Jonathan:
Hello. Answering another question and the question is, “What do you think of TaskEasy for filling up extra downtime for mowing crews? I’m not referring to HomeAdvisor as they charge for leads, but TaskEasy seems like a nice option for temporary workload reduction or increase.”
So, not necessarily speaking to an opinion about TaskEasy or any of the similar competitors, but the concept, whether it be TaskEasy or Robin or some of the other solutions out there. I think there’s LawnStarter, there’s a whole variety of companies of this sort.
If you’re a smaller company, you’re just getting started, or you’re starting a new crew and you have gaps in your schedule, and you want to keep a crew completely full, or you want to fill in the gaps so you have more density that can make a crew more profitable, it’s a viable option. And it’s one that can help you with exactly those problems. So if you can’t bring team members into your company because you can only give them 25 hours a week and you really need to give them 40 or 50 hours a week, this is a legitimate option.
The watch out is really very simple. You’re making less money on this type of work than if you build out your own business with all your own clients. And so you don’t want to long-term become dependent on this work. There’s a risk of you providing … Maybe you only have 50% your own work and 50% of your work from TaskEasy or Robin or LawnStarter or one of the other brands, and you become dependent on their work. Or you start a new crew and you do all their work and now you’re so dependent and you’re so busy that you’re trapped to ever go build your own clientele.
So if you approach it from the standpoint of solely filling in gaps when you’re a smaller company and you continue to acquire your own clients and maybe replace the work that you’re getting from these third parties. And then when you start a new crew, you have some of your own work and then maybe you fill in some gaps with their work, but you then work aggressively to fully fill that crew up with just your work, not a bad idea.
There’s some logic in that. So I wouldn’t be fully negative on that. But I’m going to say it a final time. The trap here is just that. It’s the trap of getting [inaudible 00:02:14] or getting locked into this type of work, getting comfortable, letting it be a crutch, and never building out your own work. And if you do that, then you’ve essentially built for yourself a decent paying job, but you’ve not really built a business. So, not opposed, just make sure you hustle to go build out your own thing as fast as you can. Thanks.
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