Transcript
A (0:04)
Ever feel like measuring properties and building quotes eats up way more time than it should? Brian Fullerton has been there. As your business grows, those hours spent measuring and estimating can quietly turn into a real bottleneck. That's why Brian has partnered with Attentive AI to show you how he's actually using their technology inside his business. This isn't a demo and it's not a sales pitch. It's a real behind the scenes look at how he moves faster with estimates and proposals. Because the tools don't replace your experience, they give you back your time and help you scale without the friction. Join us Saturday, March 28th at 8am Eastern. The link to register is in the show description. You're now listening to the Fullerton Unfiltered podcast. Straightforward, no nonsense business advice. Completely unfiltered. Grow your business, grow your life. Now here's your host, Brian Fullerton.
B (1:05)
What's going on everybody? Thank you so much. Tuning in to episode today here on the Fullerton Unfiltered podcast. That's not your normal voice. This is your host today, Jeremiah Jennings. I am super excited to come to you guys with a fresh new episode for your Wednesday. Guys. Thank you for tuning in. Thank you for coming and seeing what's happening here on Fortune Unfiltered. You can tell my voice is a little more southern than Brian's. Got a little more twang to it and I'm excited to see what we get into. Brian told me to send you his best. He is currently roughing it down in the sunny palm beaches of Florida. No, he's not in the palm beaches anymore. He was down on the coast at leanscaper last week. We had a great time together down at leanscaper. The operations intensive down there. Just getting to network and mingle and hang out and just really just dive into the lean Saver operation system and how that's growing our business. But that was a great time and he is now taking the family and hopped on over and up to Disney World. So he's hanging out down there in sunny Orlando. He said it was a little cold when I talked to him yesterday though. So hopefully he's still having a good time and going and hanging out with Mickey Mouse and you know, having all the fun stuff that goes on down there. Spending $30 for a pretzel and a corn dog, everything else. But it's a great trip guys and that's, you know, it's each their own on whether you like Disney or not. You have kids, kids put a whole different perspective on things and we go there and look at the good in it. And we love Disney for our family. We enjoy it, our kids love it. It's just a great environment. It's happy we're there to see Mickey Mouse. Right? Like we don't get caught up in the rest of the mumbo jumbo. That's a slippery slope to go down. But anyway, Brian would probably kick me off. I don't need to go too deep into that. But why am I here? I'm here to host the show today and I'm super excited to do it as well. He took the day off and said, hey, you want to come on and talk for a little bit and bring a banger show this week? So I said, sure, I don't know if I can bring a banger show, but I'll come on and throw up for a little bit. So I am. Before we hop into today, I want to talk to you about a few quick announcements and then we'll dive into some exciting content and talking about Spring Rush and, you know, things that we were doing. That's kind of working. But Brian wanted me to let you know about the sweet webinars doing this weekend with Attentive AI. You're going to get to see the insides of how Brian uses Attentive to grow. It's going to be really cool. I've personally seen the insides of Brian's Attentive account and how he uses Attentive to grow. So it's a really great software. It's super cool that they're starting to integrate with Aloman. The quicker they get the automations secured and set up inside of Element that'll be even better. And I don't transparently I haven't used Attentive a ton because we just haven't gotten into that much commercial bidding world. And so a lot of ours are more like residential sites with heavy trees area treat areas and things. So make satellite imaging a little bit tougher. But I have on some commercial properties I've like actually gotten into Brian's account. I'm like, hey, I'll just pay you for this takeoff and and have done that. So I don't recommend that by the way. Go, go get your own account. I did it one or two times back because I wanted to try it out. Brian managed to try it. I've seen him. And if you're in Link, which if you don't know what Link is, it's a private Facebook group that Brian hosts there and it's a great time. I'm in there. See the, see the great conversations going on. There's a couple hundred folks in there each and every week just chiming in and helping people and again, just literally growing businesses. But yeah, I know he's helped a couple people inside of there on some takeoffs and things. So it's cool to see. It's a great feature. It really helps you dial in numbers, which again, I want to talk about a little bit today on the importance of that and knowing what those mean and how you know what those mean. But that's going to be Saturday the 28th. So not this coming Saturday, but the next Saturday at 8:00am EST Eastern Standard Time. So you'll be able to click the link in the show notes today to hear that or to go register for that and see him go through attentive on March 28th. So thank you to every show sponsor. If you're listening, this is again a guest hosted show, but I know there's some amazing partners that come alongside the Fullerton Unfiltered Podcast. And I get to really pour into a lot of guys, a lot of guys out there listening that are struggling in business. They are thriving in business. They're in, in year one and in year 15 or 20. Right. And, and I know, like, I know a lot of you guys out there. And so, you know, it's very real. There are struggles, there are ups and downs. But I just want you to, I just want you to take time today to really thank the sponsors as well, because that's how this show continues. Like I know Mr. Producer's bill, Mr. Producer's bill isn't cheap. Mr. Producer's editing this show. Editing this show. So he may, he may cut me off, he may take that out of the show, I don't know. But he'll either say something nice or something dirty about me at the end. But we love Mr. Producer and everything he's doing there and everything he does for our community. But he does amazing work, right? And amazing work does not come at a, at a cheap price. So this show would not go on the air if there were not sponsors. So as much as I say thank you, as Brian says, thank you, you guys say thank you. Continue to support, continue to let them know when you go buy things that they are doing, they're spending their money well inside of the show. And so give them a recommendation. Of course, when you do that, say, you know, Brian's show is pretty good, but there is the thing called Growing Green podcast that it's pretty good as well. You Want to go throw it some money. So Brian would be happy for you to do that. But that is, I think, all the thank yous and the announcements for the beginning. I have to do a little another announcement here towards the end of the show that we'll get into, but just stay tuned for that. I want to dive into today and just talk through a couple quick things and, you know, introduce myself. I guess if you've never met me or heard of me, then I am Jeremiah Jennings. I'm growing green landscapes down in Birmingham, Alabama. We are a full property maintenance company. We do anything and everything, essentially, except from. Except for turf treatments. We do not do that. I sub that out. But essentially everything else, we will do it. We will figure out how to do it. And so we, we do a pretty wide range of things. We mow grass, we do irrigation, we do installs, we do design build work. Very light, very light design build work. I don't even feel qualified to say that we do softscape work with very, very, very light hardscape, but we're a growing company. I started the company in 2018, I am currently 26 years old. And so we are figuring this journey out and have some great team members along with us, some great leadership to help us grow. The next couple years and the last couple years for myself have been pretty transformative. Got in some good circles, gotten some great mentors, similar mentors as to what Brian has done. And our business is really just compliment each other very well and our growth patterns have complemented each other pretty well as well. So it has been exciting to. If I can bring Brian down to my level like that, at least I should say I don't want to. Don't want to take too much away from him. But it's been good the last couple years to see just the progress. And guys, I've seen Brian grow a lot too, like in the. Just from when I met him, just from when I met him. And what his business was to now is not the same. And I think you guys hear that and see that each and every week inside of the show. And you should know that Brian's putting in the work behind the scenes and I hope you are as well because you need to follow leaders who actually do what they say they're going to do, right? And that's where I put my time and my investments is to people that are going to say so when you're listening to podcasts, when you're going and looking for things to listen to, make that a pretty big priority. For yourself to know that, hey, I'm going to. Whoever I'm going to consume content from or I'm going to spend time with, they need to be doing the things that they say they're, that they're talking about. Because there are people out there in our industry, outside of our industry, that talk about things that they don't do. And that is just like. You will never hear me talk about how to run a $2 million company. You know why I don't do it. And so that's not going to happen. I'll have people on my show talk about it, and I'll talk through principles that I think may apply. You'll never hear me talk firsthand about running a $2 million company until I see $2 million come to my bank account in a year's time. And when that happens, then we may cover that. We may cover that territory. For now, we're going to stick to anything under $750,000, because that's where we're currently at. And so we are on trajectory to do 1 to 1.3 million this year in revenue, which will be exciting. We are coming off the heels of a pretty rough year, transparently. Last year we had a lot of holes we had to get fixed in the business. And we just had. We had some people problems, which we got fixed. And I want to talk about that a little bit too, and how I think you can really be prepped planning going into spring. But this is going to be a transformative year for us. I hope it is for yourself as well. So that's, that's a little bit background on myself. I want to talk to you about hiring in the spring rush. Guys. This is one of the biggest issues that we run into. It's one of the biggest complaints you hear is like, oh, well, I grew and then I went back to. I just, I scaled back down because employees, they're just too hard. It's just not worth it. It's too many headaches, too much. I just can't do it. That is the biggest thing. I had way too many headaches with employees. Oh, that's a loaded topic. Loaded, loaded topic. Because is there some validity to the fact that things get more complex with employees? Yes. If you look at them as headaches, there's your first problem. Your outlook is totally wrong. If I was working inside of a company, I don't think I would appreciate it if my boss looked at me as a headache. That does not really sound like a culture of environment or environment of wanting to Grow and wanting to teach, wanting to guide, that doesn't really happen. Take leanscaper, for example. Leanscaper has guides, as they call them, and those guides help people come into the, into the program and they teach you and guide you along the way on how to use the software and implement the operating systems. If Mark Bradley and those guides talked about each and every one of you that are in leanscaper, myself included, as headaches, do you think those, like, do you think that would work? No, that would. We would not stay there, right? We would not, we would not want to be in that, in that company, right? That's. They are guiding, okay? They're there to guide you there. You need to, not the guides. If those guys talked about us with headaches, right? That, that's the analogy is the employee to the employee relationship. You have to look at it as like, would you stay in that environment? I would not. I would want to be around that, that kind of people. Okay? So as an employer, right? You're playing the employer in this role. Don't look at your employees as headaches. Change your mindset on them. Change your mindset to say, hey, these are humans that want to come here and learn and grow. And if they're not, if those are not the humans that are inside of your company that they truly don't want, that they want to go be stagnant and stale and party and not do anything with their life, then maybe it is time for a change. But you need to exhaust all your efforts on the front of, hey, how can we teach you? How can we make you learn? How can we help you grow? Right? And I shouldn't say make you learn. How can I try to lead you to learn and grow right now? I can't make you do anything, but I would hope that I can influence you to make these good decisions. And so just consider that as your first problem here is maybe I need to change my outlook on my employees because that would not work, right? That would not work if we looked at them as we are supposed to be guiding them, right? That's our job. And so our job plays the role of the guide in the leanscaper analogy. If you can't guide them well, you call them headaches, they're not going to come, okay? They're not going to stay. So say we get the good people in, right? Well, or how do we get good people? I think that's the first thing. How are we going to get good people in the door? I can't find anybody good employees. I Can't find any. I can't find anybody that wants to work. How many times you heard that? I'm going to talk about this subject today because I literally like I cracked, I kind of cracked this code last year. Not that I've done anything. I've just taken principles from other people that have taught me right. But the thing that I think a lot of us run into in the green industry and cutting grass is like you. A lot of you started your companies either as in grade school, in middle school, junior high or high school and you just kept doing them or you started them in high school, you went off to college, worked for a little bit and you came back and restarted again or other people ran while you were gone. There are very few people listening to the show. Small percentage of people listening to the show went to school for four years at secondary education for four years, got a degree in horticulture and business in. In whatever, right. And brought it and started in landscape company out of like after that. You probably started because hey, I can make some money cutting grass. Maybe you started it as in your adult life, right? I don't think you started it from like a, hey, let's lead people and build a business and know all the numbers. You probably started because you said, hey, I can, I can go charge $70 for that yard and cut it in 20 minutes. That sounds like pretty good money, especially side money. So you got to think about those things. You were not in a place of. I was not in a place of like corporate world. I never experienced that. I've never, I've never. The only W2 that I've received in my life is from growing green landscapes. That's it. That's the only place that I've ever worked for. And so you need to realize, I had to realize there are things that go on in the corporate world that I don't know.