RANT About Your Excuses

Hey everyone, this is Mike Andes and you're listening to landscape businesscourse.com podcast. Make sure you check out the website and sign up for our next free webinar where I drop value bombs and answer all your questions on how to start, grow and save your business. Talk about the three marketing methods and the five things that are keeping your small business small. Alright, now today we are talking about something that actually was a question from the other podcast Business Bootcamp podcast came in as a question and I wanted to dig deeper into it on 98 business course. Talk about it really specifically for our age, for our industry, I mean, and what it means for younger entrepreneurs and anyone that thinks they have a handicap, quote, unquote handicap when it comes to race, religion, sex, orientation, as far as college education, like looks fat, ugly, short, whatever it is. So I'm short, I'm young, and so I have a little bit of a handicap. I know there are more, much more weightier handicaps that are real issues in our country and so I'm aware of that. I'm not trying to disrespect anything of that nature, but I am trying to bring a point across and I hope that this episode, if you've already listened to the other podcast Landscape Business course, that this still offers more value as far as what it means to do in our industry of lawn care, landscaping, et cetera. So that's what we're going to talk about. So the question essentially was like, what do you do as a young entrepreneur when you're trying to sell services and products to people that are older or people that are more successful or for any reason, like, how do you sell as a young person? But I'm going to kind of flip it and say, well, it doesn't matter. I'm going to kind of flip it and say, doesn't matter if it's like age or looks or race or anything, any sort of handicap that you feel you have, it might even be just that you don't feel like you have a lot of experience. Literally, like that's a handicap, some people think. And so, and I really went on a rant on the last one and I'm not going to try. I'm trying not to do that on this one. But essentially, like, for instance, a lot of times the big fear is when you do estimates, drive up to someone's house, might have a clipboard or an iPad. However you do estimates, well, if you've gone the course, you know exactly what you're looking at. You're looking at the three columns of.

Product description, products in the middle and. And then time on the right. But anyways, if you show up with a clipboard or an iPad or whatever you come up to with a business card or whatever to a business potential client's house and you're going to give an estimate, that's a lot of times where people have the fear about their handicap. They're too tall, they're too short, they're too fat, they have acne, they're too young, they don't have enough experience. They don't have any college education and horticultural things, and they don't have an applicator's license for spraying. And they haven't installed thousands of irrigation systems, so they feel kind of inadequate. And what I talked about and what I'm trying to tell everyone out there right now is people don't care.

The person that you're trying to sell that irrigation system to, yes, they want you have experience. Yes, they want you to know what you're doing. Yes, they don't want you to mess up. And it's all part of the value proposition. But they don't care if you've done 1,000 before, because if you messed up on the thousand that you did, there's going to be another statistic. They're going to be 1001 that you messed up on and you made problems for. What they're more interested in is if you've done 10 that were absolutely perfect and you followed up with the customer and that you continually made sure they were happy with the service they got, maybe even checked in with them the first couple years to make sure they blew out their irrigation system so they wouldn't get any frozen pipes. That's what they want to hear about. Okay. And if you don't, you know, for instance, I never got any college education in horticultural or mowing grass or like, when I started, I didn't even have any education in business. Now I do. Yes. But like, when I was starting, and so all of those things can be looked at as handicaps. And if, by the way, if it is education and you think like, oh, I don't know about horticultural, I don't know about landscaping design. I don't know enough about spraying or tree care. Guess what? There's this new thing, little secret here, it's called YouTube, and you can learn so much on there for absolutely no cost from some of the brightest and best minds in our industry. So that kind of eliminates that handicap altogether because you can learn a whole lot. Like, I didn't know anything about core aeration or fertilization or. I didn't even know what liming was like, liming your lawn. I thought literally it had something to do with lemons and lime, like the stuff that you eat. I thought that had something to do with it. I had no idea. But I did not know the difference between a hydrangea and a rhododendron. Could not have told you. Let me see, what else didn't I know? I didn't know anything hardly, like literally nothing. But what I sold people on was at the time when I was really young, like 11, 12, when we started hanging these lawn care. And I was just pushing a lawnmower around. I sold people on me. I was selling people on the very thing that some people think is a handicap. And that was my age, by the way. This is a big thing, age. Sometimes what you feel is your biggest handicap is actually your unique selling proposition that makes you different from everybody else, from all of your competitors. And when I was really young, I just realized it wasn't a handicap. It was my unique selling proposition, a thing that made me different than everyone else. And I sold me. When I sent those letters out, those newsletters and postcards out for potential mowing clients, I was selling that I was a young entrepreneur. I was young, I was a go getter, I was a little kid pushing around the lawnmower around the neighborhood. That was my unique selling proposition. And a lot of people will look at age and they'll think it's there, it's negative. They'll look at. Well, because I'm a woman owned business in a traditionally primarily dominating male environment of lawn care and landscaping, they feel like that's their handicap. Guess what? It's probably your unique selling proposition because there's probably not very many of women owned businesses in our industry in your area, you know, and so people are becoming. Their unique selling proposition might be their earth, Earth friendly, no CO2, their battery operated emissions and all that stuff. It could be all like, your handicap is probably a good unique selling proposition. Because if it's a handicap, it means you're in the minority, which means you are separated different than everybody else. And you can use that as an advantage. Okay, so I'm still young, I'm still 21, I can still call myself a young entrepreneur, you know, a young whatever, like small business or whatever. I don't use that as much now because the business growing. We're creating a brand and I don't want the brand. I don't want to be selling all based on personality, which is me, I don't want to be selling a personality anymore. So now, yes, we sell on brand and we sell on the quality and we sell on our communication skills and all of that. And we talk about value in the course a lot. But what you have to realize, if you have something, if you think because you are a different race or because you are fat or because you have acne all over your face, if you think that it will affect the sale, because when you walk up like we were just talking about, like the most critical scary thing is when you go to the estimates and you're walking up there, if you think, if you really think that those things are a handicap and because you are young, you will not be able to sell to this person, if you think that, then yes, it will affect your success rate. Because when you go and do that sale and you don't make eye contact because you feel like you can't make this sale and you're young and I don't look good and I'm different than everyone else, like if you think those things, you won't make eye contact. You will not ask for the sale. You will not say, alright, so when would you like this to be done? What is your credit card number? Will you be taking? Will you be paying with check or cash or credit card? You won't ask for the sale if you're not confident or you think you have a handicap that will keep you from making the sale. So what you got to get in your mind is start focusing on the things that are going to make the sale go through instead of the things that will keep the sale from going through. Age, height, good looks, where you came from, your parents, your education. If you start focusing on those things, the sale will most likely not happen. And it's not because of those things. It's because your mentality and then your communication and the way you portrayed yourself in the sale and not looking people in the eye, not asking, being upfront, asking for the sale, seeming kind of shady because you're kind of putting kind of. It seems like you're trying to hide things when really you're just trying. You're not confident in yourself. When you don't feel like you can tell everyone everything because. Because what are they gonna think about me? Like. Like if you start thinking like that, it's not the race and it's not your age, it's not your height and your good looks that are keeping you from the sale. It's actually just your mentality that they are affecting the sale, which then makes your communication, which is the number one reason people buy. So they buy from people they know like and trust. And if you can't do that because in your mind you have things that will inhibit those things. The knowing, the liking and the trusting. If you think that, then yes, the sale is affected. If you do not think that, then you will be like I was when I was 11 and 12, selling on the very thing that most people would call my handicap. You said, well, yeah, you were really young. I'm not really young. I can't use that as my unique selling power position. Well, guess What? When I'm 18, 19, I wasn't selling on age anymore. But going and selling a 10, $12,000 landscaping project to someone that's a multi millionaire is not an easy thing to do when you're 17, 18, 19 years old. Now I'm 21, I'm still young. I don't have no experience. I don't have an education in horticultural and all this stuff. Don't look at the things that you would call a handicap when you go into a sale. Focus on what are the needs of the customer? What do they need for their landscaping? What do they need for their lawn care? What do they need for their maintenance? If it's a property management company, how can you help them? How can you help them save time with their property managers? How can you make their property stand out from everyone else? How can you keep the owners happy? How can you keep the tenants happy? Focus on those things. Don't focus. If you go into a pitch and you start talking about why business is bad, because I'm young or I'm this, or I have this disability or I never got college education or the bank wouldn't give us a loan, they wouldn't accept our loan, we couldn't grow last year. And this like, if you focus on that, people are going to turn you off. They want to do business with someone that's succeeding, that's going forward, that's growing, that's proactive, that's thinking about solutions instead of the negative. So I'm a big believer that people who are positive are going to come out on top in this game of business. And it's because people don't want to be around negative people. And if you want to make sales, you got to be around people. So be positive. Don't think about what's going to keep you from the sale. Think about what's going to make the sale happen, how you are so much better than every other alternative and option they have. Get focused on that. This is Mike Andy's landscapebusinesscourse.com Hope you have already, but if you haven't, make sure you check out the webinar. It's free. Landscapebusinesscourse. Com we talk about all your questions and the things that you need to start, grow or save your business. Mike Andes, we'll see you next time on here on the landscapebusinesscourse.com podcast.