A landscaping business owner asks Mike Andes how to scale while over-leveraged doing custom one-time projects. Andes says stop the bespoke work, standardize everything first, then delegate in order: admin, operations, sales.
What I would recommend is slowly move up to the master juggler, which is where you still do complex jobs one time big projects, but you're going to standardize everything.
My question for you is right now kind of in a position where I'm over leveraging myself, I'm wearing a lot of different hats and I don't have a whole lot of high talent labor. So I'm doing a lot of that. I'm doing managing all the operations, managing all the sales material deliveries and we do mostly landscape installs and cleanups. So one time projects. Not only am I trying to get a continuity program like Harmozi suggested, but really what I'm trying to do is scale out either the operation side or the sales side. Curious. Which one would be easier, which one would be better for the business and which one you think is going to be the biggest constraint going forward.
You hit this 1.5, you grow in a big business, but you're doing everything inside the business and it's hard to replace yourself because it's complex and custom services. Right now you're doing complex and custom work. This is what we call the treadmill junkie leads to burnout. So what I would recommend is slowly move up to the master juggler, which is where you still do complex jobs one time big projects, but you're going to standardize everything. And to do that you're going to say these are the type of pavers, these are the type of blocks that we install and nothing else. Take standard kind of materials that you know will work for 95% of people and use those. You will not have a drop off in sales like everyone wants you to believe. Your bell guard is like, oh no, you don't have a thousand options. No, you don't. Then as time goes on, I want you to move towards built to scale, which is the top right hand corner, which is simple and standardized, which is, which means you still standard. But you simplify, you're going to cut some of those services out. Ideally the ones that you know every single time you touch, you're on the project all the time. I would start with standardization because then that way you can maintain your revenue. So next year, instead of trying to like we're going to do 3 million, just be like, hey, we're just going to, we're just going to focus on standardizing what we're currently doing. I happen to believe you'll actually make more revenue and more profit doing just the standardization because you're not going to actually cut any services out yet. Then you're also going to do the same thing for equipment. The way you answer the phone, your website, everything gets simplified and standardized, then you have the opportunity to hand things off. Until you do that, if you start handing things off, you're going to create chaos. If you start handing off your operations, it's going to be chaos because no one knows how to do all the projects like you do. And if you're trying to determine which one do I hand off first? We always are going to move in the direction of I first delegate admin, then I delegate operations down, then I delegate sales.
