How to Go from lawn Care into other Companies

all right I'm with my buddy Eric Taylor Eric what's the name of your lawn care channel uh it is Lawn Care profits Lawn Care profits Eric started in lawn care but he's no longer in lawn care and that's the story today that we're going to be covering what we're going to go over is how you can build up a profitable lawn care business and then use that to launch into other things Eric now owns Twin City hauling you can in fact see one of his trucks in the background he owns this end dump trailer and he owns another trailer in the back what kind of trailer is that in the back it's an 07 Mac frameless round bottom trailer round bottom trailer okay so not this doesn't sound anything like lawn care so let's go backwards and let's see where Eric originally came from what is your story Eric what did where did you start okay well I wanted to be an entrepreneur since I was a young lad and uh so I got started back a long time ago and I figured I wasn't going to long time ago five years ago long time ago like when I before I was graduated from high school and I decided the first book that I ever read ever was Rich Dad Poor Dad you ever heard that Robert Kaki yeah yeah so that was the first book like ever even in in high school that I actually read from cover to cover and I decided that I wasn't going to go to college and I was going to be a very big huge successful uh entrepreneur and didn't really work out that way ended up going to college for a year uh dropping out I went to college cuz my girlfriend at the time didn't you go didn't you go to a mentor and actually move to California with him for well where does that work into it so then what ended up happening was I dropped out of college colge and I moved to California I got mentored from a marketing and sales uh quote unquote Guru and I worked there for 2 years and when the economy back in ' 07 took a tank took a dive now that's that's exactly when uh we moved back from California and started um working on on our lawn care business and so about how many years ago would you say it was the actually started in the lawn care business that was probably around 6 years ago um yeah it was about 6 years ago 6 years ago from today roughly yeah and then you built that business up in 3 4 years and you got it well established around the TN City didn't show yep what did you do to do that what did it take to get you from nothing to be becoming a force to be reckoned with in the lawn care industry in the Twin Cities uh the first thing was uh making uncomfortable phone calls to people that I knew telling them that I was going to be Mowing and seeing if they wanted me to mow for them and that was mostly just um you know businesses and anybody else and and pretty much everyone said no except for one one person that helped us out and that was the school that I used to go to so we started mowing that and then two years later they fin finally gave us a snow once they knew we were serious about what we were doing and yeah we started but during that time frame you were also learning website development weren't you yeah okay so you were you were taking on lawn mowing as a new kind of a new thing and then you were trying to build your business up and you were doing it on your own and building your own website yeah is that right y okay so that's an interesting backstory that we should cover because I think what really led to you your launch wasn't the phone calls wasn't the the face Toof face door too knocking on people's you know doors and saying hey I mle Lawns it was developing that web presence with absolutely okay so developing that web presence was the key and I know you still actually own a number of formidable websites for lawn service and you don't do any lawn service at all anymore do you no and I call I I mean I think that that's the most important real estate you can own these days is online assets and they're you know worth more than they're weigh in Gold since they don't weigh anything so okay well that is basically your storefront I mean realistically it is the key to making people that don't know you they look at you they don't when they go for lawn service they don't go they don't care about a brick and mortar building anymore what they want is they want the pretty pictures they want to see what you've done they want accountability they want people that have used your service to be giving you references cuz because that is uh basically that's creating an authority in the marketplace just by using other people's verification of your services really there other and other people say hey Eric does a great job they don't have to check any further than that y okay and so then what did you learn while you were developing and building websit well I just when I lived out in California I really had a huge advantage of learning sales and marketing and how to talk to people and understanding why people say no or yes and things like that and then because of the influence that my boss had I got to meet other people and and one of the the most important people that I met out there was a guy that did online marketing and he specifically used YouTube to create relationships with people and the most important part about it was the followup and so he would send videos you know when someone when he would introduce himself and then he'd just keep on sending videos of himself to for people to get to know him and they'd like them and then they'd end up buying from them so I kind of Incorporated that into our lawn care company and just showing people what we do and so they would feel comfortable with buying from us and then YouTube also helps with your online presence of getting traffic to your website which is the most important thing but the story doesn't end there because you basically fell out of love with lawn care in fact you got to the point where you would rather eat hot dog than go out and M Lawns I mean I don't know how else to put it but realistically it just wasn't meant for you but now you owned a lucrative lawn care service you were actually ranking in the top of the charts and still due today yep and so what you've done is instead of just getting rid of that lawn care service you kept the website you kept its presence up and now you sell the leads yes to other companies yeah and one of the key got it one of the key uh motivational things for selling our business or to the guy that bought our business one of the main uh negotiating pieces was our website and he ended up when he bought the business he bought ours website but we had multiple websites so we we we did sell our main website to the guy that bought our business but we still have other websites so tell me about you don't have to give me the name of the company that you sold to okay not asking you for that but what I am asking you for is an idea of who that what size was that company before they bought you and then how did your website and what you had created affect their growth and their presence was it huge difference um basically without get giving too much information I the company that bought our business was just a little bit smaller than us so they pretty much tried to double their business I don't think they even have our website up they're way too busy right now so okay just off of what you know what they already had and trying to now they're actually a name to be recognized in the market so they came from basically nothing and just by purchasing your website by purchasing your business converting it over to their name now you see their trucks running all over the Twin Cities that is a huge factor for you guys out there and you gals listening to this is just because you're in lawn maintenance doesn't mean you don't have other skills and when you have that downtime I'm assuming you did this and during your downtime maybe the winter was that we did the trucking because it uh for a lot of reasons one is we just wanted to get into more than one business we had it's uh we I had a partner in in my business so we had a lot of free time it wasn't my partner and me on the mowers uh we never you know one time a year maybe we were on the mowers but last last year last season I mowed for two days because we had to fire a guy and another guy quit and so I had to train two new guys on out ofo and other than that you know that's not what we were doing other than that you were Business Development yeah pure Business Development so you separated yourself from the technical end of the business you focused on the business end of the business which is what actually built your company we've talked about that in other videos and I want to make sure that you guys understand that that's what leads to success now Eric was able to sell his Lawn Care lawn maintenance business and get into Trucking yeah is that right so is that how you got started in the trucking is you actually built that Lawn Care business up you built up the website you established the business sold it and now you're doing something completely different yeah basically um what what ended up happening was when we bought this truck from from our other lawn care company 3 years ago we paid for it outright and then we worked so then we had two businesses going on and our lawn care business and our trucking business help pay for for the trailer that the back the far trailer so that trailer is paid off in full because of the lawn care business and everything and then continued to do that and then sold our lawn care business and none all of that stuff was funded from the lawn care business I mean so nothing bad to say so you were able to sell the lawn care business and 100% outright buy a brand new truck Y and two trailers now I say brand new they weren't brand new off the lot but they were brand new to Eric which is a bit these trucks aren't cheap these trucks are expensive and let's take a look at this truck real quick let's see what he's done with this what he's got going on what you're going to find is you've got a standard what is this a DAT is this considered a day cab Eric no it's almost it's just got it has a little uh they call it a coffin sleeper on it so okay it just I can recline back and if I go somewhere and I need to take a nap or something I can but I home every night so and this trailer is your standard end dump yep and what do You Haul in something like this what do you use that for you can haul anything from firewood to you know I've hauled pretty much anything that's bulk you know any anything in it that's not super hard but what I normally what I my bread and butter is sand and gravel sand and gravel we you avoid all construction debris you avoid Rubble concrete because it's aluminum right yes so you have the option of getting paid both hourly and by the ton those are two different pay scales completely if you get paid hourly you know exactly what you're going to be making we got another truck coming in real quick show you that but if you get paid hourly you know exactly what you're making when you get paid by the ton you have the the chance of making even more than you would per for an hourly basis especially if you have a lighter truck hence that's why you'll see a lot of these trucks you need to understand in trucking there's two different pay scales an hourly truck a pure hourly truck is going to be pretty heavy okay it's going to be able to handle all sorts of construction debris Rubble asphalt concrete building demo a lighter truck something that's aluminum and something that like Eric has right now he's got to avoid any of that big heavy stuff because it'll Dent the heck out of these aluminum trucks it'll just beat them up it's not good for these lighter Rigs and the rig isn't light but the trailer is light but that also frees Eric up to take on those more lucrative jobs that is going to take his hourly rate and increase it immensely is that right yeah and one thing I'd like to add is because of the lawn care and running a business most trucking companies are not a business it's just they they drive and they treat it as a job but I go after work and I try to stay away from Brokers and I'm and we're going to talk about this but I'm trying to become a broker more than you know just going after and letting someone take whatever they're going to take 10 to 20% or more so so you you are although you're an independent you're actually looking at signing on and lining up your own Trucking and then we're going to classify we're going to actually make sure that we understand what being a broker means that's why you have that second truck in the background is because your plans of expansion include hiring on other trucks renting out your trailer mhm and letting someone else pull it and make you more money exactly and that's what a broker does so Eric isn't just going to stay an independent truck driver he learned if I'm listening right you learned from the lawn maintenance business to build up the business end of it now you're going to use the same knowledge that you gained by mowing lawns by building that business to build a trucking company you've already started the expansion process yes and now you go out and you go right now you'll go out and you'll truck for yourself but you're probably bringing in anywhere from 90 to $120 an hour for this rig right here is what I'm going to guess you're doing okay that's pretty good for a guy that's on a his own with no payments and he's just uh using his own equipment and then he has the opportunity let's go check out this other truck now how will this work Eric you don't have a cab for this other trailer what you have is just the trailer itself how's that going to work out so basically what I'm going to do is I'm going to get jobs and then and I'm going to provide a trailer and a lot of times in the trucking industry guys they're they're not they don't understand how big of a deal 10 to 20% is and they don't understand how to manage their money and they don't understand a lot of that kind of stuff so you know I don't basically I'm going to provide a trailer and a lot of times guys can't run on their own because they don't know anything about like IFA or getting their authority to run across state lines cuz it's you have to have like in Long care you need to have a do number well there's a whole lot more stuff that you need to do to run different states and stuff like that so they don't want to do that they don't know how to do that and honestly my wife does that for me so um you know that that really helps out but 10 to 20% is a huge amount of money when you're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars you know to provide a trailer and then also you know if someone needs fuel help or whatever and know I can front them fuel or whatever it is so that they can afford to work cuz believe it or not a lot of guys can't even afford to buy fuel so so I want to back it up a little bit and I want to go over what Eric just said you're not going to have understood a lot of that because it's the technical end of trucking is what he's really talking about and each and every business that you go into is going to have a technical component of it and you have to either Master it yourself or in this case Eric's let his wife handle mastering some of the interstate and intrastate Trucking regulations that dictate what happens with uh a trucking company but he's not alone in the game and he is willing to to take on and learn and master those things and that's a key component to success for you whether you're deciding to go into Trucking or you go into landscaping or if you go into any other field or Endeavor you have to become an authority on all the ins and outs and if you don't do that then you're going to be nothing more than what everybody else is in that industry and that's average when you become above average when you excel at something when you understand it like the back of your hand that's when you can maximize your profits and you can start to grow your business it's a huge thing that Eric's doing here and I wanted to bring this to your attention because he converted a successful lawn care company from absolutely nothing grew it expanded it and now he's taking on a secondary component component which the lawn care service gave him the freedom to do what is your heart telling you to do where is your passion what is it that you want to do can Lawn Care Can Landscaping can any one of these entry level services that everybody can thinks is just is just nothing can you maximize your potential can you take it to the next level yes a lot of people do lawn care a lot of people do lawn service but you can see when you do it the right way just like Eric did it doesn't take forever four five six years you built up enough money that you can he was able to expand into Trucking so can you another thing too is I mean my son is five my oldest son is is 5 years old and c and my wife and me decided that we weren't going to have kids until we made were making $10,000 a month in the lawn k business so like I said we started about 6 years ago and it doesn't really take that long to start making some substantial money I mean $110,000 isn't a lot for a business you know with all the expenses in there but um so yeah I mean it's definitely doable and it doesn't take that long if you're there's nothing wrong with the lawn care business there's people that drive truck and and they uh they'll say oh man it be nice to M on so it's just it's whatever your heart wherever your heart's leading you y and in this case I wanted to bring Eric to you so you could see how he was able to expand what he did to grow his company and hopefully you guys can do the same thing for your own business Eric do you have any last words before we uh let you get back to your life no I think that's it all right thanks guys love you guys take care [Music]