Five Business Basics You Cannot Ignore

Let's discuss five fundamentals that many small business owners overlook and explain how each one affects growth, profit, and long-term stability. We also get honest about mistakes we made early, including underpricing, and why taking care of yourself is not optional if you want to stay in the game. 
• accounting and record keeping as a decision tool for growth and pricing 
• starting bookkeeping early to avoid expensive cleanup later 
• hiring challenges in seasonal work and how attrition shows up 
• using AI tools to build a hiring and onboarding process 
• improving retention through culture, benefits, career path, seasonality and training 
• building a professional company image through uniformity, cleanliness, presence and conduct 
• avoiding undercut pricing that creates busy work and no profit 
• a simple pricing framework tied to labor percentage and healthy margins 
• treating owner health, rest and mental clarity as the business’s biggest asset 
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Transcript

Welcome And Why This Matters

SPEAKER_00 0:00

What is going on, everybody? Welcome, welcome, welcome back to the Momenty Mindset. My name is Dana. Thank you guys for checking out today's video being a part of the channel content. I am the owner of Motive Motivation. I'm the owner of Beelaf Lawn Mowing and Maintenance located here in Columbus, Ohio. If you're watching us on uh YouTube, I want to say thank you for checking out the channel, taking some time. Please don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe. And if you're catching us on the obscure net uh apps or whatever that actually play podcasts, I want to say welcome and thank you for taking some time to be with us here today. We've actually been gaining a lot of attention and traction that I was really uh to be honest with you, shocked behind. But it also encouraged me to say, hey, you know, there's a group of listeners out there that are finding value in your content, they're downloading the episodes. So let's continue to make sure that we serve those groups of people. And so um today's episode is a pretty basic one. You know me. I'm gonna try and keep it short and sweet to the point, get you guys in and out because your time is extremely valuable. And like most people in business, time is money. So we're gonna be talking about the five things whether you are a solo business owner, whether you are a just newly business owner, or you find yourself kind of just in a rut. Five things that most business owners, in my experience, that I've had the privilege to talk to and be a little more personal with in terms of their business handlings and how they take care and conduct business. These are five things that I've noticed that a lot of them overlook for one reason or another, and we're gonna jump right in. Let's start with number one. Number one, I got my notes here on my phone, so let's look at it. Accounting, record keeping is key to growth. All right, accounting is probably one of those things that you don't think you need to do until you make a certain threshold of money, and that couldn't be further from the truth. If you're gonna be doing accounting personally, actually, the greatest practice that you can have is starting to figure out ways and processes and systems to record keep or keep your books accurately while you are smaller, because you have a smaller set of numbers, a smaller grouping of money to deal with, to deal with allocations, to track expenses, and you know, vice versa, all those little nuts and bolts that are involved with accounting and bookkeeping. It's a lot easier to do when you're smaller, you're just getting started out, and maybe you don't have a ton of customers, a ton of overhead, a ton of payroll. Um, and if you're a solo operator, then you know, again, you're not necessarily making this extremely large sum of money, generally right out the gate. So put that into practice early on, your very first year, your very first week, as soon as you start making money, really focus on how I can record keep, what are the things that I need to keep records of. I'm not going to get into those bolts and weeds, but if you go to Google, you know, Chat GPT, those kind of things, you'll find out what you need to make sure that you are tracking and keeping your records and neatly and consistently in a way that's going to be beneficial to you when it comes time to make decisions, whether that's to buy equipment, whether that's to expand or to grow, whether that's to dial in your pricing a little better. Um, all of those things are direct results of the information and data that you have on hand. Uh, those the that data is what helps you make those decisions. So it's very important. And if let's say you're a little larger or you're a little late to the game, you're like, look, I've been operating for five years, four years, and I've never had an accountant like yourself, which uh uh excuse me, like me, like what I did, I definitely did that. Um, I had to get a, you know, a person on my team that was strictly a bookkeeper to actually go back for all of those years, reconcile everything, make an account of everything, get everything put into a spreadsheet, get everything broke down, where my expenses were like just the whole nine, which was probably honestly cost me about three times more to have them do that than if I would have paid them from the beginning to just keep it all four years of my business when I first started and just make sure everything was up to date and looking right. So uh not only will it save you money in the long run rather than having to go back and redo things, um, but again, it's something that's necessary for you to learn how to grow and to make informed decisions when it comes to your company. Should you cross that bridge? I know some people are like, I just want to stay small. That is not an excuse to not keep your books. Being small is even more of a reason to want to keep your books. You want to keep things in track. You have a smaller margin, a smaller margin of money that you're dealing with, a smaller profit margin, um, maybe a smaller expense. You want to be super tight. And honestly, it's just a lot easier when your business isn't super massive and super full blown out. So make sure you keep your accounting in check, whether that means hiring an accountant or just finding a great system to be able to take care of it and do it on your own. There are some great softwares out there that allow you to do that, you just have to take time to invest and learning how to use them. Now, let's go to number two, hiring. The reason why I chose hiring, and let me preface this these aren't in any specific order of importance. Okay, so don't think like, oh, accounting is more important than hiring. No, I'm just giving you five things. I'm sorry, I'm by the freeway, so you probably heard that law, that that that loud motorcycle to drive by. But hiring, one of the hardest challenges for line and landscape companies is attrition. What that means is losing employees, turnover, not being able to keep guys really consistently enough to build. Now, on one hand, that could be because of the seasonality of your business. When my first year, my first four years in business, I didn't do snow. So I actually shut down for the winners. I couldn't give guys the opportunity to stick with me all through the winter season because I did not want to do snow. So that might be something to consider. I didn't I didn't want to do uh Christmas lights. You know, you don't just have to do snow in the winter. There's a host of other things you can do outside of snow plowing, all right? But I'm just saying for my company specifically, um, I wasn't involved in those things, I wasn't interested in those things, so I didn't do those things. And it created an imbalance in my ability to keep employees. We would finish out the season for leaves in the fall, and I'd be like, you got to go find something to do, and hopefully I can get them back in the spring. And that did not always work well. Guys move on, guys get invested in new opportunities, and they're like, look, I want to stick around and not mess up a good thing. I understand we had a good thing going last year, but it wasn't good enough for me to leave what I got going on this winter, and I think I'm gonna ride this out. And that was sometimes a billet that I had to bite as a result of my desire to have the winners off. Not saying that that's your business needs to do something during the winter, but that can definitely be one of the things that affects your ability or your attrition rate when it comes to hiring and employees. The other issue is um sometimes it's just the competition in the market, you know, um, the the dollar amount that people are getting paid at another business, sometimes it is loyalty and culture. Guys have been in a certain business year in and year out, season after season. Um, and sometimes it's just your timing of hiring. You know, if you're hiring when everyone else is trying to hire, you're probably gonna have a tough time getting A1 candidates because everyone is competing for them to come to their business during the spring rush. Maybe try hiring, you know, in February, maybe try hiring in January, um, having some type of bonus or incentive, signups, like those kind of things go a long way. So I actually wrote down some considerations here, like how to create your first hiring and onboarding process. I'm gonna be honest with you. I literally chat GPT mine. I talked to chat, I put in a very descriptive and detailed uh prompt for what I want it to tell me in regards to how I should hire, what should my documents look like, what disclaimers should I place um within my documents, how do I onboard, what should that onboarding process look like for a line care and landscape company that offers these types of services? How do I weed out um how do I weed out candidates and vet candidates properly so I'm getting quality candidates? I just went in and just gave it this kind of detailed ideal of what I wanted, and it spit out an entire routine for me. It spit out everything that I needed to get started. Now, as my business has grown from that place, I have been able to actually tweak that system. I don't exactly use that system verbatim anymore. I've seen where this probably doesn't really fit or align with my business, so I took it out. This thing actually uh does align that it did that chat GPT didn't excuse me, that chat GPT did not uh mention. So I need to put that in. Where does this fit? Um, there's been tweaks over the years, but I had a great baseline because we're we have this access to technology, use it, you know what I'm saying? Use it. Do not, you're not sliding yourself or sliding the game. Don't feel weird about using chat GPT to help you make business decisions, all right. So this one really helped me. Things that it helped me to consider were culture, culture, like the employee culture, the culture that I create for the employees, right? Benefits. What are you offering beyond the dollar amount? Are you offering health care? Are you offering insurances overtime? Are you offering a career path, right? So, like, like, do they have a way to come in and see that there's room for growth within your company? How can they start at this place? And is there a path that you can give them to not only increase their pay and their value in the company, but then also increase their skill set, skills that they can use outside of your company, career path, how do you invest into your employees? Me, I was doing a monthly uh leadership mentoring program. A lot of the guys that come that have come to me last couple of years all have desires to start their own business. And I'm like, great, guess what? I actually have a program that I do every month. We sit down, go out to breakfast, completely it paid by the business, and uh we we talk how to uh introduce them to business concepts. We talk introducing them to leadership concepts, give them books and materials to read, exercises to practice, homework to do to come in and put into practice while they're here at the job. Uh, you know, we try to build that culture, but also invest in their in their career path and their ability to move up within the company, take on more responsibility, and of course make more money. Um, the other two things were seasonality and training. So, five things to consider. Once again, culture, benefits, career path, seasonality, which I did speak on a little bit earlier, and then training. You need to have, or you would like to have, you want to have a full-out training process. Make sure that you're not skimping on the way that you train your people. Make sure you have a process, make sure that it's uniform and streamlined. So this way everyone is getting the same training, the same information, and you're not dropping the ball by changing changing things up dramatically with how you deal with incoming employees. So, um, that's a really big one that's gonna help you fight the attrition rate in your company. Thing number three, image. T-shirts are a solid start. I think that's pretty much what everybody starts with is t-shirts, but you need to consider uniformity, ability to keep a clean appearance, presence, and conduct. Uniformity means this: my colors are royal blue, yellow, black. Whatever they wear, I don't care what jeans they are, it doesn't have to be dickies or khakis or anything, but as long as they're black and they don't have rips or tears, I'm good. As long as they're wearing one of our branded shirts, I'm good, right? So we don't necessarily have a uniform per se like you know you would at a school or at certain businesses, but we do have a uniformity. We have a sense of uniformity. They're not allowed. I'm wearing this hat now, but they're not allowed to wear hats with branding and things like that on. If you're gonna wear a hat, it has to be a belief hat. Like we have a standard that makes us look the same wherever we are. Ability to keep a clean appearance because I I chose darker colors because when you're dealing things with like mulch, dirt, leaves, all that kind of stuff. Guess what? Lighter colors stain. And you don't want to show up to your house, you know, uh later in the evening covered in dirt, stains, sweat stains, all that stuff coming through. Even though you work outside, you still want to have a clean and neat appearance, no matter which customer, from the very first one in the morning all the way to the last one at the end of the night. All right, guys, welcome back. I'm sorry, I had to like quick intermission. Um, it's about 8 30 at night, and I had a delivery of two new mowers being dropped off here at my shop, so that's why I was taking the time to try and record this podcast. Um, but got briefly interrupted, and I want to get back to the action and the topic at hand and make sure I finish this thing strong. So um, we were talking about the things, excuse me, the things to consider when it comes to image. And I believe I was on presence. Presence meaning how people conduct themselves when they're wearing your uniform. I make it very clear to my drivers and my uh team members that hey, I know some of you guys smoke, do not do it in your uniform. If you need to take your uniform off and smoke, do that. Um, I tell them to watch their conduct with how they talk and how they speak. I understand that we live in a culture here in America where some people are just not sensitive to cussing and others are. And I don't want to offend either group. So I tell them that is not language that will be tolerated at all while you're in uniform. Some people have a problem with that, some don't. Most don't because they want to make a check. So it's not hard. It's just things that presence, you know, know that they're supposed to stay in uniform. I had one guy who said it got so hot that he felt like taking off his shirt. So he took it off, wrapped around his head, and walked around and finished her yard come uh half naked from the top up. And what happened was you can imagine, uh, I lost that customer, right? So presence is very important. What guys do and what people do when they have your uniform on, even when they're not at a customer's yard, when they're at the gas station gassing up, when they're in the Home Depot buying emergency equipment or something that breaks down when they're at the tire shop, they need to conduct themselves as professionals at all times. And that does feed into their image, not only that they protrude, but you making sure that you understand the image that they have and that they hold within themselves as being an image bearer of the company. Uh, conduct goes along with presence, so I won't go back into that. I actually just touched it. But let's do number four, which is price. Don't be that undercut guy. You will get a lot of customers and make a little to no profit. I was that guy. I'm speaking from experience. If you talk to anyone who came in the game knowingly doing uh, I'm gonna do$25 line cuts, I'm gonna do a$20 line cut. I was that guy because I felt like I just needed to make money and I just needed to fill up my schedule. The problem is I was working like a dog and I was making absolutely no money. Proof in the pudding, my very first year of business, I made so little money that taxes did not even take anything from me. I made less than the$5,000 uh threshold to be taxed, and I was a full-time hear me. I was doing lawn care full time, not on the weekends, not on the weekends. I was doing it full-time and made less than$5,000 because I was undercutting my pricing so much. I was doing bush jobs, whole house bush jobs for$75. You know, like just anything to get a customer because I thought the customer was the answer. I did not understand that my pricing was actually the answer. You also don't want to be the guy who overprices your services, because on that place, you'll struggle to get customers and you'll still make little to no profit. All right. Um, having jobs that are well overpriced, you know, one off here or there. If you can grab one, you know, get you a little dessert, a little free lunch, sure, I get it. But you shouldn't aim for that to be your mission because it results in the opposite problem. Whereas now you actually don't have enough clientele and you don't have you're not performing enough services to really be a profitable, sustainable, and healthy or growing business. Um, my formula, and I wasn't going to get into on this, and I'm not going to too too much in detail because I don't want to confuse you guys. If I had like the whiteboard or something, maybe I'll do a video on it. Let me know if you'd like me to break this down. But essentially, my formula is to basically charge three to four times the amount of my labor cost minimum. So if I am working for$25 an hour as a solo operator, that's what I want to pay myself. Let's say I work a four-hour day, one single four-hour day. I want$25 for each hour. That means I need to take home$100. Now, that$100 needs to be three to four times less than the gross amount of revenue I brought in. So what that means is I need to make it a minimum of$300 to$400. That's what I need to bring in gross revenue in order to take home comfortably$100 out of that to for myself. The rest is going to go to my business, to overhead, and to the profitability of the business. Okay. The reason why this is I went to Landscape Summit. Shout out to Landscape Summit, Mike Andes, and his team. If you're not aware of who Mike Andes is and you're in this industry, um yeah, I'm gonna plug him, man. I don't know the dude personally. I just went to a couple of his conferences, watched a ton of his videos, um, and just heard him speak. And you know, I'm subscribed to like his email subscription and all that good stuff. So he's he's a phenomenal business-minded man, a phenomenal um mentor in the space. He really does raise the level of professionalism. And I went to his landscape summit uh 2021, and I'm still using um a lot of the things that he implemented and taught about at that landscape summit today. And one of them is this principle I just told you here, my formula. Um, it helps me kind of really dial in my pricing season to season um and make sure that I'm not overpricing, but also that I'm not undercharging. Um, he had a workbook that he gave us, and in the back of the workbook, it had a table that said bad, good, better, and best, something like that. And it had percentages. And one of the things that always stuck with me was it said the percentage of your labor revenue. In other words, how much do you have to pay someone an hour to do the job? And you want that percentage to be good, you know, bad, good, better, best. I believe good was like 30%. If you can do 30%, you're doing good. I mean, it's not great, but you're doing good. You honestly want to aim for, you know, 25%, 20%, or less. That's how you know you're really going to be profitable. You're really doing well with covering your expenses and your, excuse me, well, with covering your labor expense. You want your labor expense, which again was mine, for example, was$25 an hour. You want that to be 30% or less to stay in a healthy place, right? So again, I can go into that in greater detail um at another time. And I'm just gonna add this fifth one in on the bonus on the fly, and that is personal care. All right. As the owner, um, I understand the mentality of grind, grind, grind. No days off. I gotta get it. I'm a solo operator, my family's depending on me to eat. I got children and a wife and car bills and house bills and this, that, and this, and this. I understand that. And I'm not here to knock or discourage anyone from the hustle or from having that dog. Everyone's conviction, everyone's uh stamina is different, all right? So I'm not here to knock that. But what I do want to say is this do not lose sight of the fact that your greatest asset, the thing that's gonna make you more money than anything you go out in the field and physically do, is you. Every decision has to start with you and end with you, right? The way you delegate work, the way you price work, the way you market work, the way that you respond to customers and client relationships, employees, if you should have some, right? Um the truck cannot drive if you're a solo operator. It doesn't drive if you're not in a position to drive. If your health is not good enough, if you're not taking care of your body, and sometimes I'm gonna be honest, the best therapy, the best remedy for breaking down is rest. Watching after your body is so, so crucial. Um, getting a good night's rest, drinking enough water, things that you've been hearing probably for years, they make so much more of an impact. It means so much more if you're physically out in the you know field doing the labor, you're physically putting in these long hours, these hot days. This work is not easy. Anyone that's done a season of this knows that it can be very rough on the body end, especially if you're older getting started, um, you know, 30s, 40s, what have you. I started my company at 32. I'm now 39 years old. So um The things I did a little easier when I was 32 don't come as easily to me now. So protecting your body, your mental health, your brain, not allowing yourself to get overwhelmed, putting processes and systems in place. Um, you know, having a group of friends or a group of people with common interests, with a common and similar business, similar uh goals of dedications and visions, like having having those people around to kind of discuss some of the challenges and work through some of the challenges that could just come up mentally for you as a business owner is important. Having someone you can confide in. Um those things are so extremely important, and they seem simple, they seem redundant, but you'd be surprised at how many guys get so focused on trying to make the money that they run themselves into the ground to a point where even if they get the money, they can't recover. Even if they get the money, they can't go out and enjoy the money, even if they get the money, like there's no point in being some multi-billion, multi-million dollar corporation, and you know, your health is on a consistent decline as a result of the grind and effort that you put in. And I'm telling you, there's no amount of grinder effort that's worth you uh declining and deteriorating your health. So make sure you're taking care of yourself. Me, I don't personally go to a gym, but I do things that are intentional and things that allow me to do them for over the term of a lifestyle, right? So, like for example, I only drink water and sparkling water, zero calorie. It actually literally hydrates your body the same way that water does. Um, and it has a little flavor to it to get me out of that redundancy of the taste of water. But that allows me not to drink sodas, juices, high sugar things. Um, it's a lifestyle change, but it's an easy one to make because I can satisfy my palate if I got a little sweet tooth with that. Um, I also do a walk 20 minutes every night. It allows me spiritually to recover. I take 10 minutes and I pray, walking in one direction, um, and then I do another turnaround, do 10 minutes back to the house, and I try to sit in silence, let the Lord speak to me, let the spirit lead me, and um just try to clear my mind and my thoughts, you know, maybe re-rehearse some of the things of the day, um, just unload and de uh, what's that? What's the word? I can't think of the word, like de-stress, you know what I'm saying? Get back re-in touch with myself. So I do that after dinner. So it also has the benefit of boosting my metabolism, helping my food digest, making sure I'm preparing my body to calm down, to be able to settle into bed and get a good night's rest. Um, a small change. Like I everybody can probably find 20 minutes after dinner to go for a 20-minute walk. And you'd be surprised at how that one thing over the course of a season will not only change your health and your well-being, but your mentality. Um, once again, because I pray it helps me spiritually. Um, like all of those things are so important. Supplementation, of course. I try to stay away from a whole lot of supplements, but I do try to use a few key high-quality ones that you have to cycle through, such as Ghost State, um, methylene blue, um, shila jeet, like you know, some of the superfoods and super minerals that unfortunately the diet that we have here in America, they're kind of hard to get a sufficient amount. So, those are the kind of things that I take just to give you guys some examples, stuff that helps me keep mental clarity, keep natural energy focus without like, you know, over caffeinating myself or sugar rushing myself with energy drinks and things like that. When you're a young man, I know it seems like that's the way to go. Get a Red Bull and hit it. I promise you, listen, don't pick up the habit because it's hard to break, and those things are dangerous when they are consumed over a long period of time. I'm just telling you, studies have shown um it's not something you really want to do to your body. High level, high operating athletes, high-level, high operating individuals, business, uh, business people, business owners, CEOs, things like that. I promise you, they're not binging or uh have a consistent diet of you know, energy drinks, soda, pop, you know, whatever you want to call it, uh juices. They're not doing that kind of stuff. So just make sure that you're taking little steps, um, as many as you need to better take care of yourself and put yourself in position to win. So I hope these five things were helpful. I'm gonna go over them real quick one more time. We talked about accounting, we talked about hiring, we talked about uh image, we talked about your uh your pricing, and then we finished up with dealing with your body and your self-care. Um, I hope those five things really hit home for you. If you did find them to be something you know you need to work on, drop a comment, drop a like, let me know if you have there's something I missed that you think is equally important. Please go down there, share it in the comment box, put it in our review space. Um, get get in touch with us. We have all our information, open book. You find us on the web everywhere, vt floodmm.com, Facebook, all that good stuff, Instagram. Come check us out, man. Um, and like I said, we're always an open door to help anyone else that uh might feel like they need some help in a certain area. We don't know it all. We're not trying to say that we do, but we definitely know a lot about failure, we definitely know a lot about what doesn't work, we definitely know a lot about what things not to do and what things hindered us in our own development and growth. And so we want to share those things with you and hopefully help you skip a lot of those pitfalls. Outside of that, man, peace, blessings. I thank the Lord for you guys coming. I'm gonna finish this with a brief prayer. Father, I just thank you for this space and this podcast. I pray that you bless those that have listened, those that may not know you as Lord and Savior, God. I pray that you'll give them revelation and you'll give them an experience with you that they cannot deny who you are. Show yourself, show your love, show your sacrifice, show your favor, your mercy, your blessing to each and every one of them. And I thank you, Lord, once again for them giving me this little sliver of their time. I pray that they're blessed and encouraged, and I just give you all the glory, honor, and praise. Hey, please thank, please, please, please come back, tap back in. Thank you so much, and I'll catch y'all on the next episode. Peace.