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What Size Lawn Crew Do You Use and Why?

Watch this video and learn from Jonathan’s experience what size lawn crew to use and why.

What size lawn crew do you use and why have you always done it that way?

To answer the question, it’s important to know that we’re about 95% residential and 5% commercial. We started as commercial and shifted to residential. Along the way, we have tried all kinds of different crew sizes. It’s also important to know that we know who our ideal client is and what the size of their property is. We only go after the kind of client that is our ideal and we ignore everything else in our market.

We have everything in our market from small commercial to very large commercial; from very small residential, 7,000 gross square feet and less, all the way up to multi-acre residential properties and estates. It’s also critical to understand that what we have found best works for us, and it’s different for every company, is that each tech and each crew are charged with their own activity.

Mowing crews mow, trimming crews trim, spray techs spray, pest control does pest control, irrigators do irrigation. They don’t cross over. They’re trained in their area of expertise. That’s really important to know. When we go mow, we send our mowing teams in. And, when it’s time to prune the brushes or shrubs, a different crew comes in. There are some efficiencies lost from doing it that way, but we believe from testing and trying things that there are huge efficiencies gained. That’s important to understand to understand my answer.

For residential mowing crews, the ideal for us is three based on property size. We have tried four and we didn’t gain much. We’ve run four at times when we’re in what I’d describe as an emergency due to weather. You do get more done, but the efficiency isn’t there and your per man hour, your hourly man rate comes down. We have also tested two. Two is actually more efficient than three for smaller residential, but then you get into a new issue and that is asset utilization…trucks, equipment and such. Then you have insurance and safety risk, opportunity costs, and all these other factors to consider.

For us, at this size, three is better than two because of management, the way we pay, and all these other factors. If I was starting over and I was a small business again, then two is what I would run. I would run two man mowing crews. Again, you have to understand what kind of business we are and what market we’re serving and know that we go after the clients that we want, not the properties that are available to us. We are able to say we want properties of this size and not properties of another size. If our crews had to maintain acreage, one acre plus properties, and then they spend the other half of their day mowing properties under 15,000 square feet, the business wouldn’t work out so well.

If our irrigators had to do certain activities for one half of the day and a different activity for the rest of the day, that would completely change the decisions that we make. We’ve not always done it this way. We started out as commercial. On most of our original commercial accounts we were running four man crews. Then we realized that it made more sense on our warehouse properties that required a different service level to just run a two man crew.

We had a Scag, maybe a 61 inch rider, a 21 inch mower, a couple of weed eaters, and we realized that it’s more efficient to take some equipment off the truck and send just two men out to do this. On our bigger commercial properties we have found four man crews made more sense. We never did commercial properties that took more than a full day. Our biggest properties would be a one day job with four men on the job.

It’s a different animal when you are dealing with commercial properties that could require 16 to 20 people on the job site. That’s not what I’m talking about. We tend to cater more towards the smaller properties. As a result, our crew size can be smaller.

For bush trimming, we’ve tested everything from two men all the way to four men. Two without question generates the most production, the most profitability. Production was the wrong word to use, you can get more pure production of four people versus two, but when you look at what matters, which is how much money you’re generating per man hour, two is more efficient. Sometimes we have to sacrifice the margin to get all the work done and add a third person, but at the end of the day, two is more efficient.

That’s not where we started. That was a realization in the last three years or so, and that’s where we’re at now.

For spray techs, commercial or residential, it depends. When you are out spraying commercial properties, pulling a lot of hose, it oftentimes makes sense to put two men on that job. When you’re doing small residential, one man is perfectly acceptable as a spray tech. The same is with pest control. Irrigation oftentimes we find that one man makes perfect sense, but for many reasons a lot of times, we run a two man team for irrigation. Again, it depends on if are we doing commercial or residential, what’s going on, what’s happening, and what’s our backlog? Backlog has a lot to do with how big the crew is that we’re running right now.

In a perfect world, we would have completely consistent demand, meaning that our backlog would never grow too large. That would allow us to constantly maintain that sweet spot of profit margin, meaning that we’re running the perfect crew size. But at times we are forced to go against what we know is best and add an additional person to an irrigation crew, to a lawn care crew, to a maintenance crew, just because we have to deal with demand. We have to keep our level of customer service.

Profit is sacrificed a bit, but we continue to maintain our reputation and continue to maintain the level of customer service that we’ve promised our clients. These are example considerations. And yes, it has absolutely evolved over the years, and it will continue to evolve as our company continues to evolve.

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What Factors Go Into Determining Your Lawn Care Crew Size?

How do you know what the optimal lawn care crew size is? In this video, Jonathan gives you some factors to consider whether you are just starting out or simply trying to become more efficient.

What factors go into determining the best lawn care crew size for your company?

I believe it’s really important to know that as your company changes, your crew size will change. A company that’s just getting started that has 1 crew and grows to 2 to 4 crews will change just as a company that has 10 crews and grows to 20 to 40 crews.

Continue reading “What Factors Go Into Determining Your Lawn Care Crew Size?”

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How Important is Crew Size?

How important is having the right crew size to running a successful operation?

It’s one of the core elements. We are in the business of selling time. Our number one line item on our profit and loss statements is labor. Labor, it’s either efficient or inefficient. One of the big factors in determining if it’s efficient or inefficient is the size of the crew. There are a number of different factors that go into a crew, but the crew size directly affects how productive we are. It affects how efficient we are and if we’re achieving our target man hour rate.

Continue reading “How Important is Crew Size?”

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Hire The Right People To Transform Your Business

Now is the time to take a look at your business and figure out how to hire the right people to elevate your company to the next level.

If you’re running a little bit bigger organization, I think the question you want to be thinking about right now is, “Who could we hire next year, or by the end of this year that would be business changing in the next calendar year? This person’s going to cost some money, but if we could find this person and they could bring an entirely new set of knowledge, experience, understanding to our business, take a ton of stuff off my shoulders, take a ton of stuff off some of my really talented team members so that they could move onto other things and this person could show us new ways to do things that we’re doing now, possibly incorrectly or not as efficiently or optimally as possible. What might that do for our business?”

Continue reading “Hire The Right People To Transform Your Business”

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My Plumber Might Be Missing Out On Big Profits. Are You?

My plumber may be missing out on big profits of 150k a year. Hear how to avoid making the same mistake.

Hello! The other day we had a plumber out at our home and the reason is, we got a new grill and we have a gas line coming out of our home. I know it’s a super easy thing to do, but the line from the grill wouldn’t fit onto the line from the house. I didn’t want to mess with it. One, because I didn’t really have time, and two, because it’s natural gas, so I thought we’d just have the plumber out.

We called the plumber and he came out. Actually it was two guys, and they had a $135 minimum to come do the job, which was fine, and it probably took them 10 or 15 minutes to do the work. They fixed it. All was done and then the guy went out to the truck, actually both of the guy’s went out to the truck, and they were writing up the paperwork. I tried to give him my credit card before he even went to the truck, he’s like, “No, no problem. I’ll go write up the paperwork. I’ll come back in.”

I’m in my house about 10 minutes and I walk out to the truck and he’s legitimately out there writing up the paperwork. He’s got a calculator. He’s adding things up. He’s filling out all of the paperwork by hand. I stand around for a few minutes and then I finally just walk back in the house. Then he follows me in and then I give him the credit card, and he charges the credit card, and then we chit-chat for just a second. Great guy, great company, no complaints.

I estimate at an absolute minimum they spent 15 minutes between the time that they finished the job, filled out the paperwork, came back in, charged my card, etc. You get the idea. Plus there were two. If you could imagine, and these guys bill at $120 an hour. I don’t know if it’s $120 an hour for two or $120 an hour each. I’m not even sure, but if you do the math and we’ve done a number of videos on this, and it’s about non-billable time. That non-productive time. This is why a lot of companies do not make very good money, or they can’t figure out why they’re not making more money, or it’s why they don’t think their business is very good.

Let me give you the example math on this. He wasted 15 minutes at my job. For simplicity I’m just going to call it 15 man minutes. It should really be 15 minutes times two guys but let’s just keep this really simple. He wasted 15 minutes at my house. Let’s say through the course of the day, he wastes 15 minutes three more times, so he wastes a total of 1 hour for the whole day, and this is being really conservative. They bill $120 an hour, so in other words, had they not wasted an hour and they did one extra job, and they billed that one extra job at $120, that would have been $120 in profit to the company because all the other money they earned I’m assuming already covered the expenses, the over head, paying the technicians, etc. Generally when you save wasted time, it almost all goes to the bottom line unless you’re losing money in your company. But, let’s just keep it simple. It almost all goes to the bottom line. That $120 would have been profit.

Now imagine the owner of this company were to make an extra $120 per day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year. I believe that’s $30,000. I believe that’s correct. If my math is wrong, the point still is valid. That’s an extra 30,000 off this one crew of two guys. Now imagine if he has 5 trucks running around and all 5 trucks are wasting 1 hour a day that could be billed at $120 an hour, the owner’s not taking home $150,000 a year in additional pay that he could be taking if he just fixed the problem of 1 hour of wasted time.

This is a perfect example of waste, and this waste happens in every way. How you fuel the trucks. How you maintain the equipment. How they load their trucks in the morning. You can just go down the list and there’s just tons of this waste. How fast they get out of the yard in the morning. I can go on, and on. Are they doing everything on paper and they’re not using mobiles? Maybe they’re not wasting as much time on filling out an invoice. We don’t do that. We bill back at the office. Maybe the waste is happening when they’re writing down start and stop times. Maybe it’s happening when they’re writing notes. Maybe it’s happening when they’re filling out paperwork for chemicals or writing notes that they leave on the door. A lot of this stuff could be automated or simplified in some way.

What I have found is you want to go through every single aspect of your company. Everything that’s happening. Watch your team. What are they doing? You look for the waste and then you work on that. When you fix that, and then you re-bill that time because now you don’t have to go hire a lot of new employees, you can sell that time to the customer, almost all that money is profit that comes back to you.

Hopefully the analogy makes sense and the example makes sense. This is why it’s so incredibly important to be thinking this way and working on these things. I hope you’ll apply it in your business.

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Better Time Management And Communication

In this video, Jonathan shares a tip that has improved communication and provided better time management throughout his company.

Here’s a tip and idea that we found to be highly successful that I believe will make your company run a little bit more smoothly. It will improve communication and the company will move faster.

Last month in Service Autopilot Academy, we were talking about time management. We spent a lot of time on that and this is a time management tip that has really resulted in some benefits that I’m very happy with.

Now, I’ve heard this before but for years, I put this off, I didn’t do it. I guess I didn’t buy in, I don’t know why and then we finally implemented it. If you’re interested in doing a little additional research, the basic concept comes from a methodology called Scrum, S-C-R-U-M, you can look that up, there’s book on it and such.

The idea is this, imagine that you have five people working on a project together, so maybe you have an office team and that office team is working on a new marketing project. That team gets together every morning and you’re probably in front of a whiteboard and that whiteboard, you can set this up in a lot of different ways, identifies what you have that’s upcoming, what you’re working on right now and what’s done. Again, you can make it more advanced than that, but that’s the most basic concept.

So, we’d say do, doing, done. You’d say do being what you need to get done. The five individuals gather in front of the board, you have in the do column everything that needs to get done for the projects that you’re working on and each of the five people basically answer three questions. One is, what I’m going to do today? What did I get done yesterday? What roadblocks, bottlenecks, problems do I have that I need help with?

If I was going, I’d basically identify here’s what I’m doing today. I grab my project items that are broken down into tasks of the doing, excuse me, of the do column, I’d move them to the doing column and then I’d answer what I accomplished yesterday. I’d move things from doing to done and then I would say, “Hey, Chris I need your help with this. I’ve got a little bit of a challenge here.” Or whomever, “I need you to make this call because I can’t move forward on this until you get that done,” and you’d communicate. Each person would quickly go around and do that and everybody is standing up as they do it. It’s a quick five, ten, fifteen minute thing, depending on how much information needs to be covered.

What it does, it keeps everybody moving, it adds accountability to the team and it adds communication. You know exactly what’s going on, you know what everybody’s working on and it also, if you do it in the morning, gets a lot of the bottlenecks out of the way early in the morning so that the team can really have a productive day. This is a huge time management tip but it’s also a fantastic communication tip. If you want to be in the loop on what’s going on and you want to make sure your team’s in the loop on what’s going on, this really works.

If you want more information on it, look up the concept called Scrum and just keep it really simple. You don’t have to follow the entire methodology, just start with the very, very basics and your teams can be comprised of those that are working in the office or you could have your teams that work out in the field on projects meet very quickly. You can construct a team for a month and then the team can go away and you can have different teams. In our office, we have four of these different types of meetings going on every single morning, at different times. We do four a day inside our office. I think you’ll find value to it. Look it up and see if it’s of benefit to your organization.

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How To Delegate The Never Ending Phone Calls And Emails

“I am constantly on the phone and replying to emails and I just can’t get ahead.” In this video, Jonathan tells you how to delegate successfully so you can focus on growing your business.

I was responding to YouTube comments last night and there was a question below one of the videos that I thought was a good question. It was an individual that said, “I am completely overwhelmed. I know I shouldn’t be. I know that I should figure this out (and I’m paraphrasing), but I’m completely overwhelmed between the never ending phone calls, the email, and all the stuff that I have to do, especially around communication. I’m just constantly on the phone. I’m constantly answering the phone. I’m constantly replying to email, and I just can’t get ahead. I can’t get free to do the other things in the business that I need to focus on, because I’m stuck taking care of that stuff.”

I agree with working on those things because most companies are terrible about responding to email, and they don’t answer the phone. Yet, that’s where a lot of money is made, so I think it is very smart to be focusing on those things, and to be very good at those things, and to be very proactive and not ignoring the phone calls. However, you can’t scale the company. You can’t ever improve your own personal life if you don’t get out from under some of that. That doesn’t mean that you hire somebody and delegate it all, and say you’re done. I’m going to give you a couple ideas to phase out of that.

What you want to do to help solve that problem, because you have to solve that problem or you will plateau in your business, and eventually you’ll burn out. What you want to do is initially you want to start looking for an individual maybe part time, maybe full time. The number one thing you’re looking for in this individual is a person that is friendly, easy to talk to, great on the phone, a good communicator, and their personality is such that they can jump from one thing to the next.

They’re not so structural, or process oriented, that it will drive them crazy to get another phone call. Rather, they almost thrive on moving from one task to the next, and quickly, and they’re not bothered by constantly switching between things, because that’s what they’re going to do. They’re going to answer a call, they’re going to do an email, then they’re going to answer a call, and then another call, and then they’re back to email. They’re just jumping around, and they’re going from a sales call, to a trouble call, to a billing call, so that person needs to be able to handle that, and this same person then needs to be a good communicator.

Once you find this person, what you do is you give them some basic training in the beginning. What are the top 25, top 50 things that you have been answering? Start writing those down. What are the questions? Write them down, and then record an audio of your answer for each of those items, or document it in text. Then, when this new person comes on board, have them read that many times. Have them listen to the audio a number of times, and then put them on the phones to just do the basic. Just answer the phone. Tell them, “If you can answer the question, or if it’s real simple based on what I’ve already trained you on, deal with it.” You’re going to sit there and you’re going to listen, or you’re going to be in the other room, and you’re going to be paying attention, so that you can give them coaching and advice.

Then, same with email. Answer the email. If they can answer it, have them go ahead and take care of it. Then you’re going to look at these emails, and you’re going to give coaching and advice. From the beginning you’re going to let them know that “Hey, I’m not trying to micromanage you, but I don’t want to throw you to the wolves and make your life miserable. What I’m going to do is I’m going to pay some attention to what’s going on. How you’re responding. Don’t get stressed out about it because I’m not here to give you a hard time, and I’m going to look at your emails.”

“I’m here to help you. I’ve been doing this for a while. I’ve learned a few tricks. I’ve been through some of the challenges, so I want to shortcut it for you, so I’m going to pay attention to what you’re saying, what you’re writing, and then I’m going to give you some advice and tricks. I’m going to give you some help so that your job will be so much easier. So, I’ll be paying attention for a little while, but don’t stress out about that.”

That’s what you then do, and you give periodic coaching advice. Not every time. Some times you need to go do it in the moment. Other times you could just save up the advice and give it to them at the end of the day. Maybe there is no advice. Maybe they’re a rock star from the beginning. Now, what you do as they start answering the phone, and they start responding to email, and they do what they can, and the instruction is very clear, you tell them, “When you bump into something that you can’t handle, you’re not sure how to answer it, or you might be wrong, you tell the client let me get you on the phone with my manager, or let me connect you with whomever.” If they can’t answer the email, they flag that email so that you can come through later in the day, all at one time, and respond to those emails.

Maybe they can’t respond and they simply reply back to the client, hey I got your email. I’m checking on this for you. We’ll have you an answer before the end of the day. Thank you very much. And at the end of the day you go through and work all those emails. Now, if there’s an emergency email, they get you and you deal with that in the moment, but most things are not emergencies, and they can be batched for later.

Just like some of the phone calls. If you answer the phone and you tell the client, “Hey you know what? We can solve this for you. In fact, we’ll have it solved before the end of the day.” Or, “Let me give you a ring back. It will be today, to get your credit card number so that we can settle up on your account.” Maybe because this person can’t do that. The customer now has an expectation, and they got an answer. They know that you’re working on it, and then you can come through and deal with these things at the end of the day. Or, if during the day this individual who’s answering the phone can’t deal with something, they can get you in that situation.

Now, what you do is when you respond to that email with the answer because your assistant couldn’t do it, you have them read that email. So, they now know how to answer it next time. Maybe you even turn that email into a template if it’s a common question that you’re always answering.

Regarding the phone call, you then record your phone calls. You can buy a $80 phone recording device that records mp3’s and it’ll plug right into your phone. Basically, you plug it in to the headset of the phone on one side. So, if this is the little device, imagine the headset plugs in here, and then another wire plugs into the base of the phone, and it sort of sits between the headset and the phone itself, and it can record your calls.

You can just hit record anytime you want, so then it creates these mp3’s. You answer the question, you give that file to your assistant, and they listen to how you answered that, and you go through this for weeks. Depending on how much you’re turning over, it could be months, and yes, that’s quite a bit of work. Yeah, it’s taking up your time. You can’t just say, “Hi, glad we hired you Mary. Take care of everything. I’m done. I’m never dealing with calls again. I’m over here. Leave me alone.”

You can’t do that. You’ve got to work with this person for some period of time, but the beauty of it is within a month, 2 months, 3 months you’ve taken this thing completely off your plate, or a significant portion of it, and now you’re free to go do other things. You cannot hire this person, and think that they will magically know everything, and be perfect, and say the right things, because if you do, if you hire them and you throw them out there, then what’s going to happen is your going to be pissed, and you’re going to say these people suck. They can’t do this. I have to do it. I’m the best. I’m the only person that can do it, and the answer to that is no. That’s not the case.

The situation is that they never got the training. They could step up if you gave them the training. They could step up if they knew what to say, but to throw them to the wolves, in a sense, and then put them in a situation to fail, and then from that decide that you know what? It’s impossible to delegate this stuff, so I’m just going to have to handle it. That’s not how it works. That’s not reality. If you hire them, train them. Mentor them. Work with them for several months. Then, your problem is solved. You’ve got that off your plate, and you just keep repeating that with the different parts of your business, and in time, you have a good business. It’s a business that doesn’t drive you crazy and wear you down. So, that’s how you solve it. It works.

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Be Careful When Emailing Lawn Care Customers

Are you emailing lawn care customers? Use caution. It could just get you fired.

Text messaging, emailing, or trading Facebook posts with your clients, and even with your team, can really get you into a lot of trouble. It is really cool, convenient technology and you and your clients want to use it, but I’d really caution you based on some experiences I’ve had in the past, solely relying on this technology for convenience.

First, there’s nothing that will replace human interaction and building a relationship through human action. Second, as you know, there’s no way to interpret tone. For example, years ago, I was a partner in a company and we did not let our district managers when they were dealing with our clients who were property managers, we did not let them trade emails.

We didn’t even publish their individual emails. There was basically one email. We didn’t want them giving out their email addresses. We wanted them talking on the phone. If one of our clients messaged in or sent an email and said that they needed to get something taken care of, or that they had a problem, or  were unhappy about something, we didn’t want our team emailing back.

We wanted our team to pick up the phone, call that individual and get it straightened out. We wanted our client to hear the tone and we wanted our team member, our district manager, to hear the tone of the client and make sure it truly got resolved.

I was just reminded of this today when I received a text message from one of my vendors and the text message basically made me mad. It made me think I could replace this person. I just didn’t like their tone and the way they were handling something. They were sort of blaming something on me that had nothing to do with me. I never picked up the phone and talked to them, but I did continue the text message and realized that they were completely wrong in their assumption.

I’m not giving you the details but basically they made an assumption, they were frustrated at me. Had I not continued the text, I wouldn’t have realized why they were frustrated. They were just simply wrong and when I corrected them, problem solved.

That kind of stuff, had I just stopped that text message, I would have continued on thinking I’m ready to just get rid of this individual. Think about that with your team. If they’re trading messages with the client, if they’re trading text messages or phone calls or Facebook posts, how is your client perceiving what they’re saying? Is your team member even perceiving what the client’s saying correctly? Are they understanding their tone?

We’re moving into all kinds of really interesting technology and convenience. It does not hurt, in fact it pays to continue to pick up the telephone and use the phone to really build relationships and provide great service.

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Tired Of Always Dealing With Business Problems?

Dealing with business problems can be stressful. Listen to the video to learn how Jonathan has come to embrace it…

If you’re anything like me, you probably get really tired of dealing with problems. You get tired of dealing with the same thing, over and over again, whether it’s an employee problem, or you’re fed up with dealing with some stupid mistake that somebody out in the field made, and now you’ve got to deal with the client. You’ve got to apologize for the twenty-fifth million time.

It gets really old. It gets really frustrating. Or, maybe you’ve got to deal with money problems, or you’ve got to deal with figuring out how you’re going to coordinate a project. It goes on and on. It’s like everyday, what’s going to hit you now, what’s going to be today’s problem? It just never ends, and so the hope is that, one of these days magically everything will be perfect, or maybe one of these days I’ll have somebody run the company for me, and I’ll never have to deal with these problems again.

I’ve definitely felt that way, and I’ve gone through years of feeling that way. It’s like, “Gees, this frickin business. I mean, when are we going to get our stuff together here, and get our problems solved, and quit screwing up? When is all the different crap that we deal with, marketing that’s not working good enough, money that’s not coming in fast enough, hating some of the work we do, and we can’t find any employees, when is that going to get better? When am I going to have to stop dealing with it?”

There was a point, I don’t know when, but it was a while back, that it sort of dawned on me. It’s like, man this is what I get paid to do. It doesn’t mean that it won’t get better, it doesn’t mean that it won’t ever get fixed, it doesn’t mean the company will mature, and grow up, and things will smooth out, but this is what I get paid to do. I mean, if I were to go get a job working for somebody else, and I want to make a lot of money, this is what I’d be doing for them, and that’s the point.

What I did, and maybe it’s of help to you, is I finally mentally adjusted to the fact that, you know what, this is what I get paid to do. This is why I make the big money, or back in the day, this is why I hope someday I’ll make the big money, because I deal with the problems. I make stuff happen, and if you’re on my team and you make a lot of money, it’s because your the person that helps fix problems, and deal with all the crap that goes on with running a company. The guys that make all the money make all the hard decisions, have to apologize and deal with all the problems. They work the longer hours, figure it out, go through stress of all of that.

Everybody, in fact if your a CEO of a big company, it’s not smooth sailing. You’re dealing with one problem after another. One person after another is coming to you, you’re helping solve the problem. You’re dealing with the problems of dealing with the right team. You’re dealing with the problem of when your best person leaves your company. You’re dealing with the problem of, there’s a cash crunch. That is why you get paid the big money, and when you hire more people to be on your team, and those individuals within your company want to make a lot of money, the only way they make a lot of money is to solve big problems for you.

You don’t just pay somebody tons of money within your organization to do the easy job, to not have to deal with the problems. Those team members never make the big money. Even a really exceptional sales person, who makes the big money, has to deal with all kinds of crap, all kinds of stuff. They have to negotiate things. You get the idea, it’s not easy. The guys that make a lot of money selling, work really hard and they do hard stuff, and they deal with hard problems, and they’re constantly having to apologize. Somethings going wrong with the sale, somethings going wrong with the project. They’re fixing it, that’s what we do, that’s what people that make money do. There’s no business that exists that’s smooth sailing without problems.

A great company knows how to minimize those problems, and a great company knows how to quickly deal with those problems when they occur, and after a couple of the same problems happen, they know how to fix them so that they stop happening. But, then that company gets to the next level of it’s business and all of it’s systems, and all it’s procedures, everything starts to break, because it’s becoming a whole new organization. It has to go fix the next set of things, so that it can get to the next level in business, and then that stuff starts to break and you’ve got to fix it again. Every time the company reaches some new plateau of gross revenue, and employee count, lots of stuff starts to fall apart, and break, and problems start to happen.

It’s your job to fix those. It’s your highest paid employees’ jobs to fix those things. So, the point here is that life will never be perfectly smooth sailing until you cash out. But, then on a side note, with your money you now have to figure out how to manage it, and protect it and grow it. That will just be a different set of problems. The point here is, that if you mentally adjust to, this is what I’m getting paid for, I’m a problem solver, I’m a fantastic problem solver, I’ll take the problems, I’ll fix them, and we’ll be a better company. When you get there, life will be just a little bit less stressful. I finally adjusted to that years back and I have to remind myself of that quite frequently.

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Why You Must Cut Off The Things And People That Drain Your Energy

Watch this video to learn how to deal with people that drain your energy and surround you with negativity.

I don’t know if you’ve ever had this experience. I have many times. I’m about to do a sales call, I’m about to meet with a client, I’m about do something that requires that I have a high level of energy, that I’m excited, that I’m in a frame of mind where I totally believe in this thing that I’m doing so that I can hopefully make the sale. Right before I’m about to do the sales call, I am bombarded with bad information or negative information or a problem or another fire.

More than likely when I was brought up to speed on this fire that we’ve got to deal with or something that’s wrong or some client that’s not happy, there’s really nothing I can do with it in the moment because all I can do is receive that information. But I now have to immediately take care of my sales call or go meet with a client to give him an estimate or whatever. I have to shift from the negative mood almost instantly into being Mr. Positive and excited and happy and certain of what I’m selling. If you’ve ever experienced that, you know how negative bad information is in terms of your energy level and your mood and how it can hinder you from being a really great salesperson.

Case in point. A really good friend of mine is in the industry of selling airplanes and helicopters and his very top sales guy told him, “I don’t need to hear about the problems with the company. I don’t need to hear about any negatives. I don’t need to hear about any problems with the airplanes or helicopters or whatever it is that they’re selling.” He doesn’t want any of the bad news. “Just give me the good stuff. You guys work out all other stuff. Don’t tell me about it. I don’t want to hear it because my job is to be the salesman. My job is to sell a really rosy wonderful picture of what’s possible and I cannot be bombarded with that negative information.” That’s very true.

Where I’m going with all of this is the very same thing is true in building your business. You have to be aware. You have to be very aware of the problems. You have to be very aware of the fires. You have to be very aware of the reasons clients are cancelling. You can’t ignore that, but you’ve got to put that stuff on a shelf. You’ve got to deal with it at the right time. The point of this is, if you go through your business, your relationships, your employees and the outside relationships that you have, and your client list and you think about everybody that drains the life out of you because they’re constantly negative, they’re constantly unhappy. You can think of all the things that when you wake up in the morning, that suck the life out of you.

To be really successful, I gave the salesman example. To be really successful as a business owner, you have to get that stuff out of your life. You have to cut off those relationships. You have to end those relationships. You have to get those people out of your business. You have to get those clients out of your business. You have to deal with whatever those problems are and those relationships that are sucking the life out of you. If you don’t, they will drain all the energy you have to the point that you’ll never be able to build a great company.

You have to have high levels of energy to be able to sustain what it takes to be, in my first example, a great salesperson. Or in my bigger example, the over-arching point here is to be a great business owner that moves his organization forward, that grows his company, that leads his team. Whoever and whatever is sucking the life out you, either deal with it and fix it in your company or cut it out of your life. It will make all the difference. I am speaking from experience. I have done this in many many cases.