Loading summary
Transcript7 lines
- [00:00]
A
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.
- [00:26]
B
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.
- [01:29]
A
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.
- [07:42]
B
Here's a question. Do you have a system for your business, or are you just buying stuff and hoping it works? Equip Exposition taking place this October is where landscapers go to build the whole package. Equipment, software, and training. Registration is just $25 before May 31st. Equipexposition.com Register now at equipexposition.com or use
- [08:05]
A
the link in the podcast description.
- [08:07]
B
Save 50% off your registration when you apply the code PAYJACK at checkout.
- [08:11]
A
Back when I was getting my lawn care business off the ground, I was juggling routes, invoices, and customer notes with paper and prayers. It was chaos. Until I found Yardbook. Yardbook gave me the structure. It helped me track chemicals, route efficiently, invoice faster, and most importantly, it helped me grow a profitable business. If you're tired of duct taping your systems Together, go to yardbook.com and sign up for free. And if you're ready to go premium, use promo code PAYJACK to get your first 30 days on me. Now let me flip this, because not everyone has a pricing problem in the way you might think. I had another owner, and we looked at his numbers, and his pricing was actually solid. There's no major red flags. He wasn't undercharging, but he had a different issue. He didn't have enough work. So now the instinct might be, well, lower your prices and be more competitive. But that would have been the wrong move. Instead, we focused on volume. Strategically. He already had a few customers in a really good neighborhood. So we leaned into that. We created a simple introductory offer for that area. Only now, it was nothing crazy, but it was just something to get attention and create some momentum. And it worked. You know, at the end, what we ended up doing was because we knew what his numbers were and he was pretty consistent with a profit margin that he wanted. We, because we knew those numbers. Now somebody's gonna throw this in my face and say, well, you get lower prices. You just said you're not gonna do that, but you did it right here. Yes, we did, but it's only because we knew the numbers. When you know what your bottom line is, when you know what your break evens are and you know what your bottom line, your. Your profit margin is, typically, that's very powerful. It's so powerful because now you have the opportunity to go ahead and, you know, play with it. You know, think. Think of pricing as an. Not only as something that's kind of boring with putting, you know, a plus B plus C equals D. Well, you could. There's an art to it as well. You know, this goes with sales and marketing. Well, I shouldn't say marketing so much, but really the sales end of it. But the thing is, if you're a salesperson or you know, say you're big enough to have sales, somebody come in and do it for you, or if it's just you, when you know what it actually costs your business, what it actually, what margins you're trying to achieve. You could strategically come in and be like, okay, well, you know, we're going to strike this one neighborhood, and we're going to have an offer just for them. What's the goal? Our goal is to get more clients. We want more penetration. We want to get more people in this neighborhood because they are our ideal client. And all we really need is exposure. And not to mention, we already have clients in this neighborhood. So we just kind of want to fill the gaps in between our existing clients, too. So what you could do is, what we did was we devised a program, an offer, just for this neighborhood, and it did lower the price a little bit, but it was an introductory rate. You know, it wasn't going to stay there forever. We had a thing where it was like, hey, for the first, you know, for the first, like, three months of this season, you know, you're going to get this rate, and then things will go to normal price. Most people were like, yeah, let's go. Let's try it. You know, and once they started seeing the results, the phone kept ringing. And by the end of the season, you know, he had picked up 27 new customers in that neighborhood. Now, that's a lot. You know, I mean, if you're thinking about that, not everybody uses services like this. So in order, it's not like every single house on the block has a service provider. It'd be wonderful if they did. But, you know, to gain that many people in, you know, that time of the season was pretty impressive. And here's the best part. He was not chasing work, right? The neighborhood started seeing his trucks. They see his results. And now in the new year, this new season, his phone is blowing up. And he didn't. You know, we could talk about this a little bit later, too, but they. He wasn't having to spend as much money on ad spend. He'd done a lot of legwork in this neighborhood, and people, his reputation started to precede him, and now they're all calling him. So to break this all down. So what does this tell us? You know, pricing is not always just about raising your rates. It's about understanding your numbers well enough to make the right move. So in one case, we raise prices to reduce the stress and increase profits, and in the other case, we maintain pricing and increase the volume. Strategically, these are two completely different situations, but two completely different solutions, but both required clarity, the clarity of your pricing. So here's the truth. You know, too cheap, you're gonna. You're gonna get too much work and it's gonna bury you. If you're too expensive with no work, it won't sustain you. So you need to find that balance. And the only way to do that is by understanding your numbers and not guessing or not copying competitors. We're not just kind of feeling it out, but we actually know. And this is one of the lessons that I want to leave you with, is I want to teach you is how powerful one thing, one. You know, just this one. I'm going to share more with you as the week goes on here. But you know, just this one thing can change your business dramatically. That's pricing. So I know, I know today we focused on pricing. I keep saying it, but pricing alone doesn't fix everything. Because even if you're charging correctly, there's still more opportunity sitting right in front of you. So tomorrow I'm going to show you how to how I personally added over 18,000 in revenue to my my own business this season and I did it without adding a single new client. And once you see it, you're going to start to realize you've probably been sitting on the same opportunity this entire time. So as always, I hope you got something great out of this. Please listen for the rest of the week. I invite you to we usually do Monday, Wednesday, Friday, but this we're doing one every single day of the week this week. But as always, God bless. Keep pushing through and we'll catch you on the next one. Thank you once again for listening. If you've enjoyed the show, please leave a review and share it with fellow business owners. Your support means the world to me and helps keep the show going strong. I want to give a special shout out to our friends at Yardbook. Their continued support has been instrumental in bringing this podcast to you week after week. If you haven't checked them out yet, visit yardbook.com and see how they can give you the tools to streamline and manage your lawn care business. Also, don't forget to explore the resources and upcoming events that I've collected just for you in the show Notes. These are curated to help you stay ahead in your business with the latest tips, tools and networking opportunities. Whether it's a new tool, an insightful article, or an event you don't want to miss, I've got you covered. Until next time, keep pushing through and God bless.