Jonathan:
How’s it going? If you watch YouTube videos from individuals like me and others, talking about the business and talking about how you can turn your business into something interesting, or you can get started in the business and it won’t be that hard, and you have an emotional reaction, periodically, to all the YouTubers, and that reaction is, “Everybody makes it seem easy”, this video’s for you.
I’m going to read a question. I’m up at the office today … it’s Saturday, I wasn’t planning on recording any videos, and I was cleaning up my to-do list, and this was on my to-do list as something that I felt was an important comment to respond to. I have no idea how long ago I got this comment on a video. I’m gonna read you the comment and then I’m gonna respond to it.
“How are you doing? You make it sound so easy when it comes down to it. The lawn care business is a very expensive business, and to make good money, it’s not easy because of the competition and low ball prices. These guys working out there never made real money, so they are used to earning minimum wage, so they say they can start a business, so they can cut lawns for $30. So when you come down to it, how do you run a business like that? 95% of these guys working out there are not legit businesses, and they go on YouTube and make it sound easy, make it sound good. If you work this business, you have to do landscaping too and get into it deep to make money. Everyone should tell the truth about the business. There are too many guys screwing up the business.”
That’s the comment. So if you have a similar emotional response, then I’d like to speak to that because I totally understand the emotion behind it and I totally understand the frustration. It’s a very legitimate scenario. You’ve got somebody on your team, hypothetically, or you’ve got somebody that’s working at another company and they’re making 14 bucks an hour, and they’re saying, “Hey, what if I just billed $20 an hour or $25 an hour, and your company’s billing $35, 40, so if I come into the market and I just bill $25 an hour, I’m only making $14 now, I’m gonna make a lot more money.”
At a simplistic level, yeah, that sounds true. It’s not true, but that’s how many get started, and I agree, that’s exactly what’s going on, yet it’s going on in every business. It’s not just lawn care, it’s not just commercial, it’s not just residential, it’s not just pools, it’s not just cleaning, it’s everywhere. It’s happening everywhere, and so this is my point. This is the way I recommend you think about this, what is the easy industry? Is there just some easy industry out there, and the answer to that is yes. There are businesses that are absolutely easier than others.
Something that I talk about a lot, and I talked about last year at the Service Autopilot Conference, and it’s really something that’s crystallized for me in the last few years, your business model will determine if you’re successful. Yeah, you gotta pick the right … And your business model is your geography serve, the service offering, the types of people you have, how you bill your clients, which kinds of properties you take care of and clients you take care of, and which you ignore. That’s business model stuff. Your business model will have a massive impact on if you make it in business, if you’re really successful, be sort of successful, your business model will define that.
Very few people are thinking about their business model, they’re just getting into the market. So here’s where it’s on you, it’s on you to figure out in a market, in an industry, lawn care, cleaning, whatever, how to make money at that thing. There is no easy thing, so back to my point, yeah, there are easier businesses, and you can make any business in any industry easier than it is for all the other competition if you come up with the right business model. That’s a very long conversation about everything that, that means.
Then there are also easy businesses that are appearing like as an example, I come from the technology world and there’s something called information marketing. It used to be, I don’t know if it still a term, but it used to be a term, so rewind 10 years ago or more you could write an eBook. You could teach somebody how to do something. You could teach somebody how to start a lawn care company. You could teach them how to train parrots. You could teach them now how to buy Bitcoin, if it were 10 years ago.
This eBook that you sit down and you write and you sell it through ClickBank and you put it out on the web and you sell it for 27 bucks. You could make really good money doing that. Then you’d take that eBook and you’d then have a … If you have a $227 product, then you’re probably gonna have a $295 product, like an escalation. So you’d write a bigger info product and you’d sell that. That market, for the most part, is dead, but 10 years ago, you could hop in that thing, you could buy ads on the web, you could SEO, and you can make a lot of money doing it. It was easy, in a sense. You could get into it very easily.
Well then what happened is, everybody realized, “Hey, you can make tons of money in eBooks.”, and there are now tons of guys teaching you how to write eBooks and get rich on the internet. So everybody got into the eBook business and before you knew it, there’s no money left in the eBook business.
That happens in every single interesting market out there. Every new market emerges and there’s lots of money to be made in that new market. There’s lots of people that make money, and then there’s a whole group that comes around and says, “Hey, I’ll teach people how to make money.”, and so they start teaching everybody how to make money and then everybody jumps into that business, and before you know it, there’s no real margin left.
Any business that’s really high margin in it, meaning you’re just extracting truckloads of profit out of the business, well the market, everybody else is gonna get smart to that and say, “Oh my gosh, if I was in this thing, I could extract truckloads of profit out of the business.” So competition moves in, margin comes down because everybody’s looking for an angle. Some people, their angle is better service to the clients, some it’s better quality, other’s it’s just pure pricing. They don’t know how to compete on anything other than price, so they drive down the price. I don’t care what industry it is, it’s not just lawn care, it’s not just plumbing, it’s not just the service trades. It’s every freaking industry, technology, information marketing, biotech, it happens in every area.
If you look at the market and say, “Wow, I don’t really want much competition. I don’t really want to have all these crazy people that I have to compete with that don’t know what they’re doing.”, and thousands and thousands and thousands of them, then you’ve got some options. You can go into really, really complicated stuff. You can go into things where your education, you’ve got 5 to 10 years of like serious education, so you know how to do that thing. You can go into something that’s just insanely expensive, a lot of the software, technology plays. Why is Venture Capital funding all those companies? They’re insanely expensive. They cost millions and millions of dollars in some cases, to get off the ground, and so you could go into something like that. Your advantage there is millions of dollars required, filters out the majority of the competition.
You could go into something that has huge amounts of bureaucracy and legislation and legal requirements and hoops you have to jump through. You could go into that. Well, I mean, that’s gonna immediately filter out a huge percentage of competition. Are you willing to maneuver that and deal with that, and if so, then yeah, you’ll be one of the individuals that can compete in those markets.
Take something like Elon Musk is doing with Space X, insanely expensive, billions of dollars required, and extremely complex. Only the smartest people in the world working on that kind of a problem, very sophisticated people. You need a really significant network. You need to be able to get the door open to talk to whomever. You’ve got being able to buy access to government people, being able to buy access to very rich people. Those are just four quick little points about what it takes to do something like Space X. How many people can do that?
Jeff Bezos at Amazon, him, the dude that confounded Microsoft with Bill Gates, Paul Allen, there’s like only a few players at that level, Richard Branson, all billionaires by the way, yeah, great example right there because how many competitors are there? A really small number of competitors. Why, because of how complex it is to do it. So if you wanna go to a business that there’s not a lot of competition and it’s not as hard, actually hard is really the wrong word to use there, you wanna go to a business where there’s a lot less competition, maybe more sophisticated competition, then you have to meet the requirements I talked about, more money to play the game, more licensing, more legislation, more red tape, more all that stuff, because it filters everyone out.
Just take mowing versus fertilization and weed control, take mowing versus pest control. Pest control, fertilization and weed control weed out a portion of the market. If you’re in certain states to get your applicator license for pest control, you’ve gotta be an apprentice for some period of time. That just filters out most people right there. So now, you’re competing with a smaller group of individuals. If you don’t like the business, because it’s what’s called a low barrier of entry business because anybody can get into it, if you don’t like that, then go to a low barrier to entry business, and I’m not saying this in a sarcastic way, I’m saying this very seriously.
If you wanna figure out, it’s a business model concept, if you wanna figure out where to compete, look for where there are tons of barriers to compete. Just as I described, licensing, expensive, lots to learn, very expensive employees. Take technology, a lot of technology employees make more than a lot of owners in the lawn care industry make and you have to hire all those people to build the technology company. That’s complexity. Look for industries like that because immediately you’re competing against a much, much smaller group of people.
But, if that’s not what you wanna do, if you don’t have that knowledge, the resources, to do such a thing right now, then low barrier business are awesome because if you’re willing to put your head down, you can hop into those markets, like lawn care, cleaning, pest control, pool service, electricians, plumbers, all those. Trade industry businesses, you can hop in tons and tons of non-sophisticated players, competitors, you can put your head down, read the books, go to the seminars, join the business groups, get out there and hustle and work your butt off. Like sheer time invested and manpower, you can rise to the top and be one of the more sophisticated because very, very few people will do that. Most people will just say, “Wow, this sort of sucks, and my business is what it is.”, and they can’t get any better.
Then there’s another group that says, “I’m gonna go dominate my market.”, is what I’m trying to say. They’re gonna say, “Hey, I’m going to win at this. I’m gonna learn how to do this. I’m gonna learn how to fix my problems. I’m gonna learn how to become more sophisticated. I’m gonna learn how to play the game at a bigger level, meaning I’m gonna out maneuver, out win against my competitors.” There’s a group that does that. They put their head down and they go do that and they win the game. They don’t say, “Hey, man, the market sucks. There’s tons of lousy competition.”, yeah, they do have those emotional responses and they feel those exact same as the rest of us, but they know how to win the game. They know how to outmaneuver the competition, out market them, out hire them, outgrow them, out everything them.
They know how to do it because they did the time, they put their head down and they do it every day in all these markets that are overcrowded, where most people don’t make a lot of money. It doesn’t matter if you’re getting started now. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been in business 10 years, there is a formula and if you follow it, you will do well in every one of these industries. There is no industry where there’s no opportunity. There is so much opportunity and it doesn’t matter where you’re at right now. It’s just a matter of will you do the work to outplay everyone else.
Think about sports. It’s the exact same thing. If you wanna be the best in sports, are you gonna do the work. Are you gonna show up every day, are you gonna learn the plays, are you gonna put in the hours, are you gonna stay in the locker room and on the field when everyone else is calling it a day? When you’re traveling, are you gonna be the guy that sitting out at the bars and hanging out and picking up the girls or are you gonna be the guy that studying the playbook and doing the work?
You choose because the best guys put their heads down and they figure it out, and so it’s totally doable. So, go do it. It’s hard, but it’s totally worth it and there is no situation now where the market’s gone and there’s no opportunity. It literally exists in every single market, and you just gotta go do the work and you gotta go learn how to do the work. Don’t give up. I’m telling you, there’s plenty of opportunities.
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