← Profits with Pajak
Profits with Pajak
Busy Isn't Profitable, The Truth About Wasted Time in Your Business Ep. #504
00:25:05
Loading summary
Transcript5 lines
- [00:00]
A
All right, let me ask you something. When was the last time someone told you the truth about your business and it actually made you feel uncomfortable? Not motivated or not inspired, but just straight up uncomfortable? Because today I'm gonna go there and I might make you feel uncomfortable today. So strap in, buttercup. Here we go.
- [00:22]
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. 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 Pak, 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 Pak.
- [01:24]
A
Welcome to Profits with Pak, the podcast where you dive into business strategies and financial aid sites for the green industry. I'm your host, John Pajak, and today we are going to have a real conversation. And we are. Before we jump into today's topic, I want to take a minute and address something. The last episode. Yeah, I know I ruffled some feathers. I had a couple dms, I had a couple of things pop up. And honestly, that was the point. Because sometimes the nice guy has to step aside and Mr. Meaney Pants has to show up and tell you what's really going on. It's not to tear you down, but because sugar coating your problems does not fix them. So look, I'm in this with you. You know, I run the trucks, I deal with the customers, I deal with the stress. And so, you know, when I say something that hits hard, it's not coming from a place of ego, it's coming from a place of experience. And if something I said made you feel uncomfortable, well, good, because that means we're getting closer to the truth. So now today I just want to kind of build on that. Because once you start plugging the leaks, once you start fixing the broken systems in your business, once you start actually collecting your money, there's another problem that shows up real quick and that is this. You're busy, but you're not efficient. So there are a lot of guys in our industry that we're busy. Like a badge of honor. I worked 16 hours today I knocked out 25 lawns by myself, or me and my guy knocked out 25 lawns mowing. You know, we never stopped moving. We were like sharks. We smelled blood in the water and we went after it and we got it. Well, cool. My question is, did you make any money doing it or did you just stay in motion all day? Because there's a big difference between being busy and being productive. Now let me paint you a picture, okay? Be like Bob Ross, okay? We're gonna calm down. Paint some beautiful little happy trees on a mountainside. Maybe have snowflakes, you know, glistening pond at the bottom of the mountains. Just a beautiful tapestry. Gotta use that wet. That wet painting method that Bob Rossigan was just so good at. You know, just a beautiful. We're gonna paint you a beautiful picture here, but we're gonna put it in terms of lawn care, okay? Now, let's just say you've got crews stopping for whatever. They're either refilling the fuel or stopping for lunch or they gotta go to the gas station to get scratch offs and smokes. You know? You know that, that routine. You've got routes that zigzag all over town. You got equipment that slows you down, and you got no real game plan for the day. And at the end of it, you're exhausted. But your numbers don't reflect the effort. That's because inefficiency is usually a silent killer. It doesn't scream at you like a bad customer. All it does is this. It's this quiet little monster that sits off on the side and it just slowly eats your profits. And I'll tell you what, that little sucker's hungry. You know, he just. He just wants to eat, eat, eat, eat. And if you let him, he will eat you to the bone. Now let's go back to something simple. You know, let's go back to your employees and their wasted time, okay? Because this happens a lot, and it's not, like, intentional. You know, typically, I find 25 to 33% of the day is lost to inefficiencies because of drive time, taking breaks. You know, guys aren't. Let's just say they're not packing a lunch and they're gonna stop off at some fast food place and they just park the truck and trailer and then they sit there. And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that they shouldn't do this. You know, they need a break. They work very hard. But I want you as the business owner to understand that you need to account for that, you actually need to account for the inefficiencies that you're going to be expecting. You know, if you think about it just with driving, maybe they do stop off at the gas station for something other than refueling. They take a bathroom break. They, you know, do all these things. Right. Again, these are human things. You have to allow for inefficiencies in there. But you got to start looking at it. And you go, you know, even if it's 10 minutes, you know, and it's, you know, say they make six stops, if it's one guy, that's. That's 60 minutes that are gone. If it's two guys, well, guess what? Now that 60 minutes is now two people. So that's 120 minutes. That's two hours. If that's every single day, that, that's another three to five lawns you could have completed with the same crew. The same hours, the same day. It's just more production. Now, again, you're not going to be a slave driver. They need their lunch, they need their breaks. They, you know, it's hot outside. I am not advocating that you push these guys so hard, but you have to account for it. And that really is going to help you as the business owner start changing the other things that need to be taken care of. So let's. Let me just explain something real quick. I'm going to take a quick, quick break here, but this ties directly into what we're talking about today. Because if you don't know where your time is going, you're just guessing. And guessing is very expensive. And that's why I always recommend using Yardbook, because in Yardbook, you can track time on jobs. You could monitor route efficiency. You could track the time in between jobs. You could see job profitability reports, and you know exactly which properties are making you money. So instead of saying, hey, you know, we had a busy day, you could say we had a profitable day. And that's a big difference. So, you know, try it out. If you're not using it yet, you could use Yardbook for free. But if you want to use all the bells and whistles that Yardbook has to offer, don't forget to use promo code PAYJACK. And you're going to get 30 days free on the premium version. So the show, the links in the show notes, go check out yardbook.com and if you want to upgrade and get all the goodies that I use every single day in my business, use promo code payjack. P A J A K.
- [08:13]
B
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 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.
- [09:26]
A
Equip Expo 2026 is coming up October 20th through the 23rd in Louisville, Kentucky. If you're serious about growing your business, this is where you need to be. We're talking live equipment demos, the latest technology, and thousands of contractors all in one place, sharing what's actually working right now. And here's the deal. Tickets are normally $120, but right now you can get them for $12.50. When you use promo code PAYJACK, that's 50% off the already discounted early bird price. But this deal expires May 31 and prices go up after that. So don't wait on this. Lock in your ticket now get in the room and I'll see you there. Use promo code payjack. The link is in the show notes and grab your ticket today. 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 place 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 paycheck to get your first 30 days on me. All right, let's get back into it. So how do we fix the inefficiencies? Let's, let's talk about that right now. Because they, you know, awareness isn't enough. Yes, I know, because I've been in this industry for a long time and I've really studied this industry. I understand that in an eight hour day, up to 25 or even more percent of the day is wasted. It's inefficient, it's driving to jobs, it's, you know, guys needing breaks. It's all the things, tools break, we got to replace them. All the things, okay? It could be anything. So when you're working an eight hour day, you're really only getting about six hours of production. You get to work a ten hour day, hey, you get about eight hours of production, okay? It's not like, you know, we have to get 100% efficiency. That's going to be impossible. Okay. But here's what we need to do. We need to track everything. And if you're not tracking, you know, time per job, your travel time, say, your setup and your refill times, your refueling times, you're basically just guessing. And I'm going to tell you, your gut's probably wrong on that part. If you get a funny feeling, if you get the spidey sense that like something's really wrong, that listen to that. But if you're guessing and you're like, I don't know, we probably only spend like an hour, you know, a day, you know, doing things that don't make us money, you're probably wrong. You need to track that. Second thing you need to do. You need to optimize your routes. Okay? Not only optimize your route, but you also need route density. So you gotta stop chasing jobs all over town, all over the area. You know, I know quite a few people that travel multiple towns just to get to some jobs. You need to really tighten your routes. And the closer your jobs are together, the more money you're gonna make per hour. And three, you gotta upgrade your bottlenecks. If something is slowing you down every day, you gotta fix it. You know, this might be, you know, bigger tanks, you know, like if you're an applicator, like we are, you know, maybe you have a hundred gallon tank, maybe that's not enough, you know, maybe it's like, oh yeah, you know, we're pulling hose. Well, maybe 200 gallons is what's going to work for you. Maybe not. Maybe that's not enough for you. You know, you got to come back and get a refill you got to go back to the shop. That's very inefficient. You might be better off investing a couple extra thousand dollars to get a bigger tank, like a 300 or 400 gallon tank, you know, depending on what you're doing making, having better equipment. You know, if you got a. There's a lot of guys out there that are running equipment that is seen it's better days. And yes, you could still make money off of them. You know, they're paid off and all that stuff. But there's one guy locally that almost every time I see him, he's, you know, got the deck open on his zero turn because a belt keeps sliding off and he, you know, it's not that he has to buy a new mower, but it's like a chain reaction to things like, oh, I gotta, I gotta replace the belt tensioner, but I just don't have time to do that or you know, and that leads to, okay, well the belt flies off the pulley and it puts more wear and tear on the belt and he has to go buy another belt when he really should just take the time to fix the damn the belt tensioner so that that doesn't happen. And then it's like, oh, well, yeah, you know, we got a couple bearings that are ready to go because they squeal like a pig on a hot day. And you know, I'm chasing them going sausage. Yeah, you know, it's kind of a. It's kind of embarrassing but you know, you know, you gotta get, you gotta get past that. You know, if you're riding around on a lawn and it's like, you know, like a hog, you know, may, it's time to put that sucker down, make some sausages. I love sausages. They're good. But you know, maybe, maybe it is time to move up to up the ladder and get something new. Or at least maintain your equipment. Right. So you don't have all these breakdowns and stuff. Maybe it's more efficient processes, you know, maybe when you go refuel, maybe this, maybe you got to save time maybe like what we do, we. My shop is located right across the street from a gas station. I didn't select that area because of the storage facility as much as I did. The location and proximity it was in town, plus the fact that there's a CVS across the street from us, so I could go and run, get drinks and snacks and all the cool things for the guys. I mean, ice, everything's there. Either that or I could get the Ice from the gas station. You know, most of the time, we have everything fueled up, ready to go at night. So it kind of pushes people. You know, if you do it in the morning, everybody's really slow. They're on the clock, they don't care. But if you do it at night, they're like, I better hurry up. I want to go home. I don't want to be standing here for 45 minutes fueling up everything. You know, just tiny processes like that, right? Yes. Sometimes it costs money to upgrade equipment or to fix equipment or, you know, have more efficient processes to set them up at first, you know, but those inefficiencies, they cost you more. The fourth thing, and this is. This is probably the most critical thing, and I hinted at it before, but you got to plan the day before it starts, because winning days don't happen by accident. They're planned. It's just like a football game. Well, let's not talk about football. Let's talk about something where, you know, let's just talk about a game of sorts. The teams that are most prepared are usually the ones that win. Okay? Your routes should be really clean. Your stops that you make throughout the day, they should be logical. You know, it's not like, hey, let's work until 11 and then go halfway across town to go eat at the Chinese buffet. That takes us way off route. And then we're going to go way back across town again to pick up where we left off. That's not a very efficient way. It's like, hey, we're going to be on this side of town. Great little pizza place. I know you might be sick of pizza, but guess what? They got, you know, really good sandwiches, too, guys. All right, we're going to do there. They got air conditioning inside there. It's going to be great, you know? You know what I mean? We could save the China buffet for, like, another day when we're on that side of town. And another thing is the crew should know exactly what they're doing. You know, a lot of times, you know, we don't have the luxury of just being like, oh, we're a mowing company, or we're a fertilization, weed control company. Sometimes you got jobs where, you know, Monday through Wednesday, you pretty much get all your mowing done. And then, you know, you may be working Thursday and Friday. Maybe you're doing some kind of, like, mulch install or landscaping, tweaks, bush trimming, whatever it is, doesn't matter. You should let your crews know exactly what they're doing so they could be prepared for it. Because I tell you what, it doesn't sound like a big shift, but when somebody is used to mowing and all of a sudden it's like, dude, we're gonna be bush trimming today. It's like, I gotta mentally prepare for that. Okay, I'm gonna make sure I wear my, you know, this, this hat or this jacket because I don't want the pine needles sticking me all day, you know, but this should all happen before the truck even starts. Have a pregame day or, you know, have a, have a meeting in the morning that allows everything to review routes for the, for the team leaders. The. The, you know, the lead technician that drives a truck, make sure he understands the routes. It's probably going to be the same one he's run every single week. But just go over it. If there's something new, let him know about it. You know, again, enforce, we're going to get pizza today instead of Chinese and then let them know exactly what's expected of them. Okay? And here's the mindset that I want you to adopt. I want you to stop asking, how much work did we do today? And start asking how much profit did we generate per hour? Because that's the game that. I'll tell you what, that is a completely different metric. How much work did we get done today? Oh, that's. We did 20 lawns. Oh, okay, that sounds like. That sounds good. That sounds like a lot. It took us 16 hours to do 20. Okay, how many people? That's two. You know, we had three guys in the truck. Oh, okay. Do you know where that puts us profit wise? No, we just got 20 done. Oh, okay. Well, how much revenue did we generate an hour? That's a different way of thinking. You know, maybe now it's like we, we only had. We. We got 10 done today. Well, I don't know. That 20 sounded way better, but now you start realizing it's like, well, no, no, no. These 10 jobs we did, maybe they were bush trimming jobs and, you know, each job was worth, you know, $800 compared to the mowing, which was like $55 per cut. We're in a whole different ballpark here, you know? Oh, we did 10 bush trimming jobs in eight hours. Oh, okay. We cut 20 lawns in 16 hours with three guys. Average ticket was 55. Yeah, I think the, you know, the bush trimming is probably going to win for the day. You got to know what you have to understand how much profit you generate per Hour, that's the key. That's the thing, you know, between being busy and being productive and profitable. So here's some things you could do. You time your next full workday, get some data. I don't want you to guess. I want you to time on the job. You could use yard book for this. Clock in on the app and everything. Clock into each job so you understand how much time is actually being spent on each property. Clock out of that, clock your drive time. Okay? That alone right there, those two things that's gonna give you so much data, you're not going to be guessing on anything. You might go, oh, you know, we got all these mowing jobs done and you might start going, yeah, well, we were profitable, we were good. But you might realize that, hey, we spent way too much time on Mr. Smith's house. Why is that? It kind of gets hidden when you don't have any data on it. It's like all these lawns took us a half hour to do. But for some reason, Mr. Smith or Mr. Jones, whoever. I said before Mr. Smith, Jones, he. His lawn took an hour and a half. What, what happened there? Did we forget to clock out? No, we ran into some problems on his lawn. You know, mower almost fell into the creek. Why? We're using the wrong equipment. Oh, all right, well, we better take note of that. We're going to fix that. We're gonna find out who. You know, when you start collecting data like that, you could find out which jobs are dragging you down and maybe you need to charge more or maybe you just need to get rid of them. You need to identify one bottleneck and just fix one thing this week. I'm not telling you to like overhaul your business during busy season, okay? You could just make small tweaks on things, fix things as we go, and that could really help your business start to flow freely again. Instead of getting jammed up in a bottleneck. And then measure your production per hour, not just the total jobs completed, but again, using that data you get from timing the jobs and time driving and then all those things, you're going to start getting a real good idea what your production rate is. You know, Is that a one man truck? Is it a two man crew, Three man crew? Whatever it is, once you start getting that data, you could start really figuring out your profitability there. So listen, I, I know this one might hit a little too. You know, maybe it's not the thing you want to hear, but that's okay. Because if you fix your, your, you know, going back to the last episode, when we're talking about your collection system, if you could fix that, and then you could fix your efficiency problem that we discussed this this episode. You're not just working harder, you're building a real business. You're working smarter. So again, tomorrow, go out tomorrow. Track your entire day, every stop, every delay, every refill. And then ask yourself, where did I lose time? And how much did it actually cost? Because once you see it, you cannot unsee it. Until next time, I want to just say thank you for listening. 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.