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.