Starting Your Business While Working a 9-5 Job

Hey, everyone, it's Mike over@landscapebusinesscourse.com. thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. If you're watching this, make sure you subscribe to the podcast because you can listen to this while you drive, while you work out, and you can catch up on all the other episodes if you're new to the show. So just go on itunes or on any sort of app, podcast player, Stitcher, podcast addict, whatever you have on Android or just Apple Podcasts, if you have an iPhone and you can download that and subscribe to the podcast. Now, today we are going to be talking about a question that came in via YouTube about how to have a job, a 9 to 5 job, and start your lawn care business. So we dig really deep in this, in the course, the first couple videos all about kind of creating your Runway as far as financially. So I want to kind of summarize a little bit about that and, and I want to talk about some of my tips on how to start your business if you're currently at a 9 to 5 job. Or you can't just like jump out and start your lawn care business without having a steady flow of income. So we're going to talk about that. So how do you keep your 9 to 5 and start the lawn care business? So the big question is, well, can I just hire someone to do the work and then I can go do my 9 to 5 and then just manage the lawn care business? So in theory that works, but I would say that's a later stage of the company. So this is what I would do. If you're wanting to start a business or if you have a job now and you're like, well, I want to grow my company more. So this is what I would do. If you're just starting out, try on the weekends and in the evenings to start getting lawn care mowing customers. So these are gonna be people very close to your house. These are gonna be people close by where you live that you can mow their yard after your 9 to 5 job in the evenings or on the weekends or even on holidays or whenever you fit it in. And you can get 10, 15, 20 people and mow their lawns around your 9 to 5 before hiring people, before getting a shop, before getting big equipment. Like, focus on just the people right around your house, in your neighborhood and start to build up clientele that way. So now it's like, okay, Well, I got 10, 15 people, I'm mowing their yards and I'm doing really good as far as keeping busy outside of work. But now I'm getting so busy, it's like hard to keep up with my 9 to 5 and do the lawn care business. So should I jump full board into the lawn care business? For some people, yes. If you're younger and you don't have a lot of liabilities, you don't have a house and a car and a family that you need to provide for, this might be something that you could just jump into and start full time into the lawn care business at 15, 20 clients. Now, if you have certain obligations, debt, house, things like that that you need to pay for, put food on the table for your family, you need that steady source of income from that nine to five, and you don't want to let that go right away. And so what I would recommend you do is wait until the gross revenue of your business is at least twice the amount that you pull in from your 9 to 5. So if you pull in $3,000 a month from your job at your 9 to 5, wait until your lawn care business is at least grossing $6,000 per revenue of revenue in monthly receipts. So make sure that you wait at least that long. The reason for that number that I'm giving you there is usually when you're that small, $6,000 in revenue, you're small and you're going to have $3,000 in net profit because you don't have a lot of employees and overhead and all of the other things. So you're going to, your profit margin is going to be pretty high. Like, you can get up to like 8, $9,000. I've seen people as high as 10, $15,000 in revenue without a single ounce of employees or other people helping them. And so it's just about getting creative with that. But nine to five, you know, you can only mow so many lawns after work before it's dark, and you can only mow so many lawns on the weekend. And so how do you do that transition? So there's a couple ways. Number one, you do hire someone, they work during the day, and then you come back after your job, your 9 to 5, and you do the estimates, the book work, all the office work, and they do all of the mechanical out in the field work. The tough part about this and is that customers are going to be trying to contact you for customer service for all these other things during the day while you're at your 9 to 5. And the problem is if you're mowing someone's house or your employee is, and they need something from you and you're in a meeting for two hours, like is that employee is going to sit around for a couple hours waiting for you. And so it can be very difficult to have an employee while you're working be out operating out in the field. So maybe this is something that you can do, but just definitely something that you're going to have to know that that person that you're putting out on, on the route is going to be extremely efficient, is going to be very reliable. And if I was you, I would be willing to pay them a little bit more or quite a bit more to manage that crew very, very well. Because you're going to have to really trust them that they aren't just going to do two or three lawns and then hang out at the gas station or take a nap because you have really no way to spot check them throughout the day or drive behind them. It's very difficult for you to be involved in the business. So if you're going to do that, my big recommendation is make sure you at least see them every single day. So maybe if you have a 9 to 5, the crew starts mowing at 7:30 or 8, so you can talk with that one employee, maybe of 2 and talk with them, make sure they're good on their route, things like that, maybe they just help you three days a week. Before you even get to that stage though, where you have an employee out working while you're at your 9 to 5, this is what I would suggest. Try to find a young person or someone in school, a student that was willing to also work for you just in the evenings and on the weekends. So if you can do 10 to 15 mowing customers by yourself in the weekends and on the evenings, maybe try getting a friend or a student, a local high school student to come on the crew with you and do the edging and the mowing or in different aspects, while you're basically cutting the amount of time that you have to mow down quite a bit and help to just train them. You can really, it's easy to do quality control because you're there the whole time and you're really able to train them the way you want. And so I think someone that's doing 10 to 15 lawns on the weekends and in the evenings can easily do 25, 30 lawns per week by having that extra little helper that's very, very cheap. You don't have to trust them as much because they're with you, so you don't have to pay them as much. They don't have to be as experienced. And so they're really just a labor. They're very much more cost effective. You can get 15, go from 10 to 15 easy, 25, 30 lawns a week, just by having extra little help in the evenings and on the weekends. But now you've made that jump and you're like, hey, well, I need an employee and I'm gonna go work. Well, I'd make sure you at least see them once a day at the beginning of the day, make sure they're comfortable with their route, make sure that they are going to know exactly where to go throughout the day so they don't have to bug you and so that they're not waiting on questions or are waiting on answers to their questions. When you're in meetings or perhaps busy at your nine to five, the last thing you want to do is get fired from your nine to five because you're so preoccupied with other things going on out in the field. So if you're going to stay at your 9 to 5, give 100% to your employer. Make sure that you're still 100% engaged. And so to eliminate the distractions, you need to make sure that person out in the field is super confident, experienced, and knows what they're doing. So then the question is really about when do I make the big jump? When do I jump from having a 9 to 5 to just completely going full time with the lawn care thing? So now we're going to assume someone else. You've hired someone, maybe they're working three or four days a week, and then now they're like full time every single day they are working. You are in the evenings, on the weekends doing estimates and the book work and the office work. Now what do you do? This is now when you filled their schedule during the day and they're probably doing 40, 50 mo's a week. And now at least, and then depending on the size of properties, but let's just assume 40, 50 mo's per week. And now you're starting to make twice the revenue of your existing job. And so you're starting to, hey, well, can I go full time? This is the time to jump in full time. I would suggest jumping in full time about in March or coming up to the spring of the busy mowing season so that, you know, don't quit your job in October, November, even if you're busy with leaf cleanups, because it's going to be very tough to keep your employee and you busy throughout the entire winter stretch without that steady 9 to 5. So keep the 9 to 5. Strategically plan it where when you quit your 9 to 5, you know you're going to be belted with a bunch of work. So I would quit in the spring. Once you have made sure that you can do twice the revenue of your existing job. So if you're pulling in $3,000 from your nine to five, make sure you wait at least till you're making six grand, at least six grand revenue from your lawn care business before you jump in 100%. And then what does that look like after that? Well, once you jump in 100% now you and the other individual are going to be on the crew all day long mowing. You can get easily up to 100 mowing customers easily with the two of you going full tilt. And you can the next step after that is really to get a truck so that you can go do estimates and other things while that individual and another, your second employee start mowing and doing more work. So that's the steps, those are the kind of the steps to get to becoming a more of a business owner and working on the business. But those are the elementary kind of like really right from the beginning. And so in the course, we talk a lot about making sure you have that safety net for as far as dollars and looking at the budget, looking at your personal expenses and seeing how many months of savings do you have in order to kind of be a cushion once you do start your business. Because it can take a while once you jump in and really start investing in the company to start seeing a lot of money coming back to you in your personal pocket. And so having that safety net and that Runway, as we call it, is super important. Like in a Runway, they don't know. Most, most aircraft don't just go straight up. There's a certain amount of point where they take them time to go down the Runway and then they take off. And it's very similar with your business from a standpoint of, of owner compensation. Like, you know, as your business is starting and going, it gets momentum, it's growing and things, but you're really not making a whole lot of money like personally. But then as you continue to invest in the business, better efficiency, better systems, then your personal, the personal compensation that you take out of the company can begin to grow and it really starts to take off. So those are the kind of elementary steps. If you have a 9 to 5, let me know in the comments below and let me know what you're doing to make that transition smooth. Between part time business owner to full time landscape entrepreneur. This week, like literally tomorrow, within 24 hours, I and my video guy, we're going to be headed down to Texas and the Tennessee doing some off site video series of businesses that we are going to help turn around their company. We're going to help them grow and scale up their systems, their procedures and really make their company much better. And so we're going to be doing 48 hours at two different locations. That video is going to be free for everybody. You're going to definitely want to check it out behind the scenes, will be available for all the course members, things that we can't maybe share publicly. And then also if you are a course member, you're going to want to be looking out for a video. It's going to be coming out in two weeks and this is something that has really, really helped us in the past month that we've implemented here at, at my company, Augusta Lawn Care. And what we're doing is I'm going to show you on a screen share exactly what we're doing with our estimates. In order to put a personalized video into every single estimate that says the name of the customer and what the project they're entailing is just like a 30 second video that really personalizes it. We're going to show you exactly what we've been doing and what the results we've had as far as much better conversion and people, you know, getting back to us on our estimates much faster. So members check that out. It's going to be coming to the landscape business course in about two weeks. We still are getting a lot of the numbers together, tracking things. It's a little bit premature yet. So we're gonna wait a couple weeks and I'm gonna launch out. We already know it's working, but I want to get some numbers for you all and then do a screen share about exactly how to do that on a email when you send out your estimate. So keep, you know, keep your ears and eyes peeled for that and I look forward to it. So we're gonna be flying out next week, in the next weeks or so. So any questions that you might email or comments I might not get right back to. But we're gonna be doing that video series and then later will be launching those and you can watch those probably 45 minutes each video series of how we come in and change a lot of things in the company to make them more efficient and much more scalable. Last thing, don't forget to check out landscapebusinesscourse.com conference and sign up for the conference today. It's in January, it's for three days. It's in Bellingham, Washington. You can literally fly into Bellingham, Washington Airport and then literally walk across the parking lot. And that's where the conference is being held. It's right next to the airport. Super convenient. You can also fly into Seattle and then take a two hour bus that comes right to our doorstep at the hotel in the venue where we're staying. And so definitely check that out. Landscapebusinesscourse.com conference at the conference, we're going to be doing a bunch of different types of seminars and workshops for your business. It's not going to be a bunch of speeches from random people. We're going to have workshops where you bring your financials, you work on your website, you work on your certain ratios within your business. We work on hiring systems. We will bring people up and walk you through how to hire and how to vet someone during the hiring process and when you're interviewing them. And we will actually give examples and have on live, live demonstrations. So to me, so it's gonna be super awesome. There's not gonna be a ton of people, I'm guessing right now, based on what we currently have signed up, probably about 50 to 80 people. So I'm thinking gonna be showing up. So I will be able to meet every single one of you. I'll be able to help you, each and every one of you, with your business. So check it out. Landscapebusinesscourse. Com Conference I'll see you there.