The Mow Money Mindset
The Mow Money Mindset podcast works to support commercial and home service lawn care and landscape businesses. We combine insightful interviews, honest product reviews and thoughtful discussion focused on helping service providers think through ideas, issues and ownership. Our focus is to create practical, motivating, digestible, and informative content for our listeners.
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The Mow Money Mindset
When Life Mows You Down: Gratitude brings perspective.
Ever feel like your business is crumbling beneath your feet? That's exactly where I found myself after a life-altering car accident forced me away from daily operations of my thriving lawn care company. What followed was a painful cascade of losses - every single employee and half my customer base vanished within months.
The journey from managing multiple crews back to being a solo operator required a complete mental reset. Those training videos from last spring showing a shop full of employees learning the ropes? That reality disappeared faster than I could have imagined. The systems I thought were solid proved insufficient when I couldn't physically be present. I had done "just enough" with my onboarding, handbook, and training program, but reality revealed these weren't robust enough to sustain the business through crisis.
Today's episode gets deeply personal as I share how gratitude became my lifeline during rebuilding. When my only truck broke down this morning, leaving me with repair costs and just six completed properties out of twenty scheduled, my employee marveled at my continued positivity. The secret? Perspective gained from remembering where I started - crying in my living room years ago with no truck at all, until a stranger unexpectedly donated one. This perspective shift isn't just feel-good advice; it's a practical business strategy that's transforming how I make decisions, interact with clients, and structure operations moving forward.
Whether you're facing business challenges or personal setbacks, practicing gratitude for your current position - however difficult - provides the mental clarity needed to rebuild stronger. Subscribe for more unfiltered insights as we navigate the entrepreneurial journey together. Until next time, let's make more money with the right mindset.
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Welcome, welcome, welcome to the Mo Money Mindset. My name is Dana. Thank you for checking out today's video. If you're watching this on YouTube and if you are deciding to listen wherever podcasts are played and you happen to stop by and catch this podcast, I'm so grateful and I thank you for spending some time with me today. This is unedited. I have no notes. I have nothing but my audacity file playing in front of me as I'm recording.
Speaker 1:I'm truly just going to be as unfiltered and free as I can. I've been listening a lot and I mean binge listening to Mike Andy's podcast all the way from 2020 up to now. I'm somewhere in like the 2022 range. I've been listening and binge listening to Brian's Lawn Maintenance Podcast and they are giving out such great information. They're truly giving away the game of lawn care and landscaping and home service industry businesses, and it's just a wealth of knowledge. If you haven't listened to those two podcasts and you are in this industry, you're dealing with making more money Listen and you want to work on your mindset. I can't think of two better places to go. I'm sure that there are others out there, but I'm just telling you I've been locked into what they've been telling me and the information they give. So I'm so grateful to those guys.
Speaker 1:And one thing I noticed that they do is they do like unfiltered podcast. You know, they kind of just go off of the dome. Sometimes they do have things stripped and I think Mike Andy's just takes the audio from his YouTube videos and just post them, you know, to his podcast. Like he doesn't do introduction or anything like that, he just kind of like it's like a video you can watch on YouTube. He just takes the audio and boom. I was like that's genius. You know he's getting multiple uses out of one. You know form of social media content. I think that's awesome and so I just I said you know what, I'm gonna take a page out their book. I'm not going to be worried about all of the. You know intricacies and you know if I stutter or if I say too many words or interruptions, I'm just going to go.
Speaker 1:Man, it has been a whirlwind of a ride. I pray that the Lord will just lead me today on this podcast, because it has been a whirlwind of a ride To button up the last year. Essentially in August 3rd I got into a really bad car accident, ended up breaking a couple bones. I did do a video about my comeback from that, but that time was a crazy time. As grateful as I was to be alive, I also had a lot of things on my plate in terms of being a business owner, running multiple trucks, having multiple employees and not really being able to be involved in operations because I was in recovery during that time.
Speaker 1:One by one, I started losing employees and before I knew it, we hit January, where I lost my last employee right before snow hit and I had no employees to help me get through the snow season, let alone figuring out how in the world I'm going to deal with this coming spring. So if you saw the videos from last year in spring, it was like me. You know the shop is full of guys out there learning and training. I'm walking around showing stuff and I think when you're in that space, there's this euphoria and this feeling of invincibility, like, not like I'm invincible, but I guess like I never thought at that time that I could lose all of that. I never thought at that time I'd ever go back to being a solo entrepreneur. I never thought at that time that the business might crumble, I might lose half. I lost half of my clientele going into this year, my returning customers. I never thought that I would be back out in the field as much and even the employees I had, you know I never thought that they would leave and go anywhere else, not just because we had great relationships and a great culture, but I genuinely just wasn't thinking that, hey, they're going to get hit with life just like I did. You know, they got hit with circumstances, a lot of my employees that ended up leaving the company. It wasn't due to being overworked or not enough work coming in or anything like that. It was literally life hit them just like it hit me with the accident, and they had to make some major adjustments and some major shifts. And you know one thing after another, and before I knew it, I was a solo operator again.
Speaker 1:And so today's episode of the podcast when it comes to no money mindset, I think I want you guys it's not necessarily to dwell on failure or to dwell on moving backwards in your journey or to dwell on going back out in the field. If you found a place and you're in a position where you're not, you know, I think that I want you guys to have a certain sense of great gratefulness for where you're at, regardless of what stage is in. If you are a solo operator, like, be grateful, because that doesn't have to be the case. You know what I'm saying. Like if you have employees, be grateful. And I think that if we're, if we lock into that gratefulness side of us, I think that one thing is shown me as I've locked into. That is you know, I noticed this year some of the challenges I've met with as being a solo operator and then hiring my first employee to help about three weeks ago, just that transition.
Speaker 1:In that phase I'm really now starting to focus and lock into working on the business and working on the business and its interaction with the people. You know I'm becoming very people invested, from my customers to my employees. You know the communities I serve in I'm trying to be a better resource and more value to the people because I really see, after losing all the employees from last year, after losing half of the clients from last year and not because they were dissatisfied with service, let me clear that up my clients that I lost, and when I say those half of my clients, many of them I had to let go of because I could not service that large of an area and that many clients as a solo operator and some people was like, well, ok, well then, where's the hiring? Well, let me help you with that too.
Speaker 1:I realized that the process I had to hire an onboard wasn't sufficient, with me leaving the field last year from August through January, not being able to work through the recovery from the accident. I realized, like, as I looked at my business and as I started to see the employees kind of one by one leave and this, and that I was like, okay, you know, I really don't have a grasp on my systems and on my processes like I thought I did. I did just enough. You know what I'm saying? Just enough, I had an onboarding, I had a generic handbook, I had, you know, the Connect Team app and I was connecting with everybody and I had some semblance of a training program. I had all these little things that, yeah, when you have nothing, they seem like a lot, but I knew that after looking and really looking at my business during that downtime, seeing and saying, hey, but you don't have the things that are necessary to reach the level of success, the level of revenue, to build the type of culture and have the mentality and the culture of the employee. You don't have those things in place to maintain that or to achieve that, and so it was a big revelation for me to see the business kind of crumble and fall apart, losing half the revenue, over half the revenue, half the customers and all the employees every single one of them that you saw in those videos has gone. None of them have returned this year, whether it be because they found other options, and you know. Whatever the case is, that's where I stand, and so by most recent videos you've seen it's been me talking about solo operator setup things I'm doing right now as a solo operator, and that's like wait a minute, didn't he just like did his last videos before that? Yeah, so that's the reason for the long hiatus. I'm glad to be back, but again, I think gratitude, man, take time to really be in the moment. Be grateful for where you're at today. Literally today you guys woke up, had 20 properties to go do me and my guy. You know two men in a truck. We're going to get out and get to it and conquer the world and make some great money.
Speaker 1:Today, and I'm telling you, by 8 am, my truck was spewing out radiator fluid. I had to pull over. It was overheating. I was about a mile away from my shop. I had to pull over. It was overheating. I was about a mile away from my shop. It started overheating, had to pull over. I had one of my brother's employees in my truck with me. I was bringing him to the shop. He needed a ride and so I was in the area. I picked him up and we couldn't get to the shop. My brother had to rush over antifreeze so we could make it to the shop, got to the shop and I thought that the problem would just, you know, kind of fix its own. Maybe something was low, maybe whatever. No, the entire radiator blew up. I had to replace the radiator, had to have a mobile mechanic come out to the shop and deal with the radiator. They do it, install it.
Speaker 1:I come back to the shop to pick up the truck and get started for the day, me and my employee, and before we, as we get out, we probably got about five houses done. Guess what happens? The car starts smoking. I'm sorry. The truck starts smoking and there's fluid everywhere. I'm like what is going on? We look under the hood and find out that the main hose that hooks into the radiator is not clamped or connected, so all of the radiator fluid had been just spilling out these last couple of houses and drives we've been doing, and the truck overheats again. So we're stuck on the side of the road waiting for the mobile mechanic to come and repair his work and repair what happened and what went wrong.
Speaker 1:And this is no disrespect to them, you know I'm not here to bash their business or anything, so we're not going to do that. But they did their thing, came and fixed it and guess what? The problem didn't get fixed. Just found out that I actually now have to purchase a thermostat and a water pump, because those are the only other two items in a vehicle that actually control the temperature. And so since now I've got a brand new radiator in there and that's not working. That means it's got to be one of the other two. So we ended up only leaving with five or six done for the whole day, five or six houses out of 20.
Speaker 1:My guy got a full seven and a half hours worth of. You know what I'm saying. My guy got a full seven and a half hours worth of you know saying uh, uh, paid work, he's going to be paid for seven and a half hours a day after only doing six houses, and I'm out of five hundred dollars, um, before buying the water pump and the thermostat and I have no clue what he'll charge me to actually install them tomorrow but both of those together are another hundred dollars. So it's like days like this. You know what I'm saying. There's days where you conquer the world. There's days like this. But my guy says something to me.
Speaker 1:My employee was sitting in the car with me and he kind of he knew and saw. He's been with me all day so he saw the financial pressure and how stuff was going. He, uh, he saw the. You know we had somebody come fix this problem. You know, an hour later it breaks again. What's going on? You know those guys. I don't know if they forgot to clamp the holes or what, but they did something wrong and we ended up running into the problem. So he's seeing me go through all of these problems and he said, bro, I wish he was here. I should have thought to have him on the show.
Speaker 1:But he said to me, he said, man, it's amazing to me that you just keep laughing and smiling through all of this. He said you really like. He said man. He said I feel like you mask and how you truly feel the frustration. He's like I know you're frustrated. I know you was angry with them because they didn't properly fix your vehicle. Now they're telling you you need, you know, x hundred dollars more of work done. You know we've only got five, five or six houses done and you know you've you got to make payroll today and this and that. Like he's like I know you've got to make payroll today and this and that. Like he's like I know, like you're just getting hung up and frustrated. He's like, man, I don't understand why you keep laughing and smiling, like why you're such a joyful and peaceful guy. And I said this to him. I said man, to God be the glory. To God be the glory, man. I almost lost my life last year. How can I be upset about a truck breaking down, even if it is my only truck, even if it is all I got, even if I have lost half my customers and I definitely don't want to lose anymore? I've gained quite a few back, done some great marketing this year, gained quite a few back, but even if all of that, I said man, I read something a while back that said do you want to have the old problems or would you rather have your present problems?
Speaker 1:Because when I started my company, I didn't have a truck, neither did I have money to get one. And I remember standing in my living room crying, crying like tears, crying Like Lord. I don't know what I'm going to do. I ain't got no job, I ain't got no money. And I want to start this company but I have no business. I have no way to get what I need. I don't have the credit to go and get a loan. I don't know what to do. I'm trying my best. And I remember crying and sobbing I'm about to wrap it up here. And I remember crying and sobbing. I'm about to wrap it up here.
Speaker 1:And there was a young man that called my brother and he told my brother listen, this is what he told. He's trying to get one off the ground. He said the Lord told me. These are his words, not mine. He said the Lord told me to give you my truck. I didn't call this guy and ask him for nothing. I didn't tell this guy nothing. Call this guy and ask him for nothing. I didn't tell this guy nothing. He didn't know nothing about my situation. I was 2019, july of 2019. He said the Lord told me to tell you to come get my truck free of charge.
Speaker 1:And he gave me my first truck, a Chevy Silverado I think it was 2000, 2004 or something like that. Chevy Silverado 1500, had 200,000 miles on it. The floor was so rusted out. If you lift up the mats you can see the pavement. You know what I'm saying. But it was mine and it was given to me out the blue. You know what I'm saying. From a friend of a friend, like not even somebody I rock with, like that. Like from a friend of a friend, like not even somebody I rock with, like that. Like from a friend of a friend, like I knew the guy, but like not to the point where you you know what I'm saying you give, you, give somebody a vehicle. We wasn't like that. You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1:So I think about that problem I had and how distressed I was. I didn't know how I was going to make it through, how me and my family was going to make it through, how I was going to make it as a man and provide for my family and children. And the Lord brought that blessing. But I remember that problem and I said yo. I said to him, like you know, I'd rather have this problem than go back to that problem. I still remember that problem Six years later.
Speaker 1:I still remember where I came from six years later. Yes, last year I was rocking and rolling cruise. I was barely going out to work. I was doing a lot of estimates, trying to do stuff on the back end and set up and make it moves and make it money. Yes, and now I'm back to square one. But I know who got my back. I know where my faith lies.
Speaker 1:I might not have all the answers. I might not be the most suave and the most mentally intellectually strong. This is called the Mo Money Mindset. I might not even have the best I know for a fact I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed. The proof is in the putting the writing's on the wall. Go, look at my videos, you'll see it. I looked at some of the videos. I'd be cringing Like what was I thinking? What was I doing? I was doing the best I could with what I had, and now I've got something better than I had back then. And that's perspective, that's revelation and it's now shaping the way that I'm handling business, moving forward. The setback has really transformed not only the way I think, but the way I make decisions, the way I speak you know what I'm saying the way I do business, the way I conduct and carry myself. It's moving me in the right direction. So you know, I just want to say that, man, I hope that today, like if you got anything from it, I really take a moment to be grateful. You know, understand that tomorrow is not promised and nothing that you have today is promised to be here tomorrow.
Speaker 1:I didn't think none of the employees was going nowhere. I didn't think none of my clients was going nowhere. I didn't think none of my clients was going nowhere. I didn't think none of the money that was coming in was going nowhere. Even after watch this, even after I got in the accident, I didn't think that. I thought that it was just going to keep rolling in, keep going up, keep getting better, keep getting stronger, and that's not what happened. That's not what happened.
Speaker 1:So, if you find yourself in my position, you were on top of the world one day and now you have no clue how. You're at the lowest pit. Please, don't give up, keep going, don't give up. And I don't know where your faith lies, but I encourage you to put it in Jesus. That's where I put mine. He ain't never let me down. This ain't a sermon I hear to preach to you, but I got to be real. Perspective is perspective. He's never let me down and I know he's not going to let me stay here. He's not going to leave me here. He'll leave me and get me up out of here.
Speaker 1:And so the problems of today, that old problem. I told him, yeah, like I'm grateful and I'm all right and I'm going to see this thing through. By the grace of God, I'm going to see this thing through. By the grace of God, I'm going to see this thing through. So the guy's coming out tomorrow. Hopefully he'll install and fix everything. My truck will be up and running, I'll be able to get the wheels turning and get back to it and if not, then the Lord has a ram in the bush. You feel me, he got a ram in the bush somewhere. He's got a ram in the bush for me. I'm gonna be able to do everything I need to do to take care of my family. You know, I mean to take care of my business, take care of my employee. That is, uh, you know, been such a blessing and an asset to me. I'm gonna do another, another uh episode where I talk about him, but I'm gonna wrap it up right here. I'm gonna wrap it up right here.
Speaker 1:Thank you guys for joining me today on this episode. We're coming up to 20 minutes and I really want to try and keep these episodes short, sweet and to the point. I don't want to get lost in the sauce. Gratefulness, man, gratitude and I think if you apply that lens like over your eyes to you know everything you do it'll help you really deal with it in a different way. It'll truly help you deal with everything from life and marriage and kids and everything problems and challenges, business.
Speaker 1:I'm just grateful. I'm grateful for the good that comes with it. I'm grateful for the bad that comes with it, because it all works together. That's what the Bible tells us. All things work together for the good of those that love the Lord and are called according to his purpose. And so there it is, man. What else can I say? I hope you all enjoyed today's episode. I thank you all for checking it out. If you're watching this, please don't forget to like, comment and subscribe If you're listening wherever podcasts are played. I know it's a small podcast. Not many people know about it or know who I am, and that's not the purpose to know me. I'm just hoping that what I say and what I do here can be of some value to those who listen, and so, please, I pray that y'all will get the word out. Y'all are pleased with the five star review for a young brother doing something like this, and I look forward to seeing y'all on the next episode. Until then, let's make more money. Outro Music.