Ezra McCarthy
Hello and welcome back to Lawn Care Blueprint. Today we’re digging into a tremendous book by Dr. Benjamin Hardy called Scaling. And he talks about what it takes to truly grow your business on an order of magnitude. Not just 10%, not just 20%, but really creating bold goals and then building systems to make that happen. So, Wena is here with me today and we’re gonna hop right into it to see how this can help your business.
Wena
Hello Ezra, to start off, what is Hardy’s main argument in Scaling?
Ezra McCarthy
Hardy really brings out a fascinating point here and he talks about that growing a business is not merely about just trying a little harder, but truly changing how we’re building our business, what our goals are, and more specifically changing that goals and really inflating them, which we’re going to get into here in a little bit. Any frame scaling or growing your business as a science.
It’s often been said that success leaves clues or growing a business we could add clues or we might say it’s a science that we can see the patterns and they’re designed to be repeated. It’s not just luck. So many times we can look at a business and say, well, they’re where they are today because of this. Maybe they got in at the right time or that. And even podcasting, we can look at others and say they’ve got success because of this. And we got all these excuses. But in all reality, it’s probably not. There’s probably some things that they’re doing to cause their business to really grow exponentially.
Wena
That sounds really interesting. So let’s talk about goals. Why does he emphasize setting impossible goals?
Ezra McCarthy
I really like this part and this is something that’s really challenged me There’s something about and this actually goes back to another one of his books called 10x is a year than 2x Oftentimes in our business we set these small goals They may be achievable, but what it requires is just working a little bit harder. But, setting impossible goals as he brings out in the book helps us and forces us really to strip away 80% of the unnecessary things that just are busy work or work.
We’re doing, it’s kind of like a make work program that just doesn’t work. And it causes us to really think outside the box, stretch our creativity and realize, hey, if I’m gonna get to this 10X goal, I can’t just use the same old methods that I’ve used time and time again and get the same results. If we’re gonna truly get that 10X results, that impossible goals as a team, our team members are gonna have to unite around this one goal. And we’re just gonna have to completely strip away the unnecessary and strive for it.
Wena
That sounds really unconventional, chasing after impossible goals. That’s a new one. Let’s dig into how do you identify what we need to cut or what are the unnecessary things that you mentioned?
Ezra McCarthy
Sure. And a lot of it is a lot of things that feel productive. We feel like we check something off our list, we feel like we’ve done something that day when in all reality it may or may not have moved us closer to our ultimate goal. And so when we set these impossible goals all of these little things that we’re doing to just get things done are stripped away We start to look at our customers and said hey this little ankle biter this small job here the small job there that maybe we would have said yes to with our small little goal we realize hey, this is not gonna help me to get to my goal.
One thing he talks about in the book is raising our floor or basically our minimum. And this is something that I’ve thought about and I’ve done this before. And even Wena, we use a straight bar. I’d recommend you going into your CRM and taking all of your customers and saying, Hey, what is my goal? Are these customers going to help me get there? Not how long they’ve been with me. And one person I read after had a framework that they talked about A, B and C customers. And they went through and said, okay, am I making the right amount of money for my business? And the goal is the timing correct? And are they easy to work for?
You may make great money, but if they’re a headache and every day you go home stressing, it’s probably not worth searching after those customers. And so saying, OK, how can I raise my floor or my minimum so that we’re targeting only A customers and these C customers that are just a headache that are annoying. I was recently talking to him. I was at my brother’s house and I was saying, you know, some of my lowest paying customers are the most headache and some that literally pay 10 times more are literally so much easier to work with. And that shouldn’t be the case.
But I bet in your business as well, you’ve got some of those as well. Maybe some of these large commercial contracts, they’re low stress. Some of them may not be, but if they are, and then you’ve got some that are these, they’re the kind that call and say, hey, my grass barely has grown, skip us this week. And then realizing, okay, how can I raise my floor, my bottom, my lowest customers, kindly refer them away and say, okay, I’m not going to get to these goals we’re trying to build for our team members, for our customers, for our families with this.
And so, that’s going to help us identify, OK, how can we eliminate these things so we have bandwidth for higher leverage moves? If we’re messing around with all these small customers that may or may not be what you’re looking for to grow your business, we don’t, we’re not going to have the time. And I don’t know how many people I call, their voicemails are full. They take forever to get back with me. They’re just so busy that they don’t have time for opportunities. And in our business, we need to open up our calendar and say, well, I need to be busy 99 percent of the time. But do you?
You’re not going to have any time for those opportunities. And I remember when I had moved, I was doing some hourly work for someone and I realized, okay, I’ve got to do something else. And I was making an okay hourly rate, but I was like, I could do it, I could make more in one day in a couple hours than all week at this hourly job. And no, did I have those every week? But you know what? That hourly job was tying me up, missing out on the larger opportunities. So raising the floor, recognizing, okay, what is getting in the way and being in the way of growing our business exponentially.
Wena
You mentioned time earlier, so what does Hardy mean when he said compressing time?
Ezra McCarthy
Yeah, this is something that’s really good and so many times we set a goal and if I were to ask you, what are your goals? Most of the time you’re going to set it way out in the future. Now, I know Wena, you used to work in a school and there’s something about studying for a test. How many times have you probably studied for a test and waited till the night before? We all have.
So many people in our businesses as well we set these goals we set them so far out and we don’t do anything to right near we say off we gotta get done well what if we just pull the time frame up and instead of saying in 10 years I want to be at X in 10 years I want to have X or this, pulling that time frame up and saying hey in two years I want to be here now if we’re gonna think or maybe even one year as we can press that time frame. It gives us urgency and sharpens our focus. And we realize I can’t just be doing these little small moves in the shorter deadlines that create constraints that cause us to drive faster and create more solutions. I’m going to try to remember the exact phrase. There’s a law that talks about, I believe it’s Moore’s law that talks about how work expands to fill the time.
Think of it this way. If you tell your team members, hey, you’ve got 20 hours to do that project. They’ll probably take really close to 20 hours because it’s just natural that work expands to fill the time you allow it. But if it is obviously within reason you say we got to this job done in five hours five man hours. Okay Well, we’re gonna have to have a backhoe. Maybe we need a skid steer. Maybe you need a dingo. Maybe we need a larger mower. We’re gonna start to say okay something’s gonna have to change. We can’t just do more of the same thing and a great example of this is running. If I were to say to you I want you to run a seven-minute mile, that’s not a professional mile, but you have to be in an okay shape to do that now when what can you do? How fast can you run a mile?
Wena
I don’t know. My pacing is usually around seven.
Ezra McCarthy
Seven? Oh, it’s not bad.
Wena
Seven or eight minutes. Not that bad.
Ezra McCarthy
Well, okay, maybe most people listening probably couldn’t do a seven minute mile but let’s say I told you to do a three minute mile most people would say I can’t and you couldn’t but you’d have to say okay I’m gonna have to get a bike. I need a taxi. I need a motorcycle. You’d have to say okay I’m gonna have to do something different to achieve that and so many times in our businesses we create these seven minute mile goals, then we just keep doing the same thing We have been doing and shocker of shockers we get the same results, but in this book he talks about compressing time and shifting our goals from someday I’d like to, hey, this is when, and it begins to help as a team, us begin to quit drifting and set a very clear goal.
Wena
That’s fascinating. So he’s like saying that urgency creates strategy. And how it leads to that. So how about rhythm? Why does that matter?
Ezra McCarthy
Yeah, this is really good. I love goals myself. I have my goals here beside me in my computer bag. Regularly reviewing them is so important. At the beginning of the year, a lot of people will set goals and most people do. I recommend it. But the thing is, you got to check them out. Something I found was really good. We actually talked about in a podcast a while ago was the five daily non-negotiables. One of those for me that I’m working on is reviewing your goals three times a day. Now that can sound a little extreme, but you’re literally just burning them into your mind. So if someone asks you, you’re going to know.
One example, I believe I was talking to Sam Gimble and we were talking about, this was a while ago to one of our podcasts about team culture. And I asked him, “Hey, how often is it worth asking your team members about your mission or your core values? If you go up to one of your team members in your business and you ask them, what are your core values? What is your mission?” I have a feeling most of them could not, would not answer and when it can attest in our team meetings I consistently ask them and I want them to know what our core values are, what is our mission?
The reason is if you were to ask Wena or Kendrick or Joni, one of the other team members, I want them to know because it actually matters to me and to our business. You can go on our about us page on our website and see what are our core values. And that is important as a business to us. And if we’re not regularly reviewing those, the team isn’t going to know them. And it’s really, it’s meaningless. So as a business owner, having those goals, keeping them forefront and then some you’re going to share with your team and say, Hey, this is where we’re going as a business, because unless our team sees a path to grow, then they’re going to feel like it’s dead end and they’re going to look for opportunities because if they’re an A player, then they’re going to want to.
So having a cadence of consistently reviewing that, would that be your goals? Would that be your team mission statement? Would that be your core values? All of these things are really vital to keep that in the forefront of your mind, as well as your team. And we’ll give you a pop quiz here. When and what are Green Frog’s three core values on the spot?
Wena
Results driven, customer service. I can’t remember the other one.
Ezra McCarthy
Oh no! I guess we need to review this more.
Wena
I remember the 90 that was changed recently.
Ezra McCarthy
Yeah, so I guess I have some more work to do for those listening. We actually just worked on it this morning, but she’s probably nervous. I’ll give her some slack.
Wena
So not all growth is good growth. What is Hardy warned about linear growth traps?
Ezra McCarthy
Linear growth traps are the danger of just incremental goals. Just 1% 2% better and in some ways that can be good. We talk about compounding but there’s a trap that we can fall into and here’s just an example literally inflation We all have felt it the past four or five years especially and if you’re only growing one to two percent a year your business is literally shrinking in monetary terms because if we’re not even keeping up with inflation the danger is just setting these little tiny itsy bitsy goals and then never changing never growing just feeling like we’re doing good we’re quote unquote growing on paper, but really it’s hiding stagnation.
I was actually just back home. We went to a neat old place where I used to grow as a kid. It used to be a nice little stream. We caught crawfish and went back there. It was all overgrown. There was a tree in the water. The water was just stagnant, algae was growing in it. It was just gross if we’re not careful. In our business, if we just stay where we’ve always stayed it can just be gross just stagnant.
We need to have a mission that is growing, that helps us strive and get better. What I found, there’s been times, several times in a business where customers asked me, can you do this? And it’s just like one of those, you kind of gulp internally and you say, well, we can make it happen. And then it stretches you as a business. What I found is each time as I’ve, we’ve had to challenge myself and my team members to really grow, we’ve learned from it.
And I can point back to several instances as a business we’ve grown wide because we’ve had to stretch ourselves to grow as a business. So many times instead of creating those bold targets, we just kind of plateau and end up just settling to mediocrity.
Wena
And growing a business requires focus. How do you know when it’s the right time to scale?
Ezra McCarthy
Yes, and this is so important.
So many times we can get into this as well. We can think, well, it’s time to grow. But we first have to nail it as the expression goes and then scale it. And if you’re losing money in most businesses, if you’re losing money serving 10 customers, 100 customers just means you’re going to lose more. So there’s a danger here. We got to make sure we’re dialed in. We’ve got our marketing dialed in. We’ve got our numbers dialed in. We got our delivery dialed in. And then once we’re once we’ve got the system worked out, how can we put the pedal to the metal, get great goals and then consistently deliver? And this goes into the hiring philosophy. We want to hire people who want outcomes.
Now, let me explain what I mean by that. Now I’m into checklists, so don’t get me wrong, but we don’t want people who are just merely here to hit a time clock right off a checklist and then not care. We want people who are looking for results, people who can learn that are adaptable in our industry. It’s not really as much of a problem, but who not just have done it before hiring for attitude and not skills. Cause what I found is most people, if they’re an A player, they can learn very quickly. But if their attitudes are not good, I was just talking to my neighbor and he was working on a project construction project. And the people he was working with, he was telling me about it. It was just abysmal. Talking about attitudes conflict on the job. If you wake up dreading going to work, you need to either get new team members or if that’s you, you need to get another job. That sounds awful.
That’s one thing that I found if you don’t enjoy the people you work with, you’re not going to enjoy work, your work’s going to suffer, your customers are going to feel it. So as a business, how can we bring the right people in? We just had Troy on from Blue Collar Recruiting Marketing, and he was talking about literally just like we market for customers, are we marketing for team members? And so all of these things really play into that. And that goes into here. One of the questions we have as well is how do we protect the culture of our work? And what do I mean by that is culture is what we allow in our business.
If we allow people to have attitudes towards one another to show up for work late to not do the work they said and don’t say anything about it, then that’s, that’s what people are going to do without those guardrails towards our, remember we talked about core values and saying, Hey, this, doesn’t match our core values. We need to adjust that here, or this isn’t working or these customers aren’t where we’re trying to go. These don’t fit our mission. So we need to adjust with protecting our culture, especially as we’re growing, as we’re scaling is another really important part of this process.
Wena
Exactly, because businesses are like one big family or one big system. It has to have a really good culture that can sustain the business. What about pricing? Why is pricing strategy critical in scaling?
Ezra McCarthy
We talked about raising our floor. It’s really important to know what our business model is. Are we just a mow and blow that’s trying to scale at low cost? And if you’re trying to be the low cost, say you’re in commercial and you’re in a really competitive market, are you trying to be the low cost provider or are you trying to be the premium provider? Then really just hone in on that.
There’s a good saying that talks about fast, cheap and quality pick two and a lot of ways in business we have to do that. You have to say, okay, am I going to be the person that is fast? Am I going to be quality? Am I going to be cheap? And then say, okay, whatever it is, we’re just going to double down on that. A lot of times though, of course, we don’t want to be the low cost provider, realizing, okay, how can I raise my floor, cut out those customers, and how can we market it to the right people so that we can truly scale? Because if we’re not making profit, we’re not going to have money to reinvest and help grow our business.
Wena
How can founders avoid becoming bottlenecks?
Ezra McCarthy
Yeah, there’s a really good quote that says, the principle of the law of the lid and basically a business cannot grow above the founder. The author there, who said that talks about in our business, there’s bottlenecks and the phrase comes from the neck of a bottle and there comes a point where everything has to slow down. Now they can happen when all the decisions have to come back to the business owner.
Everyone has to call you for every job. Maybe it’s landscaping and they can’t get done without you or maybe it’s documentation or your office staff doesn’t know how to get back with quoting or maybe the systems aren’t in place and everything comes back to you. Then how can we begin to alleviate that? How can we have our office staff know how to ask people for reviews, how to get quotes back? Maybe it’s empowering a team lead in the field so that they complete the jobs by themselves without having to contact you.
And I remember I was working as a roofing foreman in college that’s something that I had to learn it was really easy to just call the boss and say hey what about this but you’re gonna have to teach your team members to say hey when you get to here first and Dan Martell is a really good rule he says when they come to you with a problem always ask them what are three things that you think is best and what that does is that makes the team member really think about it when they have to come to you with three options say when they come they say what are your three recommendations and then ask them which of those do you think we should do and then what happens is most of the time they’ll have a great answer before then and they’ll start to learn okay I need to think for myself, I need to start to take initiative, everything doesn’t really come back to you and then creating a roadmap. So each step has clear goals. Then, put it in stages, not just to do everything at once. We talk about compounding as we begin to put these steps into place, we can really begin to grow or scale our business exponentially.
Wena
Finally, how do you know it’s actually working? Besides revenue, what indicators could prove that scaling is working?
Ezra McCarthy
Yep. And it’s really important to realize, okay, what am I going to focus on? Because what you focus on grows. If you want to focus on getting more reviews for your customers, when you focus on that, put it in front of your team, you’d be shocked. What’s going to happen? You’re going to get more reviews. If you’re focusing on revenue, then you’re going to find if you’re putting effort in there, revenue is going to grow. If you’re focusing on merely customer count, growing your customer count, then that’s probably going to grow. And so really kind of nailing down maybe it’s referrals saying hey I know to help my business grow where we are we need to really expand our referrals so then saying okay how could we get more referrals focusing on that and then making it happen before long you’re going to find out that your business is growing and scaling.
And so, I’d recommend each of you if you’re looking to grow your business check out Benjamin Hardy’s book Scaling the Science of Scaling or Growing Your Business it’s a really great book we’ve really only touched on part of it he’s got great stories and illustrations in there and real growth really starts with shifting how you view your goals and what you need to do to move the needle.
So, hopefully this episode sparks some new ideas for you. If you’d enjoy it, feel free to share it with another lawn or landscape pro. Hit that subscribe button and don’t forget to leave a rating and review and we’ll catch you on the next one.