Episode 13 – Jonathan Reveals How the “Fake Neighbor” Voicemail Strategy Can Get You Clients

Introduction    00:00:03    Marketing, explosive growth, and revolutionary secrets that can catapult your business to new heights. You’re now listening to The Underground Marketer Podcast with your host Tudor Dumitrescu, the one podcast devoted to showing new businesses how to market themselves for high growth.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu   00:00:24    Welcome to the underground marketer. This is the place where we deliver the real truth about marketing and explore big ideas that can help new businesses thrive and grow into big ones. I’m your host Tudor. And today I have a very special guest, an underground entrepreneur who has built and scaled a six-figure lawn care business and has very ambitious plans for the future. So it’s my pleasure to welcome Jonathan, Jonathan. Hi, and welcome to the underground marketer. It’s a pleasure to have you here. Uh, feel free to introduce yourself and you can start right off the bat with your story and a little bit about yourself.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:01:04    All right. My name is Jonathan. I’m really happy to be here. I really am humbled by the invitation. I’m 24 years old. I run a lawn care company here in Washington state called PNW home services. And I started it a few years ago. It was like three years ago. I was selling cars at the time and I saved up some money. I was living at home and I found out how much an individual was paying for his lawn care service to come to his property. And he said it was like $400 a month. And I did the math. I was like, man, I could make a lot of money doing this. Um, after starting the business for a year, I kind of learned a whole bunch of lessons about how to run a business, how not to run a business, uh, what to say yes to, what to say no to.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:01:50    And then we started to systemize our business and create these like automated systems for us to be able to scale it better, uh, for it to be run better, um, to handle employees better, to handle customers better. And then, uh, the last two years have just been growing that system. So now we have, we have two full-time crews working, uh, five employees and, uh, the guys just go out and work and it’s managed sort of passively, you know, I I’m there if there’s any issues, if there’s any emergencies, but otherwise, uh, I have a lot of free time and pretty, you know, decent income from it. It allows me to live pretty comfortably. It’s going pretty well. And I’m really happy to answer any questions or talk about our systems. Talk about, you know, scaling, talk about management or, or anything that would be of value to you guys. That’s my story.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:02:40    That’s great. Thank you for sharing that, Jonathan. So you mentioned that you, the first year that you started this business, you learned some very important lessons about how to actually run a business. So I was wondering what, let’s say, the top three, or maybe top five lessons that you learned are, and if you can describe a bit about the process that you went through to get this knowledge.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:03:08    Okay. So specifically answer, like what are the big lessons from being in business for that first year? Like if I could go back, what would I skip? Kind of thing. 

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:03:17    Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, what are the biggest things that you learned in that first year? Because you couldn’t basically make the jump straight from, you know, having no business experience to having the business where you could build the systems and so on, you had to go through a process. So what are like the key things that if you had known, you could have jumped straight into the systems bit and building the system for the business.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:03:43    So, uh, in general, with any business, you’re going to go out there and taste demand and advertise and get as many, many people running through your business as possible. So you know what to say yes to and what to say no to, and you’ll find opportunities in that. So at first it’s going to suck because you’re going to have to deal with, you’re going to have to learn the lessons of like what not to do. So for example, my business was, I found that we shouldn’t say yes to like one time jobs, for example, uh, because it makes scheduling a nightmare. It makes you have to give 20 times more quotes. And so you’re like overwhelmed with giving quotes to people. You haven’t been able to feel out a customer yet. So you might be dealing with the worst, Karen of them. All right. And you have no idea that they’re going to scam you and like not pay you or they’re going to be rude and demanding.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:04:35    So you have no idea. The guys working, your employees are going to have a terrible time because they’re going to go out and do this big job. That’s going to take six hours. And, uh, they’re going to be miserable. It’s going to be hot out. It’s going to be nasty. Like all this stuff could go wrong. It’s their first time there at the property. So they don’t really know exactly what to do. Usually the requests are very specific. So what’s nice about recurring services is that once they’ve gone there for one visit, you know, now if your employees stick around for more than two weeks, then they, then every property is just repeat. So they know exactly what to do. You’ve been able to weed out bad customers. So now you’re left with, you know, low maintenance. high profitable, high profitability, nice, easy, polite customers who pay each month.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:05:20    And, um, all sorts of things. Like, for example, if you’re doing one time jobs and you’re dealing with like bad customers, you’re going to charge their card once. Right. And if there’s any issues they’re going to like charge back on their card. And now your, your merchant account is at risk of being shut down because you have a larger than 1% chargeback rate. So it’s like bad customers can really screw you over if you’re doing like one-time jobs. So things like that, right? If there’s like any disputes or anything like that, then the customers are less likely to like screw you over. If you’re doing the recurring services, the employees like it more because they’re at a place for 20  minutes. And then they move on to the next place. It’s a guaranteed schedule. So there is no like randomized scheduling. There’s a million reasons, right?  

 

Jonathan B.    00:06:05    And it’s actually way more profitable to be doing these recurring services, actually, because if we’re at a property for, let’s say like 10 minutes for these tiny little yards, we’re actually getting paid like $70-80 for these little yards that we’re doing. If you do the math on price per visit. So it’s actually way more profitable. So each crew is going to be making a lot more revenue with a lot less headache. So that’s just one of the very specific to my industry, very specific to like what we do. But I only learned that because we went out there and tasted it. Like we, we advertised, we made the mistakes, we signed up customers for like one time jobs. And it was a terrible experience. So in any business, no matter what you’re doing, you’re going to have to get a taste of everything so that, you know, what works, what doesn’t work, what you need to cut out.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:06:51    And you need to not think what is like the best thing for every customer. Because if you try to take care of everyone and keep everyone happy, you’re going to be a small little business that’s miserable. But if you find a percentage of customers that you can really go after and help, then you can take that, you know, moderate percentage of customers. And you can scale that very large. So we, you know, a lot of people call in, I’d say half of the people that call in for our company, we tell them like, you know, we don’t, we don’t do that. You don’t do this. We don’t do that. We just tell them, no, no, no, but 30% of people that call in end up being customers of ours, we keep those customers really happy. And we make a lot of money off of that 30%, which is actually still a pretty large percentage. And we can scale that pretty large. So we have good revenue right now out of the only like 160 people that we have signed up, but we can scale that very large. And this has only been the two years, two full years that we’ve started with the systems that we have now. So it’s, uh, we should be able to double it by next year. But I think the biggest takeaway is getting to taste it and then know what tastes bad, know what tastes good and see if you can cut out the bad stuff.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:08:03    That sounds great. I mean, one of the problems that I see people facing, especially if they’re at the start of this, is that you’re right. You actually have to go through the process of actually seeing what works and what doesn’t, you cannot really know that in advance, you know, you actually have to meet with customers, you have to talk with customers, you have to take jobs and you have to see what actually works and what doesn’t, but many people fear the process. And I would like to take a moment before we move on here to discuss a bit about how they can overcome that. If you basically fear the process of actually failing and you’re the type of person who just wants to get it right. What would your advice be? And is this a mindset issue or what would you say?  

 

Jonathan B.    00:08:51    What I had going for me was that I had low expectations because I was living at home with my parents. I was like, happy just to make like five grand in a month mowing lawns. You know, I was like, dude, this is so cool. I’m like, I’m like an adult, you know, like making adult money. I mean, I was making cars, but it was cool because I could like hire people and I was the boss and I didn’t have anyone to tell me what to do. And it was like the coolest thing. I was like 22, you know, 21 at the time when I started, I had like low expectations. So all the customer problems and all the headaches and everything, it was just like, you know, it is what it is. Right. I’m making adult money. So I thought that was really cool.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:09:34    That’s amazing. You know, I, I, sorry for interrupting you a bit, but that’s amazing. And actually it’s a very similar answer to what one of my previous guests gave as well, having low expectations. That’s really cool. And I agree with you because that sort of gives you the courage to actually go out there and try, and you need that courage in order to figure out what’s actually working. And what’s not at the same time in the personal development literature, we’re often encouraged, you know, to think positive and so on. And that sort of leads people to have this underlying anxiety about basically getting started and failing. Were you at all involved? Like, did you read any books, like think and grow rich and so on and did that affect you in any way?  

 

Jonathan B.    00:10:26    I, I remember listening to like Les Brown tapes here, like motivational staff. Like I remember that kind of phase. Cause it sucks, you know, when you’re, when you’re out there and you have like your weed whacking someone’s yard and there’s dog poop and it’s raining and you hit it and dog shit flies up in your mouth, like it makes you really like question what you want to be doing. You know? Like, why am I here? There’s like a lot of hard times, but after starting it and after seeing like what there were, as far as opportunities, like what we could do with turning it into the business model we have now seeing that it could be something I was, you know, just sitting around and doing the math, like writing it down on a piece of paper. Like if we have this many customers and I pay my guys this much.. then holy shit, I can make this much money and like just have them work.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:11:13    And then that kinda like inspired me to, to do that. And it’s exactly what we have now. We had, you know, we have two crews working, but it’s pretty profitable. Right. And it’s like a 40 or 50% profit margin and it’s growing and it should double next year. Like that’s, that’s really inspiring. And I don’t really have anything other, like, there’s nothing else that I think I could be making more money doing or like have a better time doing or, or have something with more opportunity for large scale growth over the long term. Like it kinda checks all those boxes. Like, do I get free time? Yes. Do I make pretty good money? I’ll be, you know, I can share numbers with you if you’d like, I mean, we have right now, like we’re at, um, so the profits actually a little bit higher because I do like some of the management, you know, I do the management and then I also have customer service kinda like helped out with, so there’s some costs in there that wouldn’t necessarily be reflected.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:12:06    So I’m saying the 40 to 50% profit margin, knowing that I’m going to have to hire someone for some of the stuff that we do for like, like customer service. But as far as like the money I’m taking home right now, it’s about 15 grand a month, 12 months. And then right now revenue, we’re at 25,5 a month. So 25,500 a month. So there’s a little bit higher than 50% like effective, like right now. But, uh, I know that I could hire customer service and hire a couple of things. And then it would, it would be at a 50% profit margin, like as we grow too. So it’s not going to shrink much as we get bigger profit margin, still be 40 to 50%.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:12:49    I see. Regarding what you said about not seeing a more profitable path. I sort of agree with that. Like that’s what I encounter as well. You know? And I find that once you get good at something and you build a business in a certain field, there’s just so much work involved in going in another field. And it takes so much time until you can scale to the same numbers that it’s, it just becomes not worth it. You know, it it’s, it’s a lot better to basically stay focused. I wanted to ask you now, you, you mentioned that at the beginning, the first year, you didn’t have any systems. Were you actually the one doing the lawn care as well at that point? And do you recommend this to anyone? Like if, if you have a new entrepreneur  

 

Jonathan B.    00:13:38    Yeah, yeah. Get out there and do it. Cause if you, if you’re not doing it, how are you going to stand for it? How are you going to hire for it? How are you going to know if someone’s doing a good job? How are you going to know? Like, what are you gonna tell a customer when they ask you a question? How are you going to train the customer service people to answer questions when customers call in. So yeah. Yeah. You got to go do it. Otherwise you’re going to have a rough time now because that means now I can train the customer service person. So when a customer calls in and says, you know, why is my lawn not doing well? Like they have an answer for that. It’s because I train the customer service person because I know the lawns. Like I know how things work or I hire someone and they do a shitty job.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:14:19    And I can tell that they did a shitty job. Cause I look at it. I’m like, no, no, that’s not how you do it so I can train the guys as well. And then when I hired someone to train the guys, when we’re even larger, I’ll know how to train him, what to look for. So it all comes down like even when I step away and I don’t even train the people to do the work anymore, I’m still going to have to train the person who trains them. And so as, as I move backwards, higher up into the corporate level of this company, as we have positions, when there is someone that trains the employees when there is someone that is the regional manager, when there’s someone that trains the customer service people, there’s going to be someone that has to train them. And it’s always going to be necessarily built on a foundation of knowing how it works from the bottom, because otherwise you won’t be able to train for it.

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:15:12    That’s. That’s awesome. And a lot of people, you know, they start for example, by reading books like E-Myth and they hear that you have to work on your business, not in your business. And they jump to the conclusion that that’s how they should start. And I actually agree with you that that’s actually a mistake because you, you can’t figure out all the little problems, what systems you should even build into place without actually having the experience.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:15:40    And you can’t want my limitations of like my beliefs to like infect other people. Like if you, if you want to go and start a business and have no knowledge of like how the stuff is actually done and you think you can go and do it, like you can probably succeed. I don’t think it. But if you go and prove me wrong, like, like I don’t want to make people think that like, oh, I’m going to have to work for three years doing the shitty work until I can be smart enough to like, if you’re smart enough to grow the business quicker, without having to know exactly how the details work of it and like, go do that. And don’t take my word for it because I’m, I’m where I am today specifically, because I didn’t take other people’s word for it when they told me their own limitations.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:16:25    So I don’t want to project that back on anyone else listening today. So I want people to know that, you know, you can grow things very quickly. I’m not going to tell you just cause it wasn’t overnight success for me, it took three years to get just the 15 grand a month, like profit, but I’m not doing the work. That’s very nice. You know, it’s like, it’s a great business and it’s growing should double next year. So we’re, we’re off to the races and I’ve got plenty of time left. I’m 24. So we’re off to the races, but it wasn’t overnight, but there’s, there’s people that can do things, you know, you could grow the business quicker. So I don’t want to like project my limitations on anyone listening and tell them like, you can’t grow a faster or you can’t do anything quicker just cause I didn’t, you know what I mean?  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:17:08    Thank you for that. That’s awesome.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:17:10    Oh, disclaimer. You know like, but I do recommend doing the work so that you can train for it when you hire them.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:17:16    Yeah. It makes total sense. I mean, one of the ways that you can do things faster is if you, if you strike the right partnership, because then even if you don’t have the expertise and the experience other people could, and I’ve seen that happen in the past and I’ve seen it work very successfully, but obviously you still need to have some skills salesmanship, you know,  

 

Jonathan B.    00:17:39    Be careful and be careful with those partnerships too, because they probably got all the same limiting beliefs built into them that all the other company owners do too. And that’s why they suck still. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Like we do things differently. I kind of had to create it. So I think one reason that I’m doing well is because I didn’t listen to what people said you should do. I listened to my gut. So always, you know, never discount your gut.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:18:06    Absolutely. That’s great advice. And I mean, how do you go about, because your gut is sort of your instinct, so how do you go about developing that? You know, let’s say that you’re a guy who trusted his gut but got it wrong. You know, how do you learn to trust yourself? Basically because a lot of people have this, it’s a limiting belief indeed, that you know, that they’re basically not sure. And it transforms into fear and it keeps them stuck or it keeps them doing what other people are doing. And you know, that’s not the road to success. In my opinion, at least. 

 

Jonathan B.    00:18:39    I look at business as art because art is making a decision and it’s like a collection of those decisions of like your self-expression. So like if I’m painting a picture, you know, I’m self, I’m an expressing something and I’m choosing the paint and I’m painting it businesses like that businesses are, it’s an expression of yourself because it’s you making decisions, but they’re not just, it’s not just decisions of paint on canvas. There’s thousands of decisions daily and over a period of time. And it’s all these different things going on, but it’s kind of like a painting, right? So it’s like this expression, it’s art. I think the highest form of anything is art, right? It’s like once you’re past the level of just performing it, then it’s like an expression like above. So if you ever want to create anything and be an artist, you are not going to ever succeed by just copying someone else’s work in my, like, I don’t think that you’re going do anything you’d like, there’s no real artist.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:19:47    If you’re just like seeing what someone else did and you’re trying to follow steps. So there needs to be self-expression. And so I look at it as like, I’m not going to listen to anyone or I’m going to take a lot of grains of salt with whatever. I look at other people doing, you know? I mean, there’s stuff that I like. I take elements of like here and there, like guide, you know, I use dispatching software for our business that other people created, you know, we use QuickBooks. Like I didn’t create that. But as far as how I think about my business, I’m creating art and my personal expression.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:20:25    And how did you get this inner confidence, you know, to basically create.

 

Jonathan B.    00:20:31    It’s not even that I’m confident, it’s that I know I don’t need to be self-confident to know that if I drop a bowling ball, it’s going to fall. So I also don’t need to be self confident to know that if I follow other people’s steps in their business and try to copy what they do, that I’m at best going to get their results. Nothing better. Yeah. So it’s like, it’s not even that. I think I’m great. It’s that I know that I don’t want what other people have, so I should, I shouldn’t listen to it.

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:20:59    So it’s sort of like, there’s no alternative. 

 

Jonathan B.    00:21:03    It’s like, yeah. If I would want to, if I want what I want, I can not listen to other people. It’s not that I think I’m great. It’s that I know that I can’t like I don’t have an option. Yeah. It’s a little like I’m afraid to, you know, I can’t even listen to the other people. I have to listen to myself. I may fail, but you know, I made worse, but I know that if I want better than I’m going to have to not listen to the other people. ,  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:21:26    And it’s the other thing, that you’re in control as well. When you’re taking your own decision decisions, you know, you’re not giving the steering wheel to some other person to drive you wherever they will drive you. So at least…  

 

Jonathan B.    00:21:39    Yeah. I just don’t want, I just don’t want what other people have, you know, I have to, for myself just out of necessity, not because I think I’m like amazing. Honestly, I think that a lot of like what people call confidence is just knowing that everyone else kind of sucks too. Like everyone else has just a kid pretending that they know something and there everyone else is looking to everyone else too, you know, all the other people are looking around at like, what are there other people doing? And like comparing themselves and questioning like, am I doing it right? Am I doing it right? And meanwhile, like, that’s what everyone’s doing. So if you just go into it, knowing that it gives you like “confidence”, like, I don’t think I’m amazing. I just know that everyone else is scared and doing what other people told them to do. Just the same. Yeah. It’s all just a level playing field. We’re all just, you know.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:22:33    Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, the thing that interests me here is how did you go from basically doing the sales and doing the work yourself to hiring your first employee? Like, how did you think about it and how did, how did it actually work out?  

 

Jonathan B.    00:22:49    Yeah. I actually hired people right away because I was going to have to hire people if I wanted to grow it. And so I might as well get it out of the way and see what problems come up. Like I knew I was just going to, so I actually hired people. I was still selling cars and that was like my day job. And I started the lawn care company and I hired people all the same. I would give quotes in like the afternoon I would schedule interviews with people in the morning. I would hire them. I would go to my day job. I would like give them the stuff to go do the work. And I would just hope it works out and like follow up with them. Like while I was at work selling cars and then I would finish up the day and like, and deal with any problems.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:23:31    Like if I got into like full thought, I would go like finish the work with them or see was, or I’ll go collect some payment. And I actually hired people right away. And that taught me all this stuff that employees don’t want to do. It taught what you should be paying people for. Like what level of work you can expect. Man really taught me about how you got to explain shit like three times to people and you got to make sure that they don’t forget it and you write it down and you like, get the checklist. Oh dude, you gotta like it’s. Yeah. Dealing with employees at like a $15 an hour rate. Like I started off paying guys at 15 bucks an hour when you’re dealing with employees for like lawn care, who to hire, who to not hire, what kind of people are going to be good for your business? What kind of people are going to be toxic for your business? So I learned all about that really like nuanced stuff. It’s like really? And if you, if you talk openly about it, you might offend some people about like little stuff that you hire and don’t hire. It’s a little, it’s kind of an art. Yeah. You gotta be ruthless. And like we hire. And I saw your interview, I was reading the transcript, a transcribed interview with, uh, the tutoring guy.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:24:39    And he was talking about how you got to hire people who wasn’t it, that it was you, who was saying that you got to tell people like the worst day of work and then hire someone who’s like realistic about it. Like, oh, that kinda sucks. But I guess I’d do it anyways.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:24:52    Yeah. I think that, that’s what I told him because that’s the methodology. Yeah, yeah, yeah.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:24:57    Okay. Okay. Yeah. It was like, you don’t want to hire someone who will bullshit. You don’t hire someone who would tell you that they would like care. You wanna hire someone who would be realistic. It’s like those things, like little tests.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:25:09    Yeah. I love that method, you know, because it really shows you if somebody is bullshitting you, if somebody doesn’t actually want the job or if they’re actually realistic and they want to do it.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:25:20    Yeah. So the guys that we hire, we found a lot of success. I know that I technically can’t say like, oh, we don’t hire, we won’t, we won’t hire. The people that I’ve found that do really well in lawn care. In my experience, you know, just saying for legal purposes, we hire everyone equally, regardless of, uh, you know, anything. Right. But the guys that work out, the people, the individuals that work out the best, uh, have statistically been, you know, like young guys that, uh, they, they come from a good family. They’re just looking for like a summer job. They’re probably like 22 years old. They’re going to go into construction in a year or two. But they don’t know that yet. Uh, they played some sports in high school. Just like those kinds of guys. They come from a good family and there’s looking for a summer job. They they’re the best.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:26:06    Do you get high turnover though with them? Because I imagine that these guys, they don’t stay for very long. I mean, they might stay one year or so, but…

 

Jonathan B.    00:26:14    That is, that is the best I could ever ask for as a year out of someone, that would be amazing. I’m used to getting like two days, you know what I mean? Like, I’ll take it. I’ll take a year over two days. So we hire people all the time and we pay, well, there’s just like, there’s drama in their life. Anyone who’s over 30, that’s mowing a lawn has a drug problem. Like you’re not going to be, you’re not doing anything good in your life if you’re mowing lawns 30. Right. So there’s, there’s deep problems with them as a person. That’s why they can’t do anything. So you want to have younger people.   

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:26:50    So how do you deal with the high turnover? Because I imagine that you have to keep replacing them, right?  

 

Jonathan B.    00:26:55    Yeah. Dude, I’ve hired like 12 people. I’ve got five now I’ve hired more, probably hired like 20. Yeah.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:27:04    So you basically don’t even treat them like they exist for all purposes until after two weeks of having them.

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:27:10    I see. Cause you can’t count on them. 

  

Jonathan B.    00:27:12    Overhire. So it’s um, like, uh, if you had a pile of wood, like a hundred pieces of wood and 50% of them were just bad, you don’t want to build something with all the wood. So what you do is you take one piece of wood, you hit it, it breaks right away. You take another piece of wood, you hit it, it stays. That’s the one you keep. And so like, you just do that with the entire stack and then it cuts out all the bad ones. So you do that. You bring them on. Instead of like building your house with the wood, you hit them, you hit the stick and then it breaks and you don’t build your house with that. You build the one. So for example, what I do is you hire someone you hire like more than you need and you anticipate they’re going to suck or they’re going to leave.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:27:57    I have to fire them. Cause they’re like incompetent. They should not be working outdoor labor or a, just a piece of crap person. You know? Like they can’t show up or they just have problems that just seem to come up every single day. So what you do is you just anticipate that that’s likely going to happen. You hire more than you need. You get rid of the bad ones and then you do it again. You do it again. You do it again. And then you’ve got guys that have common sense. They can, you know, they don’t have a DUI, they can drive the truck, they can mow a lawn. Like I’ve seen everything. We had a guy that he would, he didn’t understand like the height of the mower concept. It’s literally written on the side, like two, two and a half, three.  

Jonathan B.    00:28:39    And he would set the mower to like one and completely destroy a lawn. Uh, like I’ve seen everything, bro. I’ve seen a dude mow a straight line and then turn the mower off, pull it backwards, move it to the left, start the more up again, and then do another line instead of just running around. Like I see everything, like the names and the names of these people that apply. Like they have the weirdest names, like I’ve hired a couple of like Leviticus, you know, like there’s weird people out here bro. So you’re dealing with a different class. And so you need to like set your expectations, which is why we only do recurring services that are very basic, very simple, very cheap equipment, like very easy. Cause dude, if I give him a $5,000 mower, they’re going to break it first day just because that’s like, that’s what God planned for me today.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:29:28    Like just to lose a $5,000 mower, like just so you gotta have managed expectations with these people. Literally last week, the guys didn’t latch down the weed wacker and like lost it. It like flew off the road. Well, it’s 300 bucks. So I said, guys, what do you think is fair? Because this was actually a pretty good crew. It’s fair. And I’m like, well, we can like pay for, you know, I was like, okay, here’s what we’ll do. We’ll split the cost halfway. I pay half, you pay the other half. And then you split that cost between you too. So they paid 75 bucks each out of it. And I paid the 150 because it happened. And that’s the first time they’ve done something like that this year. But like, that happens though, right?

 

Jonathan B.    00:30:17    Those are good guys. I’m not going to talk about Chase. He’s a good guy. So they do, they do good work, but you know, stuff like that happens. Right. And so you gotta learn how to filter out the bad employees and how to attract good ones, how to keep the good ones. And I’ve found that the young guys that are just working for like a summer job, they learn quickly. Um, they’ve, you know, they come from a good family, like they’re reliable when they say they’re going to be there. They actually show up, they know how to communicate. They don’t have these weird like lapses of communication where you, you try to call them and then you just don’t answer like it’s. Yeah, it’s weird. I got hired a lot of weird people and uh, like very, very, that behavior makes you scratch your head. And you’re like, what the hell’s going on, dude? Like they said, they loved the job and then they just didn’t show up and never call or text. They blocked me like, what’s going on? Like what? You know, so a lot of confusing things happen when you’re paying, you know, a lot of weird stuff. So the best guys have always been young dudes that are comfortable working outside. They come from a good family. Those have been the best guys.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:31:18    I imagined that this must be one of your biggest problems at the moment, the turnover and the fact that you have to keep looking for people, I suppose that you’ve perfected some sort of system to actually help you do this so that, you know, it never actually creates any shortages for you of labor or anything like that.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:31:37    So what we’re doing is have a few guys that are like young and like living at home that could be like backup guys. I could call. Right. So I could, I could call Connor. I could call Griffith. I could call Dylan. I could call. Like, I can think of like four people off the top of my head that I could call. And then I know some of the guys will come in on a weekend, so if we’re short. And then if there’s really a problem, we can’t, you know, like have another guy for that day, then I can come in and do the work. Right. That’s um, you know, I mean, like I’m not above it, like it’s, it’s part of the business, right? I mean, yeah, what we’re going to be doing is once we get to a little bit larger size, like three, four crews right around there, um, we’re going to have like a dedicated employee that does other services that isn’t necessarily related with our company.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:32:28    And it’s not even to make any money in those services. It’s going to be like, that’d be something like we have one dude that was kind of pressure washes, people’s houses or something, right? Like something really like whatever. And we’re trying to make any money with it. It’s just so like, if we need him, we can just call him and say, Hey, you’re not going to be pressure washing today. You’re going to be mowing lawns today. Cause a baseball team doesn’t have guys on the team, they have like 15, right? And if a guy gets injured, if a guy has to come out of the game, they have someone on the bench sitting there waiting, how do we do that in our own company is the question. Right? So that’s what we’re going to be doing is having like some auxiliary service that, uh, we could just cancel at any time and just say like, Hey, we’re not going to have that person not pressure washing houses today, he’s gonna come mow the loans.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:33:14    So he’s going to be our backup guy. He could come in for a day. Let’s say the guy that is out for the day, like it’s just a day off and his dog is sick or something’s got to take care of that crap. Then the guy can cover for him. So there’s going to be like this automatic, like shift coverage going on, because that is one of the biggest problems with like home service companies or anything like that, uh, is, you know, dealing with employees doing reliability. And especially when you have a schedule like ours, where, you know, the work’s got to get done and it’s on the schedule and we can’t, you know, like just go home for the day. You know, we got to get it done. Having guys on deck, ready to go is key, in turnover. Yeah. So for me turnover, sorry to interrupt, but I don’t care if they’re here for a year, like people say the turnover is high.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:33:59    I mean, they’re leaving after just six months. I’m like, dude, if I could get six months out of people consistently, I’d be pumped. Like, cause I, we train them in one day. Right. And this employee who’s going to be making me $7,000 a month. Like I will, I will train them for a day. I don’t care. That’s not that bad. At 10 crews, we’re going to be making quarter million dollars a month. Nice. But like, wait, I take that back 125 grand a month. Okay. Still not bad. Right. It gets, I think it’s like 500 grand a month or 500 grand a year profit at like 10 crews. So I’ll take that. You know what I mean? I’ll take that. Yeah. 

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:34:45    I mean, for me, it’s really inspiring because you know, everybody, as you said, normally thinks that you want minimum turnover and whatever, and that that’s what you should aim for, you know? So you should hire people who don’t leave, but you figured out that in your case, if you hire those people who don’t leave, they create a lot of other problems. I imagine the 35 year old guy, as we talked about and so on. So what’s inspiring is that you actually found a way to thrive with a high turnover and you don’t care about the high turnover anymore.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:35:20    Yeah, that’s exactly it. I think that’s the case. I mean, I talked to people that have worked as managers or worked having jobs in like food chains or working at like, my girlfriend was a manager at like Papa Murphy’s right. And she said that they didn’t even count you as a person. They said we don’t count you as a person on the schedule until like at least two weeks to three weeks in like you’re not even, you’re just a trainee and you’re just there. And what’s nice is if they’re down people, it’s like, you have four people instead of five. Oh, well it’s a little busy for them with us. It’s like, you don’t really just have one guy more than one. Like you’re not going to get it done. You know? It has to be like, you gotta to have two guys on crew.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:36:00    They gotta be out there working. So we have a little bit less of a margin. And even then they still can’t even rely on people for their skin. Like they still don’t even count them as a person until like after a few weeks. So yeah. I think a lot of companies hide their turnover. They don’t really talk like, yeah. I think it’s a lot worse than people say, you know like, oh, we’re only these people are only staying for a year. Like dude, you know, when I hired someone was like a good chance they’ll just disappear. So like, you know, oh no, they’re gonna stay only for a year. Like yeah, we were, we worked just fine with people coming and going. What I really care about more than anything is knowing when they’re going to come and when they’re going to go, like.

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:36:40    It’s fascinating that you built your business that way. Because I mean, it’s especially for me because I have people that I’ve been working with for many years, you know? So for me, it’s fascinating to hear how you’re making it thrive with that. And it’s, it’s really awesome. You know, it’s inspiring. It’s motivating. And um, yeah, it’s just fascinating. The other thing that I wanted to ask you here with regards to systems. So you mentioned that in the second year in 2019, if I’m correct, you moved into the building systems into the business and basically making this into a real business. So how did you go about that and what sort of process did you go through?  

 

Jonathan B.    00:37:25    So every customer we sign up, well, I go, I give them a quote. There’s the same stuff that we tell them when they call in, we say we do these services. We don’t do this. It’s 12 month contracts. We only servicing these kinds of properties, blah, blah, blah, me just get the quote. I go give them the quote or I tell them like, this is what we do is what we don’t do. There’s the price, great. They sign up, have an iPad that has a form on it. Where I collect their payment info. We sign them up, we get them and then we’d go home and put it into the system. Um, we use, we put them into our recurring billing software on QuickBooks and we charge their card for the first payment. And then we put them into our dispatching software. We use Housecall Pro.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:38:06    We put them in a dispatching software and then each morning we make the schedule. We put the jobs on Housecall pro for the dispatching software. We send it out to the guys. We can manage, you know, uh, where the guys are, what they’re doing. You know, we put the notes in each property. Customers can call in or text or email us if they have questions or concerns or requests or complaints. And then those go into the notes for the guys for the next visit. Uh, we have contracts for everything. So they’re all the same contracts. The only thing that changes are the names, the amounts and the, uh, the locations. And then very rarely do we change actually like what services we’re going to be doing that like, that’s kind of the system. It’s not like, Hey, you tell us what you need done. We’ll make it work. And then Venmo me the money. So we, we tell them how it’s going to be. Here’s what we do. You know,  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:38:54    It’s sort of a productized service.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:38:57    Yes, exactly. You have to define what you’re really selling people so that you’re not just taking care of them. And then like, whatever they say, I need bark brought in or I need to take care of these shrubs. I need that. You know, we find a happy medium between what’s included, what’s not, but yeah, productizing a service is definitely what we’re doing. That’s a great way to put it.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:39:24    Yeah. And it’s, it’s really awesome. And I’m starting to move towards that direction as well. Because at the moment, my business is very personalized in terms of the services that we offer. Like we are really tailor made for our, for the needs of the client, whatever they are, which means that our services are very, very expensive compared to all the other alternatives, but it’s a lot more difficult to scale above certain numbers. So I agree with you that turning your service into a productized version and going for something that has, let’s say mass appeal and can appeal to a lot more people, basically volume is more important than, um, you know, the magnitude of one sale.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:40:08    It depends on what you want. You know, like we want to be the McDonald’s of lawn care. So that’s what we built for. There’s another, you know, there’s another company in the nearby area that does like big projects. They do like, they’ll do big commercial stuff. They’ll put in, like, if you, if you’ve got a school and you need it landscaped, they’ll do it for you. If you need like a giant fence build, that’s really nice. They’ll do it for you. They’ll charge you 50 grand for a waterfall that you want done. And, uh, what’s a problem is that that company would never be able to be nationwide and scaled up because the owner’s gotta be kick ass. I know a guy that is amazing at what he does and he has got the best workers and they do an amazing job, you know, and they’ve got this high-end equipment that you could break and like all that stuff.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:41:00    Right? Yeah. I mean you, now you’re probably understanding why I also work with people for years, you know, because I tried to find the very best, but yeah, I agree with you. I’ve never been able to take myself completely out of the business, especially the strategic aspect of it, you know, for, for high-end services, you know, there’s just no way because you need to have that brain behind the operation, so to speak.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:41:26    Yep. No, we just, uh, we have some systems you could just write down on a piece of paper and like, here’s your script. Here’s what we do, here’s what we don’t do. The only thing that I think is kind of tough is pricing. You know, like now like our pricing off of, you know, like how much time I think is really gonna take for our guys to do each visit, plus a little bit of like what I feel the customer is like, if they’re kind of a complaining, like high maintenance person, I’m going to add another like 25 bucks a month on top of that quote, you know, if we don’t really need extra, uh, customers right now, then it will be a higher quote. And we’ll say no to a lot more stuff. Like there’s a little bit of an art to it. Right. But as we get bigger, I’ll be able to, I’ll be able to, uh, train it.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:42:07    It’s just like, that’ll probably be the hardest part to train is the price. So what we’re probably going to do is we’re probably going to have salespeople that are, uh, they do the groundwork. So they have a script that they follow. They meet with the customer. They gather like all the notes of everything that the customer needs. And then they submit it instantly to the cloud or something where one person sits at a desk, looks at it and goes like, ding, here’s your price. That way. we’re not enabling. Because like, for example, a salesperson at a car lot selling cars, they don’t get to pick the price of the car. You know, they just sell you one and gather your info. And then the sales manager back at the desk is like, eh, no, we’re not going to discount this or we’re going to discount this or it’s going to be this price.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:42:51    That’s what we’re going to do with our stuff. We’re going to have salespeople that do the groundwork that are out there looking at the property, gathering everything. It gets submitted right away to the, uh, like the price person. And then they pick a price like right there. And it’s going to be someone who can do like hundred quotes a day, you know, instead of like one sales person has got to drive around. So that’s how we’re going to do it. We’re going to have one highly trained, like sales manager person that picks the prices on stuff. And then we’re going to have like low level salespeople that, uh, that just go out and do the groundwork of it. Right.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:43:26   That makes sense. Absolutely. So you mentioned that you’ve limited the amount of services that you offer. I wanted to ask you about that. How did you actually go about deciding which services to offer and which ones not to offer?  

 

Jonathan B.    00:43:40    Anything that someone can take care of. Like that’s involved in a recurring maintenance schedule. We pretty much do. So anything that can kind of be fit, like within an hour, we’ll do so we’ll rip out someone’s shrubs or something, but we won’t go buy them, bring them to your house and install them. We’re not going to like, we’ll rip stuff out and throw it in the truck bed. We’ll, we’ll take care of weeds and we’ll spray weed killer and stuff like that. But we’re not going to take out every little weed by hand and your entire like gravel driveway that takes three hours. We’re not going to do that. So that’s what I explained to customers. Like if there’s requests, it’s something that can get done in a recurring visit. And if it’s not something that can get done, like within that hour type thing, we’re not even gonna try with it.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:44:22    So like landscaping projects, you know, and like so maintenance stuff, we do maintenance stuff. Now we even do stuff like dethatching people’s yards, we even overseed them. We fertilize them. We can, uh, do weed killer. We can do Moss killer. We can trim hedges down. We can rip out shrubs and things, clean out people’s bed, like pretty intensive stuff. Right. All that stuff. But the actual time spent doing those kinds of things is actually not all that bad. It really only takes like an extra 15 minutes at a property to do something. And so to the customer, that’s a really high added value. It takes us away from being a commodity. So for example, if someone says like, well, you know, Jose’s lawn service will mow my yard for like 40 bucks, you know? And I don’t mind paying them cash while it’s like, well, we’re not, we’re not Jose’s lawn service.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:45:14    You know, we can, uh, you can let us know what kind of problems you have and you can text us and say that you have moss in your yard. They’ll get, you know, the moss killer get put down. We can detach it, we can rake it up and haul it out, like all those things. And it really only takes like an extra 15 minutes for the guys, like when they’re there at the property, especially since we’re dealing with like smaller properties. So it’s that value add that, uh, allows us to be very profitable. And what’s nice is those extra services really only need to be done like once or twice a year. So it’s only like one visit where we’re spending an extra 20 minutes, but it’s this like huge amount of mental, like added value to the customer. So they’re like, oh, I’m paying you 150 bucks a month, but that still seems worth it.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:45:54    You know? Cause it’s not like, um, they get the feeling of having like a concierge type thing for their lawn where they can get things done. But it really doesn’t take them much more time. So the services we offer would be like mowing, edging, blowing. That’s like on every visit. Weed control. Like we weed whack weeds and spray them. Uh, we can fertilize your yard. We can trim hedges. But those things are just like, by request everything, that’s not like the basic stuff kind of just, you gotta ask for it, but it gets done for no extra charge. So yeah.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:46:25    That’s, that’s, that’s really cool. How did you really go about, because you seem to be very familiar with all the technical aspects. I imagine that when you started, you weren’t, you know, so how did you go about learning about it? Did you just do it, or did you read about it first? How did that sort of develop?  

 

Jonathan B.    00:46:45    I remember trying to learn about taxes. I remember when I was like, how the fuck do I pay? What are, what are employment taxes? Like, why is no one helping me with like, well, I can’t find anything about it. I was trying looking it up. I didn’t understand it. Like where do I go? Like, how do I just pay it with like, what the hell I remember. It was like the most frustrating thing. So a lot of stuff you just kind of learn. I remember when I started a customer said, send me an invoice and I didn’t know, like what, what’s an invoice? Like, what does that mean? How do you pay it? It’s like, well, it’s like a thing that says, like, here’s what you owe us. I’m like, great. How am I supposed to get their money? Like, how do I put their money in my pocket? 

  

Jonathan B.    00:47:23    What do I do? What’s the point of really basic, like embarrassingly basic questions, right? Looking back. Yeah, man. So you gotta learn, you know, you just like figured out that’s what they made Google for. You know? So yeah. So we know what’s was his word. So now I know, I know everything, you know, now I know all this stuff and I know like what I can do. I can do some, a whole lot of like wizardry, you know, with like business stuff. Now I can do things a lot easier. There’s a, like, I have all the options and flexibility and I know like what I can do now.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:47:54    That resonates with me. I mean, I went through a very similar process and I remember in the beginning when you are right. Nobody helps you. Yeah. And you find this stuff, you know, it’s tough.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:48:06    Like, yeah. I paid Legal Zoom $700 to set me up with a business and they set it up in Texas. Well, like I paid him 700 bucks and they just like, no, I’m like, no, no, no, no Washington, like, I didn’t do it wrong. They did it wrong. You know? Like, I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything. It was the worst thing ever. You know, I didn’t know. You could just walk into the secretary of state and then send a little thing on the IRS website, get your EIN number and walk into a bank accountant. Or you can get a bank account set up. Like I did all that in one day, I can do the stuff that takes like weeks usually for people I can do it in like four hours. Cause I know how to do it.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:48:47    Yeah. It’s really about getting that knowledge that you need initially. 

 

Jonathan B.    00:48:49    Yeah. But as far as like technical stuff, like you mean like digital marketing, like how to build websites and shit. 

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:48:56    Not necessarily, but I’m referring to the technical stuff of like what style is on the lawn, you know how to get rid of, uh, whatever, if the lawn is, uh, is deteriorating how to fix the problem. Yeah.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:49:10    Starting and then getting questions from people and then Googling it that night. So like people it’s like, can you get me the clover? And I’m like, Ugh. And I just Google it and like how to give them the clover. And then now we, then, you know, and then so now, like we have to keep in the truck, we keep like fertilizer, we keep weeding feed, which is like, it feeds the lawn. It also kills the weeds in the grass. It’s a granular spread thing. And then we have weed killer and then we have moss killer. We also have another, we have like spot repair, like seeding stuff. It’s mixed with like multi fertilizer you just dump it into a place where it to needs seed and it just grows right away. Like there’s no, you don’t need to like bring in extra dirt or anything. So we have that kind of stuff. And, uh, I guess you just learn that, like, they just kind of find a sweet spot. You just kinda like figure out what you need to have for the next visit. And then it becomes like something standard that every crew has. Each crew has a company card that they go and buy stuff at Home Depot with, so they can just go buy stuff when they need it. And I just, I see the transactions, they buy the gas, they, I just give that to them. Pretty good.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:50:17    That’s a good idea. Right. So I think that we have quite a bit of background here and I think that we should move into the exciting stuff. You know, how you actually went about getting your clients. And let’s start from the very beginning, you know, like how did you go about getting your first clients? How did you set that up and how did it work out?  

 

Jonathan B.    00:50:38    Yeah, so we got our first clients, should’ve advertised on Craigslist right off, right out of the gate. And I got, we got some customers and then I didn’t start Facebook ads until 2019. Our customer acquisition costs in 2019 was like, I think it was like a $4 per conversation started. And then it was like a 30 or 40% closing ratio for those people. So 12, $15 to get a customer. And this customer is going to profit us like a thousand dollars. Of course. Wow. That’s a great time. And we have a retention rate of like 80. So then that one year customer is going to be worth like four years. If you look at the lifetime value or something like that. So then it’s like, okay, one customer equals $4,000 profit plus any referrals that, that customer gives us too. So it’s probably even higher.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:51:35    I think, honestly, considering like referrals too. I think we’re at like, like one customer is like an indefinite customer because one customer will get us like 0.3 of a customer, like per one. So it’s like, if you do the math, if we get one customer without advertising, if like no one else hears about us we could theoretically maintain that same size. So it’s like an indefinite lifetime value. Right. A customer is like a thousand dollars profit a year is like a hundred years, like do math. So my willingness to pay for li for customers, it’s like, you know, it could be like a thousand dollars a year of like getting, I mean, like it’s just a runway. Like how long do I want to be? Well, you know, be willing to pay. Um, it’s hard to describe how do I say this? Like the lifetime value of a customer is stupid high with what we do.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:52:32    So my customer acquisition costs could actually be really high if I wanted, like I could spend a thousand dollars to get a customer and it would theoretically be worth it. It wouldn’t be worth it because I could go get that customer for $15 somewhere else. Right. And we might not have the cashflow to afford that, you know, like paying a thousand dollars per customer to go, you know, but, uh, it would be a little, it’d be a little stretched thin for a month, but it’s, it’s such a good lifetime value for our industry that I can afford to pay more than other companies for advertising or for getting customers. Right. So like Facebook ads, like I’ll always be competitive and I’ll always be competitive and like any paid ads because our lifetime value is so good compared to like other companies for similar thing. So we do like advertising with a Thumbtack or with like Angie’s List type businesses or all that stuff. You know, we do some pay-per-click. We get the most of them from, uh, from the, the organic Google listing though. So how I got them at first was Craigslist and Google, Google My Business Page and then Facebook ads in 2019. 

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:53:40    It makes total sense. So what, what would you say is the bottleneck of growth in your business? Like, why aren’t you quadrupling in size? Because it kinda sounds like you do have the leeway with advertising. I mean, you could pay a lot of money and still be profitable. So what’s stopping you from, you know, doing 4x next year. 

 

Jonathan B.    00:54:00    A few things, how many trucks we have cause I gotta go buy a truck and then a trailer. So this year I bought, so I bought three trucks in the past year and a half because I had an older truck that was like, just not going to it. Wasn’t a reliable, wasn’t going to work. That’s what I started with. I paid like three grand for it. And I bought three. I bought a 2017 Toyota Tacoma about a 2018 F-150 and I just bought a 2020 Ford ranger. So I just bought three trucks in the past year and a half.

 

Tudor Dumitrescu    00:54:34   Is renting them not a possibility?

 

Jonathan B.   00:54:37   From who? For the enterprise, it’d be very expensive, leasing, leasing though. It’s like, might as well just buy one, you know, like I’d get the same credit and need to back in to let me, you know, and we don’t have enough established business to be walking into a place and being like, Hey, I need $300,000. And Chase is like, okay, here’s your money? You know? Yeah. My credit is like 6.50. So yeah, I had to get a co-signer for the, like, I’m not there yet. You know what I mean? Um, I am not, I’m not there yet.

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:55:08    Your profits, your profits are quite high. Yeah.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:55:13    Yeah. We’re printing money, bro. So we’re going to have to self-fund it for a little bit. And then, uh, once we can walk into a bank and say like, here’s, here’s our two years prior tax returns, here’s everything. We’re kicking ass. How much money can you give us? And then we can get a stupid, big loan and then we can for exit right then. Yeah. Until then it’s how much capital we can get that lets us get, you know, how many trucks, theoretically, I could hire someone that has a truck and I could pay them more money. And I could say, we’ll use yours, but that’s just like, why not just wait? You know, why not just wait a few months or a year? And then just, you know, do it the right way. It’s okay. I’m not that rushed. Let’s not be like, let’s not be sketchy about how we do it.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:55:56    So what’s worrying you about that. Is it the loss of control because you don’t own the truck?  

 

Jonathan B.    00:56:02    I guess my gut just says, it’s a bad idea. What if they quit? Then we get like 30 bad reviews from customers that are like, they just stopped showing up. Why not just wait a little bit and have way less headaches, stuff like that. But uh, what the, uh, that’s what stopping us, I guess it’s just like a little bit of capital. We’ll just wait. Then the seasonality of signups. After this month, signups are going pretty light. So we all have our signing up March, April, May, June. So we have four months and we went hard. I was getting quotes. I was doing the work with the guys. I was out busting my ass. I’m putting in really long hours this spring and now it’s paying off and it’s going to pay off for the rest of the year. Awesome. So I guess that is the answer is like seasonality of sign-ups and then there’s capital of like products we have.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:56:56    So like, so for example, next year, you know, we’re going to have, uh, the goal is going to be four crews working full time. So we’re going to be at, you know, 50 grand a month revenue with like a 50% profit margin. Well, I’m okay with that. You know, like my income doubling every year is acceptable for me. I’m okay with that. Like I’m not going to bitch too much about that. Especially since the type of money that I’m making is not the same as like other fast money. Like I’m not a rapper who’s doing really well. And he’s at the top of the charts this month and then it’s going to disappear. I’m not a athlete where I’m getting paid $10 million. And then the next year it’s like three. Then the next year, it’s zero. I’m not an investor in doge coin where I just made like 2 million.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:57:45    And then like, now it’s back to half a million dollars. That’s not what this kind of money is. It’s money printing itself each year. And it’s probably not going anywhere anytime soon. I don’t know. I think with how bad my industry is and how lame it’s been and how little it’s changed, uh, that the money we’re making, it’s just kinda just going to keep printing for a while. Getting each year and the people we have signed up, stay with us. So we have a really good Amazon store and we’re doing really well. And then it could disappear tomorrow. It’s like this ramp and each year is bigger than the last one just by default, you know?   

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:58:24    Yeah. You add to it continuously.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:58:27    Like it’d be really fucked up for us to be losing revenue. So I’m not too sad about doubling my income each year.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:58:37    And it’s sustainable. I think that’s a big point for you that you buy for sustainable growth.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:58:42    Yeah. Sorry if I sound like a Dick come on. Like, I don’t know. Like, it sounds like I’m bragging. I’m really not trying to like.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:58:47    I don’t think so at all. I like it. I mean, it’s inspiring for a lot of the listeners for sure. And it just shows people what you can do. Uh, I love that personally.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:58:57    Yeah. It’s fun. It’s a lot of fun. All the customers are happy and our employees are happier. You know? Like I think that’s a big thing too, is keeping your employees happy. We pay them like 19 to 20 bucks an hour to mow the lawn. 

 

Tudor Dumitrescu    00:59:09   Is that higher than the average in the US?

 

Jonathan B.    00:59:12   Definitely higher. Yeah. Yeah. So the big competition that we have is like, yeah, there’s other lawn care companies, but there’s also like other types of jobs too, that we have to compete with. And like, where would my people want to leave to? And like, you’ve got to offer something better than that. So because it’s a marketplace, this is the labor market. So, um, oftentimes I’m competing with like warehouse jobs where the guys don’t like the work and it’s not reliable hours and they’re getting like 14 bucks an hour.  

 

Jonathan B.    00:59:39    So we pay like 19 bucks an hour. The guys get the jobs done for the day. And even if it’s done in like six hours, they get to go home early and they get paid for the full eight. They it’s like kind of flexible scheduling, like, you know, it’s okay. If they’re a little bit later, they have to leave a little bit early, as long as the jobs get done and they get paid like the same amount each week. So there’s very little like me breathing down their neck. They just have to get the jobs done. Few complaints that’s easy to do because the work we do is very simple. So the guys actually love their jobs and they tell me that there’s nothing else close to it that is ever like, there’s nothing close to it. I mean, they’ll probably move on to other types of work, you know, in a year or two, they’ll probably go like go to college or they’ll go to like a construction management job where they’re making like 50, 60 grand a year. There’s different things that they’re going to move on to. But as far as like this type of work, there’s nothing that beats it, you know, they really love it. They’re having a great time.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     01:00:34    That’s awesome. Because it goes to show how important having an, a good offer basically for your employees as well is, and I think that you have this here, so that’s, that’s absolutely fantastic. One other thing I wanted to ask you going back a little to your advertising. So I know that you mentioned both the advertising that you do and also the organic stuff. We’re going to talk about both, but first I want to go into a bit more detail into your advertising. So how do you approach advertising generally? Do you hire a copywriter? Do you do the ads yourself and just how you go about it?  

 

Jonathan B.    01:01:10    Yeah. I mean, I think you’re going to link our stuff. Like, I mean, you guys could just check out on the website. I mean, I did the copy. I built a website like I did, I did all that. Now. I just, I did it all myself. I’m not going to hire someone to do that for me because what are they going to tell the customers? They’re going to tell the customers like what, in their opinion, they don’t know the business. You know, they’re going to have to ask me, it’s going to be like a game of telephone. Like they don’t know what we’re offering. They don’t know like what the value ad is. And then they haven’t actually sold any customers. So how are they going to know, like what customers give a shit about? You know? So it’s very hard to hire a copywriter. I don’t think that that would have worked really well for us.  

 

Jonathan B.    01:01:51    But as far as, I don’t know, like more details about the advertising, like, uh, so for example, our Facebook ads, we advertise to women ages like 26 through like 55 in our service area. And it’s like the top 50% of income, we don’t go too high because we don’t want like huge houses. Actually. We don’t want it like giant, nice plate. We want like real basic lawn care. Like we want real basic houses. So we don’t actually go like super high income or anything like that. Yeah. I don’t think you should. And I think that rich customers are actually the worst customers. Least profitable, highest complaining they’re assholes because they get what they want in life, they’re like type A, um, they’ll just like, they’re awful. So, you know, we like average people. They’re just like, you know, they’ll just pay each month. They will have small properties. They’re like kind of, they’re polite people, so middle ground.  

 

Jonathan B.    01:02:44    But, uh, our advertising is, uh, we just have a before and after picture and we have some copy that says like, uh, starting at $79 a month or something like that. So it’s quite simple. Yeah. And it just says like, you know, let the pros handle your lawn this year, while you just sit back and relax. And you know, here’s some of the services we offer messages to get a quote. They send a, they press the button there. Facebook ads can be like set up to where it just links them right to the Messenger app. Absolutely do that. It opens up a message. Uh, we have an auto reply. That’s like, Hey, tell us a little bit about the services you’re looking for this year. And then our customer service person talks to them and like schedules, a quote. We get a phone number from them and try to call them and like schedule it if they really want, we can do a quote virtually just like sending us photos.  

 

Jonathan B.    01:03:27    And we could give them a quote that way. But we usually do them all in person. Our Craigslist ads are basically like the same thing. Like, you know, it’s a photo of some of the work we do. And it says about our services, like I just copied those kinds of things from other companies advertising of what looked good. Just like what looked like. Oh, that looks pretty, like, I know that the customers aren’t even thinking about it that much. I know that they look at it very simply. They’re like they see a picture. They’re like, Ooh, that looks good. Oh lawn care? Oh, that’s pretty good price. Oh, let’s see. What’s up. And then they get a quote. And then it’s, it’s a pretty simple, I try to put myself in the shoes of the customer and think, you know, what, what does our ideal customer like want to see?  

 

Jonathan B.    01:04:08    And then, uh, like what simple emotions are we trying to trigger here? Like I could have probably been a copywriter in another life, you know? So I guess that’s why I did it myself. I did all the web, the web design. Um, we have like an automated email campaign. We use Active Campaign for that. So when they fill out their information on our website, it sends them an email from me. It talks about what we do has a chart with like the schedule of our services, like how, you know, the stuff we do. It gives them a Calendly link so they can schedule a phone call, all that stuff. Right. So we have like hands on automated thing. I can even see like when they open it, you know, it sends me like a little thing there. I get an alert when they fill it out and we get a call scheduled and all that. So I did the logo design, the brand design, all that stuff  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     01:04:58    And the website. Right. So, I mean, with these ads, it really sounds like one fascinating thing that I’ve seen because I’ve seen the backend of ads for a lot of businesses. But one fascinating thing that I’ve seen is that there are many businesses who make a lot of money doing ads, but their ads aren’t very optimized at all. And they simply don’t bother because they’re making a lot of money with them anyway. Whereas…

 

Jonathan B.    01:05:31    I’m that guy. I don’t AB test. I just, you know. 

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     01:05:32    Exactly. So, uh, and then there are other businesses which are the exact opposite, you know, like the, they spend so much effort on their ads and they invest so much in their copyright and they get no results or very small results, you know? So, um, it’s always been one of those fascinating things. And it’s actually what taught me that the offer and the audience that you’re targeting are both more important than your actual copywriting.  

 

Jonathan B.    01:06:00    Yeah. It’s a mix. You know, there’s a lot of stuff that factors into it. What if I couldn’t afford that same cost, the acquisition cost of a customer? What if our profits are so much smaller and I had to, you know, we’d sign up less people or it wasn’t as profitable. So now I gotta be really damn good at Facebook ads, you know, that changes it. Right. So everything kind of feeds into each other. The stuff that we do is more profitable with a higher profit margin, which allows me to pay the employees more, which gives me less headaches, which, uh, you know, and that allows me and the more money that we have, the higher profit margin we have now more for ads. So I don’t have to be so nervous that our, you know, cost per click is like an extra 20% higher than it used to be. Because our cost per click this year is like twice as much. I know if I said, what the fuck? I don’t even know what, you know, why.  I dunno why. Do you?

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     01:06:56    Well, yeah, I do. Yeah, exactly. The iOS update.  

 

Jonathan B.    01:07:02    You can retargeting, we didn’t do any retargeting. Or I thought that was, that affect the price for all advertising though.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     01:07:09    It interferes with the way that their pixel works. Right. So imagine that somebody accesses your ad from their iPhone, right. And they click on your ad, then they will not be able to track that event. So it doesn’t track it. And then they can’t optimize and bring you more of those people. Um, so, uh, they, they do say that technically the, the effect isn’t big, but based on the businesses that I’ve seen, it’s definitely big and twice the cost sounds wrong about there, you know, 60, 60% to a hundred percent increase. Yeah. And I mean, a lot of people who were on the edge with their ads, you know, they’re, they’re now losing money. 

 

Jonathan B.    01:07:51    Yeah, man. Yeah. I’m looking at it right now. My, uh, pulled up again.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     01:07:57    It’s, it’s quite, um, unfortunate. Um, and then, you know, I mean, have you tried also Google ads?  

 

Jonathan B.    01:08:04    Yeah. It was a little bit higher and it was, it was a little bit harder to track. I did not want to set up the tracking pixels and the analytics to track events and like, honestly, we’re going to be better at this. As time goes on, you know, I was just doing like, just asking people when they called in like, Hey, how’d you find this? Was it like an ad? Or was it a natural, whatever.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     01:08:26    I mean, the thing with you is that you have a really good business model, which solves a lot of the other problems. And I mean, this is one of the things that I always try to tell people. And I have clients who come to me that I actually refuse to work with.  

 

Jonathan B.    01:08:43    Cause they get shitty business model. They’re like drop shipping, like beanie babies. And you’re like, dude, we’re not going to run. We’re not going to run Facebook ads for your like, your Alibaba thing. And we’re going to make you a billionaire, like chill out, you know?  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     01:09:00    Exactly. So that, that’s what people don’t understand. You know? Some people think that if you have great copywriting, you can sell crap. And I actually disagree. You know, it doesn’t work like that.  

 

Jonathan B.    01:09:12    The only way you can sell crap is if you have like a free audience to pitch it to. Influencer, if you are an influencer and you’ve got like 300,000 followers, you’d probably sell some crap. Yeah. But you can not get away with it. You cannot get away with that shit on Facebook though. You cannot pay for Facebook ads and sell crap.   

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     01:09:33    Yeah. With direct response advertising, you need to sell stuff. That’s in demand. You know, if it’s not in demand, you can’t magically create that demand through a small ad that they see or through a sales page. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s, I don’t know why people have this misconception, I guess that a lot of copywriters are…

 

Jonathan B.    01:09:54    Cause they’re new. Yeah. Yeah. They got into business because it was easy. Yeah. I ran into a lot of like people in their own business and they think they’re going to do it cheap. Clearly. I’m like, that’s, that’s not gonna work at all. Why don’t I just do that? Why don’t I just go buy some tea leaves off of Alibaba and then sell it on my Shopify website and then run Facebook ads to it and make it then outsource all the drop shipping stuff. 

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     01:10:29    Yeah, I mean it’s very difficult to, you know, I’ve, I’ve had people and I’ve had clients who did dropship from Ali Express and people who scaled to seven figures actually doing this, but it’s very hard. You really have to find the right product and combine it with the right audience for that stuff to work.  

 

Jonathan B.    01:10:47    You become, you’re a marketing company because when you’re trying to sell stuff, that’s like easy to fulfill. It’s really easy to drop ship stuff. Well, now the hard part is getting the customers to give a shit. So like there’s a hard part in every business. There’s like a bottleneck, there’s a hangout. So the hangup for all these internet, you know, like sales funnel, drop shipping, like buy this little cheap product type thing, the problems, the demand. And no one gives up easy part is, um, like the fulfillment of the order.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     01:11:23    All right. So one more thing that I wanted to ask. I mean, we’ve talked a bit about your advertising, your direct response. Let’s talk about a bit about the organic side. How important has that been in terms of growing your business? Like what share of new customers does that bring and what does that consistent in?

 

Jonathan B.    01:11:43    A big chunk. Just our Google page, just organic listing. There we get like most of our customers tell us they just search for lawn care in the area. So I know that the search they’re putting in is lawn care service near me, or like lawn care, the city name, like Puyallup, I’m like that. So I know that’s what they’re searching for. So our Google, my business page says like PNW lawn care services, dash Puyallup. So when you search for lawn care service or lawn care or lawn care near me, we come up first out of like a hundred companies. We have, uh, like a 4.5 star review average on there, which is pretty good for like lawn care companies in the area. So that’s good. And what we did. So we did that, like the keyword, putting all the keywords, like in the name of your business is amazing.  

 

Jonathan B.    01:12:32    Like it kicks ass compared to anything else. If you had a brand name company, like you had your brand name and then you just put like what people are searching for as one of the terms, like on the end of that, and then like a city name at the end of that, you’re probably going to come up first on all your Google rankings. So that’s like an instant hack, right there is to just call yourself, like, if you are, um, if you, if your company is like magic man pressure washing or like magic man, whatever. But you make it like the name of it as like magic man pressure washing service dash, you know, Seattle, then you’re going to be like number one. 

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     01:13:15   Yeah. That’s an awesome shit. So, uh, I wanted to ask you, how did you figure it out? Is it trial and error? Did you try a couple of things or did you just think that it’s going to work based on what you needed?  

 

Jonathan B.    01:13:24    Yeah, it’s my gut. I was just like, dude, if they’re searching for lawn care service Puyallup, then I’m going to make that, the name of my business, a little bit of brand name at the beginning, just so it’s not generic as hell, you know? Yeah. But it still has, it still has some brand in it, you know? And we still have like the PNW logo, it’s like attached to something bigger than ourselves. So people like, oh PNW. And it kind of tells us that, like it tells them that it’s a big company or like, oh, the whole Pacific Northwest, like pretty big, you know, some people, when they think we’re like a big company, they call in and the phone number says like, press one for sales, press two for service. Like, we’re not like Bushly, you know, we want people to have the feeling of being part of like a bigger company, uh, very professional.  

 

Jonathan B.    01:14:07    Right. So, but having like that, the keyword name in the search, or like your company name on Google is going to be really little secret hack that not a lot of people do, but we’re ranked number one. Like we come up first and we’ve been around, we’ve been on Google, my business for me, like couple of years. And we were, you beat all the other ones. So we’re right up there with like True Green. I don’t know if you’ve heard of that. They’re a billion dollar company, so, well, that’s cool. What other, I love to talk about all the little like hacks that we do. So when I, one thing that we might even, we might even get back to doing don’t need to do it right now, but we, we might do this again in the future, when we’re really trying to ramp up is I bought a phone list for my entire state for like 250 bucks.  

 

Jonathan B.    01:14:54    So it has everyone’s phone numbers. And so what I did was I took that list of like millions of people and all the phone numbers. And I filtered out like all the zip codes that were in our area that we’ve serviced. I took all the zip codes, thousands of numbers. And I used this service called Slybroadcast and Slybroadcast sends a voicemail. it doesn’t send a recorded call because if you answer the phone and it’s someone going, hello, press five, the boom. You’re like, fuck you off, you eat them. You’re going to go write a bad review just to keep them like, you hate them. So instead it makes your phone ring and then it like goes away and it says like, you’ve got a voicemail. So if they’re looking at their phone, it might be like, huh, that’s weird.  

 

Jonathan B.    01:15:49    Why did it only ring once?  And then we’d go to voicemail. Like that’s weird. But what it does is you check your voicemail and you put a recording in there. And so it’s, so I made the recording. It goes like this, Hey, uh, my name’s Jonathan. And, uh, I got your number from, uh, your neighbor that, uh, you know, they might be interested. We signed them up for lawn care service and they said that you might be interested and that’s true. You know, just give me a call back. We’d love to get you a quote. I would be super happy to give you a good discount because you’re right next door. That way you’re saving money and then blah, blah, blah. If that sounds good, let me know, give me a call back. And I made it sound like it had little mistakes in it.  

 

Jonathan B.    01:16:29    I made it sound very real. Like it was just me calling someone. I said, you know, like your house here in Puyallup. And so what they did was I would send that out and it costs like a couple cents per message. And I could send them out instantly super cheap. And so the cost per acquisition was like really small. Um, but would I, what would happen was they would call back and they would say, Hey, I got your voicemail. Who, who gave you my number, what neighbor? And what I would do is I would see the number calling me back. I made my call back number, like a number that was separate from our business line. So I knew that when they called it was from like that thing that we did, it was a separate number. So they would call, when I saw that number ringing like, like the, uh, Google voice number, like, oh, I’m getting a Google voice call.  

 

Jonathan B.    01:17:14    I know it’s one of these people. I would see what number they were calling with. And I would say, oh yes, Debra gave us your number. She said that your name was Alex. And she said that, uh, or they, the number was, you know, 2, 5, 3, 5, 5, 5. And what I would do is I would tell them the wrong number by one digit. So they would say, ah, that’s not my number. You got the wrong number. And I would say, oh my gosh, I’m so sorry. You don’t happen to live in Puyallup, do you? And you’re like, you don’t happen to be looking for lawn care though, do you? Well, I would give you that discount either way because I made a mistake, but that’s so funny. What a small world would you like to quote still? And they will fall for every time they fall for it. And they’re like, wow, that’s so funny. What a small world we live in that, that, you know, you’ve got the wrong number and it was still like the right thing that you were looking for. That’s so funny or like, yeah. You know, a lot of people looking for lawn care,  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     01:18:06    That’s a super creative strategy. Like I have to tell you… How did you come up with it?

 

Jonathan B.    01:18:13    Well, I found out about Slybroadcast and I thought, how can I hunt as many people as possible? And like, make it work. I got creative. I just, I saw that service and I saw how cheap it was. And I was like, dude, I could sign up so many people on demand, like super cheap. So like springtime, we could send that out and we could have someone sitting on the phone. So when we get a little bit bigger, we got like a customer service person sitting at a desk like doing this. We’re gonna run this like huge scale. We’re going to scale this up. And we’re going to do it to like every single human being that lives within like 20 miles of us. Like we’re going to do it to a million people. Um, and that’s when we’re going to scale up to have like, like when we need to fill like four trucks worth of customers, which is going to be like 320 customers, then we’re going to send out thousands of these voicemails and like sign them all up that week. And so, and you can put it on a schedule too. You can put it on like a drip where it just sends it out to like 60 people a day,  

 

Jonathan B.    01:19:21    Put it on a drip. What happened was we got like, we got all our customers signed up and we’re like, shit. Okay. Well, you know, I’d have to buy another truck. It’s kind of late in the season to be adding another truck. Like, so we’re just going to do it some other time. Kind of put it on the back burner, save it for later. Pretty cool. Ringless voicemails. Pretty cool.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     01:19:39    Yeah. Yeah. It certainly sounds super powerful. And I mean, not many people know about this. I mean, I didn’t know about this. 

 

Jonathan B.    01:19:49    No lawn care companies are going to be doing this, bro. Like, we’re going to be the only one in the whole state thinking of anything like this. Like there’s no way anyone’s on that. Yeah. Unless, yeah. Or talk about it first  

 

Jonathan B.    01:20:00    I hope when your guys feels it. Cause I like, it’s so powerful. I want people to do it because it’s so powerful. 

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     01:20:08    I mean, it’s awesome. The whole strategy is awesome. And the angle that you chose to approach them with on the phone is really cool.  

 

Jonathan B.    01:20:14    Yeah. I mean, you might say, well, you’re lying to them. It’s like, dude, you’re mowed their lawn and done a good job. Like I want to promise them for cheap. And that’s how I got to do it.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     01:20:23    Yeah. Yeah. I, personally, don’t find a problem with that, but I know that some people would, I mean, you’re not lying about your service, you know, you’re still going down. Yeah, exactly. So I think that’s what matters most and I mean, everybody did. We’ll use all sorts of, um, little tricks in sales. I mean, it’s inevitable. You probably know from your day selling cars that there is also..  

 

Jonathan B.    01:20:51    Oh yeah. Oh yeah. We had some fun, you know, we had some good fun.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     01:20:54    Are there any key lessons from your days selling cars that you brought into running this year?  

 

Jonathan B.    01:21:00    Everybody’s yeah. Everybody’s full of shit. Everybody’s full of shit. Buyers are liars. That’s what they, you know, when you walk up to a girl, that’s cute and she tells, she says, oh, I got a boyfriend. He probably doesn’t have a boyfriend. You know, when you walk up to a customer and then they’re on the car lot. And they say, I’m just looking well, yeah. You’re just looking at, you’re looking to buy a car. Like, you know, like let’s not pretend like, so buyers are liars. That’s the number one thing I’ve learned from selling is that, uh, people will tell you bullshit. And if you just believe them blindly, then you’re a fool. If you go in into a sales environment and customers tell you like, no boss, I can’t give them a discount because they said all they be wanting to pay is $400 a month.  

 

Jonathan B.    01:21:43    And then sales manager comes in, works their magic. And then they’re walking out with like a $900 a month payment. Like, well, I guess I was wrong. You know? So that happens a lot. So that happens with what I do now. You know, customers will say like, they’ll just kind of pull stuff. They’ll try to test you and they’ll tell you things. They’ll tell you like, oh man, they all can. Um, I, you know, I think lawn care should be like 20 bucks. You know? I think I shouldn’t have to pay 20 bucks to get my lawn mowed. I’m like, that’s cool. It’s $230 a month sign here. And they’re like, okay. You know, cause they’re just trying to, they’re trying to pull one over on you. Right. They’re hoping they’re stupid. Yeah. Yeah. The number one thing I can tell you from selling cars or from selling anything is that buyers are liars and that people are usually full of shit.  

 

Jonathan B.    01:22:27    If there, if you know, if what they’re telling you seems like it’d be a great reason to like, have them get a really steep discount and they’re probably messing with you. I definitely agree. Is that funny? Right? Yeah. So I’m sure you get customers there for what you do. And they’re like, look, man, I can pay like a hundred bucks a month for a year. Like, oh yeah. Oh yeah, absolutely. You’re like, that’s cool. That’s nice. It’s going to be $2,000. And you’re like, oh shit. Okay fine. And they still pay it. So they were lying about what they said. They can only afford like a hundred bucks. Yeah. Obviously you can afford a lot more.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     01:23:01    And it’s not just buyers, you know, employees or people you work with do a very similar thing very frequently. You know, it’s one of the things that I learned about hiring, you know, don’t trust the first thing that people say.  

 

Jonathan B.    01:23:14    Yeah. So part of like, uh, you gotta make sure people have proper incentives, you know, like with employees. So our guys, they can head home early when they’re done. So you’re thinking, well, they probably rushed through everything. Well, it’s contingent on customer complaints. They know what a customer is going to complain about. Like I don’t need to tell them, like they know. So what happens is customers will complain a time or two. I had to send the guys back to a job today. It was like the customer complaint. It’s back on the schedule today. Now they have to waste time out of their day, driving back and doing it again. Then going to the next one, it takes longer. They learn that the hard way. So now they know like what customers will complain about, what they won’t complain about.  

 

Jonathan B.    01:23:57    And now their money is tied to like how quick and how well they do. So now they’re incentivized to get the job done, do it right. Get them home. And they have the rest of the day and they made more money per dollar than, or per hour than like anyone else, you know, like they’re making like 25 bucks an hour. If you really look at it for like 30 bucks, if you look at how quick they’re doing the work, cause they’re working like five hours in a day sometimes instead of eight hours, but they’re getting paid for eight. So like having proper incentives, you know, and I’ve made it. So there’s like really no way around it. You know, customers complain, you go back and fix it. When you’re done with the job, you go home, the pay stays the same. So you’re incentivized to work quickly and do a good job. Yeah,  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     01:24:39    That sounds great. And it sounds reliable, you know, they you’ve basically made them have skin in the game and make sure that they have the right incentives to get to the result that you want. And I mean, that’s key to building a system out of this. So, um, yeah. Good job for that. And we talked a little bit about sales, right. So what sort of advice would you have for somebody who is starting out in sales specifically as an entrepreneur in their own business? And I mean, do you have any sales books that you would recommend or courses or anything of that nature?  

 

Jonathan B.    01:25:14    Sure. I think the key to sales is you gotta be professional, you gotta know what you’re talking about. You gotta be likable and uh, then you gotta make sure you’re not falling for any of their bullshit. And then you give them a price for a good service and you’re investigating them as much as they’re investigating you. You know? So we give quotes and I’m figuring out like, is this going to be a good fit for us? You know, like I’m looking at it with judgmental eyes. Like, are you going to be a good customer for us? Cause we get bad customers. We don’t want a bad one. You know, we don’t have room, we don’t have room for shady people in our business. We’ve got to make sure you’re pretty good. Um, so there’s like a little bit of that, but dude, I don’t know if I’d be a great person out, be like convincing and sales because I tell you, our competition is so crap that we show up at a place and they’re dude, you’re the only people that have shown up.  

 

Jonathan B.    01:26:04    Like I literally could get, I could get so much more money out of people by giving higher quotes. I give quotes and probably half of the time they literally tell us, oh, that’s it. That’s it really that’s it. And I’m like, yeah, yeah, that’s it. And I’m like, oh shit. All right. And I’m like, um, we were getting paid $80 for a couple of guys to come mow your lawn. They’re going to be here 10 minutes, 15 minutes, you know, 80 bucks. Like we’re making plenty of money, you know? So I could be, but it’s weird. It’s like, some of them are like, dude, you’re the only one that showed up. If you pulled me any for like 280 bucks a month, I would have said like, yeah, instantly. And they’re like, they’re only paying like 130, like what’s wrong. Right. So, and I don’t even mind that, like, that’s cool. I’m not, but I don’t think I’m the one that asked on like how to be the best salesman in the world. I’m a, I remind people of their son, you know, I’m 24, um, tall, handsome white dude, like a lot of things, kind of just going for me, like in my face for sales, you know, I feel like it’s kind of like easy mode and I’m selling something where it’s like, they’re happy that I just showed up. Like we don’t, we don’t chase. We don’t try.   

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     01:27:17    It’s not a complicated tale. I see what you mean.  

 

Jonathan B.    01:27:20    Yeah. It’s like stupid, easy, bro. Like it’s, you know, I guess just don’t be weird and have common sense. You’ll go pretty far in the sales. But unfortunately being weird and having not a lot of common sense is like, unfortunately pretty common in most people.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     01:27:35    Well, many people don’t want to admit it, you know? Yeah. 

 

Jonathan B.    01:27:38    It’s basic. But you got to just make sure you’re taking care of those basics.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     01:27:43    Do you have any resources that you like to go back to sales books, anything like that or not really?  

 

Jonathan B.    01:27:50    Not for sales sales. I just try to be natural. I guess I have a lot of like inner, like ingrained things. Like there’s some little things that I guess I could call like strategies for sales that I kind of just do. And I’ve tried to explain it to other people and, and uh, that’s kind of helped me like put a name to it or like what it is like, uh, I will purposefully set like lower expectations to try to not be so needy. I’ll be like, look, man, they’re probably going to screw some stuff up. Like, that’s just what it is. But uh, you know, like I, I will intentionally say things that break rapport, right? It’s almost like being like a pickup artist in weird ways. There’s like little things that you do. Like you break rapport. You like, you don’t try to prove yourself.  

 

Jonathan B.    01:28:36    If there’s, if they’re questioning you, you’re like, look, if you’ve got to think about it that hard, then it’s probably not going to be a good fit that kind of, you want them chasing the makes them come. Yeah. They’ll they’ll come chase you more like there’s little crap like that. So I guess a good tip would know your worth. You know what I mean? Keep it light, you know, laugh at things. If, if people, uh, like press you on an issue, just kind of laugh at it and like, you know, don’t be tense for sure. Yeah. Yeah. And then, oh, one thing, I’ll give you a little secret. This is fun. I tell people about this, no matter what belief they have left leaning, you know, right leaning. If they believe COVID is a hoax. If they believe that if they have like a black lives matter flag in their yard, like whatever they believe, right.  

 

Jonathan B.    01:29:19    Let them talk, nod and listen. And then when they’re done, you say it’s a shame not everyone thinks like us. That’s what I say. I say that so many times, so many times when I give a quote, I tell people like, I’ve had people like they’ve got a Trump flag out in their yard and they’re telling me about how, like, you know, they hope someone tries to rob their house so they can shoot them. And I’m like, man, damn straight, dude. It’s a shame. Not everyone thinks like us. And then I have people that are like, oh God, they’re like the little exact opposite. Right. And you sign them up and you go, man, it’s a shame. Not everyone thinks like us, you know? So all of our customers think that I’m like their friend. They think that we think alike. They’re like, man, I just love this company.  

 

Jonathan B.    01:30:05    They’re just, they get it. You know? And they think that you like them. Yeah. And actually I do, I do like them, but you are like them, similar. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. They, you know, so that that’s a little trick steal that line. It’s a shame not everyone thinks like us. Cause that’s just like, it’s, it’s been ridiculous. How well it’s been. And I always laugh like on my way back to the truck after signing them up, I’m like, yeah, that was, that was fun. I had a good time, you know? Yeah. Well, do that in sales,  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     01:30:36    But it has to be an issue that is of high emotional value to them, for it to be effective. 

 

Jonathan B.    01:30:43    I know in my gut what they’re looking for out of that interaction, like, you know, I go meet a guy who needs his lawn care done and he’s like 50 years old and he’s got a firm handshake, you know, he’s a straight shooter, you know, take and take no shit as it is. Right. And I, I do the same right back, you know, we just get each other, you know? And then you talk to someone who’s like, like a middle-aged woman and she’s very sensitive, very religious. You know, she’s talking to you like, look, you know, my, my church members came and helped me out with my flowers. Do you believe in God? You know, they’ll tell you, like, you’ll get all these people and you got to know what they’re looking for. As far as like a personality, like what they like to see in people.  

 

Jonathan B.    01:31:23    And you gotta like show, you know, don’t lie necessarily, but show them that part of you. Right? Like if I’m a meet a customer that goes, I have a lot of interests, you know? So it’s easy for me to do this. If I go out and there’s a customer that, uh, they like to go shooting, I’m like, oh, where do you like to go shooting it? I got my, uh, I got an AR 15. I like to go up into a capital forest up here in by Olympia. And they’re like, oh, where’s that spot? I’m like, oh, it’s right here. You know, like building rapport, breaking rapport, and people try to test you all these little buttons. You’re pushing these.

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     01:31:53    The basics, really, of sales. 

 

Jonathan B.    01:31:56    Yeah, but I mean, if you do them right, they’re really effective. They make you like very likable. Right? So you, you, you, you establish things you have in common. You talk about them. Oh, well, I’ll tell you one thing is our process. So when I do, uh, when I do a quote, I know that we’re supposed to productize our service and we tell them like how it’s going to be, but what I start off that conversation as, as I just say like, oh, so you called in, um, you spoke with Autumn over the phone. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, great. So she’s our customer service person. So if there’s any questions or concerns, you’ll have her to work with when you sign up with us. So that’s great. And then, uh, you know, she’s mentioned in the notes here, you were looking for services, let’s take a walk around the property and take a look at it.  

 

Jonathan B.    01:32:35    And so they point at their flowers, they point at the grass, they point at, you know, the shrubs and the weeds in them. And we just start talking about how we’re going to take care of this together. That, that, that, that, that, and then like what we can do here, what we don’t do here. And so, but I let them talk first and I listen because I don’t want to just tell them, here’s what we do. And then like, make them feel like they weren’t listened to. So I listened to them and then I say, let me propose something. You do this, this, this, this, and this. And here you go. And it’s really in reality is what I would have said at the beginning, but I can just tailor it for what they’re really looking for because I listened to them. And I see like, what, you know, I’m soaking in like what they’re trying to say, what they’re trying to like, portray that they need done.  

 

Jonathan B.    01:33:20    Even though what we’re going to do is like the same for everyone, it feels customized. Yeah. So that might so that my response feels just like, oh wow. He listens to me and they know exactly what I need done. Yeah. So that’s a good sales tactic. I can give you as a listen to the customer and have them walk around, take a look at stuff, really get a feel for everything, and then come at them with this like great solution that you’ve just realized. But in reality, it’s something you offer to everyone.

  

Tudor Dumitrescu     01:33:48    One thing that I’ve noticed in sales that’s particularly interesting is that pretty much every encounter begins with each participant trying to take over a certain position. You know? So I don’t know if you’ve noticed, maybe if you’ve worked with, let’s say..rich customers.   

 

Jonathan B.    01:34:07    Sorry, say that again. Sorry, what customers? 

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     01:34:09    Yeah. So maybe in your case, if you had some richer customers or wealthier customers, you can notice that they assume a position of superiority from the get-go and to negotiate in a different manner with those people. Then with those who, you know, they’re basically your average person, how do you deal with that?  

 

Jonathan B.    01:34:32    Great question. I break rapport, lower expectations. And then I basically tell them to deal with it in like the nicest way possible. Cause I know that no one else even answers the phones. So like all your tough guy act of like, here’s how it’s going to be. And I’m like, well, if we’re the only company that picks up the phone is actually going to be like this. So I basically set them up to agree beforehand that they’re not going to complain when things aren’t the way that they’re saying they need to be like right now, I’m like what? We don’t do this. And we don’t do that. You know, here’s why, right. We want to be scalable in their systems. And so we got to say no to something, but here’s what we do. If there’s any mistakes, here’s our customer service line. So, you know, here’s what you would reach out to us for. We’re not going to come back the next day and fix it most likely, but we can probably put on your notes for the next visit. And then I just know that they’re kind of like, they’re going to bitch a little bit more, so I’ll give them, I give them a higher price so that I know that when our guys have to spend more time there, it’s still worth it. 

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     01:35:31    Yeah. I have the same, like I have a policy, you know, I never say no to a client. If I don’t want to take a client, I will just give him a very high price so that it becomes worth taking, you know,  

 

Jonathan B.    01:35:44    That’s right. I always tell him, well kind of the same way, but sometimes yeah, I do have to say no to some things because I’ve got, I mean, I bet that in your industry, you probably can do that though. Yeah.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     01:35:55    Yeah, exactly. And I found it that it’s, it’s, it’s really worth it. I mean, if somebody wants to pay a hundred times the price, you know, it’s up to him, what can I do? Uh, he wants to pay it. So be it. And he’s going to be, he’s going to whine and complain about it all throughout. That’s just who he is. Yeah. Yeah. I wanted to ask you because we’re nearing the end now. So I wanted to ask you a few last questions, which are more general. So I mean, I wanted to ask what advice you’d give to somebody who is, who was like you when you started out, in their early twenties and they want to be an entrepreneur. What sort of advice would you give them? If you had to give.  

 

Jonathan B.    01:36:44    Yeah. Stop falling for, uh, bullshit businesses that seem easy and they’re not really like a business where you’re not actually creating anything new. Examples of bullshit businesses would just be where you’re trying to just be a drop shipper because you saw, uh, you saw an ad on Facebook that said, I’m gonna teach you in this course, how to make a lot of money on Amazon. And it’s a plug and play course as well. Yeah. Like stop, like stop being a jerk off in business, you know? Yeah. And then, um, don’t start off with a giant goal right away. But, eventually you need to get a giant goal because if you’re not thinking big and long-term, then you’re chasing cash and you’re never going to create anything valuable for the world and you’re just going to be a loser. So go after something big, like I want to grow, I want to grow a billion dollar company over the rest of my life.  

 

Jonathan B.    01:37:39    I’m going to spend my life on this. I’m not going to, I’m not going to do it in a year. I’m not going to be able to ramp, like flip this company and be like, you know, sell it to Facebook for a billion dollars. I’m not going to do that, but I’m gonna grow a company big. Cause I’ve got a big vision for it. And I know what I want it to be. And I have some big goals that I want to accomplish in my life. And a lot of things that I want to do and that makes it worth it, sacrifice things, you know, like what I pick the business over my family. Yes. Would I pick this business over my girlfriend? Yes. Would I pick this business over my friends and free time? Yes. Like without even thinking about it, you know, everything else is just whatever.  

 

Jonathan B.    01:38:25    Um, and it feels good to know like with, without a doubt you’ve got, you’ve got your chips in on something and that, um, and you have something worth sacrificing, like those nights out for like something that matters, you know? So, uh, start off with kind of low expectations, just get some, you know, start doing something. Right. And then, uh, but you got to build up something big down the road and you got to have big goals so that it’s going to be worth it to keep it going. You know, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t have sacrificed nearly anything for this business if I didn’t think it was going to be just absolutely massive.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     01:39:06    So I mean, why, why do you say don’t start with a giant goal from the get-go though?  

 

Jonathan B.    01:39:15    Yeah,cause there’s no way to know what it’s going to turn out to be. You’ve no idea. Like I had no idea about this business. Cause I didn’t know what customers would be willing to pay. I didn’t know what the demand would be. I didn’t know what, what employees would be willing to do. I didn’t know how much they’d be willing to work for. I remember watching this video a long time ago. It was very old video. It was this guy that he starts companies and he made, he was on a whiteboard. And he said that, uh, when you just start a company and your company is selling, uh, green triangles that, uh, you’re not going to be doing very well, but it’s the first thing you do because it’s like, you decide that you’re going to sell green triangles and then your business is going to be very bad.  

 

Jonathan B.    01:39:55    And then you’re going to decide, you know, uh, we should actually be selling green squares. That would be better. And then your company starts on green squares and it’s still doing bad. You’re still not making any money, but it’s a little bit better than before. And then you got you, you get together and you’re like, you know, Hey, I think actually we should be selling, um, blue squares instead of green squares. Then you go, okay, can you do that gets a little bit better? And then pretty soon you’re like, you know, Hey, we should actually sell some blue circles. That’s the real business. And we should be doing, they do that. And then it gets better and better. And then it’s working and you’re killing it and you’re making a ton of money and it’s growing. And, uh, you don’t have to change anything for a long time.  

 

Jonathan B.    01:40:37    So when you start off, it’s going to be like that. It’s going to probably suck. And then you change things and then it gets better. But if you don’t set a long-term goal after it starts getting a little bit better, you get a little complacent or are you, uh, you’re going to get fed up with all the shit you have to deal with, and you’re not going to make it big. Cause you’re going to go, this is such a headache. I don’t want to deal with it anymore. Well, it wouldn’t be worth it. If you have small goals, you know, if my goal was to make like 150 grand a year, and that was like, what I had mentally capped myself out at, I would not be happy. This would not be worth it at all. This would be like the worst thing you ever I’ve had to sacrifice a lot of stuff for this, you know? And, uh, have a lot of like bad, bad days.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     01:41:22    Absolutely. I mean it’s the same, I think for… 

 

Jonathan B.    01:41:25    I’ve been stolen from, cheated, cheated, like lied to, get lied to like daily, you know, I’ve been threatened to be sued like more, more times than I could count on my hand. Um, I’ve been called every name. I’ve lost money and I’ve gone like a long time without making hardly any money. And then you just get this like feeling of like, dude I’m not doing for a living. Like I’m just some like loser, right? So you start off like that and then you figure it out. You build some systems, you get better. Things get better. But if you don’t have a larger goal, like if you don’t have any vision for this thing, or if you don’t see it as something great eventually then you’re just not going to be motivated to keep going. You know, you’re going to just get tired of it. I’m not tired of it at all.  

 

Jonathan B.    01:42:13    And I’m now I’m having fun. Now. I’m like at a point where I am sitting in my living room being interviewed now over the lake, we have a house on the water. Um, seeing the ducks swim by, it’s very pretty out. It’s like a 65 degree day here, like 70 or so it’s a nice day. I’m going to go golf in like half an hour. Um, my girlfriend’s going to be coming home and making lunch. Like it’s a good day. You know, things are going pretty good. Now I got, I got, my life is pretty good, right? But it only gets there though, if you’re willing to go through things. So get a goal. Try to actually improve something, have real confidence that you’re doing something of value for. And you’re going to have to get creative. You’re going to have to do something kind of unique. 

 

Jonathan B.    01:43:02    And if you’re just trying to start like a bullshit little, uh, little fake business, you know, and a lot of people might start off like that. That’s okay. You know, I started off doing little stupid little businesses that never turned into anything, but uh, you’re not going to really succeed and be making any real money until you start doing something for like, like something real for people that people actually want to use. They actually like, it’s actually something valuable to them, you know? So we have a lot of people that really value what we do. That’s why we’re getting paid.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     01:43:36    That’s the key. I agree. So I think that the way I look at this is that I think that you don’t know what business model is going to succeed in the market. So figuring that out is a process. You know, it’s not like you have this genius idea, all of a sudden, oh, this business model is what’s going to sell. Nobody actually does that. It’s a process of trying things and improving upon them and finding a better business model until finally it clicks. And then you can start scaling up. That’s the people who have been successful that I’ve worked with have done. And that’s what I’ve done myself.   

 

Jonathan B.    01:44:13    Yep. Another thing I could say would be, um, you know, to do the thing that you want to do long-term you don’t have to do that right now. That doesn’t mean like, okay, I will go drive for Uber until I do that thing. I’m saying like, you can do another business that gets you some cash and then go flip to something else because I’m not really in a good space right now to be starting a telecommunications company. Right. I don’t have the, like the assets. I’m not in a good spot. So bowling rink or a bowling alley. Right? Like I’m not in a good spot to, uh, go to space. You know, I think I’d need some different stuff to do that. Like I’d have to be realistic. Yeah. Like Elon Musk starting his..I mean, he had a ton of money by this point, too, but like doing Tesla and his first thing was like, you make a super car first and then you use that money to then make a cheaper car.  

 

Jonathan B.    01:45:10    And then you use that money to make a cheaper car and you use the economies of scale to like get into those. So eventually he wanted to make the, you know, the cheaper like model three, whatever. Right? The, you don’t do it yet. You got to come out with the model S you got to come out with the Roadster. You gotta come out with all of these things first, then get yourself in a situation. And that’s like on a really big scale, you could dial it back and say like, you know, you could, you could go and be like a real estate wholesaler and knew then, you know, make a little bit of money and then go like flip houses and real estate. And you could build up like a big real estate portfolio. And then you could switch over to some other thing. And that could be like, what you really wanted to do longterm would be like that other thing.  

 

Jonathan B.    01:45:50    But you built your money. First thing that takes you from zero to one, it doesn’t have to be like your lifetime goal. You can have something that’s going to take you from 10 to a hundred, but you need something to take you from zero to one. And then one to ten first. So like, they can be related things. I call it, I call it like the kiss, your sister business model, where it’s like, I think in, um, bad news bears you as saying like, they, they, they want a game or something, but it was like kissing their sister or something like that. Or like second place. It’s like kissing your sister, you know? It’s like, it’s not what you wanted, but it’s like, you know, you’re still getting a kiss, right. That’s kind of the business model. You are, you’re building something up or you’re making money and you can use that to transition into another business model that you want.  

 

Jonathan B.    01:46:40    So like, you got to figure out what’s the best thing to do from zero to one. What’s the best thing to do from one to 10. And, uh, you know, there’s other businesses I want to start, but they’re not ready yet. You know, like I want to start a classic car leasing business where we lease out classic cars for like a period of three years to people for like 400 bucks a month. And like, it would make this much money in this and that like, there’s stuff I want to do. Right? Yeah. I’m not doing those things yet because it’s just not the right time. It’s not, you know, it’s like, we’ll do it. We’ll do it later. You know? Um, don’t think about like, what do I want to do? And then like, start right away on it. It’s like, you can do it later. You know, you can start something else now that’s going to get you there.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     01:47:22    Yeah. I think that people need a cashflow business for their first business. You know, something that’s going to bring cash and then they can actually do something that’s cooler for them. You know, something that they enjoy more. 

 

Jonathan B.    01:47:34    A lot of, a lot of guys that I know they’re starting on home services and they’re using it to quickly get into something else. But like, it’s a way to be like, you know, sales getting into sales and being a good salesman or doing like home services. Great way to just start off at like 10 grand a month. Like you could just start off, you could go pressure wash roofs and like make 10 grand a month and just phone, press a button. You go do it. You don’t have to, you know, and then now you’re the boss and now, I mean, you’re working, you’re busting your ass. Like now you’ve got money, right. You’ve got enough money that you can start to save some, you can put it away to like some other business. So if you want to, you know, just get started in home services.  

 

Jonathan B.    01:48:10    I really recommend that. I know a lot of guys that are doing business and, uh, they’re out there busting their butt, doing that first. And then they move into something else. Like, I’ve seen it like four of my friends, you know, they’re out there hustling. And then they announce what that now they’re, you know, or they scaled it up or so like, home service businesses are really, really powerful because they’re local. So your competition isn’t like everyone, you’re the competition is only like what’s in your city. So the competition is pretty light, actually. They’re always in demand and they pay pretty well. And you can just go do it, some work ethic and some sweat, and, uh, you know, and you start making money like right away. So I like that.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     01:48:49    I think that local service businesses are a good idea generally. And I mean, you are right about the geography aspect. The competition is limited. It’s not like there’s a lot of people who are interested straight off the bat in online businesses, because for some reason they think it’s going to be easier. But I actually think that it’s hard. I have two more questions for you. One question, I tend to ask this to everyone because everybody generally wants to know what would be your favorite books for entrepreneurs that you would recommend to somebody who wants to be?  

 

Jonathan B.    01:49:30    I like the Fastlane. Hey, well, there’s this guy that used to have a blog a long time ago. He was in the, uh, he was in like the self-improvement industry and he wrote some books. Can’t find them now. And I don’t even think you can buy them. Now, maybe you can know they’re hard to find. You can find the PDFs for free though. Um, there was a guy named Victor Pride and he wrote some books for a blog that was called bold and determined. He has four volumes of his, his books, um, everything about being a man, everything related to being a man, you know, um, and, uh, how to think different than other people, how to set yourself apart really started, you know, like really started the process of like a young 16 year old Jonathan from, uh, not thinking like an employee anymore and thinking like a boss, um, and then setting some goals and really changing my life.  

 

Jonathan B.    01:50:26    So that’s a really great like collection of four books, because I think like you gotta, you gotta really work on that core of like who you are first. It’s not some, that’s just like you take a, you take someone with really bad mindset and you just tell them some strategies for business. And then now they’re gonna succeed. You gotta, like, you gotta really have it down solid, like in your core, like in like who you are, has to be. So, so there’s that. And then, uh, the Millionaire Fastlane, cause that’s a great just how to look at how to get rich, like the basics of it. Like you got to have units that you sell in either a service or a product. You have a units and you gotta scale it up and you gotta have all these, like, you gotta have the, uh, not break the commandments of control entry need. Um, and then scale, you gotta to like have those things dialed in, right? That’s a great litmus test for seeing like, does your business hold water? That’s a great one, obviously. And then my favorite, that no one knows about my favorite that I always recommend when you need to start managing people. There’s two of them. Dan Kennedy wrote a book called the No BS Guide to Managing People and Profits. It’s a great book. You read that one?  

 

Jonathan B.    01:51:43    I loved it too. And it’s a, it’s a realistic look from a, you know, a hard nose, traditional guy about how to look at managing people and how to not be tricked by bullshit and like corporate bullshit that you see. It’s a very realistic book on management and it’s done wonders for me and it’s set my expectations and it’s just, it’s very, it’s helped me a lot. I’m a lot nicer than that guy though, to my employees. But, uh, he knows how to, he knows his shit. I liked that guy and my other favorite for management and just like relationships in general and how to look at like the dynamics of power and stuff like that is actually it’s called Pimpology. And it is written by a pimp. It was written by a pimp and he talks all about the rules of being a pimp and like how it works.  

 

Jonathan B.    01:52:35    And, uh, he talks about how, like that’s what managing people is, is like, that’s what a pimp is. It’s like psychological management, your people and how companies are really just like pimps. And they’ve got the employees, which are like the hoes. So it’s a little, you know, it’s a little politically incorrect, but it’s, and it’s honest and it was written by a pimp. So it’s like my favorite book. Oh, nice. So I recommend it. It’s Pimpology. It’s a little rough, you know, if you read it, you’re like, damn, what did this guy recommend me for? This guy is crazy. Like, this is a terrible, terrible book, but there’s actually some great lessons in it. Then 1000% apply to business. I read it when I was an employee selling cars. And I was like, dude, my bosses are literally like, pimping me out. 

 

Jonathan B.    01:53:27    Like, this is exactly like, oh my God. So if you have a job and you read it, you’ll be like, damn, you’ll start to hear language from your employer. That like, it’s like, they read the damn book too, and they’re telling you the exact stuff. And it’s like, holy crap. Oh, I see. So it’s, it’s very interesting. It teaches you, uh, the management of people like psychology, um, and kind of some good rules rule of thumb, you know, for like living your life in general. Plus, it’s funny. It’s really funny. It’s written by a pimp. So you can imagine what kind of like saying he has in there, like just one liners, you know? And you’re like, dude, you not come up with that. Like if you, if you weren’t a pimp, it’s hilarious. So I think I might go read it this week again, but, um, that’s my, those are my favorite books and nice. They are not politically correct whatsoever. Probably making a mistake in telling you guys this, and having it recorded and transcribed. And like now it’s written down in, uh, in, in saved in history for someone to come back and cancel me for later. Like I’m probably gonna get in trouble, you know, like in 10 years from now. But, uh, it’s really funny. So yeah.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     01:54:32    Yeah. So thank you for that, Jonathan. I had one last question that I wanted to ask you. I think that, I think that our listeners are going to dig those because they they’re quite unique. Quite a few.  

 

Jonathan B.    01:54:44    Oh, sorry. One more – 4-Hour Work Week. Love that one. Oh, I really got to read that one. Yeah. Everyone, everyone talks about it. I love it. I think the idea of, um, and like, don’t copy it, but what you should take from it is that the world doesn’t like, you don’t owe the world anything. That’s what I took from it. Like, just because people are calling you doesn’t mean that you need to answer the phone. You know, you can, you can refuse to have your time wasted and it’s not laziness. It’s not laziness to value your own time and sanity and scaling back your time of managing a company does not make you lazy. Like I’m not lazy because I have employees working today and I don’t even answer the phone for like customers. Like I have someone to do that, to cut the lawn, still get mowed.  

 

Jonathan B.    01:55:34    The customers are still good. They’re still happy. The employees get paid. That’s my obligation. My obligation is not to be stressed out. Like I don’t owe the world anything of like my time and my stress. Right? So taking ownership of that and not letting busy-ness just to control your life. That’s like the greatest. I love that book so much because of that. And it made me feel like I wasn’t a lazy person for wanting to not be stressed out, you know? So, um, that’s, it’s very amazing. And it allows you like permission. Like I’m going to go golfing today while my employees are working. And I couldn’t do that before. Cause I would just feel like a dick, you know? But it’s like, the customers are happy. The employees are happy. Why do I owe someone like me just being busy and stressed out? Like I don’t, you know, there’s no, like I don’t have any obligation to feel busy. 

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     01:56:28    Makes total sense.  

 

Jonathan B.    01:56:31    So I love that book too. That’s I was listening to that one, two days ago. They have an audio book. I don’t like reading. I just like listening is so much easier for me to absorb. I cannot, I need to practice it. I just, I can’t read for shit. I had my ADHD just gets ahold of me and I like, forget what I was reading and I have to go back a page. Like it sucks. So I love listening to audio books. I absorb it way better. Yeah.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     01:56:53    I think that it’s also the advantage that you can listen on the go.  

 

Jonathan B.    01:56:57    Yeah. Yeah. Like when I’m driving around, I just put it on this YouTube thing.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     01:57:02    One last question that I had for you, and this is more about your business and the future. Have you ever considered franchising your business? Because I mean, you’ve built a system now, you know that it works. Why don’t you bring other people in to make it work in different locations and obviously go national.  

 

Jonathan B.    01:57:21    Yeah. What we’re going to do. That’s a, that’s like a numbers question and like we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. But I don’t like the idea of giving someone else all the profit. I think that we can just open up our own locations. I don’t want to have other people that all they give us is like 40 grand. They go start their own lawn care company and then we’re just there to like, Hey guys, how’s everything going? Is it going good? Like I don’t, I don’t think that’s very smart long-term but I guess it’s a numbers question that we’ll figure out, like at that time for now we’ll just keep adding locations and everyone’s going to listen to me. And um, I’m the boss and they’re the employee, you know, I think we can get pretty big that way.

  

Jonathan B.    01:58:04    I think we’ll be able to get investment money franchising, really just investment money. Yeah. And it’s like growth is because you’re getting money from somewhere. I think we’re going to get most of our money from like loans. Cause I like, cause we have a big profit margin. I want loans. I don’t want to sell equity and I don’t want to give other people the franchising, like here’s your business. I just want 10% out of it. I want to get loans and then hire employees that I paid well, but then I get all the money and I think we’ll be able to grow pretty damn quickly with profit margins that we have because if I get a loan and I have to pay a huge percentage and interest that’s okay because we have such a wide net profit margin so I can absorb way more debt, which then we have such a high return on ad spend. That means I can pump that money right back into the business. So my growth rate can be like huge. My cost of capital can be like higher and I can absorb all that cost. So I think that it’s going to make more sense to get loans and selling an equity and franchising. So I think that we’ll probably go that route, but we’ll see. We could franchise.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     01:59:13    I mean, if you, if you knew that franchising was, let’s say the faster route, but obviously the route that you take now gives you more control and could get you in the same destination. Would you go on this route still? Or would you choose the faster option?  

 

Jonathan B.    01:59:29    Depends on the speed. It’s it’s like a math equation, Like you gotta weigh it, you know, like you’re but you’re saying like if franchising was faster, would we do it? Yeah, definitely not right now. Cause we still need to build out our one location to like make it solid. Like if I was going to, if I was going to write an article and then copy and paste that article and like make a paper out of it, I like, we’re not done with our first paragraph yet. So we need to like fix that paragraph and make it full and like dialed in and nice and like organized and have a good safety net of like reserves and like be able to take some risks, having too thin of like, if things go wrong and we need to have some like safety net a little bit before we franchise.  

 

Jonathan B.    02:00:14    But if we did that out of I’m so scared of losing a territory and then like now I can’t now I can’t grow the business in that area. Cause we’ve like maybe we’ll franchise for a couple locations and then see how it goes and see like, does this work just like I said, when we started the business, you know, like we did, we said yes to stuff to see if it worked. And then we changed after that you tested the waters. Yes. We might just test the waters. You know, we’ll like, we’ll say we’ll franchise and we’ll go through all that legal, you know, it’s a big damn deal to be at a franchise. You have to like register. Okay. So it’s, it’s a giant whale, right. And like legal fees and like all that crap we’re registered. So we might do that and we’ll test the waters with it. Um, and if it doesn’t work, then we’ll just grow differently. But if it works really well and we do the math, like, and that’s going to make us grow like three times as fast, I might do that. Yeah.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     02:01:06    That sounds awesome. So, I mean, you have quite big plans for the future and it’s inspiring and nice to see that. And I hope that, you know, our listeners are going to, and I’m sure that they’re going to get a ton of value out of everything that you’ve shared with them. So I know we’ve been here for quite a long time, so this is pretty much… 

 

Jonathan B.    02:01:27    Do you have, um, do you have Fastlane for the people listening?  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     02:01:31    Absolutely. So it’s posted there. So, uh, it will be.  

 

Jonathan B.    02:01:35    Oh, sweet. Okay. Um, my name’s Johnny Boy, if you want to, uh, message me questions, you can always reach me. It’s free. You don’t got to pay anything. They gotta pay you, but you know, they can, they can message me for free and get questions if they have any, uh, interest or any questions that they want to answer. I’m always happy to chat. If any of them live in Washington, I’m always happy to meet up. They could come over. We could, uh, grill some burgers and sit by the water. You know, I just want to open up like an invitation to anyone. If they want to talk to me, uh, they always can, so you have to reach out to the Johnny Boy on the forum. Let me know what you think too. If you got any value out of the interview, I always love feedback from people. So, um, I guess there’s that, that’s my only promotion.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     02:02:19    And I mean, if you want to put an email link as well, that’s also fine. You can just send it to me afterwards and I’ll put it in the show notes and it will be there.  

 

Jonathan B.    02:02:29    Can you just link to my profile? Just do that. Yeah. Just do that.

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     02:02:36    Yeah, absolutely. I’ll do that anyway. Okay. So, um, yeah. Thank you then, Jonathan, for coming on, it’s been a pleasure to have you on and for our listeners stay tuned for the next episode. And until next time, remember to keep growing your businesses and providing massive value to the world. You are the reason why we’re all growing richer. Our freedoms are expanding and we’re all living in greater prosperity. See you next time.