You Are Never Going to Run Out of Work | Keith Kalfas

If you are new to running your own business or are just a few years in, there seems to always be this fear that if you let up just a little, you will start losing business or stop getting new clients. This is especially the case for landscapers. If you are just starting on your own or maybe just have a few guys, there is an overbearing feel that if you do not go 110% all the time, that you will not be able to sustain yourself or the business. Well, I am here to tell you that if you structure your business correctly and learn a few key skills, the jobs will never stop coming in.

Survival Mode

Many times, new and experienced landscapers alike will take nearly any job they can find whether it is well paying or not. They have this thought that if they do not take whatever jobs they can, that they will not be able to find any jobs at all and will not make any profit for the day. This is when entrepreneurs take anything and everything they can just in the hopes that they can survive, aka keep the business going. This leaves entrepreneurs scrambling for jobs daily and freaking out most of the time. It is a stressful way to not only run a business but live. If you constantly run your business in survival mode it will consume you and ultimately make you miserable and run your business into the ground.

Survival mode also keeps entrepreneurs from wanting to invest in themselves and their companies. If you are in survival mode you may not be making enough money to buy that bigger piece of equipment or start paying employees. Mostly because you are putting in a whole lot of work for a small return, leaving you with limited funds to better your business. Ultimately this is going to hold the company back. 

The amount of work you get will definitely come in highs and lows. At one moment you may have more jobs than you can handle and the next week you may have nothing. However, if you can consistently improve your marketing strategies, finding well-paying work will not be hard and you will be able to handle the lows when the highs are paying really well.

Pulling Levers

The road to successful entrepreneurship involves a lot of “guesswork”. It is sort of like pulling a lever while you are blindfolded. One lever may make something good happen and another lever may make something bad happen, but you will have no idea why. Sometimes in your entrepreneurial journey, you use a lot of different strategies and you may not know exactly what's going to happen every time you do something. Something you expect will do really well may not work at all, and something you expect to not work at all may do really well.  That is how entrepreneurs become successful. They keep trying things until they find out what works for them in their niche. Then they keep repeating those strategies and perfecting them. It takes many years but if you keep pulling levers and keep finding out what works for you and your niche you will find something that works and you'll be able to use those strategies for years to come. 

How to Never Run Out of Work

The key to getting more high-paying customers is marketing. A super valuable skill to have as an entrepreneur is to be able to market yourself and your business. Between the in-person opportunities and opportunities via social media, there are almost endless amounts of people to market to and show your worth to. With hundreds of clients, it is easy to pick the highest-paid jobs.

If you really work at marketing and advertising and you can learn how to market your business, the potential you have for growth is unlimited. As long as you keep getting better and better every single year, jobs will keep coming to you and you will never run out of work.

As a matter of fact, I have already put together a whole other article about marketing your service business and I have also made a YouTube video about it. 

You can watch it here: 

Or read the article here: 7 Steps To Marketing Your Business Online without being an expert at marketing

The great part about being good at marketing Is that you will get a lot of jobs. Now you have to figure out which jobs you should take and which jobs you should not take. Obviously you want to take the most efficient jobs you can. By efficient, I mean you want to take the jobs that you can get done in the quickest amount of time that pay you the most amount of money.  For example, if you could take a job that pays you $100 and takes you 1 hour to complete or you can take a job that pays you $150 but takes 3 hours to complete, you should take the former if you have multiple jobs in a day.

Now that you have all these jobs coming in you can start to be a lot pickier about which jobs you actually take. You can start taking the higher-paying jobs and you can get out of that survival mode where you're just taking every single job you can get. You should also be raising your prices for the clients that you worked for before you started bringing in higher-paying jobs. It does not matter if you lose clients over raising prices. If they do not want to pay what you are truly worth then they are small minnows in a giant ocean of fruitful and high-paying jobs. 

So if you can get your marketing big enough and you're talking to enough people there will come a point that you could be making just as much money as you were before in survival mode but you only have a fraction of the clients and you're only spending a fraction of the time on your business.  Obviously, you want to spend a lot of time on your grind, but now you effectively have five times more time to work on your business. This is how you expand and become a larger and more successful company and not just a small small town landscaper.

The Backwards Expansion

Before you can grow a giant business you have to start with the end in mind. Large businesses require systems, infrastructure, and people to run them. So if you are trying to do this all by yourself and you don't want to let anyone else in, eventually you will be limited by the number of hours in the day and how much you alone can get done. The only limit a business will have is the giant bottleneck of having enough employees to run the business well. 

To effectively grow your business you have to start hiring people to help you. Whether it's guys that go out and cut lawns for you or if it's marketing and HR managers,  all of these things are required for large-scale business. If you want to get there one day you have to start with the end in mind and prepare yourself to take your business to this step.  It is much harder to grow and expand after you have established small company culture and infrastructure. 

Conclusion

Once you are able to get out of that survival mode where you are clawing and scratching trying to get little minnow jobs and you are able to market yourself to get enough exposure to draw in higher-paying jobs you will start being a lot more successful and lot more relaxed. The idea is to do more in less amount of time. Although when most entrepreneurs think of this they think that if they are super picky with what jobs they pick they will run out of jobs, but this could not be further from the truth. As long as you keep marketing and keep putting yourself out there people will see you and the clients will keep coming.