They always say “life begins at the end of your comfort zone”. This cannot be more true when it comes to owning and operating a business. True business growth happens when an owner steps outside of their comfort zone to achieve a goal. This comes in many shapes and sizes depending on the company’s current stage.

Base Level Expansion

When many owners start their business, it is something that they do in order to achieve a result that is monetarily focused. Many get started because they do not want to work their job any more. This is especially the case for many home service businesses, such as the #1 provider of lawn care in Plymouth, MN, who started the firm as a means to escape the nine to five weekday grind. However, what most are not aware of is that starting a business that does not operate without your presence is essentially creating an elaborate job for one’s self and a business owner can find themselves trapped in this position.

The First Leap

The leap the owner must take involves automating things so the owner does not need to do them. With a lawn service provider, this would be evolving from wearing two dozen hats within the business, these include, CEO, sales manager, sales staff, accountant, project manager, foreman and laborer. How this cycle must work involves starting with the bottom of the totem pole positions and automate it with an employee or software technology.

Micro Expansion and Scaling

With a business like lawn services, the labor force is not yet fully automated with technology, but can first begin with ultra efficient equipment such as upgrading from walk behind lawn mowers to ride on zero turn machines. These machines increase the amount of grass cut per hour with a larger mower deck. Once an organization has the equipment they need, the owner needs to move himself off the lawn mowers and place laborers on the equipment. That way the owner moves another step up the ladder with his working positions in the company. This would be the foreman or crew manager. As the work load increases, the owner must then replace his position as foreman with a new employee. This cycle shall be continued until the principal owner can draw a salary with minimal work put into the company.

For many landscaping business owners, most are not strangers to the idea of having to work 60-100 hours per week in their business to get the foundation built. Meaning a solid flow of clients to ensure all their expenses are paid and that they may be able to draw a salary. However, the real magic of landscape business ownership happens when an owner can work less but make more.

“A landscape business owner [in the early days] must be ready to do a lot, seriously a lot. You are answering calls, meeting with prospects, putting together proposals, closing sales, collecting deposits and going to the bank. And all that before a single shovel hits the dirt”, stated the owner of a company that provides landscaping in Tulsa, OK. They routinely put in 80-90 hours each week during the busy season. It’s tough, but rewarding. One must always ensure they have a clear cut goal in mind with where they want to take their company and ensure they delegate along the way to make it reality, otherwise they are just another person in a hamster wheel with zero balance and likely no enjoyment of their business.

Save Your Profits

The first step is to keep your cash! The trend in today’s social media age is to spend money like crazy, especially with a business that is raking in the cash, just save for your taxes and then spend the remainder on your lifestyle. The key here is to keep your lifestyle spending down as low as you can temporarily. The saying “entrepreneurs are willing to live their life how no one is willing, in order to be able to live a life how no one else will be able to”. This is stating that a business owner is willing to temporarily halt their lifestyle and luxuries, take those funds and invest it into a business for a medium to long term payoff that could be truly exponential – 7, 8, or 9 figures.

In order to stay ultra competitive and be able to beat your competition, a business needs to have ample cash. So it goes without saying that an owner should reduce their lifestyle expenses and keep their earned profits in their business – more advertising or marketing, upgrade equipment and more.

Delegate Early On!

If a person wants to be able to exit their business, they must realize that they need to delegate tasks. Every single role throughout their company needs to be automated by equipment, software or employees. Everything from labor when fulfilling work for clients to sales to office management, it is all mission critical for automation. In order for a business to be able to afford to do this – they need to have the monetary funds available to make this happen! So the first step of saving a good portion of profits to reinvest back into the business must be done in order for this to be reality. If a business owner does not delegate and continues to wear all the hats, they will never be able to achieve of the 7 or 8 figure exit. Because when an acquirer – whether it is another business or a private equity firm, they want to be purchasing an already existing “system” that generates revenue without the owner present for day-to-day operations.

Once an owner puts in the time to build out management protocol for the delegated tasks to be handled by employees – that is when the real work-life balance occurs. Because in due time, work is being performed by the company without the owner having to be present.

These two strategies are a sure-fire way to set up a company to be successful, operate automatically and become worthy of a business exit that could radically change the direction of an owner’s life by providing a lump sum of multiple millions of dollars.

Folks across the globe always have a saying that states “If you love what you do, you will never work a day in your life”. But there are problems with this statement and its validity. For a person that works a job, (which even many businesses are secretly disguised as jobs due to the fact the owner must remain present in the business or the company completely falls apart) their income and livelihood is attached to their time spent working. There is no way to become free from financial constraints or have true wealth, which is the ultimate prize in being happy by being in a financial position that no party has control over your time. Many will look from the outside and ask themselves, “How can I get to that point?”

The Transition From Employee To Business Owner

The stage in the transition to becoming free will be branching away from relying on a source of income via trading hours for dollars. This would be a person’s job they must be present four to five days or more per week in order to receive a stable paycheck. What far too many do when they start receiving a paycheck is force themselves into financial servitude with purchasing a nice car, home and more which forces them to work in order to keep those things. What one must do in order to get away from the matrix of being an employee and in a hamster wheel is to ensure they have little to no expenses.

Once they have temporarily reduced their living expenses, they must find a business to start. There are thousands of industries across the globe but what the focus should be in this first business is simply making money with a cash flow business. Something that requires the owner’s time in order to acquire currency, usually as an exchange of value in the form of a skilled service, lawn services, graphic design and website building are some examples. Then as this new business owner builds up their clientele, they realize that their time is still attached to their income.

At this point they have created an elaborate job for themselves and the owner must make a decision, do they scale this service business with employees? Or do they take the profits from this current business and put it into another business, one that requires a higher capital investment but will offer a big payoff down the road?

Delegating The Tasks To Automate

The chosen route in this scenario is for the owner to scale their service company, this will involve significant investments into staff, software and equipment for this to work. However, the big payoff with delegating tasks in your business allows you, the owner to step away from the day to day operations and the company still operates and generates revenue.

“The margins decrease, but your time is more valuable and is better spent selling to clients instead of cutting grass. Because the volume of revenue coming in increases drastically. Then once you have enough leads coming in, you can delegate the sales tasks to a new employee and continue scaling.” Proclaimed the owner of Stillwater Outdoor, a company that offers commercial and residential Stillwater, MN lawn care.

Business Automation Equals True Happiness

Most poor people will say that money does not equal happiness. They completely miss the point on this statement because they equate money with work, and work means misery in poor people’s minds because they generally work crappy jobs. On the other hand, a business owners that starts his business from scratch and scales it with incredibly focused and hard work over several years, will begin to enjoy his work because it has become fun to him and he receives fulfillment and joy from what he has created. Not only because the owner built a company from scratch, but because they achieved financial abundance by building an automated system (in this example, a lawn service company with staff managing the day to day) to create a money tree that the owner can sell in the future and fund his retirement or the next business venture.

Delegating tasks as a business owner and managing your people (and sales skills is one of the most important skillsets an owner must have if they want success.

When most bloggers say the standard and typical lines of “life is meant to be lived”, “to travel is to live”, or my favorite, “not all who travel are lost, they are wanderlust” or any other generic phrase that people put on social media about how they love to travel. I am here to inform the word in my blog, that all of that nonsense is a joke. If you are not getting your money right and becoming obsessed with in fact getting your money right, to the point where you do not have to worry about the currency balances in your accounts when you want to travel, that is how life is supposed to be lived.

Get Your Freakin’ Money Right

Far too many out there put no emphasis on the future of themselves and their family. They are focused on right now, and that is it. Whatever the derivative is of that mindset, whether it is from the instant gratification of social media applications and websites or some other factor, humans need to fix their thinking pattern. This thought of “I do not need that much money to live” shows that people are delirious.

They will use the story of the fisherman who gets approached by a wealthy banker who tells him the story of scaling so he can retire and do what he is already doing. Lest we forget, if he is taking the lazy route to barely scrape by, there are several outside factors that can come about and completely wipe him out. Such as, government regulations, competitors moving in, an unexpected massive repair bill required on his equipment, the list continues. Which would you rather be, the guy who plugged away ensuring he has generational financial security or the guy who is one slow month away from having no money?

The same occurs with these people who travel the globe in an effort to look appeasing on social media. First, they are doing it to impress others and not make themselves happy. This is a recipe for disaster in and of it self already. Second, they are already barely scraping by as it is, then they will scrounge up whatever money they have in a feeble attempt to purchase the cheapest airline ticket they can and travel across the globe and stay in a complete dump for accommodations. Sleeping in decrepit conditions, but it somehow appears to be all good when they take that social media photo with the typical filter in front of the popular monument that in that city or locale.

What a joke. 

You can expect my blog to give real advice and knowledge on acquiring currency via a business that can become autonomous, allowing one to then, and only then to travel freely while taking business or first class flights, staying at top of the line hotels and resorts and much more. Stay tuned.