Transcript
A (0:00)
Welcome to part one of a five part special series designed to help you have your best season ever. What if I told you that the reason you're exhausted right now isn't because you don't have enough work? It's because you get too much of the wrong work. You know, you're waking up early, you're grinding all day, you're coming home completely drained and somehow the bank account still doesn't reflect the effort. If this sounds familiar, well, you definitely got to listen to this.
B (0:26)
Today's episode is brought to you by Yardbook, the all in one CRM for your lawn care business. And as an exclusive partner of this podcast, you can get started today and begin simplifying your business and maximizing your profits. Sign up now@yardbook.com the link is in. The show notes time now for Profits with Paycheck, an essential podcast for you in the green industry who are looking to unlock the full potential of your business. Hosted by John Pajak, your certified financial coach, the show features in depth discussions with successful entrepreneurs, thought leaders and industry experts. Providing practical advice and proven strategies on financial planning, operations, marketing and sales. Profits with Paycheck has valuable insights and action steps that you can implement today for creating long term success. Now here's John Pajak.
A (1:28)
Welcome to Profits with Pajak the podcast. We talk about business strategies and financial insights for the green industry. I'm your host, John Pajak and this week we are doing something a little different. For the next five days, I'm releasing a short series, one episode each day, designed to help you fix the biggest profit problems in your business. And each episode is going to start, it's going to build on the last one. So today is where we start. And we're starting with one of the most obvious, misunderstood. Sometimes it's uncomfortable and sometimes people just avoid this topic altogether. But it's pricing. So let me paint a picture for you. Your phone is ringing, your schedule is full, you're booked out, and on paper, everything looks like it's working. But in reality, you're stressed, you're behind, you're constantly trying to catch up, and when you take a look at your bank account, it doesn't make sense. And you start asking yourself questions like, where's all the money going? And why does it feel like I'm working harder than ever, but I'm not getting ahead? And this is where most people go wrong. They think this, you know, they think the solution is I need more customers, I need to work more hours, I need to hustle harder. But the Truth is, more work at the wrong price is actually gonna make your situation worse. And I worked with an owner who is exactly in this situation. And I mean, this is a fairly common thing I'm coming across. I've been doing this for years now, and a lot of times this is like the number one hot problem that people have. And you know, this, this owner, he was very busy. I mean, I mean, I'm talking completely slammed. He's working long days, he's working 16 hour days easily. Full schedule, constantly moving. And you, from the out, you know, from the outside, you're looking at this, and if you see this guy on Instagram or something, you'd be like, man, look, this guy's doing great. Look at him, you know, but, you know, him and I sat down, we looked at his numbers, and they told a completely different story. I noticed almost immediately that he was undercharging across the board, not just for one service, but pretty much all the services that he had. And every job he completed was, it was profitable. So he was not like completely upside down. But the problem was his profit margins were very low. So what was happening, you know, he was basically adding fuel to the fire by, you know, he had to do more jobs just to stay afloat, which meant more hours, which meant more stress and more wear and tear on the equipment and more wear and tear on him. And still there was not enough money left over. So I started pointing things out to him and he made the decision that we needed to raise his prices. Now, this is the part where people get nervous. They ask, well, what if I lose customers? What if people say no? And the thing is, yeah, it happens, he did lose some people. But here's what happened overall. Once he raised his prices, his schedule became more manageable. He wasn't running himself into the ground anymore. And most importantly, he started keeping more of the money he was already working for. Nothing changed except the price. And everything changed. Think about that for a second. How many of you are working harder just to make up for what you're not charging? Because I'll tell you flat out, you know, let's just make the math super easy, right? Let's just say you got 100 clients and you're charging $50 per service. Is it a bad thing to maybe lose some of those people and have 50 clients, but they're, you're charging a hundred dollars. You think about that. It's the exact same math if you look at it, no matter what you got, you know, if you're doing it for 100 clients, and you're doing it for 50. Yes. You're still making. You're making, you know, $5,000. Right? But what if you flipped it on its end and you, You. You ended up losing even half of your clients? You won't lose half your clients. Okay? But let's just say you lose half of them. You could still make the exact same amount of money, same revenue, by charging those 50 people $100. And this is kind of what happens, you know, it thins the herd out a little bit. There's more value placed on what you're doing. Some people don't care. They're just like, yeah, you're doing a great job. Okay, you raised your prices. Fine, I'll pay it. It's fine. Just continue to do what you do. That alone. When you start to flip it and start think, instead of thinking of scarcity and thinking about how, you know, maybe you're not in the mindset of, I would pay that much. But you're not them. You're not your client. You don't know what they're willing to spend. Because you got to remember this, the things that we do, you know, almost all of them are literally luxury items, luxury things to do. If people are willing to pay this much for it, then they might pay a little bit more. Now, I'm not saying you double your prices, but you strategically find out what margin you need to. To hit to be able to be profitable at the rate of what your goals are as well. So if you're, you know, for your personal life, for your business life, all these things in between, making sure that your. Your people are taken care of, all these things that should be reflected in your pricing as well. It's not just the, the static number of like, well, you can do it for this much. Well, then you're, you're. Oh, I, I could only charge 10% more or 20% more. No, that's not the, the message I'm trying to send here. It is, there's value with what we do, and you can charge more than what you would pay for something because people are willing to do it.
