Ezra McCarthy
Hello and welcome back to the lawn care blueprint. Today we’re going to be talking about a very important and needful topic about goal setting. What if your business goals were more than just quote unquote next season’s plans. In this episode, we’re going to unpack the power of goals of setting a vision for your business, whether that be a clear three year five plan or even a one year plan, how it can help your company, your team and your business overall. Let’s hop into it here.
Wena
Let’s begin with a big picture. If everything went exactly right, where could your business be a decade from now?
Ezra McCarthy
This is really important, kind of like painting the end picture or as good as it can be. Now it’s really hard to predict the future. I know some people say business plans. Okay. Is it even worth doing? Because I look back at sometimes even a year to go, we’ve had to make so many pivots adjustments as things change, but really looking out a couple of years, even up to 10 years, do you want to start with the end goal in mind? So say to yourself, what am I optimizing for? We just, by the time this release, had on an episode, Tony from Tony’s Lawn Care Talk.
He’s got a smaller business. On our podcast, we talk a lot about growth, about growing, and that’s important. But maybe in your business, you say, that’s not my goal. My goal is to optimize at $500,000. And that’s where I want to grow. Maybe you’re saying to yourself, I want to optimize for a $250,000 per year business, or maybe a million dollar per year business, and then optimize there for profits. Getting that end picture in mind and saying, okay, what team size am I looking at? How much do I want to manage people? Maybe you really enjoyed that. Maybe it’s revenue. Maybe you say, okay, I want to optimize my business for this service because this allows me to do this.
I’ve heard people talk about how their business is literally mainly a Christmas light business and they do some lawn care just to keep their team members around. So what kind of business are you optimizing for? Maybe you’re optimizing for time freedom. Then you can work backwards from that. So get the end picture in mind and think about how do I want to structure this business? And then describe yourself, okay, if that’s the case, who are the customers that I need to attract, that I need to advertise to, and who are the employees that can help serve these customers well? And sometimes it’s good just to take and say, okay, if money and time weren’t the issue, what would you build? It kind of helps get the juices flowing, you might describe it that way, and say, once I find the end goal in mind, it makes a big difference because otherwise, then you’re just gonna get caught up in, okay, if you’re not doing landscaping, landscaping sounds great. Or some people think, okay, fertilization and weed control is where we need to go. And maybe it is for your business. But if we don’t have the end goal in mind, then we’re just gonna be kind of flailing all over.
And I saw a great illustration. I’m sure we’ve all as kids played with these latex balloons. And if you’ve ever blown them up and just let them go, they just go wild all over. They’re just shooting everywhere. Now, if you’ve ever seen somebody, if you take a long string and pull it out, kind of take that balloon to the string loosely and let it go, it’s going to shoot in a straight line along that string or however long the air has because it’s focused and going in one direction. So many times in business, people, instead of focusing their energy, getting a clear end goal in mind, they kind of just flail about. An opportunity comes up and they jump on it because they don’t have an end goal in mind. So anything that comes, they’re just hopping on it.
When we get that end goal in mind and begin to work backwards, it makes such a big difference. And something else that it really helps is it helps when we’re hiring. Why this matters is we can get our team members to buy into our plan. And if we can’t go to our team members and say, hey, what’s the vision for our company or where are we trying to go? At least in some way, then we’re really, we’re kind of missing out. And this is something that we have team meetings every Monday and we’ll talk about and we’ll ask them, okay, what’s our mission? We make decisions myself as a business owner with that mission in mind or our business goal. And so if our team members don’t know our goal or our vision for the business, if we don’t get that across to them, we’re not going to help them to begin to buy into what we’re trying to design.
Wena
That vision doesn’t just inspire the owner, it affects through the whole team, right? So if you could design your ideal business today, what role would you play in it?
Ezra McCarthy
Yeah, this is a good question, Wena, and why this is important is some people want to be out in the field. Some people want to be out there landscaping, laying mulch, and that’s their ideal business. If that’s your goal, there’s no shame in that, but recognize it and then optimize for it. Or if you say, hey, I don’t want to, I’d be fine if I never touched a lawnmower again, then say, okay, how can we get there? How can we build a business where I’m in the office, I’m managing people, I’m managing contracts, or maybe you want to step back even further than that.
We had Jonathan Pototschnick on a few weeks ago at this point. He’s completely out of the field and he has been almost out of the business for a couple of years now. He owns CitiTurf down there outside of Dallas, Texas, a multimillion dollar business. He’s chosen to step back from the business and you say, okay, that’s what I want. Well, recognizing that is going to be one of the best first steps to get there. Recognizing where you want to be in the business and then say, okay, where would I fit best and what does freedom look like for you? Maybe for your freedom, you want to go into the office every day and get a 10 hour day during the spring. If that’s your goal, let’s optimize for it. But if you don’t plan to, then you’re just going to kind of drift along and who knows where you’ll go.
Wena
Let’s connect vision to lifestyle because what’s the point of building a business if it doesn’t support the life you want? In your case, what kind of lifestyle do you want your business to support?
Ezra McCarthy
This is helpful as well. And I’ve heard several people, they kind of have a derogatory saying that’s a lifestyle business with kind of saying that it’s not really a business. But if a business isn’t giving you time and financial freedom, I think you’re kind of missing the point or if it won’t in some time in the future. With that being said, there’s going to be times where obviously you’d work a lot, et cetera. That’s just part of it. But with our end goal in mind saying, okay, how can we get to the place where we have that time freedom?
Because there’s some really good books about this. Now, I don’t agree with everything in it, but the four hour work week is a fascinating read in that regard where he talks about basically the wealth of time and getting yourself out of the just 60 hour death trap. If that’s how you’re working all year, maybe that’s how you want to work, but that doesn’t sound enjoyable to me and probably most people. So how can we design our business so that it supports the goals that we have outside of that? Maybe you can say, hey, how many days off a year?
How many vacations? How can I be there for my family, for my kids, ball games, or whatever it is that they’re doing so we have time to put in for other things. You can build a business that allows you to do that. But if you’re going to, then we’re gonna have to design our company structure really backwards from that lifestyle. Okay, if I get to the place where I can take off two, three weeks in the summer and dizzying with my family for a week, whatever you wanna do, what roles am I gonna have to hire for? Maybe what roles am I gonna have to step back from? Then it’s gonna lead to what systems do I have to put in place?
If something goes wrong, we don’t want ourselves to be the front man, the firefighter that runs out there and makes sure the fires are out, who can we get and hire and train to get that when something goes wrong, they can handle it? And then how do we need to hire, develop, train, give them the confidence to be able to handle these things so that we in turn can get back that high level time that we can. Have time for our family so that we can work on strategizing, growing the business, and begin to lay out the next action steps to grow our business. All of these steps are so vital and we have to start with structuring our business, recognizing the lifestyle and then structuring back from there.
Wena
What would you change in your company today if you prioritized time freedom over just revenue growth?
Ezra McCarthy
Maybe you’re saying, okay, I can’t find someone who can do this intricate landscaping, this paper patios. And so if I’m going to get that time freedom back, I’m going to have to maybe cut out some services that are just absorbing all my time. Maybe it’s decent revenue, but it’s destroying your time freedom. So recognizing, okay, this service, maybe it’s these clients. Maybe the commercial clients that you’re getting are just not in sync with where your business is going to go. And maybe it’s pricing. You’re saying, hey, our pricing, if we stay the way we are, but we’re not gonna be able to afford these things to hire the right team members. Maybe you’re gonna have to say, my daily schedule, the way it’s going, I have to change something if we’re gonna be able to help our business grow to get that time freedom back.
Wena
Sometimes growing means not adding more, right? But cutting back. So let’s talk about subtraction before addition. What are the activities or services that are stealing time and profit but not moving you toward your goals?
Ezra McCarthy
This is something that we really need to consider because there may be some services that are low margin but high stress. Maybe there are those clients that they just drain your team every time they call, every time that they call back or nothing and you just realize, hey, maybe we don’t need these clients. I was talking to one of my customers and he completely cut out all commercial clients.
Now I hear a lot of people and they’ll say, hey, I want to get into commercial because they think that’s where the big money is. Now that’s your business model. I’m not saying don’t do commercial, but recognize what you’re trying to go for. And for his business, it was worth it to cut out literally every single commercial. And his business is based around residential.
Recognizing that and then cutting out those clients that don’t fit your business model so that you can serve all of your clients really, really well. First, of course, you’re probably going to see a slight revenue dip. But remember, we’re not optimizing for revenue up for profit. That can help you move a lot faster toward your goal, toward the vision you have for your business. And to do that, it’s going to take digging into the services that actually make you money and would help you choose that. And this is really important just to kind of get a clear view of what’s working. I remember I was doing a business plan, I think it was a couple of years ago, and they talked about going through your clients categorized them, I think it was by A, B, and C.
You can do it in different ways. And they talked about basically how easy it was to service them, the profit and the stress. And go through and just categorize them and look back at your clients and say, which are my aid clients? Those ones that they’re just so easy to work for, high profit margin, low stress. As you categorize them, you may find that it’s the commercial clients for you. Maybe your business is set up for residential specific services and going through and saying, okay, all of my aid customers are here. How can I serve more of them and less of others? There’s a really good book by Michael Michalowicz, it’s called The Pumpkin Plan.
And he talks about these farmers or people that will help grow these monster pumpkins, literally five or six feet tall, a thousand some pound pumpkins, which is just nuts. And how they do that is they’ll get these pumpkin plants and then they’ll care for these just like a baby. They’ll trim off any excess that’s sapping the plant strength. I think they’ll even like to inject them with milk or something crazy. In that book, Michael Michael Michalowicz talks about really doubling down on what’s working and cutting away what’s not. The book boiled down in its simplicity. Because it’s just like those pumpkins, they can’t water and care for 20 monster pumpkins. They’re going to have to bring it down to a few. Now I’m not saying we need to cut back on customers necessarily, but what we do need to do is find out who are our best customers or the type of customers that are our best and cut out all of those that are not working for us.
Wena
I did witness that myself working with your team that you did cut some pumpkins and it did some good to the company as well. Why is it harder to say no as you grow and how do you build the courage to do it?
Ezra McCarthy
For sure.
This is something I see people doing as well. When you first probably under a hundred thousand dollars, you’re just taking whatever you can. If we’re not careful and if we don’t learn once we cross that point, we get into everything is yes. But there comes a point in our business where we have to start saying no. Maybe they’re outside of our service area or the service that they want isn’t in our wheelhouse. We’ve got to start turning down that work. And we think, okay, it’s another job.
It’s another couple hundred thousand dollars or a couple hundred dollars a month or a couple thousand dollars a month. We think, well, we could add that on, but we don’t realize if we’re not tracking carefully our man hours, our profitability. 15 minutes out of our service area with a crew of three and you start doing the calculations in your eyes. We’re hardly making anything, but it’s taking a bunch of time. As we grow and as we begin to grow our business, we’re going to have to learn as we go, the nose keeps getting bigger. We’re going to have to be turning down bigger and better opportunities, but it’s going to be good for the business.
But if we’re not careful, we can fall into that scarcity mindset rousing. If I don’t get this, I’m not going to have anything else. That’s not true. If we don’t have the time for opportunities to come, we’re going to be so busy that we don’t have time to say yes to the right opportunities. And so, subtraction or simplifying can actually help to grow your business faster than just adding more and more services. Because if you’re not proficient, if you’re not efficient at getting these other services done, you’re just making it harder for your team members to get up to speed and to learn as you begin and to get the best or really good at what they do.
Wena
Before we close, let’s talk about the trap that catches almost every business owner, having vague goals. So why is growing the business not a real goal?
Ezra McCarthy
There’s a really good framework that talks about simple, durable, specific time. And oftentimes in the spring, I’ll call people and I’ll ask, or when I talk to people, I say, what are your goals for this year? And I actually just talked to someone recently and they’re like, well, I need to grow my business. Well, that’s not a real goal. I mean, it is, but it’s going to be really hard to get action steps and just quote unquote grow your business. Is it grow your business 2%, 100 %? I mean, what does that even mean?
A goal is not trackable when it’s just a day. When we get specific goals, say you’re at $450,000 and you say, hey, this year or next year, I want to get to 700,000. Say you’re at 100,000, you want to double the 200, or if you’re at 800 and you want to go to a million, whatever it is, you want to create a clear and specific goal.
At our team, we had a specific customer count. We said, hey, we want to get to this amount of recurring customers. Now you may have to adjust it personally. I have goals that I try to carry with me on my checklist that I read, try to read every day. And throughout the year, I’ll revise them. Some will get accomplished. And so we’ll check it off the list and then we’ll adjust it. But some things people get wrong with creating goals at the beginning of the year is they have these great New Year’s resolutions or goals that they want to keep, which some of you don’t like them. I love them. But then they don’t look at it for the rest of the year. And then they…
Next January rolls around, they’re like, ⁓ I didn’t accomplish anything, you’re one, but you want your goals to be trackable, not vague, so that you can say, okay, over this next month, how can I move us toward this goal? Just 1/12th, consistently adding in, but vagueness just creates frustration because we’re growing in that, we’re not growing, but what are the action steps that we need to grow? Well, it totally depends how much. So getting clear, specific goals in place and not just dreams and help us to maybe your goal this year is to make more money. How can we get the right customers to do that?
Maybe this year, your goal or next year is to have more time freedom. Maybe you just got offspring, the time this will be released is I guess late September, October. And maybe this year you’ve just worked like crazy and had no time for your family. And you said, I want to keep the business steady, but get some time freedom back in my life. And then we can say, okay, that’s something we can track. Let’s get specific. I want to take X amount of time per week or one day a week or two days a week or whatever it is in your business. And then we can track that. Literally put it up on a checklist, put it up on a board and then start tracking it because that’s gonna help you know it happens.
There’s a great quote, I believe it’s from, I forget his first name, but the great quote says, what gets measured gets managed. Because what if you told your employees, hey, I want you to work more. What does that mean? Or what if you told them, hey, we’re gonna need to put in, we’re behind an extra five hours per week. So instead of if they’re working 40, I want to see on your time card 45 hours. Now they know specifically what they have to do to succeed. Getting specific trackable, that can drive accountability so you know, okay, it’s working or it’s not just by simply looking at your tracking sheet.
Wena
What about the danger of setting our goals too small?
Ezra McCarthy
This is good and I love the book by Dan and Benjamin Hardy. 10x is easier than 2x. A lot of times we can get stuck in that just well, I just need to work a little harder. And sometimes we do. But there’s also the thought of completely shifting the paradigm. Realizing that maybe I don’t need to just do a little more of what I already have been doing. Maybe I need to completely change how I’m viewing this because I may not be doing it right.
I remember I was listening to a book by Benjamin Hardy called Scaling. And he gave the example of a software company that had this great product. She had just been growing it really, really slow. And she just basically created this huge goal for herself. And she realized, okay, if I’m going to get these, she had been doing cold calling. She realized, okay, I can’t just keep cold calling and reach my goal. So she had to partner with someone who had her audience. In our business, sometimes we can get, we can just kind of play it too safe and aim for small goals rather than saying, okay, is there something that I am missing?
Is there someone who has been there before that can help me maybe supercharge it? Whether that be a business coach or some of these things. And we just released an episode a little while ago about having a guide in our business. Are we setting too small of goals? And if we are, what can we do about it? The danger of setting too small of goals is basically just stagnating. Just the danger of doing it yourself, a little more work and I can just do it harder. And that might not be the case. That might not be the right answer.
If your goals feel vague or stuck at just getting through the season, maybe it’s time to rethink how you view them. Because most successful lawn landscape businesses, they don’t just react to what’s happening. They’re going to plan, they’re going to track and then build backward from the business and ultimately the life that they want.
So I’d encourage you to take these questions, think about them and help them to make you think a little bit, to shape the goals. Because when our goals are clear, then our path is clear and that will help us build the business and the goals that you want.
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