Ezra McCarthy
hello everyone and welcome back to the lawn care success blueprint. today i’ve got a killer episode for you. we’re joined by none other than the chris gentry, founder of myservicearea, a simple but powerful tool that changes how service businesses qualify leads, reduce time, reduce wasted time for sure, and streamline the quoting experience. so chris, you’re great to have you with me today.
Chris Gentry
ezra, thanks for having me on. i greatly appreciate it.
Ezra McCarthy
chris, to start off with, you want to tell the listener, you know, i talked to people—i was just mentioning before that some people come to us and they say, hey, we want my service area on our website, but some people don’t even know who it is, what it is to even mention it. so maybe if the listeners never heard of it, what is it and how does it help the lawn landscape businesses?
Chris Gentry
well, it’s a tool that helped me solve my own problem. you know, i’m a trash can cleaner, a residential trash can cleaner. so that’s how i discovered a problem of not being able to qualify inquiries automatically. i was wasting time looking up every address that came in through my system. i use jobber. and so in the evenings after getting back from cleaning trash cans, i would have to look up all these addresses and see if i would travel that far. and it just didn’t make any sense. there had to be a way to pre-qualify these inquiries.
and i couldn’t use a zip code filter or a mile radius just because of the way, you know, where i live in the low country in south carolina, i service pockets of zip codes. and so i just needed something very fine-tuned to create a profitable service area and filter out those addresses that i wouldn’t travel to. it just didn’t make sense monetarily to travel that far, where route density is the key in a lot of home service businesses. it’s very important to my business to have route density.
and so that’s where msa came about—the idea of giving business owners the ability to create service areas by geofencing. if they wanted to, you know, encompass their whole town, they could do that. or if they wanted to just circle neighborhoods or geofence particular neighborhoods, we’ve got quite a few customers, lawn care customers, that just do neighborhoods. and if you’re in that neighborhood, you get through. and if you’re not, you don’t get through. and the great thing is it drops a pin on your map and collects that data for future marketing.
Ezra McCarthy
and the good thing about it, i’ve seen the back end you’ve showed me chris, and you can literally go street by street. so if your town’s anything like ones i’ve lived in, you’ve kind of got the other side of the tracks, but it may be in the same zip code. so the nice thing about the msa is you can literally go and you can—if i’m understanding correctly, chris, you correct me—you can go, you probably don’t want to go street by street, but you can make it as fine as that. cause say you got some neighborhoods that they don’t take care of their lawn, they leave the dogs out and you know what happens after that—not good. and you say, hey, we want to skip that, you can literally, am i correct chris, that you can get that fine if you wanted?
Chris Gentry
yeah, i mean you can get down to the street level. if you don’t want to service the other side of the highway, you can just geofence your territory there. the example i like to use, one of my largest customers out in san francisco had a run-in with this gentleman on this one street. he has a lot of customers in this particular area, but it turns out that this guy is highly involved in the local government. and so he was like, you know what? this guy’s giving me a hard time. i’m just going to cut out that street. i know i’m going to miss some business, but it’s just not worth it dealing with this guy. so literally, his map goes around this street and there’s probably, i can’t remember exactly how many houses he said were on that street, 20 or 30 houses on that street. but if anybody on that street tries to get through to order his service, they don’t.
Ezra McCarthy
that is really funny.
Chris Gentry
so that, i mean, that’s how, you know, detailed and finite you can really drill in and do that.
Ezra McCarthy
so you work with several different industries. obviously, you do trash cleaning, you do a lot in the lawn care and probably some of the landscaping. so in your view, what is some of the biggest mistakes that you see these service businesses make when they try to define their service area?
Chris Gentry
that’s a great question. i think it, you know, like we were talking about before we started recording, it’s where are they in business, right? so are they new in business where, you know, you made a great point—do they need every lead that they can—or are they a mature business that’s, you know, two, three years, five years in business, where they’ve really dialed in where their customers are?
and so it’s understanding who your customer is first, right? so in my world, in the bin cleaning world, even though i’m a firm believer in the benefit of cleaning your trash can, i also realize that it’s a luxury service. it’s 100% a luxury service. even though it helps with pest control and things like that around your house, it’s a luxury service.
so i need to know where those people are that have the disposable income—whether the economy’s booming or the economy’s in the tank, it doesn’t affect their daily lives and what they have. and so i’ve dialed that in. i say no to a lot of people in the low country area. but i also say yes to a lot where i’ve got it dialed in. i know where my customer base is.
so, you know, the biggest challenge there, again, it’s just knowing where your customer is. and then as a new person in business, whether it’s lawn care or anything else in the home service world, you’re scared to say no.
Ezra McCarthy
and you know, i think that’s so important and people don’t do enough. they just kind of get started and you kind of have to take what you can get. maybe it’s not perfect at the beginning, but then they’re two, three years down the road and they don’t have a clear customer avatar or customer persona. and i’ve even heard of businesses naming it. now, i was laughing—I just named my gpt i made—but naming your customer. so literally, i’ve heard of businesses naming it like sue.
and they say, okay, when we’re marketing, would sue click on this? and just like getting a customer avatar. for you, it’s funny that you say trash can cleaning is a luxury service—but maybe it shouldn’t be, but it is. and with our lawn care, as much as we—maybe it isn’t, depends where you live down south, maybe it’s not—but it is a luxury service too. and landscaping 100% is.
so if we’re targeting the wrong end of town, or we’re wondering why every time you give a quote they’re saying it’s too expensive, we’re targeting the wrong person. so whether you’re using a software like my service area or you’re sending out postcards, trying to see, okay, who is my customer? and then how am i presenting myself? and that goes all the way back to the pictures on your website, the language you use in your marketing material.
if using my service area—so chris, if i were to ask, could you explain real clearly who is this for? and then is there anyone, in your opinion, that you think it’s not for?
Chris Gentry
so since we work with a hodgepodge of clients across the home service industry—I mean, we even have a rehab, a remodeler in the detroit area that uses our software, which is crazy to think that somebody that does remodeling uses msa, but they’ve been a customer for almost two years now—pest control, mosquito sprayers, irrigation, aeration, weed fertilization, bin cleaners. we’ve got somebody that does some va work for some home service people that use it.
and so it really depends on—well, let me step back. at the core, these are business owners who understand the value of their time. they want to buy back their time.
and we have business owners that are single-op, they’re owner-operators, and we have business owners that are seven figures. they have an in-house staff where they answer the phone, they use the msa map page where they ask for the address, they type in the address on the msa map page, it says yes or no, and they can move on. and so, with such a hodgepodge of customers, it really boils down to: do they even care? are they in business just to make a dollar, pay their bills, or are they creating a business where they can end up selling it one day or maybe pass it down?
so there are a lot of questions and variables on that side of who is msa really for. at the end of the day, it’s for the business owners that say, you know what, i’ve got so much on my plate. when i’m out—if i’m a single owner-operator, a lawn care guy, for example—and i’m out on the lawn mower, do i want to be answering the phone every day while i’m out there and looking up an address and then say, hey, sorry, we can’t travel that far or hold on, let me turn off my blower so i can hear you? or do i want to come home and say…
Chris Gentry
and open up my crm and say, okay, i’ve got five leads. i don’t need to look up where they are because they’re already in my service area. it really depends on the business type. you know, for me, i think everybody should use it, right? because it’s so nice—before, in my world, i was looking up all these addresses. now, especially in the summertime, i come home and if i have inquiries, i just put them on the right route.
i don’t have to qualify anything. i don’t have to respond to them. and that’s another thing—people that value their time, they want to buy back their time, they understand efficiency, and they care about, you know, dense routes. and at the end of the day, profit. so it’s a hard question to answer, and i jumped around a little bit, but i think it’s really people that care about their time that want to use msa.
Ezra McCarthy
and i think a couple of different people, in my opinion, that would really benefit are people with a high lead volume. probably certainly pest control, because that’s a volume business. and then probably smaller businesses that haven’t been able to outsource. because i know something that some of my customers do is—they’ll have their voicemail, and say they’re still working out in the field—instead of just letting that go to voicemail and nothing, they’ll put on the voicemail, “hey, go to our website, go to our contact form, please fill it out.”
and that’s a great way—yes, you still want to try to probably call people back, because you’re gonna, with friction, you’re gonna lose people if you just tell them to go there and don’t call them back. but that way there’s another step that they can take. and then you can filter them through something like my service area, your questions. and it depends on the form, how many questions you have. i just had one customer and they’ve just set up basically a consultation form, because they have so many leads that they’re having to pre-qualify even more.
and it really just kind of depends where you are. then i have another customer that whole charges—we actually just had him on the podcast, it’ll be released a couple weeks ago by the time this will be released—and he’s one of the only people that i know that charges for quotes. now i’m all about, and we were just talking to chris offline about reducing friction—now you want to add some friction, charge your customer for quotes. but you know what it does? people that really want him are going to be willing to pay that.
the tire kickers, obviously, he told about one person that they were talking on the phone and they’re getting ready to pay the fee. and then the husband or wife is like, “don’t, i got someone coming for free tomorrow.” that person wasn’t invested in first party landscaping. they just wanted someone. so really knowing where you are in business and what your problem is, i think is helpful—whether to know, do i add friction? do i need to take friction away? because every step you add will reduce leads, but depending where you are in business, that may be the thing that you need.
Chris Gentry
well, let me share this. so while you were talking about that, i just pulled up my request form to see how many questions—there’s 15 questions that a resident has to answer.
Ezra McCarthy
wow.
Ezra McCarthy
that’s a lot.
and you’re more established in business—for someone new, i would not recommend that.
Chris Gentry
well, you have to look at the bin cleaning world. we have to understand, i mean, this is information we need. we need to know what day your trash is picked up, what day your recycling is picked up, any gate codes. i mean, there’s just so many things that we need to know as a bin cleaner. and so they fill it out.
Ezra McCarthy
and the service. yup.
Ezra McCarthy
so let me stop you there, chris. so interesting—why would you not, and this is just something i’m curious about, why would you not wait until the phone call? because obviously you’re doing it that way, you’ve found it to be useful. so why would you not wait until the phone call to get the information? because one thing i’ve noticed—sometimes when i send things to customers and say, hey, can you fill this out, it can take so long for them to get back with me that it’s easier, at least for me, to get the ball rolling if i’ll call them. so just curious, why have you chosen to do it like that? and was there a point where you started adding more?
Chris Gentry
so in the phone call, i think the phone call is a friction point, right? what happens if you don’t get them? you gotta leave a message. in fact, that happened this past week because i had somebody who filled out the form and they had put in the notes section—it was a commercial account, a business office—and they had put in the notes section a statement. so i emailed her and said, can you clarify this, you know, this question or this statement that you put in the notes section.
and then we played phone tag because she decided to call me. and when you call happy cans—everybody runs their business differently, so let me preface by saying this—when you call happy cans, i don’t pick up the phone. it says, “hey, if this is a new customer, please go to the website and put in the request from there. if this is a current customer, leave a message or send me a text, i’ll follow up with you.”
so we had to play phone tag before i could even book her. and so that was over 24 hours of waiting around, you know, to figure out, well, am i going to put her on the schedule or am i not going to put her on the schedule?
and so, when they come to the site, they have to enter in their address just to receive pricing too. like, i don’t share pricing on the website, and that is another level of qualification. i don’t consider that friction. i consider that qualification—that if they’re willing to put in their address to see the pricing, then probably nine times out of ten, they’ll fill out the form as well.
Ezra McCarthy
mm-hmm.
Chris Gentry
or maybe there—you get the few that are shopping. since there’s, i don’t know, three or four different bin cleaners in my area, there is a little bit of competition. and i’m the highest priced, so…
Ezra McCarthy
good problem.
Chris Gentry
yeah, but, you know, we just need all that information. and if i can get all that information in one form, you know, that’s fantastic. and part of the problem again that i found in the very beginning before msa is people would fill out this form and then i’d have to tell them i can’t service their address.
Ezra McCarthy
okay. yeah.
Chris Gentry
you know, and they’re like, great, i’ll never call you again. you know, can i get the 10 minutes back in my life that i wasted on your website and form? i mean, that’s not good customer service either. why not be upfront with somebody and say, hey, i can service your address or i can’t? so anyway, i just—you know, in the bin cleaning world, it’s just different because we need all those questions asked.
Ezra McCarthy
ha ha ha.
Ezra McCarthy
yeah.
Ezra McCarthy
mm-hmm.
Ezra McCarthy
mm-hmm.
Chris Gentry
do it over the phone—are you going to catch them? they’re usually at work or what have you. it’s just easier for them to take control and fill out the…
Ezra McCarthy
as you’ve been growing in your business, have you come across any sort of limiting beliefs that you’ve had to overcome as you’ve grown either msa or happy cans?
Chris Gentry
well, i mean, happy cans right now—it’s fear, right? it’s always fear. even though i continue to grow the business year over year, last year was my lowest growth year. and that was just because of things that went on last year that kept me out of the field a little bit. some challenges. i still grew it, but i didn’t grow it like the year before.
you know, that year was 32%. the year before that was 20-some percent. last year was only, i think, 15 or 16%. so i’m still moving in the right direction. but you know, do you take 30, 40 thousand dollars, dump it into the business? and how do you get out of the truck? i think it’s fear. the big one’s fear with happy cans—even though i don’t spend a dollar on marketing and i still grow.
Ezra McCarthy
good.
Chris Gentry
with msa, there’s fear there, but i think the bigger thing is the outside noise. what i mean by that is people that will…
Ezra McCarthy
can you explain that?
Chris Gentry
i said, pooh-pooh your idea, for lack of a better term. i mean, that’s just like—it’s stupid. and i’ve heard that, you know, talking to people that will inquire about msa or have a question about msa. they’re like, “stupid, why would i—I need every lead that i can get. i don’t mind looking up every address.” and i think that’s just a mindset thing that they have.
but when you tune out that noise and get your head down and realize that there are other people just like me that have the same problem, that need the same solution, understand the value of their time, understand the importance of putting procedures into place to create efficiency—those are the people we want to work with.
the people that just understand that moving the ball forward is a good thing and not being complacent. “i’m paying my bills, i’m putting a little bit of money in my pocket, i’m happy. i don’t need anything else.”
other limiting beliefs? i guess negative self-talk. those down days, you know, when you’re like, man, maybe i should just close the doors. but when you believe in something and it’s growing—it may be step by step, but it’s going in the right direction. and it’s not, you know, something like ai that’s going through the roof right now. but those are some of the same limiting beliefs that i fight, you know, either on a daily basis or a monthly basis. you always hear negative stuff. there’s always haters out there. and if you don’t have haters, then you’re not doing something right. that’s what i think.
Ezra McCarthy
unfortunately, that’s very true. so, how do you find yourself—it’s really easy, you know, as entrepreneurs, and i can’t help but think of yourself more on the technical side—how do you stay focused to avoid chasing the shiny object syndrome? i mean, you’ve been doing msa for a couple years, and i know happy cans for several as well. i’m not quite sure how many on that, but i know you’ve been doing msa for a while. so how do you fight that?
Chris Gentry
constant struggle. i’ve done everything. i used to own a restaurant—had that for three years. ice machine, i had a photo booth business here in charleston. so the shiny object syndrome is very, very real. i had a little design company doing t-shirts and hats. i had another software company that was a complete and utter financial failure that killed me and broke me—and almost lost my marriage. i’m joking, but it was… that was an expensive learning lesson.
even with msa, we’ve got some new stuff coming out this month, both on the functionality side and the marketing side, because, you know, we’re realizing that these inquiries provide a lot of valuable information. but you’ve got to learn to say no, and it’s hard. i mean, even as an entrepreneur that sees a dollar—that dollar may cost you five dollars at the end of it, right? so you need to understand how to say no.
i mean, we even had—in the earlier days of msa—people throwing ideas at us left and right. but the big thing was that msa is not going to be a crm, routing, scheduling, payment system. there’s, you know, five thousand different crm, scheduling, routing systems out there, and that’s just not the world we’re going to play in. we are going to do a great job at solving this problem—and just one problem—with the benefit of, as we continue to grow, hopefully helping more on the marketing side as well.
but you just kind of learn to say no. that’s how you get away from the shiny object syndrome. or, in the case of happy cans, you outsource it—like pressure washing. i outsource that now.
Chris Gentry
it’s tough. i’m sure you experience the same thing.
Ezra McCarthy
so… it’s very real. you see something, and then sometimes my wife has to tell me, yeah, to slow down. because i think a lot of us—or i’ll speak for myself, i know myself—I can get so excited about stuff. i think, “there’s such a big opportunity,” and it may be. and then you realize, you know what? that is probably, once you get into it, just as hard as the thing that i’m doing right now. and i’m going to hit a wall there too. so it’s kind of… keep at it. yeah.
Chris Gentry
well, you lose focus as well, right? when you throw a lot of things into the mix of being an entrepreneur and you give 25 here, 25 here, 25 there, 25 there—nothing gets done, right? and so if you don’t say no to some of those things, you’re just, i mean, you’re causing yourself a big headache, and you’re not progressing the other businesses as well. that’s why i try to, you know, put my blinders on, work on msa and happy cans. you know, there’s not a lot on the happy cans side—it kind of runs itself, except for some admin work and everything. but that’s why i focus a lot of my time and energy on msa.
Ezra McCarthy
pretty good. oh, i had a brilliant thought—it just left me. that’s never a good problem. yeah, well, i’ll have to cut that part out.
Chris Gentry
it’ll come back.
Ezra McCarthy
all right. can you walk us through an example of a before and after of a contractor who got some great results with myservicearea?
Chris Gentry
yeah, we’ve got quite a few, but i’m gonna use an irrigation guy. he’s been with us for almost three years. he’s up in virginia. it’s a father and son outfit. and when he found us, he was like, “thank god i found you.” and so i was like, “brian, tell me—why are you happy you found me?”
his scenario was just like mine. he couldn’t do zip codes because he had pockets of zip codes that he serviced. he said, “listen, we’ve been in business, i don’t know, at the time, seven years, eight years, i guess. and i’m just tired of these inquiries that we get. we have two rushes, right? we have the rush in the spring to open up the irrigation systems. we have the rush in the fall to close them.”
and he said, “i’m just tired of it. i just want to service these people that are in my area.” and so i said, all right, let’s get you signed up. and he’s like, “it’s beautiful. now i know everything that comes through msa…” because he has it set up on his website—msa is either a wordpress plugin or it’s a line of code that you add to your website, and it can live on buttons. so “get a free quote,” “request service,” “get a free estimate,” “contact us,” “book an appointment”—what have you.
and he has it tied to “book an appointment.” and if they get through, they can book time on his calendar. and he said, “before msa, i’d have to go back and cancel all these appointments because i’d have to look up their address and say, sorry, i can’t. i apologize.” so it has saved him a ton of time. and he should probably be paying triple the monthly subscription fee that he pays, because he has like a simple—i want to say, i don’t mean this in a degrading way—but he has like a craigslist website. i bet he hasn’t updated it in forever. and now he’s just like, “it’s beautiful. i don’t have to look up addresses. they book the meeting. it’s…”
Chris Gentry
the whole thing has just made my life a lot easier. and then, you know, one other one is where their office staff had to look on a map on a wall—literally, like look at google maps, then look at the map on the wall to see their zones that they had outlined with a marker. and now it’s like, she doesn’t need to do that anymore. it’s just in or out, right? when she’s on a phone call.
and so that office person—she loves it because it saves her probably, i don’t know, 30, 45 minutes a day during the rush times of looking up addresses and such. so it makes life easier. and then, like i stated before with happy cans, in the summertime when my sales staff—aka the maggots—get out there and get fired up in the heat and the humidity… everything that comes through i receive in jobber, i know is a good lead.
Ezra McCarthy
so you dropped a hint a little while ago. are you open to telling us some of the new features you mentioned that might be coming out soon?
Chris Gentry
not yet. i will say though, yes—it will be beneficial to a lot more people.
Ezra McCarthy
any teaser?
Chris Gentry
that maybe think that… geofencing is not a suitable way for them. so i’ll share that. then the other thing that i can, that i will share is that—and i think you kind of mentioned this or we inquired about it a little bit earlier—is one of the things that we’ve noticed, and i’m jumping ahead and i apologize.
but one of the things that we’ve noticed over the two or three years of msa is that we collect this data. so: the address, the date, the time, the street, city, zip. and the question was, well, how can we use this? because it would always drop a pin on our map. so our customers would look at their map and they can say, hey, i know where to grow, i know where to shrink.
well, we’ve taken that—we’re playing around with things and taking that a step further and doing data analysis. and we’ve shared some data with some other marketing companies just for feedback and said, “hey, if one of your customers had this information, would this help with their marketing efforts?” because, correct me if i’m wrong, if you run google ads, it’s based on zip code, right? you can only do it on zip.
Ezra McCarthy
yes, you can also do radius. you can also do radius as well.
Chris Gentry
okay, even better yet. so we said, if we had this information, would this be beneficial to your customer base? and especially if somebody was already using msa and they wanted to start running ads—and they were like, yeah, especially when it includes out-of-area pins and addresses.
so, for example, one of our lawn care customers that we did this for—and this is one big, you know, we’re playing around with things—mondays and wednesdays after 10 to 2 were his most inquiries.
Ezra McCarthy
wow.
Chris Gentry
and so he was like, well, this is fantastic. i can just throttle back my spend on those other days and kind of double down on mondays and wednesdays during that time slot. and so it’s things like that—when we capture that information, that really becomes valuable to the customer who is marketing.
and another thing is with edm or door hangers—where are your inquiries coming from? are there areas where you have maybe two, three, four, five inquiries, and you’re like, hey, maybe we should open that area up? we can do door hangers—we’ve already got the addresses and/or we’ve already got the contact information to email them or call them. those are some things that are in the pipeline as we kind of play around with.
Ezra McCarthy
hmph. that is…
Chris Gentry
the data—obviously, they need to be using msa for a little while to collect that information. then again, we can always upload any data into msa from their crm to put it on maps, to segment and look at a little bit further.
Ezra McCarthy
yeah, seeing that pin map, which is pretty neat. it’s kind of like a… i don’t know what you’d call it. basically a map, really nicely done, with all the pins there. so chris, if you had to relaunch myservicearea from scratch today, what would you do completely differently?
Chris Gentry
i think that probably the biggest thing is—and this is on our list as well—is probably automatically building a form builder and let that be part of the program. because, you know, as a jobber user, i only get one form.
and i can’t…
Ezra McCarthy
which is really, really frustrating because i was trying to help someone with their marketing, and you really need multiple forms. because you want to run a separate landing page to ads so they can fill out a form. so, you know, as soon as that hits—“hey, this came through ads”—and then anyway… that’s one thing. i like jobber, but i wish they would do it differently.
Chris Gentry
yep.
Chris Gentry
do you know any other crms that give you multiple forms? because i haven’t heard of any yet.
Ezra McCarthy
hubspot, but i would not—I use it myself, but i don’t think it would be a good crm for a service-based industry. copilot… i don’t think they do, because i was talking to someone the other day. i wish they did. that’s one thing—the most prominent crms are very poor at. their forms are abysmal. and what i mean by that… i like jobber, but their forms—you can only… i like short forms because i…
Chris Gentry
yeah. yeah.
Chris Gentry
yep. yep.
Ezra McCarthy
i’m a friction fiend—you want less friction, and their form is terrible. i like the crm. i recommend them. but their form… and there’s none better that i’ve seen. now, obviously, yeah—and you can’t even embed a form. you have to take them to a completely separate landing page, which is terrible because you don’t want to take them off your website. you want to be able to collect that info right on your website, because you’re introducing friction when you take them off. anyway, there’s a lot of things there. maybe a rant there, but yeah.
Chris Gentry
no, i mean, it’s very valid. because with msa, you can do address-based pricing. and so what i mean by that is that if you have zones a, b, and c—and somebody comes to your website and ends up in zone b—you can send them to a zone b pricing page. well, you know, for me, that’s a different form. that’s not a jobber form, you know.
Ezra McCarthy
that’s really neat.
Ezra McCarthy
yo, it’d be nice to integrate all of that so that you don’t have to double input.
Chris Gentry
yeah, exactly. and so that’s probably the biggest thing. i mean, there’s a couple other small things, but that’s the one that just sticks out because that’s a personal pain for me as well. and so here again, if i’ve got a pain, i’m sure out of the other, you know, almost million—or there’s more than that across all home service businesses—but there are more people out there that have this pain.
Ezra McCarthy
a lot. so to close us out here, chris—what is the worst business idea you’ve ever had, and did you try it?
Chris Gentry
doing that restaurant. you know, that killed me. i wouldn’t change it for the world, but, you know, being in my mid-twenties, out of college, and opening up what started off as a coffee and smoothie bar—and this is in the 90s, you know, ’96, ’97, before starbucks was even starbucks…
it was just—I was married to it. all my friends, you know, getting corporate jobs, making good money, having fun, taking trips, getting married. and here i am, you know, working six days a week. i was like chick-fil-a—I was open every day but sunday. and at one time, i had 11 employees and built a kitchen and started doing breakfast and lunch. and it was just… that was a miserable, miserable—yeah, it was almost four years. but i was fortunate enough to sell it.
yeah, you know, every business that i have started except for two—which was the design thing, i wouldn’t classify that as a… that was just a side hustle—but the other texting software business that i had…
Ezra McCarthy
hard business.
Ezra McCarthy
that’s good.
Chris Gentry
i had an opportunity to sell that, but my partner—great person, terrible business partner—and kind of held me hostage. we couldn’t sell the code. and when i had a buyer for the code, because he wanted a huge dollar amount, i was like, “let’s just recoup some money.”
the restaurant thing? i would not open a restaurant if you were funding it. if you gave me the money and said, “hey, you don’t have to pay me back,” i would still not do it.
Ezra McCarthy
hey, we were just talking about this yesterday. my wife’s like, “man, a coffee shop would be great here in our little town.” and when i go into a place, i look at the menu, i look how busy it is. and then in my head, i’m thinking—probably you guys listening do the same thing—you’re like, “they’re making this much,” you know? in your head, you’re thinking like, how much are they making? and coffee shops—I love them—but it would be very hard to make good money. yeah, it would have to be a labor of love.
Chris Gentry
yeah, i mean, there are a lot of businesses where i scratch my head and go, how are they doing it?
Ezra McCarthy
yeah, and that’s one of them. i love them, but it’s going to have to be probably an owner-operator just working crazy hours and then barely making a living. and that doesn’t sound like fun to me. that’s not my kind of fun.
Chris Gentry
it was a great experience—I mean, a learning experience—but, you know, life-wise… i missed weddings, you know, some friends’ weddings and such, and just…
Ezra McCarthy
i heard this really good acronym the other day—i think joe polish came up with it. he said he wants business to be an elf business. and elf, the acronym stands for—wow, now i’m going to forget it—something lucrative and fun. enjoyable, i think it’s enjoyable, lucrative, and fun. and i thought, you know, that’s pretty good. i want an elf business. so maybe we’ll leave it there.
Chris Gentry
yeah.
yeah, i’ll take the elf-on-the-shelf business.
Ezra McCarthy
boy. thanks, chris. well—big thanks to chris today for dropping some serious wisdom. if you’re tired of driving across town for bad leads or just want to qualify customers faster without adding more work to your plate, go check it out: my service area. it’s one of those tools that can quietly eliminate big headaches from your business and help you scale without the chaos.
if you got value from this episode, be sure to share it with another lawn or landscape pro who’s looking to grow. and as always, if you’re serious about building a business that gives you profit and freedom, make sure you subscribe—because we’ve got more great interviews just like this one with chris coming for you.
until next time, keep working, keep improving, and remember—you don’t have to do it all yourself.
