seattle and then there's a bus that goes right from the Bellingham, or, sorry, the Seattle airport right up to the doorstep of the conference center. So check it out. Today, go to landscapebusinesscourse.com conference. Now, today I am trying to convince one person to not be solo in their business any longer. So.

Many of the businesses in the landscape industry are solo mowing operations. Just one guy with a blower, a mower, a weedy whacker, and the truck. And I'm trying to convince one of you, two of you, three of you, some of you to not be solo anymore. And so I want to give you a few reasons as to why. And I know this is going to spark a lot of debate. I know a lot of people will not like me even posting this video saying that people should, should not be solo. Now, the reason I'm making this video is not to create that.

Confrontation. It's rather to respond to a lot of you that ask me questions or to people actually debate with me about this topic about why you should stay solo or you should just say small and not hire employees and just have one truck and trailer and just run your business like that. So I want to kind of give my ideology and my reasoning as to why going solo, why staying solo is a horrible idea and why you should not.

Spend another day by yourself out in the truck and why you need to start thinking about your business instead of a job of landscaping and thinking more about the business of your business instead of the business of lawn care. So I just want to go for a few of these because I could probably do 20 different reasons, but I want to kind of highlight just a few. Number one is if you are staying solo, in other words, you are the only guy on the crew you're the guy mowing, you're the guy blowing. You either go weed eating, you're also the one doing estimates and invoicing and answering the phone and answering emails. If you are that solo operation and you drive around in your truck and you do lawn care and landscaping and you are solo, you're very, very vulnerable. Alright, so you've heard me talk about vulnerability before. You're vulnerable from a whole bunch of different angles, but really from two major ones. One is your health and two is just family issues and other issues of life. So if your health gives out and you are running a solo operation, you instantly, almost overnight can start. Your business will fall apart because within a couple weeks your mowing customers have to get someone else to come mow their lawn. Within a couple weeks, those leads that are getting coming in through email and phone, they are no longer valid. Literally your business can evaporate within a couple weeks. If your health goes, if you break a leg, if you get a car accident, if you get some sort of illness or disease, like literally it can wipe out your business, you are vulnerable because the health of your business is dependent upon the physical health of your body. And that's just not a game you want to be playing, in my opinion, as far as whether or not you get the cold or you come down with some. You break a leg playing soccer and roll an ankle before you know you have to have surgery and you can't go out and mow and can't go out and service your customers and all of a sudden you're scrambling, trying to find a friend or trying to sub it out and all of a sudden you're losing a lot of brand equity. You get complaints like it's just not a game you want to play. You're literally playing, you know, a lot. Or you're literally gambling by being a solo person, gambling that you're going to be healthy tomorrow and still be able to do the work. Alright, so your health is a vulnerability. You know, stuff happens in life, family issues come up. You know, maybe you don't get sick, maybe your family, your parents do, maybe you have to move to go help them in their old age and they go through the grieving process with a family, if they pass away, like there's so many things that can happen. Your loved ones, your children, your spouse, things can happen. And all of a sudden you have to step out of the business. And if you are the business, you are stepping out on your business because your business will no longer exist. If you have to step Away from it for a few weeks. So again, vulnerability, vulnerability for your health, vulnerability for what just happens in life. And if you are open and susceptible to that, you'll be so low. And things can really, really work out poorly. The reason I'm making this video is because I've seen this happen. All these things I'm talking about today. I've seen it happen in people's businesses. I've seen them lose their livelihood and lose their house because they got hurt, because something came up with their own relationship and they had to dissolve the business. The company went absolutely nothing. And because they were solo, they didn't have anyone. No systems, no procedures, no employees, no management team, no leadership. And they and their business went to nothing literally overnight. And so number one is vulnerability. That's why I would push you. I'd plead with you to go and not be solo anymore. Hire individuals, create a team, create systems and procedures and a way to price jobs and someone else to answer your phones and emails. Get out and getting out of the field and developing a real business. That's why I'm asking you to do that. Next thing, you could be making more money somewhere else. So we talk about vulnerability. But another reason why I'd really push you to not be solo is you could go get a job and make more money than you are just pushing a lawn mower on. Like, if you looked at the amount of overhead and expenses that you have in your business, if you're running it properly and you have insurance and all. And that's a whole different topic if you're not insured or if you're not paying taxes and things like that. But if you're solo and you are paying taxes and you are paying for, for your truck and you are insured and bonded and licensed and all of those things, and you have everything above the table.

It is very likely that you could make more money going out and getting a job, even at another landscaping company and having it, becoming a manager in their position in their company. You could probably make more money as a project manager, an office manager, or some sort of lead at another landscaping company. That's big than if you were just to stay solo and mow lawns. So another reason, you could probably make more money elsewhere if you didn't go solo. All right, a lot of people, then this is their excuse. Well, I'm just staying solo because I enjoy it or I don't need to make a lot of money. I need to make enough money for myself and I don't need a lot of money. And I just enjoy mowing and I enjoy being on the truck by myself. And I don't like to have employees because I, I want to have a little business where I can just mow lawns and enjoy myself outside. And if you notice, everything I just said right there. Right. Everything I just said right there is selfish. It's all about, I, I want to be outside. I want a little business. I don't want the pressure of having employees. It's very, very selfish to be solo. This is something people don't talk about. In order for you to be solo, you have to be, and you stay that way. You have to be selfish. Because people who come up with the excuse that, well, I just don't need a lot of money, well, guess what? If you made more money in your business, you could then not be selfish. And instead of just paying for your own bills, you give money away. You could give it to charities, you could give it to your church, you could give it to other individuals that are in need overseas or abroad. Go to your school. Like, there's different ways you can give this money away. And instead of being selfish and taking the easier road and saying, well, I don't want to deal with employees, I don't want the extra headache of having more customers. I don't have to think about other things. Like, that is the path of least resistance. And it's a very selfish way of living. If you're simply trying to dodge the responsibility of being a boss, dodge the responsibility of owning a real business. And so this is one thing we don't talk a lot about, but I think it's pretty selfish when you could go bigger and when you could make more money and be able to give that to other people and when you could create jobs within your community, but you're not, you're just going to stay solo because that's what you want. I feel there is a sense of responsibility. Yes. There's a lot of accountability and there's things. There's a lot of pressure that comes with being a boss and being an employer and being the head and leader of a larger company. Yes. But you'll take that if you are not selfish and want to give to other people, Give jobs to your community, give monies to charity, give money to your church and your school, be able to provide for your family better, be able to provide for your grandparents and your parents as they age. Like, these are things that you can do. It's very hard to do if you're solo. So just another thing I'm not throwing everyone that solo into that bucket by saying they're selfish. I'm just saying that if you're staying solo simply because you don't want to make more money, because you don't need the money, because you just want to stay out in the field and mow lawns and not have to deal with people, then it's selfish if you're putting yourself and your business in that box. So another thing is that a lot of people don't think about is if you are running a solo operation, you are not running a business, you are running a job. What that means is if you ever want to sell this business, it is not a valuable asset, it is not an asset, it is not a sellable asset. So in order for a business to be an actual asset, it needs to have what's called goodwill. So if you look at the valuation of a company, you have assets like your truck and your trailer and your equipment and all the hard assets, all of the tangible goods, you might say the physical assets of the company. That's how you determine the valuation of the company. But the bottom, if it's a strong brand and has a really good business model, there's goodwill that's attached to the company in the form of brand and brand recognition systems and procedures. And if you have a good team in place, that's why a company like Apple that makes a few billion dollars a year is worth hundreds of billions, is because they've created a brand that's worth a lot of money and they couldn't do that with one person. I promise you that. But when it comes to your business, if you're by yourself and you decide to sell your company, the entire business is you. So if you're selling it, you're basically removing the one thing within the business that makes it run, run correctly. And so if everything is going through you, if you're the bottleneck to every single thing, sales, operations, phone calls, emails, mowing lawns, doing landscapes, everything comes through you. And you're the solo entrepreneur, the solo gear of the business. If you sell your business, all that your business is worth is the physical assets of the company. That's all it's worth. You might get a little extra for the contact information for the jobs and the clients that you have, but there's no brand, your business name is worth nothing, is really not worth anything. If you do not have a business, what that means is, can the business run by itself? Do you have a management team in place? Are you on a sustainable track of growth based upon the amount of people that you're employing and the long term longevity of your business. That's when the real valuation will kick in. You might have $50,000 worth of equipment and as a solo entrepreneur, that's all you're going to get. If you try to sell the company, you might get 50 grand. You'll probably have to sell it at a discount because it's used equipment and people don't really want it and they're just really after your contracts or after your client list. That's all they're after. And so we bought a company up for $18,000 when he was originally pricing at 150,000. And the reason I had gotten down to 18 grand is cause I didn't want the equipment, I didn't want the physical assets. All I wanted was his contact list because that's the only thing of value besides the contracts. The name of the brand, we did away with it. The website, we did away with it because all of that was tied to the business owner. So when he left, basically everything of the business left. So we just took the contact list, that's what we paid him for. And he ended up trying to sell for pennies on the dollar, his equipment. And there was no business to buy. The business has to run itself. The business has to be have a team. The business has to have an in order for this organism to be alive, it has to be multiple parts moving. And if you're the solo entrepreneur, the one that runs everything, if you leave, the business is worth nothing. You might have physical assets, but the business is absolutely worth nothing. So I implore you, I hope this helps one person decide tomorrow that they need to employ someone and they need to think a little bit bigger about their business because they're vulnerable right now. They're thinking selfishly they can make more money if they went and got a job somewhere else at a bigger landscaping company as like a crew manager. And worst of all, your business is not a sellable asset if you are the solo entrepreneur, the one that runs and does everything within your business. So check out landscapebusinesscourse.com for more material. And I've uploaded a video recently that shows exactly what it looks like inside of the course. Because a lot of people were asking like, what's the course versus like the podcast? The podcast and all these videos, they're 100% free. Please listen to these before you even get involved in the course. The only reason I made the course is because there's some content I can't share online that I can't share publicly. I mean I can't share it without having to see who's in the course. And so that's things like financials, things like shop tours, seeing our operations on a very, very close up, detailed information, our emails that we send to customers, seeing our backend system. That's what I show in the course. That's the value. The difference here is I'm sharing this with the world and so I have to be careful about what I can and cannot share. So that's all you get. Different with the course. Obviously there's all the videos and the forms and all of our contracts that I share with you but I want to make that quick distinction that the main reason I made the course is to be able to share information that I can't really share publicly. So There it is. Landscapebusinesscourse.com I'm Mike Ennis. I'll see you next.