The Evolving Job Title of the Owner - Ep.63

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes, and you're listening to the Landscape business course podcast you might be watching on YouTube or Facebook. But a big thank you for listening. And today we're going to be talking about the four different stages you, as the business owner, need to be walking through as you scale up your business. So we're going to be here on the whiteboard, four different positions that you're going to start your business as and where you want it to get to. And. And obviously, if you're in the course, you know exactly how this progresses. As far as in the course, it's built around three years. So year number one, you are number one in the second year, you're in the second step. Third year, the third role. By the fourth year, you should be the CEO of your company. So let's go through exactly what I mean by that and what each step is all about. So number one, the first role you, as the business owner are gonna be playing, if you don't have a bunch of capital, if you don't have a bunch of money to invest in a bunch of equipment and hiring people, if you don' have a bunch of money at the beginning, then you're gonna have to start in the field. So you're gonna be the field worker. That's really just gonna be. Your role.

As the owner is really just working in the field. So you're gonna be the one out there mowing lawns, raking leaves, spreading mulch, trimming trees. You're gonna be the one also doing all the other stuff, including estimates and selling and doing office work and answering the phones and all the other stuff you have to do. But most of your time is spent out in the field working. Again, this can be avoided by if you already have a bunch of equipment or if you already have two or three employees, or if you have a bunch of money to kind of waste that first few months, having the employees having a bunch of equipment and being able to pay other people to be out in the field. So there are ways around that. Step number one, being out in the field. The thing is, you don't want to stop there. And too many business owners in our industry, the landscaping industry, they continue to stay in the field. They continue to be the one working, the one mowing the lawn, spreading the mulch, cutting the trees, pulling the weeds. And so they never scale their business. So the next three steps are where you have to progress to. And so the next role that you want to be going to, and if you're in the course you know, this is year number two is when you're going to become office manager. So this is now when you are out of the field. And it doesn't necessarily mean you're off of the job sites because you're still going to have to manage the jobs. In other words, you're going to have to get your field workers started each day. You might, by this time when you're office manager, you have a couple employees. So they're gonna be the ones out doing the mowing, they're gonna be installing the landscaping jobs. You are gonna be the office manager. So you're gonna be really focusing on everything that's not in the field. Like I said, you're still really a project manager too, because you're out and you're leading the field workers at the beginning of the day, getting them started, closing the job out with the client. However, your main responsibility is sales as well as the office side thing. So all the accounting, sending out the invoices, answering emails, all of the sending of estimates, getting in new leads, that's all you, office manager, everything else besides the field. So now year number three, you know that in the course, that's when we want you to be moving out of the office manager position. Now, on each of these positions, you need to hire the position you're moving out of. So once you go from field worker to office manager, you need to have hired some field workers. And when you move from office manager to the next level, you then need to find an office manager. So before you move out of a role, you need to find someone that can fulfill those tasks and those responsibilities before you move up to the next job title. So the next job title, year number three is when you really become the estimator. So I call it estimator, but really it's everything sales. And so this has basically you are the one that goes out to the jobs and you make the relationships with the clients, you create the job estimates. There's still a whole bunch of other stuff you're doing, things like hiring people and all the other stuff that goes along with it. But as your business grows, what you're trying to do is outsource and hire people to take over the menial tasks or the tasks that aren't best served for you as the owner to be doing to scale the business. So when we were out in the field, what you did when you moved to the office manager is you're able to outsource or hire out people. The fuel work part, then you move to the office manager. Answering the emails on a day to day basis, answering the phones, a lot of just the communication between the clients, sending the estimates, putting them together, making the emails, formatting them in your software, keeping track of your CRM, keeping track of expenses. Office manager does all of that. So when you move into the estimator role, you shouldn't be answering a lot of the emails or the phones, you shouldn't be setting up appointments, you shouldn't have to be doing your expenses. That should all be done by the office manager. So what you're trying to do is eliminate the things that you can outsource as you move down each level here. So estimators, year number three. A lot of times it takes a couple years for people to get out of this role because they got to really scale their business to hire a full time estimator, someone that's full time sales, that's their main role is to just do sales. So the compromise that I have and that I've talked with a lot of the course members is when you move out of estimator, instead of having to hire a full time estimator, what you'll want to do is get one of your field workers, that is estimator material, and train them to be a field manager, like a project manager, as well as the estimator, so they can get the field workers started in the morning, so their project manager, and they can also be the estimator. And what's really great about that is, is then when you do hire them as an estimator, when that becomes their main responsibility, then they can do the estimate, send that information to the office, the office then sends that estimate to the client. But then what's great is now the estimator can also be the project manager because you might not at first have full time work for that estimator where every day they're doing 10, 15 estimates. So what he can do is if he has three or four estimates, he can be the project manager, get the field worker started in the morning at the job he's already done the estimate for and knows the client. So he can already be the project manager, he can get the field worker started and then in the middle part of the day go do his estimates and then come back to the field workers and close out the job if it's a landscaping job. And so that's kind of a medium that a lot of people will want to use. And that's where we're really at with our business. I don't have enough questions quite yet to have a full time estimator. So what I have done is my project manager that has always been kind of my project manager for my field workers. I've moved him down into the estimator role and he can get the job started in the morning, do quite a few estimates throughout the day. I can take some of them at the beginning of the day and the end of the day. So he has the time to go back to the jobs and finish up his project management. So he's really called still project manager, but. But he's really the estimator. And as the business grows, the next step, the fourth step is where you as the business owner want to be and allow this estimator. As the company grows, the estimator become full time. And so what this is going to be is the CEO. So that's where you want to be as the business owner. You are now completely out of really day to day operations. You're focusing on hiring, you're focusing on getting new talent, you're getting focused on building up your team, training your people, developing the business, getting into new markets, getting into new services. How do you scale up your business? That's where you want to be. Now what I've kind of changed or kind of altered in this thing is I have made where my estimator is always my project manager. So even if we have three project managers, they will all need to learn how to become estimators. The reason I've done that is I want. This is very different from a lot of people. So. So a lot of landscaping companies have a sales division and then a production team. And so the sales people are the estimators, the office staff, kind of the people that don't get their hands dirty. And then you got the field workers, the production team. And what I find is there's a lot of friction between the two because the sales team sells the job and then expects the production team to live up to these standards or beat the time that they've allocated. And there's not much communication between two. Sometimes there's a lot of friction as far as between the sales people who kind of like the production people look at and think they have a cushy job and don't work hard. And then the production like the production people are like, man, if it wasn't for us, we wouldn't get any money because. And the company wouldn't go anywhere because nothing would actually get done. And the sales guys like, well, the production guys, they're just laborers. And without us doing sales, we would the company wouldn't grow at all. So I don't want that to be in my business. And so what we've done is really made the project managers who are still on the job with the field workers, they're the ones who become estimators. So they have to. What's great about this for the customer, and that's really why we did it, is the customer is gonna see the estimator and that's gonna be the same person that manages the job and is with the production team. So they get to see the same person throughout the entire project. If we're doing a landscaping, like a big landscaping job, that is our goal. And so that's kind of the steps as CEO. Like I said, you're focusing on hiring, you're focusing on cultivating the talent once you do have it. By this time, usually a CEO, you're gonna have a team of 15 plus people. Because that's just what it's gonna usually take in order to have a full time estimator that is managing 10 plus field workers. And you can have two plus office managers. And so obviously as your team grows, I mean, as your company grows, your team is gonna grow. What I see before you getting to CEO as far as just general numbers is very round numbers. It's just gonna change depending on what type of service you do, whether it be lawn care, landscaping, tree service, things like that. But what I have seen as far as averages in the course when people switch from each position is usually in order to be at CEO, you're gonna have about 10 field workers. This is just average. You have two people in the office and you're gonna have one estimate. That's really the minimum. In order to have an estimator working full time, you, you need usually about 10 people. That's like five crews of two. That will keep an estimator really busy. And then usually this is right when you'll probably need to. If you're using my model, where I have a project manager that also does estimating, you're probably gonna need two guys here because they're gonna be managing five crews. And so like I said, depending if you're doing a bunch of landscaping jobs, you're gonna need a project manager. And if there's five crews, it's gonna be tough for one guy to do that and estimating. But in general, if you're not using my model that we use where we go from the, where the estimator carries the job right through the end, with the project management managing the job as well, then you'll probably have your project manager wrapped up in this 10 person. You'd have like eight people, eight field staff, 10 field staff. But two of them would be your project managers. And so this is kind of what we see. The whole objective, really the reason I made this video is that you want to be progressing. You don't want to stay stale at any one of these different stages. Most landscapers get stuck at number one. They are always in the field, they're out doing the work. Like I make it very clear to my guys in our team meeting, it's not that I don't want to work. I actually really do enjoy working sometimes out in the field. It just clears my mind and like gets me out of the office and I like it a lot. However, they know that if I'm out doing number one activities when I should be doing number four activities, they know the business isn't growing, we aren't moving towards our objectives of franchising and things like that. If I'm out doing the field worker, they know that if I'm answering emails and I'm answering the phone, I'm not doing level four activities. I would continually ask yourself every single activity you do throughout the day, what level of activity you are, Are you a level one, a level two, a level three or a level four? And as your business grows, obviously you can't be doing level four all the time. If you, if you have two employees, you're going to have to do these other things. But continually ask yourself, what level are you at? And if you're always saying level one, you need to continually, how do you get more sales so you can hire more people and get fuel workers so you can become, move into the office manager position. And then how do you continue to get more fuel workers? Get five, six guys so that you can hire an office manager and move into just sales. When you make this Jump from Level 2 to Level 3, this is the biggest differentiator for your business. There's a big speed bump going from field manager to office manager. A lot of people get hung up there. But the money, the money is made when you make the transition from office manager to estimator. For one reason, this one word right here, sales. When you start focusing on being the estimator within your business and that's your main role, your main responsibility is sales. And my main role is, you know, last year was how do I keep the pipeline full and keep the leads coming in, generating estimates, making the sale, that was like my main job. I've moved into this position now and you know, because we have an estimator and a project manager and all of that. So I'm really moving into this right now as far as how do we do business development. We're franchising the company. I want to be. I'm out of day to day operations a lot more like literally I could just disappear if I needed to for a few weeks to go to a conference and things like that. Because I'm in the CEO position, I. I'm not in the day to day operations of the business. So stages one through three is day to day operations. Level four is where you're gonna be at when you have 15 plus people usually and where you want to be to really scale up your business. That being said, if you don't want to manage 15 people, then there's a happy medium. You can become an office manager, run a crew of four or five guys and run a business that makes $500,000 a year. That's perfectly possible. The key is here. If you want to scale, if you want to get to $100,000 in monthly revenue like we talk about in the course, these are the steps you're going to have to follow to get to the CEO level. And I just consistently ask yourself what level of work are you doing? A level one, a level two, a level three or level four. And constantly be trying to upgrade to the higher level. And then make sure that your people know that, that the higher. If you're doing stuff up down here at level one activities and you need to be at level four, they need to realize that you are really becoming a big speed bump for the business's growth if you're constantly doing stuff up here. So get your people on the same page and make sure that your people in this role, for instance estimator, knows that if they're out in the field too much and actually pushing things around and mowing lawns, it's probably not the best use of their time. It's an opportunity cost. They could be go out and getting more sales. So figuring this out, moving people on your team is really important. But you as the business owner, your role within the company has to progress if you want your company to scale. My name is Mike Andes with landscapebusinesscourse.com if you haven't already, check it out. Landscapebusinesscourse.com thank you so much and we'll see you next time.