Would Your Business Fail if the Economy Tanked? - Ep.53

Hey, everyone, this is Mike Candies and you are listening to the Landscape Business course podcast. And as always, I'm today and we are going to deliver some value. Before we jump in, today's question, which is how to make your business anti fragile. I want to make sure that everyone has signed up for the webinar. On December 21, December 21, 11:00am Pacific Time, we're going to be having the best webinar that any landscape business owner can attend. It's 100% free. There's absolutely no charge. You want to sign up? I've added a whole bunch of more material to this webinar, including some of the stuff we're talking about today as well as we're going to be, I'm going to be sending everyone a workbook. So essentially, probably either 24 hours or 36 hours before the webinar starts you, if you've signed up, you will get a PDF, which is a workbook, which we will print out and bring to the webinar and we will work your way through that. Of course, we're gonna be talking about marketing, we're gonna be talking about creating your budget as well as your plan and strategy for 2018. We're gonna be talking about what we're talking about today on the episode which is becoming antifragile. And in the workbook, it's gonna essentially help you answer certain questions to get to what parts of your business you can make anti fragile for next year. We're gonna be talking about what aspects of your business you need to delegate and get out of the field. So, like this workbook I've created, actually created today, and I've been working on it most of the day to day, trying to perfect it, trying to get it to where you start at the top with the webinar, we work our way through this thing. By the end of this webinar, I don't want you just to have a bunch of good ideas even. I want you to have things that you've written down, steps, things that you need to do, and really a game plan for 2018. That's what I'm looking for. I'm not looking to just give a video edition of the podcast. That's absolutely not what's happening. So one to two days before everyone that has signed up and is going to sign up, we'll be receiving that packet. I'm guessing it's been about five or six pages and it's going to. You'll need to print that off if you've already Signed up. You definitely want to print that off, bring it to the webinar, bring a pencil and an eraser because we're gonna be working through that packet at certain junctions of the webinar. I'm not 100% sure how that long that webinar is gonna go. I will definitely be taking a good solid 45 minutes as far as walking through that packet and all of that. Probably more like an hour. And then also giving our side of what our 2018 marketing plan is looking like and how we kind of create our strategy for marketing the year in advance. But then I'm gonna open up for questions. So it could be another hour. Usually that's kind of a 50, 50 split as far as how long I talk versus questions, Q& A. And so in that live environment, you'll be able to ask questions and I'll be able to answer those. Right now there's about a hundred people signed up for that and usually, you know, some people don't show up unfortunately to live events. But I'm looking, the more people can get in there, the better. It'd be a lot of fun. And so definitely, definitely, definitely want to sign up. It's very, very, very easy. Always all you have to do is text. Then text the number 44222. That's 44222 and just type one word in landscape business. No space in between landscape business. One word to 44222. Text message. That SMS. Old fashioned, you know, I know it's like a telegram basically, but nothing fancy, you know, just pull out your phone, send a text message to 44222 and one word. Landscape business. It's going to ask for your email. And that's the email that we will send the registration and link to get into the webinar that you'll need that. And that's also the email I'll be sending that packet to that we will be working through on that webinar. I definitely believe that if you're listening to this show and you have a landscaping business, this is gonna be a game changer for you. I was actually talking today, I was working on the packet at the office at Augusta Lawn Care, my landscaping business. And I was talking to my office manager for the Blaine location and I said this is gonna be a game changer for some people that actually do sign up for this webinar. And it's things that we've done for a long time I kinda take for granted as far as planning the year before and doing your budget and Creating a strategy and figuring out what are the things you need to work on. I kind of take it for granted, but I'm like, I know that this can be a game changer for you. So if at all possible, if at all possible, I'd love to see you on 21 December 2017, 11am Pacific Time. Just sign up by going using that phone of yours for something good, sending a text message to 44222 and just one word, landscape business. It'll sign you up and we're gonna be talking about some really, really good stuff. And one of the things we're gonna be talking about.

On that webinar, going over in that workbook for you to actually create actionable steps on, is making your business antifragile. So I talked about this on Business Bootcamp Podcast. So hopefully no one's turned me off already once seeing the title of this show because I wanted to make it very direct for us as landscapers and not just the generic industries that listen to Business Bootcamp Podcast. This podcast, landscape Business Just cause people have asked me this before. Landscape Business Course Podcast. The listenership here is about 20% of what business Bootcamp Podcast is. That's why in the Business Bootcamp podcast I have sponsors and people from all sorts of industries ask questions and things. It's a much larger scope, a lot more people, different industries, different businesses. Landscape Business Course and this podcast that we're on now, like I said, it's about 20% of the other listenership. However, this is really what I feel is what I'm really, really good at. This industry that I've figured out and how to create a business and create a scalable company that makes real good profit margins of 20 plus. And so.

That'S why I wanted to make this show for not just the generic industries, but all really just 100% focused on landscaping. So how do you make your business antifragile? What do I mean if you haven't listened to that episode on Business Bootcamp Podcast, what I mean is when certain things come up, let's say you get sick, all of a sudden it's unexpected, unforeseen events happen. Things like a tsunami or a hurricane or a tornado, or you get sick and end up in the hospital for a year. Or.

It could be as small as something like an unexpected event. Like the truck, the one truck that you have in your fleet, if you're a one man crew, it dies, the engine goes out, transmission goes out. Things that are unforeseen, things that happen no one knew they were coming. For instance, like an economy collapse, all of a sudden an economy just tanks. That's an event, an unforeseen event that happens. If your business is fragile in that moment, when a big something happens, some shift in the economy, some shift in your health, some shift in your family.

Equipment breaks, something financially in the business happens. If your business is fragile in that moment, you will break. We saw it happen in 2006, 2007, 2008. Too many companies were overextended, way too much leverage and too much debt. And what happened is the economy fell apart, the housing bubble popped. And in our industry, we rely a lot on the housing industry. We course correlate a lot with that. And so when the housing market went to bust and the economy fell out of the bottom, all of a sudden people that had fragile companies, they were broken. And we saw companies go out of business, landscapers were hit very, very hard. As far as people going out of business that had been in business for years and all of a sudden now were bankrupt and couldn't pay their employees and basically had to go out of business, their companies were fragile because they had built them in such a way where it depended on certain things within the business. Now, the reason I keep that so vague is your company can become fragile in a whole lot of different areas. It can become. People come fragile from the. People can become fragile from an economic standpoint. And then I wanna look specifically, especially in the webinar in marketing. Are you fragile in the way that you're marketing? And what I mean by that is what are you covering the downside? Are you covering what could go wrong? If there was some cataclysmic event to the economy, a natural disaster to your health, would your business be able to stand the test of time and be able to get through it without breaking apart? So when we talk about becoming antifragile, we're looking at how do we make our company at those weak points, at the points that are fragile, how do we get, compensate, strengthen, keep those places guarded and secured so if something does happen, you don't get caught with your pants down and you don't get, you know, your business doesn't fall apart, you are anti fragile, you are guarded against those events that might happen. So a couple examples in our industry that I find most prevalent that make companies fragile and how you can become antifragile in those areas. The number one way in our industry is that people are making. People are really the problem. And what I mean by people is really the owner, the owner becomes the fragile aspect of the business because they have become the bottleneck within the company. In other words, it might be that you don't have any employees and that's definitely. If something ever happened to you health wise, your business is gone. The business is definitely fragile and you need to make it antifragile by employing people. What I find even more common though is people do have employees, but yet their company is still fragile because they have not delegated enough responsibility to others and they are involved in the day to day operations of the business. So much to the extent that if they were to be hit by a bus and in the hospital for an extended period of time or they had to move because of family circumstances that the business would fall apart. If that is the case and you have created a business that is fragile on your existence, is fragile on your health, is fragile on you showing up every single day. And if that doesn't happen, the business falls apart. You have created a fragile business and you are the weakest link of the chain. And so how do you protect yourself against that? You create systems, you create procedures, you have training manuals for your people so that if something did happen to you, they would know what to do. That you begin to delegate out the day to day operations that you are no longer involved in the creation and execution of sales, creating the work, going out and getting the jobs, doing the estimates and then the execution of the work, mowing the lawns, installing the mulch, following up the client after the job is done, all of those things. If there's any bottleneck, if there's any aspect of your business where you are the integral piece, the one thing piece of the puzzle that must be there. You, you have created a fragile business and you create a very weak link in the chain that we call a company. Now other areas that I find people in our industry especially have created a fragile business and how we can make those anti fragile is their marketing.

What do you mean by that? Well, if you are constantly getting leads from Google because you are the number one on Google, when people search in your, you know you have SEO down, everything is fantastic. You don't do any marketing besides some SEO, but other than that not much because everyone just sees you, you're the top ranked on Google. What happens if Google changes their algorithm? An unexpected unforeseen event happens, they change their algorithm, another update comes out. Or who knows, maybe Google is no longer the biggest search engine in three and four or five years. What if Apple decides to choose Yahoo as Its provider of search. All of a sudden a massive mobile shift in which search engine is used. What happens then if Yahoo or Bing becomes the Internet dominating search engine? What happens if you have created a business that is fragile because it is dependent on one source of leads? What if you are getting all of your leads right now from Facebook ads and that is the number one driver of your business? What happens if tomorrow Facebook doesn't allow you to get ads if you are doing under $10,000 in ad spend each month? What happens if they decide that they are going to do. What has happened to Google AdWords where they increase their prices because now bigger players are getting in the market and now what used to cost $1 per click is now costing $20. That is a very real possibility in the next 12 months. Hey, has your business become dependent on it so much that if that one medium, that one medium of marketing or advertising was taken away, would your business crumble? Would those leads cease up? Or would you have to be paying so much for those leads that it doesn't make it economically viable? What if all of your leads are coming in from word of mouth? You say, well, that's a great thing that can never change. What if a natural disaster happens? What if something happens in your. What if a big player comes into your market and they have cheaper prices, better trucks, better equipment and they are going to go to every single one of your people and offer lower prices? Now all of a sudden there's something you've got to be trading on. This is going to be a way to get attention besides just word of mouth. Because all of a sudden word of mouth is that the new guys on the block has the cheapest prices, the best equipment and the best people. How are you going to compete with that? And how are you making sure that you're so how would you say, well, how would you become antifragile in that marketing aspect, that scenario you just played out? What I'd be doing is playing in each one of those fields. And yes, if one's doing great, fantastic, pour gasoline on it. But don't become so fragile, don't become so reliant on that one thing that if it was wiped out, it would also wipe out your business. So these are some of the things that I think about when it comes to a small business, a small landscaping company. And when I look at companies that are doing 100, 200, $300,000 in annual revenue versus the companies that are doing 1, 2, $3 million in annual revenue, the difference between those two companies, those two different sides of the coin, you might say the difference between those two is that the companies that have made it to the seven figure marker many times have looked at the places in their business where they are fragile and they have protected themselves and made themselves anti fragile. You look at the companies that have been around for 20, 30 years, the reason they've been able to the recessions and the economic depressions and the times when a bunch of the labor market dried up like it is right now and how did they get through all of those times is because they protected themselves and kept themselves from over leveraging themselves. That's another thing. You can make yourself very fragile, but overextending yourself, getting high interest loans, getting lines of credit, mortgaging your house in order to fund your business, and then getting way too leveraged and, and then it's all fine and good as long as there's lots of leads coming in and the economy is doing good. But what happens if everything dries up tomorrow? Would you be able to sustain with paying those interest loans? Would you be able to be able to get through the economically difficult time when you're no longer growth isn't just coming to your door and the phone isn't just ringing off the hook. Would you be able to get through those times? That's something we've asked ourselves a lot lately, is okay, what can we do in 2018 to make sure we are completely if the economy.

Goes to the bottom in 2019, what can we do in 2018 to make sure that we are completely debt free, have a bunch of cash on hand? Because the beautiful thing about being anti fragile is it allows you to attack when everyone else is on defense. What I mean by that is when the economy dropped in 2007, 2008, the companies that came back stronger in 2010, 20, 2012 were the ones that didn't have debt and had cash in the bank to put into the marketplace and advertise and go after the leads that everyone else had withdrawn and were beginning to back up in the market because oh, the economy is, you know, contracting, everything is going bad. And so what happened is other companies were playing defense. They were, hey, we gotta, we can't spend so much, we gotta still pay off these loans and these equipment loans and we're gonna have to fire some people, we're gonna have to contract and wait for the economy to get better. Whereas other people that were anti fragile, that had money in the bank, that had no loans, could get through the period of economic recession and at the same time go and pump marketing and advertising into their marketplace so that when the recession did end and the economy did start to kick back up, they were at the forefront of all of their clients minds. They were at the forefront of their market's mind in their industry and they were leagues ahead. They had made up for years of the competitors that that it contracted. So I asked you today, what is making your business fragile and how do you make it antifragile? This is one of the things I've added to the webinar that we're doing on December 21st at 11:00am Pacific Time to sign up text Landscape Business. That's one word. Landscape Business. No space in between. It's landscape business to 44222 and you'll sign up. I can't wait to see you in the webinar. It's gonna be absolute fire. I promise. If this is anything that's resonated, I promise that the webinar is going to be fantastic. I'm not trying to sell you on the whole thing. There'll be one opportunity at the very end to that I will be selling something. It'll be a minuscule 2 to 3% of the webinar. I want people to be able to go to this webinar and it to change their life. And at the end I'll give an opportunity for you to invest in something further. But that is not the primary goal of this webinar. I'm not. Don't. The reason I say this is because I've been on other webinars and online stuff where it seems like you're listening to a sales pitch. That is not what's gonna happen. You will not hear me pitch a product until the very end. And it'll be for maybe 10 minutes. And I just want people to come to this webinar. I don't care if you give me a penny. I don't care if you're in the course. I don't care if this is your first time listening to this podcast. I really want you to walk away from this webinar having a clear strategy and a plan for 2018. I implore you, if you're listening to this, sign up for the webinar. I can't wait to see you there again. This is Mike Andes, lansmithbusinessforce.com We'll see you there.