Transcript
A (0:00)
Imagine this. You're slammed, phones are ringing, work is piling up. You're working long days just trying to keep up and you're thinking, I need help. But then the next thought hits you and it's what if I don't have enough work to keep someone busy? And now you're stuck. You know, you're too busy to stay solo. You're not busy enough to hire. And this is one of the most dangerous stages in business. And today we're going to break it down.
B (0:27)
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 PayJack has valuable insights and action steps that you can implement today for creating long term success. Now here's John Pajak.
A (1:31)
Welcome to Profits with Pajak, the podcast where we talk about business strategies and financial insights for the green industry. I'm your host John Pajak and today we're going to be talking about a situation almost every owner faces at some point. You're on the edge of growth, but you're not quite there yet. So this is the stage that I like to call the messy middle of hiring. You've outgrown doing everything yourself, but you haven't built enough consistent revenue to to confidently support a full time employee. So what happens? Most owners do one or two things. They either wait too long to hire or they burn themselves out trying to do everything or they hire too early and now they're stressed trying to feed that payroll. And neither one is a good place to be. And the real issue isn't hiring. It's consistency of your production and your revenue. Because hiring is not based on how busy you feel. It's based on whether your business can consistently produce enough money, enough revenue to support another person. And this is where your numbers matter. If you don't know what your production rate and your break even hourly cost is, you're making a hiring decision based on emotion. And I'm going to tell you this from experience, emotion is expensive. So before you hire you have to ask yourself this question, what is my time actually worth inside the business? Because what you need to really start looking at is buying back your time first. Because if you're spending time on estimates and scheduling and phone calls and driving inefficient routes and fixing problems, you may not need an employee yet. You need to buy back your time. And that can mean better scheduling, better routing, better systems, raising your prices to reduce the workload. And sometimes the solution isn't adding labor, a lot of times it's improving the efficiency. So, you know, a lot of times you don't have to jump straight to a full time employee. One of the smartest moves is phased timing. And this is where you start with part time help. You can have say, a helper, you know, for specific days, bringing someone on during peak workload times. You know, some basically a, you know, something that's going to just come in knowing it's like a very seasonal part of your year. And it's like, we just need extra help during this time. Now what this is good for is it allows you to test your systems and you're, when you're training somebody, you could train without all the pressure of, you know, you could actually walk them through the jobs and everything instead of just throwing them out to the wolves. You can train people properly. And a lot of times when you do this, it helps you build consistency before you commit to a full time person on your payroll. And when you're doing this, you're not hiring a full time employee yet you're building towards one. And this is where most people miss the opportunity. If you know you're close to hiring, you need to start selling the work before you hire, not after. And this means going back to the drawing board. You're raising prices, you're tightening your ideal client profile, your customer avatar. And that's the fancy way of saying like, who are your people? The customers that are going to be buying your stuff? And then making sure that you're filling your schedule intentionally. Not just like, oh, you got a phone call and somebody that's halfway across town. It's like, no, you know, we're filling the schedule with, you know, very specific, you know, geography in mind, a demographic in mind, you know, something that's inside of the routes we're already servicing and you're marketing with a purpose. You're not just like, hey, we're a lawn care company and we're, we're out, we exist, call us. It's like, no, I want, you know, very specific. If you Know, let's just say, uh, we're going to do aeration and seating. Okay. We're going to be marketing that specifically talking about all the, the benefits of that particular service so that we're getting those clients. You know, this is going to help fill our schedule with intention, not just, yeah, we're going to add somebody and, you know, whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever, you know. No, we're being very intentional about it. The goal is simple. We're going to create enough revenue to support the employee before they even start, not while they're standing next to you waiting to be paid.