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Are you mowing lawns, running crews, and still wondering where all the money went? You're not alone. Naylor Taliaferro of LCR Media has been there, and that's exactly why he created Profit Accelerator Live. Join Naylor and expert speakers John Pajak and Eric Triplett for two powerful days of hands on workshops designed specifically for lawn care and landscaping business owners in Richmond, Virginia, June 26th and 27th. This isn't a conference where you'll sit in the back and take notes. You'll leave with an actual business plan in hand, knowing exactly what to charge, how to manage your time, and how to attract better customers. Tickets are just $299, but right now you can bring a partner or a fellow business owner free. With our two for one special. Tickets are just $299, but right now you can bring a partner or fellow business owner free. Free. With our 2 for 1 special, only 75 spots are available and they will fill up fast. Use the link in the show description or go to profitacceleratorlive.com to secure your spot today. Put more money in the bank and more time in your schedule with Profit Accelerator Live. Here we go.
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Welcome back to another episode of Truck Talk Tuesday on the LCR Media Podcast. I'm your host, LCR Naylor Tagliaferro. And I'm just going to start off by saying stop making excuses and start making decisions to improve your family's experiences. Now what do I mean by that? I'm not trying to sound harsh or cast judgment or anything like that. I just, I'm a very transparent person. I'm a very passionate person. I want to see as many fellow landscape lawn care business owners and serve, you know, complementary service industry services as well. You know, pest control, you know, window cleaning, pet waste removal, like so many different other lateral services, pond construction, maintenance, water features. Right. So many different services out there. Pressure washing, trash bin cleaning. So many. So like everyone that is impacted by what we do and say in the lawn care and landscaping industry and events that we do and the content that we create, that's, that's who I'm talking to and for and interacting with. Because there's just far too many times that I see marriages and families disrupted or destroyed because of business mistakes or like bad business decisions or lack of decisions being made. And I don't know how many business owners out there really fully understand that the decisions you make, or lack thereof, how much they affect those around you. You know, like your family, of course. Right. If you have Spouse, kids, or even if you're all by your, you know, you're all on your own right now and you haven't found your, your, your spouse and your, and have started a family and, and you're on your own doing your thing, that's fine as well. But one, you can get into some bad habits that way and kind of live more of a selfish, independent life where you get set, kind of set in your. Not trying to say in a bad way, selfish, I just mean like you're only half yourself to think of and take care of, right? And then when you go, when you do enter a relationship, it becomes a huge learning curve to try and fix that and get used to like kind of the new ways of, you know, someone communicating with someone else and taking care of someone else and not just yourself, being responsible for someone else, not just yourself. And you know, so now your decisions or lack thereof can impact them. So even if you're just thinking in the future, which you should be because then your future goals dictate your present actions. So if you definitely want to get married and have family, then you definitely need to think about that and think about your current actions, you know, use that as your future goal to control your, or dictate your present actions, decisions that you're making and lack thereof and how they're going to impact your future and your future family. And, and if that's not the case and you, you're, you're, you're not, you're not focusing on family right now or in the future and you want to be by yourself, that's also fine too. But no one is 100% by themselves ever, right? You still have some sort of family, I would imagine, or friends or neighbors, people maybe that you've met in the industry or locally. And your decisions can impact them as well and lack thereof, right? We're not on this planet all by ourselves. So I know that might be way too high level thinking. Like, man, I'm just trying to focus on what I have going on in my life. I don't really have time to focus on everybody else's life, which I totally agree. So many people are so caught up in the news and the drama and politics and religion and who, who this and that and I believe this and that. And so all these different opinions and all the different hardships and challenges around the world and they, they ignore like their own challenges, right? And their own house, their own, their own issues like, and they don't focus on, on, on themselves for one reason or another. So I get that. Focusing on yourself for sure, like you can fix your own challenges better than you can fix anyone else's. That's for sure. Because you can't control people. You can barely control yourself in some situations. So I totally get that. But you, you need to, we need to understand that our decisions, or like I keep saying, lack thereof, can and will and does affect anyone and everyone around us. So when it comes to family and friends, especially people that are dependent on you, if you're doing things the hard way, the slow way, the ho hum drum way, the manly way, the womanly way, the independent way, the whatever you want to insert in there, that's admirable only to a point. If you're making people around you or allowing people around you to suffer for an extended period of time because you're just so determined to figure it out on your own, no matter how long it takes and how hard it is and how much and how long people that you care about around you or that dependent on you and your success to suffer. You know, like, you don't. If you're not thinking about that, no matter how long it takes them to, to, to suffer through that like that, you're not considering all those things. And I, I submit to you that the, the sooner you make certain decisions in your business, whether that's getting rid of an employee that you've been hanging on to too long because it's better than nothing. But I submit to you that that's untrue. I have told my employees that were, that I was holding accountable on many occasions like different employees. I've, I've told them when it came down to it, when they kind of gave me, you know, that they were just giving me the, that attitude or whatever, I'm like, hey, I can do, I did this by myself before you, and I can do it by myself after you. So I don't need to feel like I'm being held hostage by you. Like you're, you know, the whole, like, you're replaceable thing. Like, I don't come right out and say those words, but I definitely don't allow any employee or any customer to make me feel like they're unreplaceable. Like that's a bad way to feel and operate in your business and life. Now, now you're, you're being bossed around by all, by these people. And so many of us got into this industry to get away from a horrible boss or horrible bosses. And in so many ways, if you're not careful, you don't have systems in place and you're not, you know, you don't have a strong mindset. You can have a whole bunch of little bosses. Right. So many different customers could be your boss. And employees can be your boss to a certain extent. Right. Because if they don't show up for work on time or at all, they call out, you know, if they're. If they. If they're unreliable, that's essentially dictating what you can and can't do. Right. All right. Well, I guess we can't get as much done today because so and so is not here. Or I got to work longer and miss dinner because so and so is not here. Right. And you just let that go on because you can't find anyone else to replace them. And you think that's. That's better than nothing? Well, not really. Not if you're living in that stress and anxiety of not knowing, you know, how long things are going to take, you know, like, how much you can get done and the quality and you just get overwhelmed. Like, man, I don't want to keep missing dinners. I don't want to work so late all day every day. Like, I don't know if I can get all that. Like, all that uncertainty is a whole lot of stress and anxiety. So wouldn't it be better to just get rid of that person? Just let that person go and have. And be short someone. But at least, you know. At least, you know, right? Like, okay, until I find someone else, I'm just going to have to hunker down or we're going to have to work some extra hours, team. You know, if you're by yourself, I'm just going to. Honey, I'm sorry. I'm going to have to work a little bit extra. I'm going to have to work on the weekends just so I can stay caught up until I find somebody new. I'm working on it, you know, or maybe I'm just going to finish the season like this and regroup and really focus over the winter on finding somebody when I have a little more time, because that's. That's better than. Than. Than the mystery of it all and the anxiety of. Are they going to call out? Are they going to show up late? Are they going to be grumpy? Are they going to, you know, have. Are they going to do a good job or not? Like, it's better to know that you're going to show up every day on time and you're going to do a great job even though you're working longer and harder doing it all yourself. That's what I submit to you anyway. And so that's just one of many examples of decisions that you need to make or decisions that you make or haven't made. Also, hiring, right? Waiting too long to hire another person or hire your first person, that falls into that category as well. And I mean, there's. There's so many things, right? We can go. I can go on and on about this. I didn't really want to go too far off the deep end there, you know, on, on the rabbit trail there with that, but with this. But I definitely wanted to share as much as I could or just give as many examples that make sense, just kind of prove my point without, you know, beating a dead horse. I mean, you know, we could talk about training or going to events, mentorship programs, AKA coaching, like that. Those are also other decisions that could really impact your business in a positive way. I mean, there could be something that you like, a skill that you just didn't know. Like, you know, we don't know. We don't know, right? You've probably heard that many people have probably heard that before. You don't know what you don't know. So there could be a skill that changes the game for you, something that you just didn't even realize you were missing or didn't know, or didn't know you needed to know. And being in the right room or around the right people outside of your little local community or your little bubble of like, not talking to anyone in the industry and you're just doing your thing and you're in your own little world again, that could be a potentially slower process for growth or efficiency. Even if you're not looking to grow to be a big, massive company, you still want to be efficient and profitable. You want to make as much money as you can for the work that you're performing and the hours that you're putting in and not feeling like you're just still not able to make ends meet. And maybe you don't need to grow that big, but you think you do because you're not making as much money as you need to. And that could just be some simple tweaks, like I said, some skills that maybe you didn't know you. You needed to learn about budgeting and managing your money better. Like, I've talked about the time management, I mean, the time management and money management system that I created following nature's framework. I've talked about that in some past events and a little bit on Social media and podcasts. It's a lot easier to see it in person when I'm talking about it and showing it and explaining it and answering questions about it and helping you actually implement it into your business. But those kind of things can give you the tweaks needed to really help you get the most from your time and the most money out of your time. But you would just never know until you get in the right room or hear the right conversation or get around the right people somehow, some way listen to the right podcast episode or whatever it is to give you that spark or that new, that new belief maybe, you know, or that just that, that new skill set like oh wow, okay, I never realized that or I always had a hard time with that, but I get it now. You know, you just. And you finally figured it out or someone helped you figure it out and, and definitely time helps. LCR Media Podcast is proudly sponsored by Turo and they're giving listeners a powerful tool to run a smarter, more profitable business horizon. 360 helps you schedule jobs, track crews, monitor equipment and understand what work is really paying off. LCR listeners get an exclusive 7 month free trial with promo code LCR. Claim yours today. Click the link in the episode description. But again, back to my one of my original points is the more time you take, the more difficulty you know you, you create because it's. And the longer your success waits and the more your family suffers or the people that are close to you, important to you in your life may suffer or at least not reap the rewards right of the fruits of your labor, they're still just kind of waiting. They're still just hanging in there while you're struggling and they're struggling and they have high hopes. But why take five to 10 years when you can do that in one to two? If you learn some skills that maybe you didn't realize you needed to learn and some new mindsets and some new self worth beliefs about yourself and how you're worth more so you can charge more and then you can become more and you can have more. A lot of us are doing more, but we're not really getting what we're worth getting what we should be getting. So we just keep doing more, doing more, doing more. But we're not getting, we're not having as much. We're not having more of what we actually want and need. So anyway, so my, my back to my original original point when I'm saying stop making excuses because that's something that you know, I'll Wrap up with that. Stop making excuses. I said that because I've heard so many business owners say oh, that will never work in my, that'll never work in my area or I can never charge this in my area or I could, my customers will never accept that or I can't do this or that. And you just insert the I can'ts and the I won'ts or you know, all the negative words you insert all those and those are essentially just excuses and it makes you procrastinate making decisions or think that you can't even, it won't even work, you can't make those decisions at all. But really if you just change those. I can't. I can and I will and I am and I am not, then that's going to give you more confidence right then and there. And just, just making, just making the decision to do a thing. Like, you know, I'm going to send this email out, you know, I, I did my due diligence, I did some research or I learned how to structure a price increase letter or how to communicate better with my customers in general. So I got this, or I'm utilizing, you know, AI to help me maybe in the software that, that you're the CRM that I'm using or I just use Chat GPT or Gemini or something or Claude or whatever and help structure up some emails so that I can communicate clearly and professionally a price increase or credit card on file that I'm now implementing or 12 month billing or you know, we're not offering this service anymore, we're not taking care of this service area anymore. You know, insert whatever that you might be reluctant to do for one reason or another and now you do it. And the worst that can happen is they say no or they cancel services, right? As long as every single person doesn't do that, you'll be fine and I guarantee. Like for example, if you were to send out a price increase letter the right way for the right amount, right? Like if you just double everyone's price, like yeah, we used to mow your lawn for $50 per cut, now it's $100 per cut. Like if you do something extreme like that, it doesn' what you say in that email, people are going to freak out, right? I mean some people might be okay with it, but most people probably not going to be okay with that. And you're going to get a lot more freak outs with that kind of situation. Now of course, as an exaggerated version or example, just to prove my point, that of course something super exaggerated, like that is going to make people quit on you. But I guarantee if you have, you know, a strategic price increase, whether it's like 5% or 6% or whatever it happens to be, doesn't even need to be a percentage if you know your man hour rates. And that I believe was on a recent podcast episode from a live stream that I had. You can go on my YouTube channel and check that out if you want to see it in action and see the video. But I talked about your per man hour rate and if you at least know that and then you track your time on every job, your start, stop time, every job, you can now play with the numbers. You know, it's taking you x amount of minutes or hours. You know, if it takes you 30 minutes for a job and you have two people doing that, that's one man hour, right? Two people working 30 minutes, you multiply that by two, that's 60 minutes, that's one hour. So whatever you charged for that service, if it's $50, that was $50 per man hour, right? Two, two people, 30 minutes took an hour, you charge $50, whatever. And you manipulate those numbers back and forth. If you want your man hour rate to be $50, which that's a whole nother conversation for another day. And you know, to figure out what that is, it should definitely be a lot more than that. But just for simple math, you know, just throwing an easy number out there. But you could say $60 too. But if that's your, whatever your man hour rate is now, if it's taking you longer than 30 minutes for two people and you're still charging $50 now that it's not $50 per hour, now it's just gone down, right? If it's 1.25 hours, like you know, an hour and 15 minutes it took you instead of an hour for two people, well, now that's what, like $40, I think or something that per man hour that you're making. So now you've just lost money. So you either need to increase the price from $50 to $60 or whatever the math works out to get it back up to $50 per man hour, or you have to figure out a way to reduce that time back down to an hour from an hour and 50 minutes to an hour, right? An hour and 15 to an hour. Whether that's being more efficient with your setup, maybe your guys, or they're being unproductive, whatever, just that one metric alone can help. You dial in your numbers there and you make more Money and you get more with your time and so on. So I essentially just gave you the whole summary of when I talked about this before. But again, I go into more details wherever I talked about it, so you can check that out. My YouTube channel or a recent podcast episode. But I digress and I don't even remember the original point there that I was trying to make. This final point that I was trying to make about per man hour rate. But regardless, that's an example. Maybe this is where I was going. But just yet another example of you don't know what you don't know until you figure that out. You can be more profitable even with the lawns that you have or the jobs that you have, less people that you have and so on. You can get more to do, you can get more money with what you have. You can be more profitable. Anyway, I'll wrap that up there. My point is stop making excuses. Wait, I think I remember where I was going with that. Yeah, making excuses like people saying, I can't do this, I can't charge that. Anyway, I still don't think I found my original point of why I was talking about per man hour rate. But hopefully you listening to it, you remember what I was trying to say and hopefully can connect the dots. But my point is if you want more help with that too, right, like knowing your numbers and things like that are really hard to talk about on podcasts. I just try to quickly go through your man hour rate and I think I did a relatively decent job. But again, it's a lot easier to. I'm a visual person, so I learn visually. So it's a lot easier that way for me. And if that is for you as well, you know, we're going to be going through all this on the Profit Accelerator Live two day event in Richmond, Virginia. It's going to be on a Friday and Saturday, so you're not even really missing work. You can come spend the weekend with us. You can bring your spouse for free or business partner. It's a buy one, get one ticket right now for a limited time, you can get two tickets for the price of one. So you can come and enjoy the, enjoy the weekend with us and learn at the same time. If you're local to Richmond, Virginia, you can just drive on here, right? That so many neighboring states, so many of you are in PA and Maryland and North Carolina, you know, you could just drive on, on, drive on over, drive on up or down or over, you know, New York, New Jersey. I know, you know, some folks coming from Jersey and pa. So it's definitely worth driving to for sure. And of course you can fly here too. We've got an international airport in Richmond you can fly over from wherever as well. It's definitely going to be worth your time to to not only just net, not only network right with people, but to learn from me and John Pajac, Eric Triplett so many more on really how to increase your profits, how to make more money in your business without working so much more, without killing yourself with hours, how to hire more efficiently, how to market more efficiently to get more customers, better customers, higher quality premium customers, how to talk to your customers, how to close more high ticket sales for those premium value customers, how to get your time back and not work all day every day and still make more money, what to do with all the money that you're making, how to manage it properly so that you always have money when you need it and you never feel broke and you can make better decisions right when you feel broke you feel like you can't breathe and now you can't really make any real clear minded decisions. You're kind of acting more impulsively and defensively and reactively. So let's help you figure all that out. Everyone needs, everyone can use to learn a little bit of something. Again, you don't know what you don't know, you're going to learn a whole lot, I guarantee that. So come on, spend time with us. Richmond, Virginia is going to be June 26th and 27th profitacceleratorlive.com get those tickets. Buy one, get one. Or you can just click the link in the episode description as well to get you there fast and hope to see you all there until the until then. Or if I don't see you if you're not able to make that decision to attend and change your business and your life and the future of your family faster by accelerating your profits. Hopefully I'll see you at Equip Expo in October and you have a great summer either way. But again, hopefully I will see you in June. But until the next episode, thank you to company for sponsoring the LCR Media podcast. And this is Nail or Italia Ferro signing off.
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This has been an lcr media and Mr. Producer production.