Episode 52

Ezra McCarthy

Welcome back to the lawn care blueprint today. We’ve got a great guest for you Rob and I’m gonna try to pronounce his last name Treppendahl, I have a feeling that is not it. Okay, well he started his lawn care company at 24, but after hitting seven figures in his words He was exhausted in debt and ready to quit but things changed in 2017 when he revamped his business today Rob runs a multi-million dollar location Remotely and coaches others. So Rob sure glad to explore your story today

Rob Treppendahl

Treppendahl. Thanks for having me, Ezra.

Ezra McCarthy

Just kind take us back to the beginning. I know I kind of did a quick overview but at 24 you started right at a college of the landscaping business. Was this something that you always wanted to do or you just kind of fell into it as a job?

Rob Treppendahl

That’s a good question. I come from a family of entrepreneurs. Everybody, my father has a real estate business, my mom is an architect, both my sisters now are entrepreneurs too, and grandparents. It was just in the blood. I always knew that I wanted to work for myself, I just didn’t know what I would do. I kind of thought I’d follow my dad’s footsteps and get into real estate. I’ll tell you the genesis of me wanting to not do that. I went on a study abroad trip to New Zealand when I was 20, so my junior year. When I was there, I got there early, went with two of my friends, and we took a six week long road trip around the country of New Zealand before school started. 

So we got there in like early January. School started mid February, which is their summertime. We bought a van and we just toured the country and I met all these other backpackers and they were just kind of living off the grid, living their lives and they were so free and they were 23, 24, 25. I was 19, 20. They were just experiencing things and I talked with a lot of these people. There’s something about the freedom that they experienced that made me think, I don’t think I need to be in an office. I want to have more freedom than that and I want to build a different kind of business that doesn’t tie me to an office, and I just really fell in love with the idea of living a life of freedom and a life of outdoor adventure. I always was into that, but I remember those conversations with all these different backpackers then made me think, real estate’s not the ticket for me. And so when I came back from New Zealand, I was like, I’m gonna be an entrepreneur, or at least I hope I will be, but it’s not gonna be something in an office. That kinda opened the floor for other ideas.

Ezra McCarthy

So those early days, how did you get from New Zealand to the landscaping business?

Rob Treppendahl

Yeah, so I closed the gap. So I came back, had my senior year at Ole Miss, and I actually had a fifth year, had a little victory lap, because I really liked it there. Then me and some friends paddled the Mississippi River as a fundraiser, and that was two months. How far? 2,400 miles. So we had a lot of time to think. From Lake Itasca, Minnesota to New Orleans. So we paddled the whole river right after college. It was a fundraiser for a couple of charities. And so as I’m paddling, I’m thinking about, OK, college is over. What’s next? What am I going to do with my life? And I didn’t know.

Ezra McCarthy

So from where to where?

Rob Treppendahl

But I knew it’s more of the adventure thing. And I’m like, I mean, I’m gonna do something where I can keep doing stuff like this. So when I got back, I still didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I sure as hell didn’t wanna work in an office. So finished college, I’m paddling the Mississippi River, I’m trying to figure out what I’m doing next. Dad’s like, look, Rob, you can take over the family tree farm. It’s a small little hobby business, like $80,000 a year. He’s like, do that while you figure out your next move. So I’m running the family tree farm. We’re selling these large live oaks that are like maybe seven or eight inches thick, and you dig them up with a tree spade. It’s not a great business model, but it was something for me to do while I figured out my next big plan. 

And while I was doing that, people started calling me saying, hey Rob, I don’t need a live oak, but I need a cypress tree. I need this, I need that. And I said, okay, well I can figure that out. There was a particular phone call where I called a landscape architect to try to sell him some of my trees. And it was like, Rob, I’m never gonna buy your trees because I’m not only an architect, but I’m a landscape contractor and I can buy things wholesale. I can buy them at a nursery. I can plant them with my bobcat, can mark them up three times and I don’t have to pay your tree spade prices. And I was like, contractor.

That’s pretty cool. I like that idea. Maybe I should be a landscape contractor. So I took that rejection that he gave me and I ran with that as a business model. And pretty soon I shut the tree farm down and started a landscaping company.

Ezra McCarthy

So in the beginning you said you’ve fallen into the trap of too many clients just to hit that million dollar mark. How did this approach of just kind of clients, clients, clients backfire? And then what would you say was the difference between growing fast and then growing smart later on?

Rob Treppendahl

Yeah, that first year, 2012, I started out on a tree farm, started a landscaping company. I wanted to grow it quickly and I wasn’t really that concerned about profit. I was just like, I know nothing about business. I know nothing about landscaping. I really didn’t know much about anything, but I knew that I knew a lot of people in Rouge. just kind of got the church directory out and lots of connections from growing up in that Rouge for a long time. And I just started calling people and trying to sell them the work, trying to start figuring out marketing. 

So at the beginning, I did everything I could just to generate revenue and to add new clients. I said yes to everything. I would drive a couple of hours to do the work. I didn’t really have employees. I was just trying to get experience, just trying to get some reps in. That was what the first few years looked like. The first year we did about $100,000 in business. The next year we did about $400,000 in business. And I’m doing mainly projects. I didn’t start off cutting grass. I thought grass cutting was below me. I’ll be honest with you. I remember sitting down with a buddy of mine at the very beginning, we went to a Waffle House on Airline Highway. Said, Rob, the key to profitability is maintenance. Keep it simple.” I was like, no, I’m too cool for grass cutting. I’m not going to do that. I’m going to do the big sexy projects. He was like, okay, you’ll come back around to maintenance. I was like, yeah, we’ll see, Jono. 

So anyway, I started doing a bunch of projects and the revenue was good. The numbers were coming in and I’m seeing, and I’m feeling good because our top line revenue is growing. So year two, do 400,000. Year three, we do 600,000. And I’m like, man, I’m building a business. Meanwhile, I don’t have good employees. I don’t have any profit. There’s very little money in the bank account, but we’re growing. And I think that’s what you’re supposed to… I’m thinking to myself, this is what you’re supposed to do early on. You just grow your revenue. And I’ll just live on beans and rice and I don’t have to pay myself much right now because I’m young. I’m 24, 25, not married, no kids. I was just growing the business as fast as I possibly could. That’s what the first three years looked like. Year four, I got into some commercial jobs and our revenue sky rocketed.

We go to 1.5 million in a year. Well, this kind of breaks the business because I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t have systems. I don’t know how to price things. I’m overpaying people. I get in over my head. We aced one big commercial job, which gave me a big head and had me start quoting all the other big commercial jobs. And I was like, I’m the king of Baton Rouge. And so I start bidding on all these other big commercial jobs and just start saying yes to things I shouldn’t have said yes to because I had one lucky job that went well. And this pride can get in the way. It caused a lot of problems. So that was the year where the first three years kind of broke even. Year four, when we went to 1.5 million, is when we started losing money. I bought a bunch of fancy equipment. I got a Dooley and I got a Bobcat and I got two managers and I was just daddy Warbucks over here. And I thought, I thought this is what you do. Also, that was the year I got married. I took a whole bunch of money out of the company and bought a down payment on my house. And I was like, look at me, I’m a big fancy business owner.

But what I wasn’t watching was how little profit we had. Because I figured once you hit the million dollar mark, all your problems just magically get solved and everything’s good. Because everybody had been talking about, got to break a million, got to break a million. We broke a million and that’s when things started going downhill. And so that was pretty sobering was I realized towards the end of the year and I wasn’t doing my profit and loss statement. I wasn’t really keeping track of the books. Towards the end of the year, I started getting caught up on my books. I realized we don’t have any money. We’re losing money, in fact.

And I was like, how is it possible that we have a million dollar company and we’re losing money? Also, I’m working all the time. I hate going to work because my employees are not good employees. My managers don’t trust me anymore. They just see me as this salesman. They don’t see me as an expert in landscaping. And so there began to be this mutiny within my crew. It was a disaster and it was a very low point in my life.

Ezra McCarthy

So what was kind of the pivotal moment? Obviously it sounds like sometimes people have their mind in their head, whatever that number is, $500,000, 700,000, a million to they think once I hit this kind of, you just kind of be made. But here you found yourself there. You said 1.5 million over a million and you’re losing money in debt. Things are going downhill. What was the pivotal point? And no profit. Sometimes we have these numbers in our head. We don’t realize when we get there, we’ll still be the same person. We’ll have to learn. So what was the changing point?

Rob Treppendahl

Yeah, so what I kept thinking as I was there, and maybe some of you who are listening can fall into this trap, is I thought, man, I’m just one big project away from getting myself out of this hole. If I just work harder and grind a little deeper, I can win another big job and I can dig out of this hole. But I was just digging with the same tool that got me deeper. So I was a little hard headed about it. And I was just like, no, I can do this. I can do this. I can do this. I just have to work harder. And so really the turning point was the following year when things still didn’t get better. A year later, I’m married now.

So I’ve got a woman, who’s in my life, who’s asking me questions who’s saying, Hey Rob, how come your big company is not able to pay us any money? How come my social work salary is paying the mortgage on our new house? How come you have to borrow money from me to make payroll for you guys? And she’s asking me these questions and I’m like, yeah, this shouldn’t be happening. And I’m trying to like hide these things from her because I’m ashamed that this big business that everybody thought I was this big successful business owner that actually it was failing.

She’s asking these questions. I don’t have any cashflow. I keep borrowing money from her and I started borrowing money from these debt companies. They would call me, hey, do I need $250,000? And I was like, yeah, I do. And so I started accumulating debt, right? I’d already bought some equipment the previous year. I started getting high interest debt coming to the equation. I realized I got a real problem here. So my wife and I had this conversation. We’re driving, we’re going to the beach with some friends on a much needed vacation. I hadn’t taken a vacation in a while. She looks at me and she says, Rob, how much longer are we going to do this? How much longer are you going to fall asleep at the dinner table when we have friends over? How much longer can we have no money in our bank account? How much longer are you going to work 90 hours a week? When is this going to stop? We can’t keep doing this. And I was like, honey, I know. 

I’m very ashamed of, kind of where I was in business and that she’s kind of calling me out, but it was true. And I was like, give me one year. If I haven’t figured this thing out in a year, if I haven’t made this business profitable. I’m going to sell the business or get rid of it and I’m going to go work for the man or go get an office job or work for my dad or something like that. I said, just give me a year and we’ll see what I can do. So she said, okay, I’ll give you a year. That was when the clock really started ticking where I was like, I have to change what I’m doing because obviously I can’t keep doing more of what I’m doing. Fast forward a few months, it’s October. I’m in Talladega. I’m at a NASCAR race with one of my suppliers who was trying to win back my business because I kind of switched suppliers.

By the way, it did work. And I’m sitting there in the booth, Ewing, Irrigation was the supplier who flew me out there. Love Ewing, great, great, wonderful people. I’m sitting next to this guy who also was there, another landscaper, and he tells me his story of his business. And he had been through some massive turnaround where he used to be a bunch of debt, working all the time. And now he was kind of living the life, working 10 or 15 hours a week, saving up for a big RV to do an American road trip. And he was like, how’s your business? And I was like, oh man. I was like, I’m kind of where you were.

And he was like, tell me more. And Megan was right there. My wife, she’s kind of filling him in on everything. Of course she doesn’t know as much as I do. And she’s like, Rob, listen to everything he says, because he’s turning his whole business around. Maybe you could do what he does. And maybe you could figure this out. And I was like, all right. So I started listening. And he starts telling me about what he’s doing and how we made the changes. And I’m listening. And she’s like, keep listening. That conversation really opened up my eyes. And he said, look, come join my mastermind group. I got a few guys I meet with regularly. And I think we can help you turn your business around. There’s real hope for you. I thought to myself, OK. I’ll listen.” And then I went home and I was like, I don’t really need to listen. I can figure it out. 

She was like, call that guy. If you don’t call that guy, I’m going to kill you. Remember the timeline is ticking down, Rob. And I’m like, all right, I’m going to call the guy. I called the guy and he said, come up and see me. Come to my office. His office was a few hours north of me. So I drove up there on December 27th, two days after Christmas 2016. So a couple months after the meeting in Talladega, he looks at my business, looks at the P&L, looks at everything. He’s like, it’s a lot worse than I thought. He’s like, but you can do this. He goes, looks, and plays the long game. We’re playing chess, not checkers here.

You’re not going to fix this thing overnight, but we got to start taking some immediate steps to get you cash flow positive. You need to fire a lot of people. You need to stop doing those big commercial jobs. You need to start doing residential maintenance. You got to figure out marketing. You got to get away from all the big sexy stuff and do the small easy stuff that you can do at high volume. You got to start tracking your numbers.” I was like, that’s a lot. He was like, look dude, just one step at a time, baby steps. So I started taking those things to action. I went back to Baton Rouge and man, within two weeks I fired like seven people. I sold the Dooley. 

I got rid of the bobcat. I just started calling up all my people that I owed money to, all these suppliers, said, look, you know I’m good for it. I can’t pay you right now. I know you owe me 20 grand. Give me a few months. I promise I’ll get to it. But can you just have me, can I just suspend the loan payments for a few months? Obviously that doesn’t work with the loan sharks. That was different. I was paying 40 % interest on that. That’s a different animal. 

Ezra McCarthy

Wait, wait. Literally 40% interest.

Rob Treppendahl

40%. Yeah, so I had a total of about $130,000 in loans to those high interest companies that call you and they say, hey, do you need $250,000? I said, yes, three of them times to those guys. And it’s daily. They draft your accounts. If you’re listening, you know what I’m talking about. On-deck financial companies like that, very, very painful. And I thought I would borrow the money and then pay it back early, but actually they take all the interest on the front end. wow. So there’s no way to avoid the interest. 

Ezra McCarthy

That’s literally like a loan shark.

Rob Treppendahl

Yeah, so that was awful. It was terrible. Guys, please don’t ever take those guys. I was too prideful to ask my dad for a loan. Knowing he could do it, I wanted to solve the problem on my own. So this is a tell-all, man. I’m just gonna give you all the details here. I start taking action items. I’m doing the things that Garrett had recommended and we start having a little bit more cash in the bank. I start finding better employees. I start dialing in some core values and figuring those things out. Start figuring out Facebook ads. I roll out Bert and we control. And by the end of the year, we weren’t broke and the business turned a very small profit. And I was like, my gosh, I think we can do this. 

Right around then too is when we had our first kid. We had our first baby in September of 2017. Talladega was October of 2016. So we have our first kid. And the first month that we were able, the business was able to actually provide enough cashflow to support our family was the month she was born. My wife really wanted to stay home. It was like, it had never been able to pay us very much, but it was incrementally a little bit more, a little bit more. And then when she was born, that was the first month where the business could support our bills, which was a huge moment, huge prayer moment where it was like, my gosh, this can work. And we’re just, hoping and we’re praying and we’re making little changes with the business. My wife quits her job, had the baby, she stays home and I’m like, can this sustain? I think it can, but I had to stay the course. I had to keep doing the daily improvements, doing the atomic habits, the 1% better. I’m listening to my mentor, he’s saying, look, you gotta do this, you gotta do that.

You need to get better at Facebook ads. Hey, you need to expand long-fertilization weed control. Let me do all the things. And it was, I had to learn a lot of new things. I had to learn a lot of new ways to market. I had to learn all new service types. I mean, I’m drinking out of a fire hose here, but I had surrounded myself with some great mentors. I was listening to their advice. I joined a bunch of Facebook groups. I’m getting …I’m being very teachable because I know that there’s a way to run a business in which you’re not working 90 hours a week. There’s a way to do this when you’re really profitable. And I’m going back to that New Zealand thing and I wanted to be free again. I wanted to build a business that gave me freedom, but for the past few years, it had been prison. So I followed the course. I just get better and better. And I started, I reduced my business to a handful of services and said no to everything else. Hey, no more paver driveways. Those things were the worst. If you don’t know what you’re doing. I said no to no more commercial jobs, no more commercial installs. And I just got it down to a handful of things and we started marketing those services. Then things have began to stack and get better and better and better.

Ezra McCarthy

So would you say that one of your keys to success was finding a niche and then kind of focusing on it? Did you completely, it sounds like cut off all commercials and focus on more residential focused?

Rob Treppendahl

Yeah, high-end residential recurring services. We kept some commercial maintenance, but no commercial installs, at least not public bid stuff. I mean, maybe if like we did someone’s house and they needed their office, like a $10 a month project there, then yeah, we would do that. But we started focusing on higher volume, lower ticket stuff. We got into mowing, we got in Fert and Wheat Control, bed maintenance and small projects. And then we said no to everything else. We narrowed our service area. We didn’t go drive 30, 40 miles anymore. We kept it within about 20 miles of the shop. 

We did that because we started marketing. We started figuring out marketing and that gave us more options, right? It started doing Facebook stuff. And this is like 2017, 2018. Facebook ads were a little bit simpler back then than they are now, but that was our main way to grow. Video ads on Facebook, shooting with an iPhone and just learning how to get better at that. We tried Google and other services and they were okay, but Facebook was our baby. We pushed Facebook really hard and we got a hundred new clients in and then we could be picky with the kind of services that we would sell them because we had so many coming.

Ezra McCarthy

You say one of the failures as you were beginning was were you just not keeping track of your jobs because obviously you’re losing money, so why didn’t you stop a little sooner did you just not know until way later that you had not made money on these projects?

Rob Treppendahl

That’s a good question. I was chasing top line revenue with so much focus that I just wasn’t really looking at the backend stuff. I kind of just thought things would work out and I didn’t have a regular bookkeeper. I was balancing my books once a year with a CPA as opposed to getting regular.

Ezra McCarthy

You weren’t getting monthly P&Ls?

Rob Treppendahl

No, it was not. I mean, I’m telling you, and there are probably a lot of guys who are doing the same thing right now where maybe they get it every few months, but I did not have a monthly report. If I did, it wasn’t very accurate. I was basing the strength of my business based on my one bank account, which would be really good sometimes, then it would be really bad sometimes. And so we’d get a few jobs done, it would look really good, I’d pull some money out. It was awful. It was a terrible way to run your business, and it made me very stressed out. So I’m following the course, I’m dialing in the services, I get a regular bookkeeper, getting my P&L dialed in. We’re growing the Fert and Wheat Control side, we’re getting that stuff done.

And I just continued to narrow the services down and raise prices. And then people started to know us for these handful of services. If you’ve got a few, only do a few things, you can get expertise in those areas. And so I started finding the right people, getting the right training, and then we just got better and better at a handful of things, and the profitability became much easier.

Ezra McCarthy

That’s so good, Rob. I know, I think the part of the problem is people look at a bookkeeper as an expense rather than think there’s probably even people listening that are doing the same thing you used to do with no bookkeeper. And then they wonder why they don’t make any money. They’re going to save you money. It costs, but it’s worth it. Yeah. So if you’re listening in, you need a bookkeeper.

Rob Treppendahl

Definitely, yeah. I mean, we spend three or $400 a month, whatever. Most bookkeepers, probably under $500 or $600 a month, you can get a good one. And it’s so important that you get that report, you look at it every month, and you can compare it to the previous month. And I always look at the percentage of income that each category is. I like my materials to be at a certain number. I like my cost of goods sold to be at a certain number. I’m looking every month at those things. I go over those with my general manager, and we’re saying, hey, where are we off? Okay, wow, this is a lot higher than it used to be. 

Why is our car insurance so high? Okay, maybe we have some drivers only that we need to get rid of. But I’m looking at things every single month and keeping a close eye on things. Because before I was only paying attention to revenue and not expenses, which is so common. But man, expenses are really where the profit happens.

Ezra McCarthy

And here’s a little neat hack for you that they just come up to GBT five and what you can do is create a folder in there and then take that P&L and every month you give it to it and then you can ask it query at questions. And so I can come back even like, can we cut expenses? 10%. If you use QuickBooks, depending on how your accountant doesn’t the way she sends it over, there’s a couple of different things, but one of them has all the expenses. So you put that in there as well and you can, it’s pretty amazing what you can do. Some questions you can get trying to compare month over month and you can do quarter and anyway, it’s pretty neat. 

Rob Treppendahl

I love it. 

Ezra McCarthy

You mentioned that before you kind of got things sorted out, your team was really struggling. So what kind of changed before now? Maybe fast forwarding here a little bit. You’ve grown your business. You’ve worked your way out of the business. You have team members working it for you. I believe you said he worked remotely. What changed from sounds like terrible employees. If you had to fire seven right away and then now that you’re able to be remote building this business?

Rob Treppendahl

I think the number one problem that guys in our industry have is that they hire people for their experience and not because they fit the business. The old exercise of core values and knowing the kind of business and the culture that you want to create is really important. It’s not just some plaque that goes on the wall. I have three core values that I created, I think around 2018. Actually, we had five back then, so I simplified it to three. But I came up with three things that I wanted to have, qualities that I wanted to find in my employees, and the kind of culture that I wanted to build. 

And mine are disciplined, ownership, and teachable. It spells dot. It’s really easy to remember. And so I thought to myself, I went through this exercise from reading the book Traction, right? Traction really walked me through a lot of the things that I did to build my business come straight from that book I’ve read eight times. Very early in the book, it tells you, hey, you got to dial in your core values. So I wrote down my core values. came up with the three to five things that I wanted my business to look like, my employees to look like. And then I was hired and fired for those things. I stopped caring about if somebody was experienced in landscaping or whatever. And I started finding people who fit those core values, who I got along with, who I wanted to be around, just have the right behavior, the right personality. And then I figured I could teach them the skills. I could teach them the industry. 

When I started making that shift, it was extremely helpful for building the right team. I hired who now is my general manager, but back then she was my administrative assistant about six years ago with those core values in mind and she came on board and really has helped transform the company. And then once I got her on board, then she and I were able to go out and build more of a team. And everybody that we recruited to join the company, almost none of them had industry experience, but they were teachable. They appeared to be disciplined. They seemed like the kind of people that had ownership. There’s only so much you can gauge from an interview. If somebody comes on board and they join your company and they’re there for a couple of months and they might be a rock star as far as like the work, but they don’t fit the culture, they’re breaking those core values. 

For example, let’s talk about teachable. If someone can’t receive feedback well, if someone, if you’re going to give someone feedback on how they did on a job or something like that, and they don’t respond well, well, that’s a cardinal sin in my company because we have an environment of constant improvement. If you can’t handle feedback well, you’re gone. It doesn’t matter how great you are at mulching or weed eating or driving a zero turn or anything like that. If you can’t receive feedback well, you will not be in this company. Knowing the kind of business you want to build, knowing your core values makes those decisions really easy because it’s easy to keep a high performer in your business. But if they don’t fit your values, then they become what’s called a culture killer and they’re going to create a mutiny and bring the company down. And I see this all the time.

Ezra McCarthy

How did you transition then? Cause now you actually don’t live where your business is. There’s a process. How long did it take you? You mentioned kind of almost one year you’re turning the ship, but how did you get from barely making a profit to now hiring great team members and working remotely?

Rob Treppendahl

So obviously a lot happened between then and now. I began to build the leadership team. Started off really with that general manager and hiring the right kind of people. Finding the right team that combined with learning Facebook ads and getting really good at that helped to drum up thousands and thousands of clients. We had a volume of clients coming in and most of them we sold Fert and Wee Control.

That was our gateway service. And then we started selling other services, bed maintenance, mowing. We eventually got out of mowing. We had this engine, this marketing engine that really gave us a ton of freedom as far as the kind of jobs that we could take. Started building the right team and I started implementing pretty much everything that that book EOS says, EOS traction. We had to put processes in place. A really important, very boring step that has to happen if you want to remove yourself from the daily operations is literally coming up with a one page process sheet for everything that you do. Hey, this is how we cut grass. Hey, this is how we trim a tree. This is how we do a lawn application. Writing them down, use Google Docs, putting them down in bullet point form, and then having a place where they live. 

That way, okay, you’re bringing on a new employer. You want to teach somebody, hey, how do we do this? You have this company brain and it’s all there. So we just started putting those kinds of things together, training people, putting processes together, simplifying everything so that all of the questions and problems didn’t have to come to me. I began to delegate those things to my employees. I began to build up my leadership team and giving people room to make mistakes. When you micromanage people and you just hold their hand the whole time, they’re not gonna go out there. They’re not gonna take risks. They’re not gonna show true leadership. I remember a key point was I left town for a month in February of 2021. My wife and I went to Hawaii with our kids. We found some really great deals kind of during COVID.

It was cheap flights, was like three flights for the price of one. She’s like, let’s go to Hawaii in a month. I was like, all right, let’s go. So we went to Hawaii and rented like a little Airbnb near the water. was really beautiful and very inexpensive. And while I was there, I was gone for a month. My team, we had technology where we could communicate and all that stuff, but they took over a lot of tasks when I left town. They started calling the weather, they did some hiring, they did some firing. I gave them responsibility and I let them make some decisions and do some things outside of my control. They did really well after that, I just gave them more and more rope. Now, I would check in on them. We had weekly metrics that we would look at every single week. We still do that every single week. We have about 15 key metrics that we look at. It’s called our company scorecard. And so I’m aware of what’s going on, but I’m also constantly in the business of giving people more responsibility, seeing how they do with it, and then giving them more.

Ezra McCarthy

This is really helpful. I think people listening in would like to hear that. Hopefully helpful for them to hear that. So how do you go from the contractor to now you actually help people kind of use some of the tools and strategies to grow their business as well?

Rob Treppendahl

How did I transition into that role, into like coaching? So two years ago, my wife and I and our three girls, we moved to South Carolina. My business is in Louisiana. We now live in Greenville. A lot of people are like, Rob, you’re crazy. There’s no way you’re gonna be able to move out of state. Your business is gonna crater or you’re gonna have to start one up there. And I was like, I don’t think you know my team. And so we’ve just always run things in a different way. Not always, for the past five years, we’ve run things in a different way. And most people don’t realize how much work has been laid in the creation of that team, the way we run things. 

People on the outside just see us as a regular landscaping company, and I was like, no, we got something unique. Moved here two years ago, confident that my team could run it. Now, the prep work that I did before I moved, I’m gonna get to your question, but I kinda wanna lay some groundwork here. We hired an EOS implementer, and so that guy came in to our company, and he helped us to all buy into everything in that book, EOS, and for us to all really get on the same page with the way we’re gonna run meetings, and the way we’re gonna plan our quarterly goals and annual goals, and he really helped all of us to fully get aligned. And once that process was complete, that’s when I was comfortably able to move. 

The idea of a business owner of a three million dollar company, especially if it’s a service-based business, moving 700 miles away is kind of preposterous. But if you’ve got the right system, you’ve got the right team in place, you’ve got the right processes, it doesn’t matter where you live. Moved a couple years ago, it’s gone really smoothly. I have a Zoom call for 90 minutes every Wednesday. We go over all the metrics. It’s really awesome. I go back to town about once a quarter. And we moved here a couple years ago, I was like, great, I’ve worked myself out of a job.

I’m only working four or five hours a week compared to the 90 that I was before. And I was like, cool, I’m 35 and semi-retired. Well, I came to Greenville and I was like, I’m bored to tears. This is not actually what I want. I don’t really want to, this is too much time on my hands. And so I said, you know what, what’s the next thing for me to do? People have been asking me a lot of questions as I built this business and figured a lot of things out through mistakes and trying new things. And I said, you know, maybe I should start helping other business owners. I got plenty of time on my hands. I can’t just hang out with my kids and go fishing all the time. I needed something to do.

So I did it to, one, to give me something to do, and two, because I really enjoy it. I’d just been naturally doing it for a long time. So about two years ago, maybe a year and a half officially, I rolled out Treppendahl Executive Coaching as a way to help other business owners get through a lot of those challenges. Man, let me tell you what, there are a lot of blood, sweat, and tears that got me to where I am now. And I want to help people alleviate some of that pain and maybe get to where I am a little faster. I don’t know if that answers your question.

Ezra McCarthy

Yeah, it does. So what are some four takeaways you could suggest to the listener from your journey going from kind of broke to now even moving out of that as far as you’re able to go away from the business? A lot of people may be working 90 hours a week or they feel like they can’t even leave for a weekend. So what are some concrete steps they could take from your experience that they could start implementing in their business?

Rob Treppendahl

Number one is figure out how to market yourself. A lot of marketing companies are not gonna deliver for you. And AI is changing the way that marketing works. You need to figure out how to promote your own business. We’ve hired marketing companies before and they just haven’t really delivered. There’s a handful of good ones out there. Of course there are. But in general, I’m gonna recommend that you figure out how to do marketing yourself and social media marketing is, Facebook ads can be killer. There’s a few references. You can check out.

YouTube ads by a guy named Ben Heath. He’s really good. You learn a lot from him. You’ll also learn a lot from a guy named Ezra Firestone, but learn how to do Facebook ads yourself. Start shooting content on your phone and not content for the sake of making some viral TikTok video. I’m talking like stuff to run paid ads. Don’t do boosted ads. Boosting doesn’t work and nobody cares about the organic stuff, only your grandmother. Learn how to do targeted Facebook ads. That’s a really important skill set to develop and the upside is unlimited. The cool thing about Facebook versus things like Google is it’s not a true auction.

If your content’s really good and you put a little bit of money behind it, you can get hundreds or thousands of clients from it. Whereas Google, you’re competing against True Green and Weedman and all these other guys, it’s just an auction. Facebook has a lot to do with the quality of the content. And if your face is on there and you’re sitting there talking to your prospective customers about problems that they’re having right now, you can win a ton of clients from that. But using the generic stock footage and AI, that kind of stuff, people are gonna see right through that. So the quality of your content matters on whatever marketing channel you’re using and Facebook is gonna be a really important one for you to master. 

Number two is the kind of people that you hire. Do the core value exercise, figure out the kind of people that you want to build your business with, and then go find those people. Finding people is hard, and you can find them on Indeed and all that kind of stuff, but just when you go to a nursery and somebody gives you great service, know, somebody loads your mulch and they do a really good job and they’re really great, pull them aside and be like, hey man, do you like working here? like, you rather be a part of something amazing? Like, this is what we’re doing over here, and I’d love you to come by and sit down for an interview and see if this is a good fit. Just be always looking for good people, people who give you good service in the community. What holds a lot of business owners back is they just can’t find the right people. So if you just change your approach a little bit and just be always looking for new employees and then tell your friends, look, I’m looking for these kinds of people. If you run these kinds of people, please send them my way where you have everybody kind of rooting for you and sending you key employees. So that’s, that’s a couple of takeaways. 

Number three is to know your numbers. I know every podcast, the lady is going to tell you to know your numbers, but QuickBooks online, get an account if you don’t have one, get a bookkeeper and get a report every single month and look at it. If you don’t know how to read it, have your bookkeeper understand, teach you how to do it. But it’s really not that complicated and you need to be looking at it on a regular basis to help you make regular decisions. 

And another one is just have a good CRM. I see a lot of guys that run their business on QuickBooks and a spreadsheet and you need a CRM. You need to be able to use that CRM and do email marketing and keep up with people and that kind of thing. I see a lot of guys that are either barely using their CRM or they don’t have one at all. So by all means, we use service autopilot. I love it. Everything has their problems, but it works pretty well. It’s a little bit robust, not great for the smaller guys, but make sure that you’ve got to see a rim and that you’re utilizing every aspect of it because it can really save you a ton of time.

Ezra McCarthy

So helpful Rob. To close this out, do you have any book recommendations? I know you already mentioned EOS, specifically traction. So not that one, but any other books that you’d recommend, maybe a podcast you enjoy.

Rob Treppendahl

Oh yeah, yeah, for sure. I love Michael McCowick’s. Pumpkin Plan’s really good. For anybody, in like the, like under a million, I mean it’s good for anybody, but Pumpkin Plan’s are really good for like differentiating your business. And then Profit First is super good. He wrote both of those books. And then one that I’m enjoying right now, that is The Gap and the Game. So that’s written by, I think it’s Dan Sullivan and.

Ezra McCarthy

Benjamin Hardy. 

Rob Treppendahl

And Benjamin Hardy, yeah, yeah, together. That’s a really good one about like Entrepreneurial Mindset. I’m reading that one right now and I’m loving it. And then one of the books that I’ve read eight times is Essentialism. That’s Greg McEwen. That’s about lifestyle design and it’s the disciplined pursuit of less. Those are some that come to mind. I’m a huge reader. I listen to most of my books on Audible. Yeah, reading is a really great way to stay ahead of things.

Ezra McCarthy

So helpful Rob, thank you. If someone’s interested in learning more about you, where’s the best place to find you?

Rob Treppendahl

Instagram. My handle is lifestyle landscaper, all one word. So that’s probably the easiest way, because spelling my last name, it’s kind of long, you’re going to butcher it. But lifestyle landscaper is pretty easy. So yeah, you can follow me on there. You can send me a DM. I’m always posting new content on there pretty much every day, various things about ways to run your business better. So that’s probably the best way.

Ezra McCarthy

Thanks, Rob. From burnout to building a business that runs without you, Rob has been there before. Hopefully this podcast gave you a lot of value. Be sure to hit that subscribe button, leave a rating and review, and we’ll catch you on the next one.