Ezra McCarthy
Hello and welcome back to the Lawn Care Blueprint. Today, we’ve got an exciting story for you. I actually went on kind of an adventure last week and hopefully I thought of it. There’ll be some great business lessons for each of you. So today I’m going to tell you about a story that happened last week and when it’s going to be here helping us. So last Friday I actually went out fishing. My wife and I and our kids, we went out on this lake, this huge lake like 100 miles long literally and then there’s kind of an intersection into a T probably 200 miles wide. We paid this fishing guide to help us and we went out there early in the morning about two and a half hours one way to get to this fishing spot. With this guide he tells us hey this is a great spot and I thought okay I’ve been fishing before you sit there for 10, 15, 20, 30 minutes or longer and then you get a nibble and then you lose it. You sit there for another 30 minutes and nothing.
Well, we got to this spot and I’m telling you within literally minutes of putting down that line, we had huge fish and now I’m not talking about I’ve seen these fish stories and I’ve got pictures to back it up I’m talking about feet. That’s how big these fish were. I’m talking about huge lake trout and it wasn’t just one. It was one after the other as soon as we got our lines into the water. It could be one, two, three just a couple minutes and then we would have a fish on the line. We were catching fish after fish after fish until I thought man, this is just so easy. Well, long story short, we had a great day on the lake. We caught some massive fish. But then as we were driving back in the boat or whatever you call it boating, we saw two different people as we stopped off at different places and the fishing guide, his name is Tom. Tom’s like “Hey, how was the fishing today?” and these other boaters that have been on the same lake, they said the same thing, “We’ve been out here all day and we haven’t caught anything.”
Now literally, we had gone to a spot and within minutes we’re catching massive fish. This really got me thinking about guides. Now we had paid him a fairly substantial amount to go take us there, but you know what? He had the knowledge. He knew what spot to take us. He knew what depth to put the lure, exactly how to do it. And it saved us all day. If we would have went out there on our own, had our own little boat, had our own stuff, we probably would have wandered all over that massive lake and caught nothing.
So, what I was trying to relate this to business is that I was thinking, okay, in our businesses, how can we take a guide and help this? In business, effort alone doesn’t guarantee results. This guide points us to the right waters and the right spot. And in business, how can we get some guides that can help us point it to the right systems, to the right strategies, to the right priorities? Cause a guide or someone who can help you can save us years of trial and error, just like I was talking about that guide saved us hours and hours and hours in the hot sun. And there’s nothing worse than going fishing all day, being you got your line out there, you’re hoping and nothing. So today we’re gonna explore kind of some frameworks, the role of guides and how it can help us in business. And hopefully that story can kind of relate it to you. So Wena, what questions do we have for us today?
Wena
So that’s quite an interesting story. I’ve never gone out fishing in a wide lake before, but that sounds fun. So why do you think having a guide is so important in business, not just fit in fishing?
Ezra McCarthy
Yeah, this is something I’m a big fan of. And I remember I was in a coaching group, actually for web design. And I was going through my pricing and I was looking at what it costs to get in the group. And I was thinking, okay, is this worth it? At that point, it was a significant investment for me. And I got into the group and literally within the first month, it changed my perspective. My pricing was just off. This business scope was a guide for my business. And in our businesses, sometimes we just don’t know what we don’t know.
And so having a guide in business, whether that be through a coaching group, whether that being through reading a book, whether that be listening to podcasts just like this, can help us avoid those costly mistakes that just destroy and eat up all of our profit. And a guide as well, if you’ve ever seen a learning curve, it’s really easy. You start something, you’re just excited, and then the trough of despair. You start to realize how hard it is. If we’re not careful in business, we can kind of stay in that trough of despair. And a break guide or a guide who’s been there before can help us say, don’t make this mistake, do this, don’t do that and help us avoid those blind spots that you and I can’t and just we don’t know. We don’t know to slow down when we go around the corner, there might be someone coming in business, we don’t know, but we don’t know. So a guide can help us avoid those blind spots.
Wena
What would you say to the landscaper who thinks hiring guides is just an expense they can’t afford?
Ezra McCarthy
I’d really like to flip that question on its head. Hiring a guide is an expense that you cannot afford not to spend on. Here’s why. Not hiring a guide is costing you so much opportunity. As I mentioned with the fishing example through story, we could have been out there all day and caught nothing. And in business, a good coach, a guide, not even necessarily a coach, a guide in a lot of areas. We’re going to talk about a couple here and pay for itself so quickly.
I had an example, I was looking to hire some team members. And so there were two people that I began to pick their brain, expertise. I paid one guy $500 for an hour and I would gladly spend it again. That’s a lot of money, but it was worth it because I spent that time. He was hiring people that I needed to hire as well. And so I said, okay, how are you doing? And I just began to pick his brain on compensation. I began to pick his brain on how to find the right people, the process he uses. And so many times we have these troubles. So, asking people who have been there before, who are where we want to be and saying, okay, what mistakes did you make? How did you find the right team member? We’re having trouble getting people to show up. How did you fix that? Or our profit, we don’t have enough profit. And thinking of it like an investment and not an expense, saying, hey, yes, this is gonna cost me X amount of dollars right now, but down the road, this is gonna help our business grow exponentially so much that I’m gonna have to do that.
And so really the question is, okay, if guides are so valuable, where in my business can I find them? And then how can I use them? And then starting to look at that. So we’re going to look at some of those here. What are some areas that we can find guides in our business?
Wena
Picking on what you’ve mentioned, there are different guides. So let’s move into one kind of guide. It’s the financial guide. What’s the biggest mistake lawn care owners make with their finances?
Ezra McCarthy
A lot of us get into it and we just don’t know how to price it. We’re undervaluing our services. I was actually just talking to a business owner and he’s not in the law and landscaping industry, but he’s a friend that I was at a church camp with actually. And he was telling us about how his gross pricing or basically he was charging like $35 or $40 a man hour.
Another business owner and I were there and we’re just telling him like, “Hey, you are so underpriced” because you can’t build a business at that price and pay for marketing expenses and tools and use a contractor like construction. So we’re just trying to encourage him. He felt like I don’t want to take advantage of my customers.
Of course, by raising your prices, you’re not, you’re telling them beforehand, you’re not trying to keep their expression, get their head over a barrel and then just try to extract as much money for them. But if we’re not charging our customers the right price, we’re not going to be able to give them the service, the time that our services are necessary. So we’re undervaluing it. So we’re not serving them. We’re not serving us. And we can’t serve our customers if we’re not going to be here next year. Really valuing your services, pricing it right, getting a guide and saying, okay, who can help me here? Help me track my true profit margin.
If you’re ignoring your cashflow until it’s too late. If you’re getting your monthly statements, your P&L 15, 20 days after the month is over, you’re not going to be able to keep track of your business correctly. So having a bookkeeper or accountant, these different services can really make a big difference for your business because it can give clarity on what you can afford. It can help you make smart decisions about growth, about saving for taxes, about equipment. I don’t know how many people I’ve talked to and they’re like, I’m behind on my taxes. And I’m thinking to myself, was it really a surprise that you’d have to file your taxes every year?
The old saying goes, the only thing that’s not uncertain is death and taxes and taxes are coming. They shouldn’t surprise you. If you have a good accountant, a good bookkeeper that every month you’re keeping track of it. I was just talking to someone and they were a little bit behind there because their accountant hadn’t got back with them. That’s unacceptable. If your bookkeeper is not doing a good job, you need to find another one because this is going to help you turn your numbers into a story that you can base your decisions on, not just something that at the end of the year, we just kind of compile it. So this is an area, just like, we’re talking about guides, a bookkeeper, an accountant can be your guide to help you understand those. Cause most of us, I’m probably the odd one. I enjoy it. Most of us don’t. So having those numbers and understanding them and a guide that can help you navigate that is really going to help your business grow.
Wena
Let’s talk about marketing guides. Why isn’t word of mouth enough to keep a landscaping company growing?
Ezra McCarthy
This is helpful as well. Another guide that can help you. So many people we get into business think we’re a technician. We know how to perform the work, but we don’t necessarily know how to run a business yet. We kind of stumbled through, a team member too. And then we’re in that feast and famine cycle. We just had a podcast at the time of this release a couple of weeks ago about that terrible roller coaster where we’re slammed with work and then we’re not. And no one wants to be there. Just like we’re talking about guides that can help us go where things are a marketing guide, someone who their sole focus is on. How can we get the best work in the right place at the right time?
Word of mouth is not enough to keep a company growing because it’s unpredictable. You can’t turn it up. You can’t turn it down. And the danger is, yeah, everything’s good in the spring rush but then grow stalls in the middle of the summer without a steady stream of leads. And our business is, unless you’re down in Florida or maybe the deep South, things are seasonal. It does change. If we cannot scale a business by chance, the word of mouth just isn’t enough. We need word of mouth. And if you’re performing a good service, you’re going to have that. But that’s not the only thing that we can rely on. A marketing guide can help us go from just merely word of mouth and just kind of a wish and a prayer and hope your phone rings to consistently getting leads all the time. And a right marketing guide can actually help you save money because I don’t know how many times people have said, I tried Google ads and they don’t work. They may not if you’re not doing it right. Or I’ve tried X marketing platform. Or I’ve tried doing this. Or I’ve tried SEO and it doesn’t work. Just like those people who are fishing, they were fishing all day but they didn’t catch anything because they weren’t going to the right spot at the right time of day, at the right level.
Literally this lake at certain points is hundreds of feet deep. Literally hundreds of feet deep. So where to even place it in the water, not only the right location, but what depth. This guide had knowledge where, what depth, how long, how fast. As a business owner, we got so many things we’re trying to deal with and marketing can be one of those things they say, I want to do SEO. So somebody nights and weekends or after work, they’re exhausted and they try to read an article. You’re just too busy. Or they say Google ads. This is something that you could spend so much time on.
And this is why we stick to one industry at this point, our business, our team members, myself, we spent thousands of hours working just on lawn and landscaping businesses, websites, marketing, SEO, pay per click. And so many business owners, instead of saying, okay, I need a guide to guide me through this. Say, okay, let’s grab the bucket of spaghetti, throw it at the wall and hope something sticks. And they say, well, you got a customer. And I never asked them how they found me, but I think this is where they don’t pay attention to where their dollars are going. They don’t track anything, they’re not paying attention, they’re just saying okay got to do something. Having a guide can really change that paradigm and help you put your money where it’s going to work because this isn’t their first rodeo so having someone who knows what they’re doing in a guide can really help your business grow.
Wena
Now, you mentioned two guides so far, financial guide and marketing guide, and that’s a lot of work. We wonder as we go along that some business owners do a lot of things. They do it all by themselves. Think about how to scale up. What does it look like to get stuck in the owner operator trap?
Ezra McCarthy
This is something that a lot of people fall into. I think, okay, to grow, I have to work harder and longer. Business requires us to work hard. Don’t get me wrong, but there’s a danger if we try to stay in that DIY trap. I’m just going to do it myself or you’re always stuck in the field with that be landscaping or lawn care, never getting it to the place where the business can run even partially without you. And this is where getting around perhaps a coach or a mastermind group can help us get around people whose visions are bigger. Maybe we’ve just been stuck at the point of one or two team members. And we’re just like, okay, there aren’t good people out there. That’s the mindset we’re in when there is, but we just don’t have the skill. We don’t have the muscle to define those great people yet.
And so getting around people, whether that be in business growth, maybe that’s in operations, maybe operations or efficiency is your weak point. And you’re saying, Hey, our labor cost is just destroying us. It’s killing us. I’ve heard about this thing called paper performance, paying people for the work, but I don’t know how to get around people who are using paper performance. Maybe you’re saying, hey, people aren’t showing up on time. Maybe we’re overbooked. Maybe we’re under booked. Maybe our profit’s slipping away due to the waste of time. Everyone’s stopping at the gas station. And I don’t know how to motivate my team. And so getting around people who have used these guides before who have been there, and they can be a guide to you to help your business grow. Maybe it’s something as simple as recommending a software and giving you the confidence to spend that money on the software and say, hey, I know this is maybe going to be a couple hundred bucks, but it’s going to save me thousands this year. Maybe it’s going to cut 30 minutes off every cruise day.
I was just talking to a customer and their fertilization and weed control. They’re referencing one of the software they were using for routing instead of going up one side of the street and down the other would just bounce them from one side to the other and just waste time. Now that sounds so simple, but yet affected how much time it took them to complete the route efficiently. Even something as simple as that really makes a difference.
I hope you can see through this that is really important that in each area of your business, whether that be in sales, whether that be in marketing, whether that be in business operations or growth, that it’s really important to get these guides in our business that can help us navigate some of this treacherous waters that can help us learn, okay, this is where we need to improve. This is where we need to get better. This is where we need to grow as a business. And that fishing trip really just kind of solidified it for me that in each area of business, how can we get a guide that can help us grow as a business, as an individual and help our lawn and landscape business thrive.
With that in mind, if you’re struggling with marketing, maybe you say, “Hey, our website needs some help”. I need a guide to help me. Perhaps you’re saying, “Hey, our paper click, our search engine optimization. We’re not showing up first”. Feel free to reach out to Green Frog Web Design. And if not, I hope this podcast gives you value. That fishing trip sure taught me a lot. The lesson I’ll never forget is with a guide, we can get so much more than trying to do it ourselves. And in our lawn and landscaping business, it’s really no different, whether it’s in finances, marketing, or any other aspect of the business we can drift along aimlessly or find a guide who knows the waters and has been there before and followed their lead.
So thanks for tuning into this episode we sure appreciate you taking the time. If you haven’t already subscribed be sure to hit that subscribe button, leave a rating and review and we’ll catch on the next one.