why starting a lawn business is a HORRIBLE idea!

Starting to get gray hair just thinking about this.

All right, all right. So shots have been fired. And when someone comes against your industry and says that people should not start a lawn care and landscaping business, I have to say something. So I'm not going to call it who this was exactly, because it was a few years ago that they wrote this. And so maybe they've changed their mind. But the article's name is 5 ugly reasons not to Start a Lawn Maintenance Business. So I'm going to go through this today. I'm going to go over the five things that this author suggests that you should not start a lawn care business with. And yeah, let's just go through it. So the first one is competition. The author says that there are plenty of lawn care businesses out there and competition is most areas is competition in most areas is huge. And there's well established businesses. Okay, so this is the deal. Every great business started in a very competitive industry. Even the ones that you think are like super, super, technologically advanced and innovative, like Tesla, Apple. All these industries that like, have been disrupted by these companies started in industries where there were dozens, if not hundreds of alternative options. Where when you start, almost never do you have an advantage. There's always movers in the market. And if you're the first one ever to think of something, guess what? Those don't usually succeed. It's the ones who start in a crowded market, dominate that market, and then grow and innovate inside of that market to become industry leaders. Competition is something you should run towards when you're starting a business. When you look at all the flashy new startups in terms of like the new app, the rate of success of the new app that's gonna change the world is so minuscule. There are literally millions and millions of apps on the app stor and all of us have maybe what, 50 or 60 in our phone. And they're mostly the same ones because guess what? Most people don't win the brightest, flashiest new app. They don't. And so competition is something that's good. If your thing is so revolutionary and so new, I honestly don't think it's going to do very well. Start in a market where, you know, there's demand. Great. Lots of competition mean there's lots of demand for the services. Therefore there needs to be lots of competition to supply the demand. I like competitive marketplaces. I like to start there because I know there's demand for my product. And then I like to focus on how do I serve the customer better to the Point where I can innovate and make a better customer experience so they come to me instead of the competition. All right. The second reason why you should not start a lawn care business is because it's financial risk. Starting a lawn maintenance business is a huge financial risk. You need to buy equipment, purchase insurance, and you need to form a legal business.

You have to start an LLC and get insurance. Yeah, it's called starting a legal business. Anyone in their right mind has to buy some sort of equipment. I don't care if it's a mop, I don't care if it is squeegee. I don't care if it's a lawnmower. I don't care if it's shearers. I don't care if you start in a tech business. Like, you gotta have some startup capital. You gotta put something at risk. And to say that, you know, it's very difficult because you have to purchase insurance and you need to form a legal business, what other business would you start that you don't start a legal business? It's just like, there's only, you know, what are you gonna do? Do pot and drugs on the street? Like, yeah, you don't need a legal business. Probably not the best option for you, though. Goodness gracious. That all can cost quite a bit and might even require to take out a loan or borrow money elsewhere. Like, honestly, lawn care maintenance has one of the lowest barriers to entry, and that's why there's so many competitors, over 600,000 landscapers in the United States. And it's because it's easy to get started. For a few thousand dollars, you can be up and running, and that leads to a lot of competition. But it also leads to an awesome opportunity to get to profitability within a year or two, or if you grow slower. Whereas there are businesses that spend 5, 10, 15, 20 years in unprofitable territory before they become profitable, because they're extremely, extremely capital intensive. Amazon was not profitable for 10, 15 years prior to ever making a single dollar in profit. So we should not start Amazon because we would have to start a legal business and we'd have to get insurance. What would we do if people drop off packages at the wrong house and then people steal the packages? This is business. There's risks. There's absolutely risk to capital. There's risk legally. And that is why capitalism works, is because the free market gets in and figures out ways to do things better. And yes, it's going to require risk to innovate. I'm not going to Read the rest of the financial risk. When it's a joke. If a customer doesn't pay you, it might mean that you're going to miss your personal financial. Like seriously, you're the business owner. Profit at the end of the day is going to you if a customer doesn't pay. Yeah, you're right. You're not going to be able to pay your personal bills. If you have a retail store and some someone's coming and steals from you, guess what, you're gonna lose money. It's called risk. If you're a business owner, you're going to have to put risk. Capital at risk is what leads to outsized returns. If you're going to just want average returns in the stock market, you're going to put into an index fund, get 4, 5, 6, 7%, maybe a well diversified portfolio of bonds and real estate and things like that. Seven, 8% a year. If you want to have outsized returns on your capital, you're going to have to put it at risk. All right, let's move on. Next one. Sorry to get gray hair just thinking about this. All right, this is hilarious. Look at this. Just the caption on this thing. I'm going to show it to you. Extreme stress. And you can see the little video here of this cat. Like it's just hilarious. Starting a law maintenance business can be extremely stressful. You have to deal with bad customers, difficult employees, legal barriers and everything else that comes with the territory. We're going into battle because we are starting a long care business. The stress that comes with owning your own business can far exceed a regular day job. Well then yeah, of course, but my goodness, like being your own boss sounds nice, but in reality your customers are your boss. Yeah, that's true for every single industry. If you don't make the customers happy and they don't buy from you, you don't make any money and you go out of business. They determine your pay, your hours and your livelihood. Mercy. Okay, let's move on. Fourth one. Time consuming. If in case you think I'm making this up, this is an actual article that someone wrote and spent their good time, their day time, their limited time on this earth was spent writing this article. Next one is time consuming. Starting a long care business is time consuming. If you're starting on your own, you wear a thousand different hats. Okay, news flash. If you start any business by yourself, you are going to wear a thousand hats. You're going to do marketing, you have to do sales, you're going to do administrative, you're going to have to perform the work itself. You're going to have to do marketing and and figure out web design. You're going to have to figure out how to do design of your print marketing material. It's unending. All right, so if you think it was going to be easy, then you should just go get a job. It's going to be time consuming. Mercy, here we go. Let's keep writing before I lose all my brain cells, my IQ drops to negatively eats into a whole lot of your day. Like this is the reality of it. And if you don't believe these things, then you're not going to stick around in entrepreneurship very long. You're going to eventually hit a recession and you're going to have a bad day. You're going to have a bad day. You have to work longer than 9 to 5 and you're probably going to quit a regular 9 to 5 is not going to cut it. If you're just starting out, you essentially live in your business in the first few months. And if you make it through the first few seasons, there are busy seasons that require seemingly round the clock attention. So, so long vacations, goodbye weekends, forget about breaks. To say this is about lawn care maintenance, it's basically just about entrepreneurship. And honestly, all these things are really up to you. The coolest thing about having your own business is the fact that you get to determine your rate of growth and you get to determine how many hours you work. If you don't want to work on weekends and if you want to have long vacations, you can. It probably is just going to lead to a slightly less growing business and potentially slightly less profitable business. And you might take you longer to get to profitability. It might take you longer to get employees that want to stick around if you're taking a month long vacation. But eventually you can figure it out. All right. Failure rate is high. This is the fifth one in case you you stuck with me for the past eight minutes listening to this craziness. Failure rate is high. You should not start a long care business because failure rate is high. And here they take the stat that was said by Forbes. 80% of businesses fail within their first 18 months. Read that again. The failure rate of starting your own business is incredibly high. Why is your lawn care business going to be the one out of the five small businesses that actually make it past half a year? Past a year and a half? Even if you feel you have the know how and skills to run a business, the statistics are. So we should all just go to the average. We should all just focus on what everyone else is doing. We should all go to high school, then we should go to college, go into massive amount of debt. Then we should just wait until we're in our 40s to buy a house, wait until we're in our 50s to start thinking about retirement, Wait until we're in our 60s to get our first real estate property. We should wait until we're in our 70s before ever we own a business. Like it's, it's just hurting my head. Oh yeah. If you think, if I think of all those things, you probably shouldn't start your own business, but you think about starting a long care business. My opinion, it's like every other business. It's stressful, it's very hard to ramp up. You're going to wear a million different hats. You're going to work crazy hours. If you want to grow fast and at the end of the day you choose to do it because you want to have the flexibility and you're willing to put in the work for 5, 10 years in order to build something that's going to build generational wealth and provide for you and your family for 40, 50, 60 years. You want to create jobs in your local community. You want to be able to create wealth that isn't taxed at 30 and 40% by the government. You want to create a future for your family to be able to work inside the business and for, for. To change what potentially was poverty in your family for your family family. Your, your brothers, your sisters, your, your, your, your family. Like. All right, gonna close the video out. Watch this video over here. If you want to hear about another cool video, hopefully not as depressing and demoralizing as this one, hopefully more encouraging, just click it.

Sam.