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should you hire someone?
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Should you hire someone? How do you know when the time is right? If you struggle to keep up with your work, it might be time to employ someone. But before you place that worker wanted ad, let me talk about what I learned about hiring people in my lawn mowing business. If you're mowing 40 hours a week and employ someone, you'd assume you'd get things done in half the time. Right? Wrong. I've done this many times and found that it only increases output by a third. If you were turning over $2K a week and employed someone full-time, you could grow your business to $3K. Now you need to allow for costs. Once additional employee costs like wages, benefits, and taxes are factored in, you may find that the increase in output is not worth the additional expenses. You've increased the market value of your goodwill by a third, but you're no better off. We ended up putting guys in vans and sending them out alone. They can turn over as much as $2.4K a week without management duties, which makes it easier to pay costs and take some profit. But here's another option... Consolidate your business, sell off lower-profit lawns, and focus on work that brings in the best money. Do this for a few years, and you can become one of the best-paid lawn mowing guys in town without the hassle of hiring. New lawn care guys think hiring is the path to growth. "I'll hire someone and double my income." Reality? Costs eat most of the extra revenue. Managing people takes time away from mowing. Training, sick days, holidays, and bad hires. Another path: stay solo, raise prices, and focus on high-profit work. Become the highest-paid lawn guy in town instead of a stressed-out manager. But here's what both paths require... Professional online presence. Whether you're hiring or staying solo and premium-priced, you need a website that makes you look established and professional. Customers won't pay premium rates to a guy with no website. They won't trust you to manage employees if you can't manage a basic online presence. So if you're thinking about hiring or staying solo and charging premium rates... You need a professional website first. Grab our $199 package and look like the established business you're building: [Get your website for $199/year]Stuart P.S. Hiring complicates your business. Sometimes consolidating and raising prices is smarter than scaling with staff however both methods can work. |
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Build a Six-Figure Lawn Care Business in Your Spare Time. Stop trading time for money. Get one short, actionable tip delivered to your inbox every morning to help you work smarter and scale faster. Privacy Note: Join 5,000+ pros. 100% privacy, zero spam.
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