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A
Here we go. Welcome back to the episode of the LCR Media podcast where we get to know the pros. I'm your host, LCR Nailer Taliaferro. And on this episode it's. This is a fun one and a unique one, a different one, a new one. I've never done this before and I don't know if anyone. I haven't really seen anyone in this kind of a combination. I'm sure it's happening. I just haven't seen it. But for me it's new and for payjack it was new, so I figured have some fun with it. But John Pajac from the Profits with Paycheck podcast, good friend of mine, friend of the show, friend of the community, you may or may not know him, definitely. I'll have the link in the episode description so you can check out his podcast, check out our full episode. But I was on his podcast recently and I decided that I wanted to do. I'm trying to get into. I'm trying to think of more ways or I am attempting to think of more ways to just get, get messages out there, get information out there, just creative ways above and beyond what I normally do for creating content and podcasts and so on. So I haven't really gotten back live streaming. I know it's been around for a long time. I got into it in the very beginning. Long story short of that, back in the Periscope days, if you even remember that, that was the first live streaming. I believe Twitter owned it before it became X and all that, but that was the first live streaming platform. It was pretty fun, pretty cool. And I, I connected with a lot of people, met folks such as Eric Triplet, the pond Digger Little, you know, inside Baseball there of. That's, that's how I met him, was through Periscope, I think a mutual friend or whatever. You know, when you know people and you. Things get recommended to you or whatever. I forgot exactly how Periscope worked, but somehow I stumbled upon Eric's content and I was like, this dude is pretty epic and he knows he's talking about and so on. And so I just kind of, kind of reached out to him through Periscope, commenting on his stuff and it was fun and I brought that to our community. And some of the, some of the guys in the community, content creators were, were doing the same and it was, it was fun to be able to live stream. I thought it was great, especially for events like at that time it was just a quip expo. Oh, it was called G Plus Expo at the time. I'm like, how cool would that be to Periscope live from Gie? So people that weren't there or not there yet, they could see it, right? Like, they could see what it looks like. This is only like maybe year two of going to it as the community, you know, like, of us knowing about it and going to it. And I'm like, this, this will be fun. Or maybe it was, but maybe it was my first year actually. I think actually it was my first year going there. It was in 2015. That's how 11 years ago Periscope was revolutionizing live streaming. But I remember I was live streaming all over the place at the Gie and it was fun, but I was used the whole summer to kind of get familiar with Periscope and build an audience on Periscope, like try and get as many of you just through YouTube. Because there was no podcasting or anything at that time in our industry, really. It was just YouTube. And I don't even know if Instagram had really popped off yet. I think maybe Snapchat was just starting off. There was no Tick Tock. There was, of course, Facebook, but I was really only making YouTube videos. That was really the only main way I was connecting and many others. So we were just talking about, about, you know, Gie at that point, and it was still, still new and fresh and just getting. So I was trying to get everyone on, as many people as I could onto Periscope so that they could be a part of the live streams from Jay, you know, so it was a fun time, is my point. And pulling myself out of that rabbit hole there. It's been a while since I've, you know, live streamed. Of course, live streaming has come a long way. You know, Facebook jumped on the bandwagon of doing Facebook Live, of doing lives. And then Periscope just kind of died, I guess, for one reason or another. And then. And then YouTube started doing lives, you know, now there's. There's always essentially every platform you can live stream now, right? There's. There's live streaming platforms that are just dedicated to live streaming, like Streamyard and Riverside and so on and so on. So there's a lot of, I mean, zoom, you know, zoom meetings. Like there's all kinds of live streaming that you can do now, but social media platforms as well. And I just never. Instagram live, of course, LinkedIn live, so, so, so much. I feel like they all do it. I just haven't really gotten back into it. I've been on some live streams for, for, for some other folks over, over the years. But you know, for the last eight or nine years, I just haven't really been doing a whole lot of live streaming. So again, my favorite saying, I, I've been attempting to find ways to get back into it, but I want it to be relevant. I don't want to just, just whip out my phone like I used to do back in 2015 and just, you know, stream live in the moment. I mean, I, it was, it was intentional, but it wasn't like a really thought out, sat down, scripted thing like I wanted. So now like, I want to really make it more intentional. I want to get the most impact as possible. That's really my thing for 20, 26 is impact. How much impact can I get with the influence that I have, right? All of my network, all the people that I'm connected to, the businesses and brands I'm connected to, all of my experiences and 40 some odd years of my life. Well, how even old am I? Geez, 46, 7, 8, 48. I'm gonna be turning 49. What? That's crazy. Anyway, that's a side note there. But so anyway, so I thought, I thought of one of the new ways that I want to start live streaming. I just was like, hey, you know what, Paycheck, Wouldn't it be cool if I, if we live streamed while we podcast? Like just kind of like an old fashioned way. Not like on stream yard or anything like that. We just kind of bootstrapped it. It's like, all right, we'll just set up a, a zoom record. Like, you know, he had a, sent me a zoom meeting. You know, we could have done Riverside or whatever. That's irrelevant. But we didn't have that set up for live streaming, even though you can do that for some platforms. We just set up the regular meeting for the podcast, right? So we had all our audio stuff set up and recorded like the good old days, like we normally do when we do a virtual podcast. So it sounds good, we can get some video clips out of it if you want to. But then we both set up our phones so that, you know, you can see us on our phones. And then I went live on Instagram and invited Paycheck to join so that both of us were on the live stream on Instagram. So essentially everyone in Instagram could see and hear us having the podcast together live. So it was just like kind of an inception or whatever. It was just like camera on camera, you know, on camera, I was like conversation on conversation. On conversation. So it was, it was kind of cool and, and fun. And of course, you know, we'll work out the, work out the bugs and whatnot as time goes on. I definitely want to do that more often and get more into live streaming just so we can get more, you know, you're already planning on the interview or whatever it is. Why not just set all these things up? It's not that difficult with all the technology and everything we got going on now and all the platforms have, have, have it set up, you know, so just. Why not? So anyway, that is what this is. This is that. That whole intro to set up this episode is a good chunk from our conversation. Myself and John Pajak and you can go to the Prophets of Paycheck podcast and, and listen to the whole episode. We talked about a lot of things, but of course, just like usual, I took a snippet out. I think it's about like 20 minutes almost. And it was really me talking about how to, you know, we talked a lot of. We talked more about it, but it was a portion, a part of me talking about how to stop underpricing your jobs this spring, your work, so you can be more profitable. Right? That's been what I've been talking about a lot recently. I had a, a webinar, how to not get crushed by the spring Rush. Got a lot of great feedback from that. A lot of folks signed up for that. That was a couple weeks ago. So we have another one, another webinar coming up Wednesday, April 15th. So if you're listening to this in real time, when it comes out, you've got like a day or two to, to register, a day and a half. This is coming out on Tuesday. So if you have 24 hours, depending on, you know, what, when you, what time of the day you listen to it to register for the free webinar. And it's going to be me, pay Jack and Eric Triplet, the pond digger, who I mentioned earlier in this episode, who has been doing contracting for over 40 years. I think he said recently to me he's. He's a lifelong contractor, right? And he knows a lot about sales, knows a lot about pricing, knows a lot about profitability. He has a $2 million pond design and construction and maintenance. Design, build and maintenance, pond business out there in California. So he's got a lot of knowledge there. So three of us are going to do a free webinar training on what we can essentially teach you that you can implement in your business immediately so that you don't get so that you don't get crushed by the spring rush, but also so you can be more profitable, specifically so that you're not underpricing your work so that you don't get stuck in a contract, you know, for one example, that's underpriced and now you're losing money the whole season. Like that's, I mean, that's, that happens often. So if there's anything we can do to help prevent that, or at least any future contracts after the fact, if you already signed the wrong ones now, it is what it is. But hopefully we can catch catch things before it gets too carried away because I know many, many of us are in the middle of the spring rush or just starting the spring rush or it's right around the corner. But either way we're all getting busy or already busy. So we wanted to get in there. And it's going to be 7pm Eastern time. So the link is in the episode description for that, which I think I mentioned somewhere, maybe in, in, in this snippet. But that's what you're listening to. What you're going to be listening to is me sharing what I, what I could in this conversation or part of it that hopefully you can take away with. So even if you don't join the webinar, hopefully you or you don't sign up for the free webinar, you, you learn something from this snippet and you go listen to John's full episode and you'll hear even more from him and from me. That will hopefully help you regardless if you do anything else after that. The whole point is helping at different levels, right? Those that are serious and not curious, that want more, you can obviously join the free webinar on Wednesday and you'll have a lot more of our time to be able to learn very specific principles and techniques on how you can I mean, literally, Paycheck is going to be sharing the formula on how to price your services correctly, give you like a foundational framework so that you can take that immediately and, and look and see are you pricing correctly? Do you need to dial some things in, tweak some things? Excuse me, Maybe certain services are working and others aren't. So you're going to learn all that on the free webinar. But at the very least, hopefully you get something out of this episode. So without further ado, here is my part of my conversation with John Paycheck. While we're waiting for John to get situated here, what we're going to be talking about specifically, as you see, the title is stop underpricing your work. So being the spring rush, I know it's probably late for a lot of you, depending on where you are late, you know, in the, in the, in the evening, depending on where you are, but in the country. But ultimately it's either currently the spring rush for you or it's about to be. And I wanted to take this time to get on here live as well as John has been gracious enough to. To do a podcast, kind of short notice here so that we can go over some, some pricing do's and don'ts, how to be a little more profitable this time of year. Right? There's so much more work coming in the spring rush, and it can really, it can make or break you, essentially. So if you don't get your pricing down pat, then you are not going to win the way that you want to. Like whatever your goals are financially, the size of your business, whatever it is you want to. You want to have your pricing dialed in. And I know for a fact that this is something that a lot of people struggle with. You know, we talk about knowing your numbers and everything, but let's be more specific. Underpricing, right? Underpricing your jobs. I've been there, done that. I mean, this is year 12, I think now for me. So over a decade. In the beginning, I, I didn't, didn't know anything about anything. I mean, I knew a lot about business, but not about lawn care and pricing and how to price. And I had to figure that out the hard way. But you have leaders and experts such as John Pak, who talks about this every week on his podcast, as well as when he's at the LCR Summit and some other events speaking and on other people's podcasts. He does an amazing job kind of breaking it down on a granular level on, on how you can know your numbers, essentially. Right, but. And what does that even mean? You know, but ultimately it's again, a little distracted here. I see Pay Jack's trying to send a request. Here we go. Let me see if I can get him on here. But John does a great job at demystifying and simplifying how to know your numbers. Right? So there he is. Oh, my gosh.
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It worked. It worked.
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All right, well, we're back at it. So. So John, John is, is. Is kind of become known as the financial expert, the profits, the man with the plan. So he has a podcast about it. He speaks about the LCR summit. So we're going to have a podcast about it right now and during the spring rush or right before the spring rush so that you can get your pricing dialed in as, as quickly as possible. So thank you guys for joining. Follow along. Listen literally to a live podcast. So pay Jack, whenever you're ready. You just, just. Let's go hit. Don't forget to hit record.
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Let's go, hit record.
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Don't, don't forget.
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I already touched it, so.
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Awesome. Touch the button. The red button is always fun.
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Welcome to Profits with Paycheck, the podcast where we talk about business strategies and financial insights for the green industry. It is my pleasure to bring you, Naylor Taliaferro, to the studio. Right now. We're doing something kind of fun right now. We're doing a multi stream recording. I'm not exactly sure what you want to call this, but it's going to be fun. We're right now Naylor's got a live stream going on his channel, his Instagram channel, and we are recording from the Yard Book Studio here in wonderful Northwest Indiana. But Naylor, it's great to have you on.
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Thank you, Pajak. It's great to be on. It's been a little while. I can't remember when, when the last time was, but thanks for inviting me back and I'm excited this time of year we have a lot, a lot going on, right, with the spring rush and I have a lot to talk about, but you know, of course there's only so much time in the day and the night and on episodes. So there's, there's, there's levels, right, that we can really approach this subject to help, help our community know their numbers and stop underpricing, their jobs, their work. Right. I feel like that's, that's a huge, a huge challenge. And I know personally because I put some polls out recently, like what are some of, what are some of your roadblocks or challenges for the spring rush? And underpricing is always the highest rated option, you know, in that poll. So it's not a guess. Like, I know that it's a challenge and I had this challenge, you know, early on when I first started I, my business 12 years ago. And I know, John, you've talked about this in the past too when, you know, like Johnny boy, lawn care, whatever, whatever it was, you know, like that you had to really learn kind of the hard way that way. And then went, went through some things after that and then kind of started all over again with, with, you know, your new business and, and, and you've been Teaching everything that you've learned along the way. So I know you've, you know, my point is we've all had to start somewhere, you know, and, and, and we've, we've learned a lot, and now we want to just give back and help shorten that learning curve. So everyone's not struggling as much.
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Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that is one of the many problems that I had in my first business was not pricing properly. Had no clue. And I'll tell you that, you know, when you're, when you don't know how to price your work, it is terrifying. You always have this fear hanging over you. And that's the one thing that I truly want to help others avoid, is that fear of not knowing. You know, you built this, but you started a business. You know, some of us have actually built a business. Some of us are still in the process. Right. But, you know, if you start a business, you're trying to do it for whatever various reasons, whether it's to claim more independence over your life, if, if it's to make more money, or, you know, just, you know, be the boss, you know, whatever. There's a million reasons why people start a business. But to keep that going, we need to understand first the actual cost of our business, but then also the value that we bring. So there's also, there's all types of things that we could say. It's like, you know, like when you start looking at the way that I price, you know, budgets break evens of bottom lines. That's, you know, what I'm kind of known for now. You look at it and like you said, you get down to a granular level. I get down to the molecular level. That's what was a Stan Genetics said that, I think. Or Jonathan Pitochnik, I can't remember which one said it, but yeah, it's, it's, you know, you look at it that way and you're like, okay, now I know what it's the prices. And then from there you figure out, okay, what's the value of my service? You don't just have to price like that, you know. But anyway, I noticed in the comments a few people. Hey, Erica Krupin, thanks for jumping in and saying hi. It's been a long time since I seen you and I can't read that other one. My glasses are off.
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That's all good.
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But anyway, thank you everybody for stopping in. But yeah, you know, it's, it really does give you freedom once you understand what your numbers are. And like you, you mentioned right at the top that, you know, it's very. Just getting a start on trying to find your numbers. It could be scary. And like I said, I try to keep people from falling into that fear, so. Naylor. I know because I'm part of it. But we got something really cool coming up pretty soon here actually, like two things. One's really close and then the other is going to be in the distant future, right?
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Yeah. Yeah.
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Why don't you tell everybody about that?
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Hey, just real quick, if you haven't heard, I have a new event coming up this summer right here in Richmond, Virginia on June 26th and 27th. It's called the Profit Accelerator Live. Special guests, what you're going to learn there. So you're going to learn how to stop underpricing your jobs, improve your route density, close more bids and fill your schedule with more profitable jobs. So stop sacrificing so much of your time for a little bit of money and join us at the Profit Accelerator Live. Link is in the episode description. The LCR Media podcast is brought to you by Turo. And if you've been thinking about upgrading your walk behind, now is the time. The 30 inch turf master with casters, one of the most capable and productive walk behinds in the game is $100 off through May 31st. Don't miss your chance to save on this game changer. Click the link in the episode description or head to your local tour dealer to get yours today. Couple of things like you're definitely the profits, you know, the, the leader in the discussion of profits and how to really break it down for, for everyone. How to, how to get their budgets in line, how to, you know, like you said, the budgets break evens bomb lines. I forgot exactly how that all flows. It's been a little while but essentially like all, all of all of that planning that you've done for everyone, like so you, you are the go to person for that. But, but you know, there's some things that I've learned along the way too. Like, you know, there are certain things. So, so yes, the paycheck alluded to there are some events coming up. There's actually a Profit Accelerator Live which is coming up right here in Richmond, Virginia, the end of June, June 26th and 27th. And we're going to be spending two days, myself, John Pajak and Eric Shiplet, we're going to be spending two days with you really dialing in your profits, right? How to accelerate your profits in your business, how to get, you know, manage your time better so you can get more profits out of life, which is more time. Just really dial all that in. But, you know, June is, is a little ways away and right now is a spring rush. And you can get yourself into a little bit of a bind if you underprice. And the spring rush can either make you or break you. So my goal right now on this podcast and on this live is to help give you some sort of insight and action steps that you can take, like immediately right now. You know, of course, audio wise, we can only say so much. A lot of times you have to show you some things. So with that being said, you know, the next step is Wednesday, April 15th. Those of you listening live and real or in real time watching all that, April 15th. On Wednesday at 7pm Eastern Standard Dinner time, we are going to, myself, John Pak and Eric Triplett actually are going to have a webinar. It's a free webinar and it's all about how to stop underpricing your jobs, essentially what we're talking about now. But it's going to be a webinar, so it's going to be a little more immersive. Right. I'm going to use my board in the background here and be able to write things down and show you what things look like. You know, Paycheck might, might have a slide or do something along those lines. Triplet as well. But I know specifically, you know, paycheck's going to be breaking down the formula on how you can figure out your pricing so you at least have something to go by or like a foundation. You know, it's not going to be personalized for your business because we can't do that until you get to the Profit Accelerator Live event where we're actually in person. And we can dial some of this in for, for some of you at the event. But, you know, right now we can't do that because we're not even interacting with you in that sort of way. We can answer some questions here and there, but that's, that's, that's the surface level. But then on the webinar on Wednesday, we'll be able, on April 15, we'll be able to dive in a little bit deeper and show you more and really dive into the formulas. But right now, you know, there are some things that we can still talk about, like route density, for example. You know, some things take longer to put into effect. You know, like if you have employee issues, that's another conversation. You know, if you're, if you're over Leveraged. You know, you have too much overhead, you have too much of the wrong equipment. You know, you have too much, too much debt. Maybe you have services that aren't, you know, working that aren't profitable. You know, there's a lot of those things that take a little bit longer to fix. But route density is something that I can like literally give you exactly what to do right now and you can start implementing that immediately. You know, there, there's, there's just certain aspects like that that you can, that we can implement, that we can help you implement immediately. And then like I said, paycheck on Wednesday will be able to give you the foundation of how to get some of your pricing in line so that you can have something to work with so you're not underpricing your jobs, right? And then you get locked in, maybe with some contracts in the spring, you're all excited and you realize you're under price and you're stuck with it for the whole year. So, so that being said, let me just dive in real quick. Well, not real quick, but let me just go in a little bit and paycheck. I know you, you talk about route density as well. We're all, you know, you and I were on the same page with that. I mean, clearly you're, you're all about the numbers. So you know, the, how profitable route density is. For me, it's a little bit of a different story. I, I, I realized how profitable it was with my time, not just the money is with, for me, it was about time. I by default stumbled upon route density before I even knew that was like a, a, a, a phrase. You know, I didn't even know that was a thing. I just knew that when I started my business 12 years ago after burning out in retail management for over 15 years and just wanting to reset my life and you know, reconnect with my wife and my kids and see if I can repair the damage that was done and actually enjoy life and started my lawn care business because I just enjoyed lawn care and all that. If you've heard my story, you've heard my story. I won't go into it here, but my number one goal when I started my lawn care business was can I, how can I get my time back? Right? How can I get my time back and still make money to pay my bills? Right. I still need to support my family financially, but how can I get my time back, be more in control? Right. I didn't have to deal with horrible bosses anymore and nasty customers and just put A smile on my face. Now I, I can dictate who came, came in and out of my doors, right? Like, who are my customers that I'm going to work with? So there was that, but then it was also the time. And I realized very quickly, the first year driving all over Richmond, Virginia was not profitable with my time because I was working really late, past dark, missing dinner, barely making as much money or enough money to get to where I wanted to go and keep unlocking new levels. And I was only doing a small amount of work, but it's because I was driving all over the place. And I'm like, this just doesn't make sense. Like, the only way for me to get more work done in a select amount of time, be home for dinner and so on, is to have better route density. Like, well, I didn't, I didn't even have that word, is to get my customers closer together, right? So that's what route density means for maintenance, for lawn mowing, fertilization. We control, right? That's weekly, bi weekly, monthly, those type of services is what we're really talking about. And that's what I primarily was doing in the, in the early years and still do now. And that's where, when you can get everyone, as many customers in similar neighborhoods, surrounding neighborhoods. So you're minimizing the windshield time, as some, some call it. You're not sitting in the truck driving all over town, especially when you have employees. That's a lot of wasted payroll. You want billable work, not non billable work. So all these things I just figured out by default, just knowing like, hey, if I want to make a certain amount of money a day, I need to be able to get all these, I need to get more work done in a day. So if I get them closer together, then that just made sense to me. So that's what I started working on. And so by default, I want to get my time back. And that's how I discovered route density. And I created a framework without realizing it. And that framework is just four easy steps, right? Saying no, that's the first and foremost thing is say no to the wrong work out of your service area or out of the area that you want to work in. Like, so you're not spreading yourself all over the place saying no to the wrong work, right? Maybe it's a service that it's not profitable or that you don't want to do. Just not saying yes to everything. Like not saying yes to all the wrong work, all the wrong people in all the wrong Areas. So you got to say no so that you have room in your schedule for the yeses, for the people that you want to work for. You want to do the, the, they want the services that you offer in the area that you want to work in or areas. So saying no is the first step. Of course, there's a whole lot more about that. We, we'll go into that more. I'll be going into this in more detail on the webinar as well as at the live event and, and really breaking that down in addition to some other, other, other business principles as well. But then there's increasing your pricing, right? Strategically raising your price, your prices so that you are repelling the wrong people and attracting the right people. And typically those right people are all together. Right? I, by doing, by just by doing the first two steps, by saying no and raise, strategically raising my prices. I built a whole neighborhood of 26 accounts in a neighborhood with only million dollar plus homes. And that was my ideal customer because they, they, they recognize value and they're willing to pay for value. And they just wanted, they were the people that were like, can you just add this to my invoice? How much? Or they didn't even ask how much are you able to do this? Okay. And like they just even asked for a price. Like those, those are the type of customers that when you start raising your prices strategically, it attracts those people because they, they, they, they just perceive the value in that and then you do the work and they're like, oh yeah, this is legit. And it repels the wrong people. The cheaple people, right? The people that are cheap and looking for a bargain. Let's make a deal. They're looking for Chuck in the truck. All of that. So I had, I built up 26 properties in that neighborhood and I sold it to a local competitor a few years ago. Or friend Petter, I should say. A lot of us know friend, know him friend better. Yeah. So, so just those first two steps like really dialed in my route density and started making me more money, but in an effort of saving time because I know you guys are super busy and we have a lot going on and I want to get into more of the meat and potatoes here with paycheck on the podcast. You know, check out the link in my bio and you can sign up for the free webinar on Wednesday and we will go into this deeper route density. There's four steps that I, that I, that I utilize to create route density. You guys can do those immediately and you can start creating route density or improving route density. If you already know what that is and you're already building on that, there's some things that you might not know or think about in in such a way, and I'm going to help break that down for you. So so I'm super excited to be able to introduce those things to those of you that don't know or go back over them again. And I know Pajax got some great stuff that he's going to share page. I mean, is there anything that you wanted to to kind of give everyone like a preview of what you're going to go over at all on on Wednesday on the webinar?
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Oh yeah, we're we're doing we're going to implement some things that you can do right now.
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All right. So again, hopefully you got some insight out of that out of this conversation. If and if you want more, you can listen to the whole episode link is in the episode description or will be or the link to his podcast is on is in the in the description. I think his episode is coming out around the same time as well. But either way you can go to his podcast and click Follow if the episode's not live yet. So this way you'll be notified when it does pop up. And again, the episode the Sorry, the registration link for the webinar On Wednesday the April 15th is in the episode description as well. So if you want more, more more insight and more, you know, business principles on how to actually get your pricing dialed in more specifically, then join the free webinar as well. And I hope to see you guys there. So thank you for for listening and thank you to Toro Comedy for sponsoring the LCR Media podcast. And until the next episode, this is Nailor Talia Farrow signing off. This has been an lcr media and Mr. Producer production.