Why 90% of Home Service Businesses Quit Before $1M

I was thinking this morning about some of the moments I wanted to quit. I started college when I was really young. I was 13 years old. But my parents never pushed me to go to college. And they did they get a lot of credit for that. They never pushed me. But they also made it very clear to me that if I wanted to take time off or travel or do anything, like, I did not need to go to college. They never told me that's what I had to do. I still remember my dad taking me to Woods Coffee locally and said, like, hey, I know your plan is start. You can do whatever you want. We are not pushing you to do this whole starting college at 13 thing. And at that time I had already gone to, like, the president's office and gotten like a little bit of a. An interview. They want to make sure I was mature enough. My mom went with me. I was 13. Like, goodness, I'm glad they made sure, like someone half decent. In my second year at Western Washington University, I was in a class with Mr. Bauer. So he was probably early 70s. And there's a class, it was an elective, and we had. I had to do it to fulfill my elective requirements. And so it was very, like, lots of group discussions and projects, et cetera. And so one time we were in the computer lab and at the end he's like, hey, can I talk to you? I'm like, yeah, sure, absolutely. So I wait a little bit. I still remember that in the corner in the computer lab. He's sitting in front of me and he's like, hey, I really respect, like, how much effort you pour in and I see how much you're working. And he saw how much I could just apply myself to becoming a doctor. And he knew that because of the discussions. We had talked about me becoming a surgeon, and I had talked about some of the things that I went through being younger, trying to do that. And so I remember him sitting down like, hey, I don't. I don't think it's worth it. I think you're going to regret this one day. You went through all these reasons why in terms of, like, relationship, how, like, I wasn't. There was no one there my age. So, like, I would be stunted from a social perspective and how I was giving up things I enjoyed, like golf, for something that, like, I didn't even know if I loved it. All I thought about, all I watched on YouTube was, like, surgeries and all that sort of thing. This is my life. And he's basically telling me, like, hey, I think you're going to regret going after this goal. I just remember thinking like, man, I have no evidences to prove him wrong. I think he's wrong. In those moments, you still doubt yourself. Like, okay, someone who's wiser, older than me, has way more experience than me, and someone I look up to is telling me I should not do this and I'm going to regret it. Like the fear, the fear that you're making the wrong decision can actually cause you want to quit because it's risk. As soon as I went against his, quote, wishes or what he recommended I do, there is risk that I will be wrong. And furthermore, because someone else told me I'm going to regret it, you start to rehash and rethink that every single time you hit a low moment. And so if it's been a family member or a spouse or someone else tell you you're gon to fail, or someone else like a competitor. I still remember the first day I went to this new shop location and one of our competitors rolled up and said, good luck, you'll never make it. Like, those things play over in your head and in your low moments, you start to realize that maybe, maybe they're right. So I started GUSA Lawn Care. Like, a year into it, we'd started to grow quite a bit. I had to ask my brother for a loan because, like, we could not make payroll. Everything was going wrong on this project. Completely over our skis in terms of skill and experience required to do this work. And again, in that moment, it's like, maybe Mr. Bauer was right. What am I doing doing, like, here I had spent four or five years in school now, not using any of that, going at night to get my mba, which has nothing to do with the stuff I was doing earlier in terms of medicine. And I'm starting this lawn care business and it's not working. And so again, you're like, you have so much evidence as to why you have made the wrong decision. And making and quitting seems like the most logical thing to do. Fast forward another year. I'm now in a workplace accident. My hoodie gets caught in the PTO of a dump truck because I don't have systems. I'm out in the field with the crew. I'm. I'm hustling material between jobs. I get caught. The PTO wraps around my hoodie, grabs me up into the pto. My bicep gets punctured. You can kind of see the scar a little bit. Still goes underneath here from the gearbox. Going into my bicep and preventing me from just spinning out. In the pto, they thought I had broke my neck. I couldn't move. I'm in this MRI machine and trust me, MRI machines get a little eerie. It's like dead quiet. You're moving like super slow. I remember in the MRI machine just thinking, like, maybe Mr. Bauer was right. Like, this is. What am I doing. I spent four or five years in school. I've now spent two, two and a half, maybe almost three years trying to build this. This law Augusta lawn care thing. Because I owned, I needed to make money. The business couldn't run without me. I'm literally FaceTiming my crew from the hospital bed. I was making all sorts of mistakes and there was no evidence whatsoever as to why I should continue down this path. I remember thinking, everything I've learned in my MBA class, I have not applied to my laundry business. All these systems and procedures and how things are supposed to work as a business, literally. A few. When landscapebusinesscourse.com started, it's a free course. And you can see in the first few videos if you watch on there, you can see some lacerations along, like, my neck. Like, that's why I can't grow a beard because of scars. Because that was literally three to four weeks after the accident. But back then it was very much a matter of like, I am changing these because I have learned this in school and I know I'm doing this wrong and my business stinks as is. And so I was trying to make changes in the business and then just document them. And that's what landscape business course became. Because I still remember sitting inside my bed while I was healing up from after the after the hospital and searching landscape business course and nothing really good showing up. I determined that day that the only thing that was going to keep me going and stay applied to this long care thing was trying to keep the older version of me out of what happened to me, which is underneath the dump truck getting wiped out, having no systems in the business, having an unprofitable business. And if I would have had dependence, I would have been wiped out like bankrupt. In the next 16 months, I took the business, implemented pay for performance estimate videos system after system, like scripts, cut out services. We simplified things and the next year did $280,000 in distributions from that location. I say all of that to say that was not the last time I wanted to quit. Last year, 2024, I took on Copilot CRM and started it because I really Feel like there needs to be someone a little more centered in the industry and knowing what business owners are going through. I'm connected with them every single day through Augusta Lawn Care, through the turnarounds, and I have a pretty good pulse of what is required from software to solve their problems and not just tell them here's your numbers, but also here's what to do about it. And so I wanted to take the coaching that I do on the turnaround show and in the turnaround book and just turn it into software. I actually tell you what to do based upon the numbers that I see inside your CRM using software. It's the best way to scale the coaching. And so I wanted to do that. But to get to that level, I knew is going to take 12 to 24 months of just infrastructure and building out a team, building out engineering, building out all of this to be able to get that, that, that's, be able to make that happen. But what I didn't, didn't anticipate was the amount of pain it would happen in bugh of 2024. So the first six months the software just kept crashing. I remember just thinking again, like, why am I doing this to myself? I had a good thing going with Augusta. We had just became profitable in 2023 with the franchise because the first few years you're growing so much and you're just adding infrastructure and offices and hiring people and you're buying all sorts of infrastructure to support the owners inside of Augusta. We become profitable and then immediately I go get copilot to like add on to it and solve that pain, but also just bring in tons of pain right when like things could have gotten a lot easier. All these doubts, all this evidence as to why I should quit, everything I had built up in terms of goodwill with the audience getting flushed down the toilet because of the stuff that I was doing on the code base that I was not equipped for, I didn't have the team for. And so all of 2024 was like solving that problem, however, on the back and you just want to quit. And I said all of that rambling for about 15 minutes. And I only said those things for you to realize the feeling that you're having right now are the reason why 90% of people will not stay in business for 10 years and build a million dollar business. Your competition will quit in home services. Very few of your competitors will get sold, Very few of them will get acquired. Very few of them will merge or become some other big thing. The vast majority of them will Quit when times get tough. The most sound way, the most dependent way to just win in home services is just outlast your competition and simply stay in business long enough for the rest of your competitors to just melt away. Furthermore, if you're like, well, home services is so difficult. Every single industry is difficult. And what you look to, whether across in other home services or in completely different industries like, man, if I could just do real estate, it'd be so much easier, so much more passive than all of those. And all of those are hard. All of them are hard. And all of them I've wanted to quit. Like when Covid came. The gym takes a very, very passive stream of income that I able to spend hardly any time. And there's money printing all of a sudden for three months, well, really six months, the state comes in and says, if you don't lock those doors, we're going to take you to jail. And guess what? I had to still pay rent. Every business has its form and shade and flavor of hard. The grass will always look greener on the other side. Quitting is a byproduct of feeling like it is more logical for me to stop doing this than keep incurring the pain. That is physical pain. That is physical stress. That is psychological pain. Psychological stress in your relationships, it starts to get threadbare. Cause now you're working seven, eight o' clock every single night, you don't see your family, you're exhausted, you're starting to physically give out because of day after day after day after day of pain. And being outside, especially if you're in a smaller business and you're out doing the work and in the field physically, you start to break down. And then you're not in a right place emotionally to even support a spouse or your family or your dependents or your children. And it just starts to feel like everything is falling apart. Makes all logical sense as to why you should quit. And you're like, what are you going to tell us to keep us in the game? And the answer to that, I'm not going to tell you anything. This is a feature of entrepreneurship. This is not a bug. This is part of what happens to every person that stays in the game. And the 90% of people, they quit right now. What you're feeling right now is what caused the 90% to give up. And so in order to have the 1% life that you want to have, just realize you are asking for what such a small percentage of the population can do. And if, if that is the case, you will have to endure where the other 99% gave up and quit. If you grow a business, it will be painful at every single stage. Whether you're going from 100,000 to 300,000 or 300,000 to a million or a million to 10 million, at every stage of business, it will be hard. I think if you're watching this type of video, I do believe that you will go against what logically makes sense in the moment. You will rally the people around you that you need to support you. And that is a very small group. You don't need a lot of people cheering you on. You don't need friends and family and every single competitor and all of your classmates telling you that this is what you should be doing. You don't. You just need yourself. And if as long as you convince yourself that the short term pain you're feeling, the stress and anxiety you're feeling today, you are willing to pay that cost in order to have the achievement and the goal that you attain, to have it is worth it and you will make it through. And so I do not try to pump people up. I did not try to tell them that you got this. And here's the affirmations you say in your brain, this is a feature of entrepreneurship. This is why it's hard. This is why getting a 9 to 5 seems like an easier option. And logically makes a lot of sense. You're like, man, it makes so much less. But I would have my weekends, I would be able to actually have my relationship, I'd be actually able to get a girlfriend, I'd be able to do these things. This is a feature of entrepreneurship. And if you're going to have the goals that 1% of people want to have, you have to endure what 99% of people give up on.