This Secret Will MAKE or BREAK Your Lawn Care Business! [Fighting Mental Fatigue]

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes. And today I'm going to be sharing with you the differentiating factor, I believe, between success and failure in the lawn care industry. And when I say success, it could be big business, it could be really profitable business. It doesn't have to be necessarily big though. It could be profitable. When I talk about failure, I'm talking about someone that might be in the business for five, 10 years and then eventually just give up because they can't make any profit or they stay small forever and, and they're wanting to grow, but they never can. I'm gonna talk about the differentiating factor that I feel is the difference maker if you wanna become ultra profitable or big versus failing and staying small forever. Alright? And this is really, I feel mostly a psychological game. I think business is 90% psychological, 10% numbers, and you could probably throw a bunch of other stuff like luck and stuff like that. But a lot of it has to do with psychology and mental fortitude to get through all the hurdles and the issues and the problem, the struggles and the depression that comes with being a business owner. And if anyone ever tells you that they don't have low moments or that they doubt themselves or like they either are lying or they're basically the ironman, like the most incredible entrepreneur ever. Because for most of us, including myself, this is kind of what the entrepreneur journey looks like, right? You kind of have ups and downs, you kind of have some good days, bad days and dips and lows and ups and ups. And then it comes down.

Roller coaster of being an entrepreneur, right? And you start out, let's go, you're super excited, then you might get your first damage case, you break someone's window and you hit a top, right? And for some of you, like, man, this is like the stock market. So I'm gonna kinda make this analogy of the stock market.

When it comes to the stock market, what are you trying to do? You're trying to capture the highs and sell here, and you're trying to hit the lows and buy here, okay? So if we take that same analogy when we look at entrepreneurship and running our lawn care landscaping businesses, this is what I wanna look, and that is something I mentioned before, and that is we want to cut out the lows and the highs and try our very best to reduce the volatility of our mental state. And for some of you, like I'm checking out, this is not lawn care landscaping. What kind of truck I should buy, what type of lawn care that doesn't move the needle I'm telling you today, I promised you I would give you the differentiating factor between successful and unsuccessful landscapers. This is it. This will not get a lot of views, but this is the differentiating factor and that is the person that can figure out somehow to reduce these high highs and reduce the low lows. So my goal from a mental state when I'm running my business is when I'm in full ecstasy. Everything is going amazing, everything is going fantastic. I'm on top of the world. I want that to actually be lower, alright. And then when I hit the really, really low lows, I don't want those to be as low. So instead of this trajectory, which is a lot of volatility, which is the word used in the stock market to mean that there's a and downs in the market. I don't want volatility in my mental state. I feel it's detrimental to growing a successful business. It's detrimental to being a great leader, it's detrimental to making positive changes in the business. It's detrimental to making sound decisions at pivotal moments in the business when you are constantly up and down. One day everything is great, the next day an employee leaves and walks off the job and you're just completely in the dumps. You think the business is going to be destroyed. You have one really great month, you do $200,000 in revenue, the next month you have a bunch of custom leave a pandemic hits, whatever it might be, and now you're at $20,000 the next month. And literally you've hit a low. And the decision is like, well, how do you deal with that mentally? Because for most of us financially, these ups and downs aren't actually moving the needle very much. Most of us, our financials are somewhat like this.

But our mental state is all over the place. And that's why strictly looking at only the numbers in a business can actually hide a lot of the flaws or the potential downfall for the business own is the fact that financials actually don't move as much as you think. What does move a lot is our mental state. Based upon a customer leaving a bad review, based upon employees not showing up or calling out sick two minutes before they were supposed to show up for work because one of the employees left a bunch of grass in the chute of your bagger and all of a sudden now it's broken. Now you're gonna pay an extra $800 to buy a new one. An employee backs into someone while they're fueling up for gas. These are the mental highs and lows, the psychological problems that we as business owners have to deal with is all of this chaos. So my question to you is, how can you reduce the highs and increase the lows? So how can I, when I'm coming up this journey, instead of going all the way to the top here and being just, like, so crazy happy, how can I reduce that a little bit? How can I curb all of my enthusiasm and joy and just, like, absolute. Just everything is amazing. And I love business ownership, and I would never want to be an employee. How can I curb that slightly? And then I feel like if you can do that, when you come down, you won't go as low. I am never going to say that your life as an entrepreneur is going to be linear. It will never be that way. There will always be ups and downs. But my goal is to try to reduce the highs and increase the lows. So what that means is when everything's going well, you have to ask yourself, okay, so if this happened every single day, this is kind of how I mentally make this happen. If this happened every single day for the next hundred days, how would I feel? Now, what that does is it works both ways. Because if I'm doing really good, I just close the deal of my life, right? Or maybe, for example, for me, if I close, like, two or three franchisees in a week, that's awesome, right? A big win for me. But what I ask myself is, if I did this every single week for the next hundred weeks, would I be thrilled? Super over? No. It just become commonplace. And by doing that, some people are gonna call you boring because you're not gonna take the lift victory lap. You're not gonna do a celebratory dinner because you sold two or three franchises. Or in your case, maybe close a big client, your biggest client ever. Or you got two or three really great employees, and now you're just like, this is awesome. There is no victory lap. There is no. Everything's great. Cause when you start getting a victory lap, you're up here, okay? You're at the top of the mountain. And again, we're trying to reduce volatility, and we're trying to keep ourselves from being mentally unstable. Going up and down, up and down. What happens, though, when you are boring and you try not to keep yourself from going too high? What happens is when you hit a really hard time, those three employees that you just hired and thought were so great leave. They just walk off the job. And now you're stuck with a whole bunch of work that can't get done, or that customer, you just landed, a massive deal, leaves, or in my case, a franchisee starts to do poorly because they get sick or they financially start having issues, all of that pressure that comes on me, that can be really, really defeating and really low. But you ask yourself the same question, and that is, if this happened every single day for the next hundred days, what would I be feeling like? And you know what? It wouldn't be a big deal. Because if every single day you could expect that two or three employees would leave, that a customer, your biggest customer, was gonna leave, that there were people that were gonna let you down, that you were gonna have damage cases and yell, if it happened for 100 days, it'd become completely normal. And so I think this is a great question to ask yourself. When you have a really tough customer, a really hard day, when an employer treats you completely wrong, or just saying weird stuff to you or walks off the job and leaves, you gotta ask yourself, if this happened 100 times in a row every single day, how would I feel? You just take it in stride like, oh, guess that just happened. That's fine. Okay, let' you know what you would do. You'd create a strategy around hiring two people a day instead of just hiring one. Because you already know that you're going to lose one person every single day. If I know that I am going to have customers walk away and they're going to leave me, and I knew that for the next hundred days they're going to leave me every single day. And I started to depend on that. I wouldn't be so disappointed. I wouldn't come down into depression if I just expected that there was going to be one bad customer view every single day for the next hundred days. When I got on day 57, it's not gonna be a big deal. I'm not gonna go way low because of that one negative one star review on Google or Facebook or whatever. But what you can do is you start to strategically think about what can I do to offset the down. Cause if I can plan out, okay, 100 days, I'm gonna get a one star review every single day. Okay, I've gotta figure out now how I can get five, five stars every single day. And here's how I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna create an Automation to get 5 star reviews from my customers. I'm gonna call my customers, ask them to review my friends, family and previous customers I had from five years ago and ask them to leave us a review and you start thinking creatively to actually figure out the solution to the problem. And what does that do? That immediately will keep you from going too low. Alright, so if a customer leaves, guess what? I've got to figure out how I'm going to. It can be really hard. You lost your best customer, biggest customer or customer you've had for a long time, and, and you gotta ask yourself, okay, if I lost a customer like that every single day for the next 100 days, would it be a big deal to me? No, it wouldn't. What you would start thinking about though is okay, well how can I get 2 more customers per day and actually in 100 days be 100 net positive. Alright? This is how you wanna think about your entrepreneurial journey. This is how you wanna think about disappointments. You wanna think about when you close a big deal. I see it all the time in the landscaping industry and that is people get a big, big, big project, you know, $40,000 job, like, let's go, I'm gonna make 20 grand profit on this job. And you know they're up here, right? They get started like we're gonna crush it. Then bad things happen. Equipment breaks down. Material wasn't as, you know, they need way more material than it was quoted. The customer has a work change order. They changed their mind on stuff. They expected something completely different that was not in the estimate. And all of a sudden you start going down, down, down. And then all of a sudden an employee walks off the job because they're defeated and they're tired of working long hours. You can hit really, really, really, really low. And I see this all the time. But the bottom line I see consistently in business is the people who win are the ones that stay fighting. They're the ones who stay in the game. It's not about winning the game. Business is not a start. Stop. Oh, that mentality is like day trading. Like, good day, bad day, good day, bad day. Up, down, green, red, green, buy, sell. Business isn't like that. You win in business if you just stay in the game. If you can just keep going, you'll be fine. But what keeps people from going on is when they hit these lows, this is where they want to tap out. So the same way in business is in stocks. And that is when you're high, sell it off, like cash it in. This is great, this is awesome. But I'm going to take my money off the table in the stock market on the down. When you're really low, that's the time to buy in. I'M so committed to this business. I know I'm low, but I'm confident this can happen. And if this happened 100 days in a row, I. I can dominate this. That's the mentality that will keep you much more level and stable. And if you can stay mentally stable in the game of entrepreneurship, you will win. So this will not get a lot of views, but this is the differentiating factor between the people who win in 10, 20 years and the people who give up after two, three and five years. Unlike Andes. We'll see you tomorrow.