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You don't always need to raise your prices to make more money. Sometimes you just need to stop wasting time. Because if you've ever stood there waiting for something while thinking I could be doing something more right now, then you already know. Inefficiency is expensive.

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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 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 you can implement today for creating long term success. Now here's John Pajak.

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Welcome to profits with PayJack, the podcast where we dive into business strategies and financial insights for the green industry. I'm your host John Pajak and today I want to walk you through a real change that we made inside my business that completely improved our efficiency. Now, this wasn't something I planned perfectly from the start. This came from noticing a problem and then basically following it all the way down a rabbit hole until we found a better way. And this, I'll tell you, this all started when I began using Yardbook to track time more closely. This is many years ago. It wasn't about scheduling. This was actually timing jobs. You know, I was timing how much, how long it took to do our services on each property and I was timing the travel between each stop. And if you use the Yardbook app, you know, for Android or for iOS, the Apple, you can easily do this. And basically once I started reviewing these timesheets, I started noticing something strange. You know. You know, for our fertilization, weed control properties, you know, we basically have three properties all similar in size and the first one would take about 15 minutes, and the second one would take about 15 minutes. But the third one, that one took about 25 minutes. So now I'm thinking, what's going on here? You know, was I talking to a client? Did I take a break? Did I? Was it just a weird property layout that took some extra time or they had extra weeds or something? But I kept watching, I kept looking and I started noticing a pattern. Basically every third lawn, it was taking about 10 to 12 minutes longer than the previous two. And that's when it hit me. I wasn't slower. I was refilling the machine and I was doing it while I was clocked into that job. Now when I saw that pattern, I started looking at how we're actually operating and it started to make perfect sense because when I first started doing fertilization, everything was batch mixed on site. You know, I would carry five gallon water jugs and, you know, five gallon buckets of water with the, you know, the cap still on them and everything. And before the machine would get empty, I would go ahead and I would start, you know, it wouldn't be, I would just have a little bit at the bottom, you know, just enough to where it wouldn't run dry. But basically at that point, I would go ahead and I'd mix up basically a 10 gallon mix because, you know, I had the, the jugs were five gallons each. Exactly. And so, you know, you go through the process, you go through, okay, well, we're going to fill the tank halfway, we're going to add the chemicals, we're going to. Then top it off, we're going to, you know, use, I used to use drill mixers and stuff to make sure everything was properly blended. And then I would run it through the, you know, the machines, pumps, to make sure that everything was primed and, you know, everything was, was good, you know. But, you know, this process had two big problems. One, it was slow. You know, batch mixing is not really set up for speed. Okay. Then the second problem was it was easy to mess up because if you get interrupted, you can lose your place in how you're mixing your, your chemicals. And I've done it before, you know, I, I've gotten pulled away, I came back, I lost track, you know, and I ended up double mixing a batch. And that's a huge problem. That happened to me one time when our clients got me, started talking to me and I was about a third of the way through the process and then I talked to them for like 15 minutes. And then I started going back to the, the mixing process. And then somebody else, a friend of mine, pulled up behind me and just started chatting away and I literally lost track of where I was. And I ended up making a double blend, which was not good. That backpack sprayer was really hot and I ended up damaging some turf by spraying the weeds with it. So anyway, that's a big problem. So the first step I did, the first evolution of our process there was I created a laminated checklist system, you know, basically step by step instructions where you mark it off as you go, you know, and that helped fix consistency, but it didn't fix the real issue, which was time. It was still really slow. And after that too, when you were reloading or refilling a spreader, sprayer machine, that's just one part of it. You got to refill the liquid, which I was doing, but. But then you also have to load the granular fertilizer into the hopper. So basically we had two processes that we had to do at one time, every single time we refilled. So let me pause here for a second because if you're listening to this and thinking, yeah, I've got stuff like that going on in my business, that's exactly why you need events like profit accelerator live, June 26th and 27th in Richmond, Virginia. This is where you're going to be able to step out of your day to day grind and actually work on your business. And we're not just talking about pricing, but operations, systems, efficiencies. These are the things that are actually going to make your business run smoother and more profitable. Because profit isn't just about what you charge, it's about how well your machine runs. So I'm inviting you to join Naylor Taliaferro, Eric Triplett and myself at Profit Accelerator Live. It's going to be in Richmond, Virginia. You could go to profitacceleratorlive.com and grab your ticket. There's a link in the show notes. Go ahead and click on that. Get your tickets. And we're running a promo right now where if you want to bring your, your wife or your, your business partner, whoever, you're gonna get two tickets for the price of one. So don't miss out on this. Profitacceleratorlive.com get 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 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. 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 PAYCHECK, 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. All right, so, you know, we're talking about the old process that I was using. And once I saw that pattern of why it was taking us so long on certain properties and realizing it was because we were reloading our machine, I started looking at how we were actually operating. And basically, again, it started to make a ton of sense to me. You know, we were, we were doing everything, batch mixed on site, and when we would, we're just, you know, trying to improve the entire process, you know. So basically, again, I identified the problem and I started fixing it. And basically, one step at a time. So the first, there's an entire evolution of how this went. It did not, and it was not a very. This is not. I'm going to shorten this process up for you so you don't lose interest. But it, it wasn't just a one and done thing. And then it was fixed. It took us a while to figure out how to do this right. I should say myself. Okay? But the first thing I did was I realized, you know what, I don't want to mess up. I don't want to burn out a lawn. I don't want to make mistakes because I did that with a backpack sprayer. I don't want to do that with an entire tank full that's going to be broadcast across an entire lawn. Multiple lawns. Okay? So the first step I did was I bought a 45 gallon nurse tank. Now, instead of mixing at every stop, I would basically mix the batch in the morning and, you know, follow my laminated checklist, you know, my step by step checklist. That way it eliminated all the mistakes. Like, there was no worries about, like, whether the tank was mixed properly. Because I was alone, nobody could bother me. I would just be focused on making that process and perfecting that process, you know, from when to, you know, when to add specific products into the mix, to blending it and then just making sure that everything was, you know, homogenized. It was all mixed up and ready to go. So that, that eliminated a lot of mistakes, but it was still slow because this nurse tank that I bought was really just a sprayer. It was a 45 gallon sprayer that had a one and a half gallon per minute pump on it. And it had a wand so that I could, you know, you could basically just walk around. And basically it looked like a pressure washer wand, you know, and that was restricted. So even though it was like a one and a half gallon per minute pump, I had to take the tip off and I had to take the nozzle off and everything in order for it to actually get close to that 1 1/2 minute volume. So basically at, you know, it was nice because I didn't have to mix anything in between stops, but I was still standing there, you know, waiting seven or eight minutes to, you know, top off the tank. So they have. The second evolution was I decided to upgrade to a different size pump. And that's when we went to. It was like a 3 1/2 or 4 gallon pump. And now, you know, it's just taking us a few minutes to fill. Huge improvement, you know, but it still wasn't efficient because we're still standing there watching the tanks. We can't. You know, I wanted to be able to fill the hopper with granular, and sometimes I would just, you know, put the hose inside the tank and let it kind of fill. But then because it was a split tank, it was 12 gallons total. But it was a kind of a saddle system where you have 6 gallons on one side, 6 gallons on the other. It. If I wasn't watching it, sometimes one tank would fill up faster than the other before it would equalize, and then I might spill. So that's. That's not a good way. You know, you don't want to have spills and look very, you know, you don't want to look like a rookie, you know what I mean? So anyway, basically instead of being able to do two things at once, I'm still doing one thing at a time. I'm still either filling the granular hopper, then filling the liquid, and it was still taking time. But then I was looking around and I looking on the interwebs and whatnot, and I find this direct connect system that had a float shut off. So now all we had to do was we would just, you know, we had to adapt the machines a little bit, do some. A little bit new plumbing and whatnot. But it was a pretty easy fix and we went ahead and now we just use this dry poppet system and we could plug in from the nurse tank to the, you know, to the machine and it would automatically fill. You could basically just walk away. And not to mention, it had a seven gallon per minute tank, a seven gallon per minute pump on it. So now we're, not only are we able to just walk away, but there's no spills, there's no guesswork because we have the nurse tank. It's already filled in the morning, so we know that we're putting the right thing down. There's no more babysitting the tank and hoping it doesn't overflow because now it had these little float valves that would shut it off. And that alone was a pretty big shift because now we could do two things at once. Now while the tank is filling, I could load the granular fertilizer. So instead of doing one thing at a time, we're doing both at the same time. And that changed everything. Now, I kept it like that for quite a while and it was a huge, huge time saver. And not only that, but just compliance. You know, there'd been times where a client started talking to me while I was in the middle of filling and I walk away. And then I didn't have to worry about it overflowing. Like in the past, if I would have walked away, I would have had to have been looking over my shoulder every couple minutes just to make sure that, you know, there wasn't liquid, you know, herbicides and things like pouring out of it and causing a problem. Now I could just walk away, talk to them, address them, give them my entire focus. And then when I came back, it's like, oh, yeah, the machine's already filled, we're good to go. But I started to realize that because we became more efficient and we could get more things done in a day. And we're going, you know, we're spending less time on filling and whatever. We, we had more time in the day to do more accounts. And I realized that the 45 gallon tank wasn't enough. So what I ended up having to do was I was, you know, stopping off mid, about halfway through the day and then having to refill that 45 gallon tank. And I was like, this is not fun. I don't like doing this. So what I ended up doing was I just ended up upgrading to a 100 gallon nurse tank. And then I pushed it even a little bit further. I decided, well, we got a bigger tank. Is there another pump that I might be able to upgrade to? And I found a 10 gallon per minute pump, which is awesome because now we could fill. We could top off most machines in about a minute. So this is really where it all came back together. You know, like before all these changes, you know, we were getting about three properties done before we had to refill. So let's just look at this in a different light here. Let's keep the math simple. Let's just say we were doing 21 lawns a day. That means we were refilling about seven times during that day. And at 10 minutes per refill. And that was being conservative. That was 70 minutes. That's an hour and 10 minutes every single day. Just gone. Not producing, not making money, not. It was all just refilling the machines so we could do the work. Now you think about that. That's the difference between doing 21 lawns and getting into the 25 to 30 lawns a day range. The same day, same crew, same hours, just more production. And it's not just the time, it's the energy. Because, you know, when you're constantly stopping and you're thinking and you're mixing and you're trying to keep everything straight, that drains you. You know, if you're just doing physical work, it's manageable. If you're just thinking, it's manageable. But when you combine the both all day long, it gets exhausting. So what we did didn't just make things faster, it made the job easier to run. So this, and again, this journey, this evolution didn't happen in, in a single season. You know, we made, I made improvements. But, you know, over time I had to realize how to get more efficient, more and faster to accommodate all the new clients we were taking on. So again, this wasn't just a single stroke of genius. And then, oh, we fixed it and it was done. It was, it was a process. It was a, you know, evolution of how the business and the needs that we had. You know, because now when I look back, I'm like, how the. I don't even know how I got through the jobs I did by batch mixing on site. That was crazy. Why would I do that? You know, I look at it now and I'm like, you know, we, we still use the hundred gallon tank system, nurse tank system. We use the, you know, the appropriate pumps. We actually have to, you know, we added extra batteries. You know, we got two deep cell, two deep cell batteries just in case, so that, you know, because that's Happened before where? Oh, our battery died halfway through the day. Oh, we forgot to charge it. Well, you know what fixes that besides charging them every night, is having a backup. That way you could just switch over to the other battery with. It just takes two seconds. Switch over to the other battery, and you're good to go. These are all things that happen as you start to evolve. But anyway, it's just amazing how much more efficient we are now than we were when I started. So here's what I want for you. You might be saying, okay, so what should. What should I be doing right now? Well, first of all, you know, to become more efficient, you have to identify the problem. Where are you? Where are you losing in efficiency? And most of the time, it's time. Okay, you know, there's other versions of it, but let's just stick to the time one. Right now, being able to find the, you know, organization is another huge one for efficiency. But we'll talk about that later. But right now, we're just talking about actual time. So what you could do right now is, is start tracking your time. Because if you're not tracking your time, you're guessing. You know, use Yardbook or something. Like, just even a stopwatch will be fine. But start timing your jobs, start timing your travel time between jobs. And more importantly, like, once you get that data now review that data. Look at, you know, if you're using Yardbook, you could go into your timesheets and look at each day and you could get a report telling you, like, how much time you spent? Is this still profitable? These are things you could set up the job profitability report and yard book works off of the timesheets and everything. But when you start looking at that data, you could start looking for patterns like I did when I started. When I identified it, then I knew where to hone in on. Because when you start, you know, looking into data, that's where the truth is. And that's exactly how I found this problem. And once you see it now, you could fix it. So at the end of the day, you know, efficiency is profit. Every wasted minute, every extra step, every inconsistency, it all adds up. And when you tighten your systems, you don't just make more money, you make your life easier. So I appreciate you guys for listening. If this gave you something to think about, don't ignore it. Take action on it. As always, God bless. Keep pushing through, and I'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 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.