How I Got My Mowing Business To Run WITHOUT Me!

Have you started a lawn care business on the side, or maybe you have quite a few customers currently and you feel like you started the business for freedom, but lately you just don't have it? You're so busy with the customers and all of the work that goes along with actually starting and growing a business from just an idea to a side hustle to something that actually starts to give you freedom. If you're like me, that's what It happened to me. I stepped away from corporate America as an IT specialist after I got out of the military. And I wanted the freedom to have my own schedule, to start a business, to make my own decisions. And I found very, very quickly that when I stepped away, there was this sense of pure joy knowing that I didn't have to work for the man anymore. And it was great for months. I still remember I worked a couple days a week mowing lawns and I had all of my time back, my freedom. I felt so relieved of so many things. And very quickly after that, I started getting swamped with work. And what was freedom in the beginning quickly changed to basically handcuffs to my own business. And so that's what we're going to be talking about today is how do you build a business that you can gain your freedom back, which is the The whole reason why most of us do start a business is to make more money, spend more time with our family, the people we love. Sometimes it's to have a greater purpose and to have a calling, what God has called us to do. Or maybe it's to travel. Maybe you want to travel or buy a nice house or buy a new car. Like all of us have these aspirations and goals, and it's really important to recognize the different stages that can happen as you transition from working a job, having an idea, saying, hey, I want to start my own business, doing it. On the side as a side hustle, transitioning to full-time, and then very quickly you find you don't have a lot of freedom. So there's something called a stress test that we're going to talk about, and I'm going to share with you guys today on how you actually start to transition to building something to get your freedom and time back. Currently right now, I don't know if you can see these palm trees, beautiful palm trees in the background. I'm in the Dominican Republic right now in Punta Cana. Punta Cana. We're here for a week. I'm spending time with my family, and our business, Military Lawn Cuts, is ran by 3 general managers right now. We have a complete backend office staff of incredible people that operate the day-to-day operations inside of the business without my daily involvement. And I am so blessed to be able to sit here and share my knowledge with you guys Literally out of the country. Beautiful vacation. The weather here is gorgeous. We're right, right over here on the beach. Let me, let me show you guys this. So this is the pool section down here. If you look right out there, there's literally the beach. This is my view from our patio, okay? And it wasn't always like this. We even have a nice personal pool here. This is great, right? Like, rest and relaxation is something that's important for the mind, for the body. Like, you should do that, right? But it always wasn't like this. You see, we're here for a week and the business is still going to run. It's still going to operate. It's still going to do the services. We have 9 trucks right now. The teams are going to get the jobs done. The general managers are going to get the work done. The office is going to do the billing. The payroll is going to get done. All of the business operations are getting done whether I'm in the office or not. So, how do you get there? How does somebody go from having this idea of getting freedom, getting their time back with their family, rest and relax, Being able to travel, being able to buy nice cars, nice house, whatever it is that you want. How does somebody come up with this idea, start the business, do a side hustle? How do they get there? There's something called a stress test. And I still remember, by the way, for anybody who doesn't know, we've been building Military Lawn Cuts now for 7 years. This was not like this 4 years ago. We did take some vacations. Some of them were very rocky. Okay? It wasn't always as peaceful as this. So a stress test, there's a methodical way that you can do this, whether you just have a side hustle or you have, you know, a helper or 2 or a team, wherever you're at in stages of your business career. When you want to take time off and rest and relaxation, most of us didn't start a business to just create another job for us. And I didn't. I still remember going and talking to my mom one time in her kitchen. I said, hey, Mom, I'm a business owner now. I got a couple of employees that work for me and it's all great. And she said, well, what happens, Will, if you don't show up? And I said, well, what do you mean? And she's like, is the job still going to get done? And I said, I never really thought about it that way. And I was like, no, I don't think they would because I need to be there. I need to be the one telling them where to go, telling them what yards to do. So we didn't build these systems and processes inside of the business for them to run without You and me. And so eventually, we started to pick up some knowledge and pick up some ideas and start to implement some of these systems. It's like everybody talks about these systems that need to be in the business, right? And so we started to implement some of these like P4P and taking cards on file. You know, setting up a payroll system where we weren't doing it cash. So I remember giving one of my first team members a paycheck in an envelope with cash and coins. No pay stub. Like, here you go. So let's talk about the stress test. If you wanted to get to a point where you have a business that runs without you, you have to start to put yourself and your business through a stress test. So what does that mean? What does that look like? Well, first off, you start very, very small. The worst thing you can do is go on a week or 2 long vacation when you don't have the systems and you haven't put your business through the stress test yet. Worst thing you can do, everything's going to probably crash and burn and you're going to come back with Way more chaos, way more stress, way more lack of sleep at night. Don't do that. You're just going to cause yourself to get more gray hair. How do you implement the stress test the right way? What you'll want to do is start off by taking a half day off of your business. Okay? So if you normally work from 8 to 5, what you would do is come noon midweek, let's call it a Tuesday. On Tuesday, you're going to work till noon and then that's it. You're going to tell your people, or your customers, you're just doing this as a side hustle, you're not available from noon till the evening. You're off, you're off the clock. What that requires you to do is put your phone on do not disturb. You stop answering texts, you stop answering calls, you stop being accessible to people that report to you or your customers if you don't have people report to you. Whatever fires come up in that day, it's their responsibility to figure it out no matter how big or small it is. It's their job to become solution seekers. This is part of the process of training your team how to operate without you. You have to give them room. You have to give them the freedom in order to make the decisions within the boundaries that you aligned with them. Another key component here is to give them the end goal. Hey, people in the office, the goal is to make the customer happy. Or maybe your field team. What is the goal? For the customer to be fully satisfied when you leave that property. They're not fully satisfied, there's a problem, and you need to figure out how to make them happy. I'm not going to give you the exact steps. Do this, do this, do this. I need people on the team that can problem solve and figure this stuff out, and I have to give them room in an environment to say, hey, that stove is hot, don't touch it. I wouldn't touch the stove. It's hot, it's warm, and then I sit back. And guess what? They're going to come over, they're going to touch the stove, and they're going to get burned. When they do that and they make a mistake in the business— that's what I'm relating this to— is you give them the boundary and you say, hey, play within these means, but don't go over there and don't go over there. Well, guess what? They're going to go over there and they're going to go over there. They're going to get burned. They're going to feel the pain. They're going to feel the stress. But it's in a controlled environment where they're not getting a 3 or 4-degree burn. Burn, where it's going to scar them for the rest of their lives. That's not what we're doing here. We're giving them the means to be able to make decisions inside of the business while we're away for that afternoon and not answering any calls or texts and letting them come up with the problems and the solutions themselves. So then when you come back the next day, you come in, hey, how did everything go when I was gone? And there's going to be a couple of things that come up. And Susie said this, and Susie's not happy with This, right? Whatever it is. Okay, cool. Hey, how did, how did you handle it? Like, walk me through that. Like, did we get this solved? Is she happy? So we're kind of assessing how the team did while we were gone. If there's massive big fire that happens and they don't know how to handle it, if it's something that we think is gonna come up consistently, we need to build a system around it. Okay? Like, what does that look like? Right? I remember in the beginning, people wouldn't talk about systems. How do you build a business with systems? Right? It's simple. It's very simple. Let's say, for example, I don't know, one of your field team members damages something while you're away. Is there a process that they know what to do when damage happens? Is there a document? Is there a text? Is there a form? Is there a OneDrive template? We use Connecteam. Okay. On Connecteam, you can have the knowledge base where you can actually have documentation inside. Is something documented somewhere that they have access to that says, When damage happens, do this. Because I would ask you, is damage going to happen frequently as you grow? Yes. It's going to happen frequently. This is not a one-off thing that you damage the fence or you damage somebody's gate entrance or you nicked their garage door with the edger blade, right? Like these things are going to frequently happen as you grow and scale. So building a system around it and or even if you're like, hey, Will, I don't want to build a 10-location business and have 50 trucks and 150 team members. That's cool. Like, you don't need to do that. But maybe you do want to take a vacation, spend more time with your family or your kids. You can always borrow money, but you can never borrow time. You never get it back. Okay, so you took a half day for the stress test. I talk a lot, guys, so you guys got to keep me on track. You take a half day, you fix the things, and then what? You wait a few weeks, maybe give it another month. And the next test, you're going to do a full day. You're going to take a full day off of your business. You're going to turn your phone off. You're not going to answer texts. You're not going to answer calls. Let them figure it out. Let the field get the routes done. You turn access off to you. The business is not going to crash and burn without you there for a day. And if you think it is, we got bigger problems. And it's a— that's a mindset thing. That's a mindset thing that we have to fix. The business is not going to crash and burn for you being away for 24 hours, I promise. All right. And if it does, you probably don't really have a business. You got like 5 lawn care customers on the side and you're just figuring this stuff out. And clearly, if you're not the one there, the work's not getting done. But even then, can we structure it in a way where we are still able to take vacations 3 or 4 days out of the week and then only work on these 2 specific days? Like, we need to build systems and processes around this. All right. So you take a day off, you come back, you figure out what all the problems are. And you ask yourself, okay, these are the 3 big problems we had. Are these going to be frequent problems? If they are, we need to build a system around it. We need to build a process around it. We need to document this in some kind of, if this happens, do this. And then if this happens, do this. Why? It's going to happen again. If everything lives up here in your business, How are people going to run the thing when you're gone? When you're on vacation like this with your family and you're spending time with them, with your kids, you're going to be constantly answering, oh, man, you got to go do the— Your family is going to look at you and say, dude, take a day off. You run the business so much when you're home. So, you take a day off. So, the next thing is you start to transition to multi-day. You take 2 or 3 days off. You take a long weekend. You take a Friday off and then maybe a Monday. You do a 4-day weekend. Same thing. You're inaccessible. You do this process over and over and over again. You come back, you fix the things that are broken, and maybe you go back and test it again. You say, okay, I took a 4-day. These massive things occurred because you were not there on Monday, and Mondays are busy days. So you're going to build this training process, you're going to build this system, you're going to implement it, you're going to give access to your people or your team or your field member or your part-timer, whoever you're managing, and then you go and you do it again. With the new processes in place and you see, hey, did it get smoother? Did it get better? Did we improve? As long as you're improving, you're going where you need to go. After that, take a week. Take an entire week off of your business. Put your second in command in charge. Whoever that is. Whoever your second hand dude is. And you know who that is right now in your head. Who is that second in command guy when you're gone? The guy that you can count on. Or girl. That you can count on. Inside of your services, inside of your business, inside of your operations. This is how you build a business to where you do stress tests. You take a half day first, fix all the problems. Then you take a full day, okay, fix the problem. Then you go and take a four-day weekend, fix problems. Then you go take a week, fix problems. And news flash: it's normal to have problems. Don't think that you're going to go and take these vacations for a week and nothing's going to happen. You're going to come back and. There's going to be boatloads of issues happening. Guess what? Those are the cracks in your business that you need to solve. Welcome to being a business owner. Our job is we identify problems, we identify solutions, and then we go and execute. And the better you become at allowing room for chaos to reveal the problems in your business so that way you don't fly off the wall like I used to. Because it's normal to have problems and chaos in a business, especially one that's growing rapidly. But if you just started, you had 3 customers and now you got 30, you like 10x the business. And then you go from 30 customers to 100 customers, you just 3x the business. You tripled the business, the visits, you tripled the revenue, you tripled the customers. Like there's a, there's a hockey stick of growth that's It's okay to have problems. That is a stress test. I recommend it for everybody that's going through this process. Now, I will tell you, the seasonality matters. Okay, please, until you get fully established, don't do the stress test during the spring rush when it's your busiest gold rush time of the year. Don't do that. It takes quite a few seasons to figure that out. Don't cause yourself that much stress. When should you? It shouldn't just be in the winter. It shouldn't just be during Christmas time. You should set it up after the spring rush, still in the summer where the jobs are still needing to get done. The teams are still needing to get work done. It's not spring rush, but it's— there's still calls coming in. There's still services, new customers signing up midsummer, maybe even late summer. Like that would be a sweet spot to start to try your test, your stress test for you. I encourage everybody that's watching, To do stress tests in your business, it is very important. One of the things about living a full, wholesome, healthy life is rest and relaxation. That is a core key component for your mental capacity and state, your well-being, your soul, your mind, your heart, the way that you interact with your team, the way that you interact with customers, your kids, your spouse. All of that plays into rest and relaxation, and it is required for you to be well-restored, level-headed, to where you can come back to the operations, plug back in, and hit the ground running. If you never take a vacation or you never take a day off or you can't, psychologically that becomes a problem and it's going to flow into other areas of your life. So I encourage you guys, Take the vacation. If you're on the fence, you're thinking about it right now, start with the stress test. Do a half day. Do a full day. Do a 4-day weekend or a 3-day weekend and then transition into a week. And then if you want to get really crazy, once you've done a week a few times, go 2 weeks. Go 3 weeks. And eventually be able to go a month away from your business and the day-to-day operations still get done. You still get paid. Your team still gets the hours. The business Still runs without you. And that, my friends, is where true freedom lies. And I, and I hope that for many people that are watching this. Thank you so much for watching, guys. If you found value, hit the like button. Make sure you subscribe to the channel. And hopefully I can help you guys also be on vacation just like me because I am super blessed. And what I'm passionate about is building and developing people and helping more people achieve their goals and dreams. Thanks so much for watching this. Thank you.