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Don’t just service your clients, partner with them

November 12, 2020

In this episode of the Green Industry Perspectives Podcast, Ty Deemer welcomes Jeffrey Scott to the show! Jeffrey is the leading authority on growth and profit maximization in the green industry. He shares how you can begin to partner with your clients instead of just servicing them while sharing his strategies for instilling an ownership mentality in your employees.

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On this episode, you’ll learn:

How to instill an ownership mentality to your team members.
Why you need to become a data scientist for you business.
A few simple ways you can begin partnering with your clients
Jeffrey’s strategies for achieving 20% net profit.

Links to love

Full Transcript:

Ty Deemer:
You are listening to The Green Industry Perspectives podcast, presented by SingleOps, a podcast created for green industry professionals looking for best practices, tactics and tips on running their tree care or landscape business. All right everyone. Welcome back to Green Industry Perspectives. I have a really exciting episode for you this week. Today we have Jeffrey Scott on the show. Jeffrey, welcome.

Jeffrey Scott:
Thank you so much.

Ty Deemer:
Yeah, absolutely. So, Jeffrey, every show or every episode of the show, we like to have our guests provide some immediate value for our audience and we ask the same question every time. And that question is what are the top three common threads you see in successful tree care or landscape businesses?

Jeffrey Scott:
Sure. Absolutely, positively all successful lawn and landscape and any green industry business has an A-plus leadership team, not just loyal but high performing. So, they align with your values, they’re high performing, you would give them a solid A, maybe there’s an A-minus in there but there’s also A-pluses. So, in general I’m going to call that an A-plus leadership team that’s transparent with each other. They can get into arguments with each other, disagree, come out friends and that are all individually accountable for clear results. So, that’s number one. Number two is the work hard, play hard culture. It is so meaningful to have a culture that really gives 100% effort, works really hard but then also takes time on a continual or ongoing basis to play hard, to bond, to have fun, to laugh, to eat together. And so, you can’t have one without the other and if you want to work hard, you’ve got to play hard. And so, a strong team of employees again with clear accountability to specific roles and metrics. That type of culture, very important. And the third I would say a little bit more generic here but the companies that are really trying to build and become a destination company, that’s the name of my third book that I wrote where you’re creating a company and a company culture that attracts, retains and develops great employees. So, that type of living, breathing culture that’s employee-focused, 100% critical to not just be successful in one year but to sustain and grow your success.

Ty Deemer:
Absolutely. Yeah, I loved your first answer of an A-plus leadership team. We had an interview for the podcast with a company in Georgia, a landscape company, North Georgia Landscape Management. And Jeremy, their owner and president communicated just how important his leadership team was to him. Ryan was actually on the call with them and you could just see how they fed off of each other and it was really clear like they were a team that could have those hard conversations, bounce things off of each other, have fun, have the hard stuff. I think you’re spot on. Having people in your corner as an owner that you can trust like that, that’s huge.

Jeffrey Scott:
Absolutely. Having them in your corner and also, building that leadership team that as a team takes ownership. Sure, the owner sets the tone. Once you start growing, the owner’s not everywhere. So, it’s the leadership team that then sets the tone and everything cascades down from there.

Ty Deemer:
Yeah, absolutely. I’m sure we’ll dive kind of more into the weeds of that later on in the show. But just for people that might not be as familiar with you, your role in the industry, I’d love for you to just provide some of your background. How did you get involved with the industry? How did you end up where you are today? What do you do today? I think that would be helpful for the audience to know.

Jeffrey Scott:
Thank you, Ty. I grew up in the industry. So, at the age of seven, I had my first paying job in the landscape industry. I earned two pennies. My parents made me save one for college by the way. So, even way back then, I was a saver. By the age of 13, I was working basically full-time after school in the industry. Throughout college, working full-time in the industry. And then I took a break because that’s a lot of years at a young age to be in the industry and it’s a tough industry. And at that point, I was like that’s enough. This is hard work. I’m going to try something else. And so, I studied engineering and I went and earned a Master’s in business. And I actually got a job in Europe, living in Europe and doing corporate consulting, really big company consulting. And then after a while, I just felt a tug to come back to the U.S., to come back to my family’s landscape business. I came back in and then a couple years later, I became the leader of the company and I grew it to the next level which was back then $10 million which in today’s dollars might be $15 or $20 million. And so, I made accomplishments there.

But I really had this tug to go back into consulting and work with entrepreneurs, work with the business owners. That’s my passion. That’s where I really get off is helping entrepreneurs be successful, achieve their dream both professionally and personally. And so, I’ve been doing that since 2007 I believe is when I incorporated. It might be 2006. I have to go back and check the records. And so, I’ve been doing that the whole time and I really help entrepreneurs do one of three things you could boil it down. Either to fix their business because they find themselves overworked, underpaid or they just hit a plateau, a growth plateau, right? A growth ceiling that they can’t get beyond. Or I help them scale their business where they’ve got certain things figured out and they’re growing but they want to grow faster and smarter and they want someone to come and help pour jet fuel on the fire. And so, I supply that jet fuel and oxygen and help them really take off. The third group are clients who are ready and want to do succession planning. They either want to pull back part-time or really get the team to run the business for them or they may actually want to exit the business. And so, the fix scale or exit or plan the exit is where I help and I do that through one-on-one consulting with the owner and their team or I do it through coaching of the owner or do it through to my peer groups. I’m sure we can touch on that later on here.

Ty Deemer:
Yeah, that’s great. Just to provide some context with the audience of your background. I love the fact that you started earning two pennies a job or two pennies a week. That’s pretty awesome. And then just your previous experience being kind of in the day-to-day is helpful.

Jeffrey Scott:
It was two pennies a week now that—you’re making me think about this. It was two pennies a week.

Ty Deemer:
Yeah, that’s awesome. Yeah, that’s incredible. But yeah. So, now that we kind of have a background for your experience, let’s go ahead and dive into some more topical questions really where some of your areas of expertise are. One thing just in our experience of talking to different owners that come on the show whether it’s they’re owning a landscape or tree care company, one thing that we hear all the time is that owners really just wish they could clone themselves. And by that, they really just want their employees whether it’s members of their leadership team or even with their crews because lots of times the owner at one point was doing what a crew member is doing now. They just wish that they could instill that ownership mentality to their employees and I know you’ve talked about this some on LinkedIn and different blog posts. But if you were talking to a landscape or tree care or side supply company owner, how would you encourage them in a working session how to begin to encourage or train someone on their team to think like them?

Jeffrey Scott:
Yeah. So, this is literally what I wrote my book about become a destination company. And so, I’m going to kind of take from a few chapters of that book. The first chapter was all about creating that vision. It might sound soft and easy. But most owners don’t do it right and they don’t do enough of it. You have to have a vision and a purpose that your employees can grab onto and get excited about and that you’re excited about and that you’re preaching really internally. Here’s where we’re going. And people will fight for something they really believe in, something bigger than themselves. And so, having a clear purpose and vision—and by the way, those are slightly different. A purpose is your mission, what you believe in that is never ending no matter how old you are. Think of missionaries, right? They’re trying to convert people to a certain belief that never goes away. The vision is a destination you’re trying to get to to build your company to. Think of Moses and the vision of the land of milk and honey. We’re going there. It’s only going to take us 40 years but we’re going to get there. And so, it’s a little bit more finite of what you’re trying to achieve. Both need to be compelling. You want to involve your team in setting the strategy. All right. So, let’s set the level of what we’re going to do this year, this week, month, year, next couple years to get there. And so, involving your employees all the way down to the front line. I don’t care how big you are. I don’t care what language barriers you have. Involve everybody in helping set the strategy and take ownership of their areas. Give everybody ownership.

So, back to your question, how do you get people to think like owners? Well, give them ownership of something that they can own and have ownership mentality around. And so, if everything you’re doing is prescriptive or if you’re a micromanager, then it’s going to be hard for people to take ownership. And so, you have to look at yourself. If your employees aren’t taking ownership, what are you doing or not doing that getting in the way? And then of course, give people the resources to do a great job. Give them the resources they need to do their job and do it well without frustration so they can be proud of what they’re doing and then they’re going to take ownership of that work and of the company. You said a working session. So, there’s four planks if you will that can start helping create this destination company culture where this ownership mentality can thrive.

Ty Deemer:
Yeah, I really like what you said about setting a vision and purpose for your company because you’re exactly right. There’s a lot of green industry companies that don’t even set that vision or that purpose or have a process of really thinking about like hey, why do we do what we do? What’s the meaning behind it? Once an owner or a leadership team decides like hey, this is what we believe in, this is why we are who we are, how would you encourage them to really communicate that to their team well? Do you have it on a sign in the break room? Or what companies have you seen do that really well? Could you provide some context there for people that are wondering how to really share that vision and mission effectively?

Jeffrey Scott:
I’m going to give you the opposite example first. I have a new client. He just bought a company I think around $2 million and he has a strong vision but he came in with it too much too quick before he really learned about his people and got them the resources they need to do their job day to day. And so, he was doing too much vision and he had to pull back and give them the resources as I spoke about a few minutes ago. But let’s assume they’ve got the resources and you’ve got the work. So, you’ve got to be willing to trust your employees with the information. You have to trust them, that they can deal with what you’re telling them, that they’re smart and they can digest it. And you’ve got to be willing to over communicate. So, you don’t tell them just once and then forget it and then think or assume well, I told them once, they must remember. I call that ESP where as the owner, you’re always thinking about it so you assume they’re always thinking about it. You have to over communicate it ad nauseam which means a lot. And just like you said, visually with posters, there’s something called the dream board which is something that a kid might make for themselves. You might think of it as kind of silly or I don’t know, however you might think about it. But I have clients that are actually building dream boards to share their vision in pictures because it’s a lot easier for people to take in pictures. They say a picture’s worth a thousand words. What it means more importantly is people can absorb pictures much more readily than they can words or numbers. Some people can’t absorb numbers at all. So, putting your vision out there pictorially, talking about it all the time, bringing it up in meetings all the time, making it a part of your awards that you might do and your meals. And so, you breathe it into life by constantly talking about it and giving it life. So, it’s like breathing. It’s an ongoing thing you have to keep doing or it’s like working out.

Ty Deemer:
Yeah, that’s great. I kind of like what you touched on too where there isn’t like one set vision that’s correct either. Some of them can be, like we had a guest on last season that she always talks about a pay for performance model. That could speak to a team more than another but then some people have like company visions and structures completely built on providing an incredible customer experience. So, I think that’s important to remember whether it’s a dream board or it’s a like actual numbers board that your employees are able to track their success through the company. I think as long as it’s public.

Jeffrey Scott:
Well, yes and no. So, yes, I agree that everybody has a different vision and a different culture, a thousand percent. But even if your vision is numbers and the reason I’m saying this is the client I just told you about with the dream board, he does complete open book management sharing all the numbers. And what he learned was they don’t understand them all. They don’t get excited by all the numbers like he does. And so, he’s taking this open book management, management by the numbers, people are going to win only if the company wins monetarily and is converting it into something that’s just more accessible and digestible and exciting all the way down in the company. So, they’re not mutually exclusive, Ty, is another way to look at it.

Ty Deemer:
Yeah, that’s a good point. Okay. I think that covers that topic. We can move into kind of the next one I had written down to discuss with you. Something you’ve mentioned before and thing and pieces of content that I’ve seen you produce is that you can’t just service your clients. You really need to learn how to partner with them to grow your business. And I’m really just interested to hear kind of what you mean by that and what are some practical ways that green industry businesses can start really partnering with their clients to grow?

Jeffrey Scott:
Would you mind if I go back and add one more thing to what we just spoke about?

Ty Deemer:
Yeah, no problem.

Jeffrey Scott:
So, I think some type of pay for performance, some type should be in all companies.

Ty Deemer:
Okay.

Jeffrey Scott:
I’m a big believer in it. For some, it’ll be in-your-face culture. For others, it will be supportive. But the more you can dial in what a win means to everybody at every level, the more successful you’re going to be whether you put token rewards or big dollar rewards. That part’s up to you.

Ty Deemer:
Yeah.

Jeffrey Scott:
I’m a big believer and I help a lot of my clients to dial it into the right metrics. The problem with pay for performance is if you get it wrong, you’re sending your people in the wrong direction.

Ty Deemer:
Yeah, that’s a great point.

Jeffrey Scott:
And it’s easier to de-motivate somebody with that than motivate. So, it’s kind of like a land landmine. You have to really avoid the landmines of demotivation to get to the golden ring of motivation where it really works.

Ty Deemer:
Yeah. There’s a lot of psychology around that too. We don’t need to dive all into that. But I couldn’t agree more with what you’re saying. Yeah. So, let’s go back to, kind of jump forward to where we were, talking about not just servicing your clients but partnering with them to grow your business. What are some practical ways that green industry businesses can not just service their clients but really partner with them to achieve growth?

Jeffrey Scott:
I have like five things for you that come to mind. The first one is you can only partner with the right kind of client. And so, make sure you’re attracting and selling the right kind of client. I’ve developed IP called Green Light Selling which is all about helping you figure out who your green light customer is and who your red light prospect is that you want to stay away from. And so, you can only have a long-term healthy partnership with the right clients. So, doing that, filtering out upfront creates the platform for this. And also, setting clear expectations upfront, what you do and what you don’t do and what the service is. So, very clear expectations upfront create a very healthy long-term partnership. So, I think those two things have to happen first. And then you can bring loyalty. And we want loyalty from our clients but we as the landscape companies, lawn and tree, etc., are we giving loyalty? And so, you have to make loyalty and true customer service not just lip service but customer service part of your culture and how you want people to live and a culture around that will help you to start partnering with your clients.

And then to actually partner with them, there should be a dedicated account person whether you’re doing install projects and there’s a point person or it’s maintenance and they know who they can call. But you want to keep it personal even if personal is I know the person who answers the phone or I have the person who follows up with me in person. And so, unless you’re just doing massive amounts of commodity service, it’ll come down to that personal relationship. So, we’ve talked about positioning with the company and then clear sales process and then the culture. And then it comes down to that personal relationship where the actual partnership is made. And then the fifth thing that comes to mind is—this might sound funny—but sell them stuff. Sell them solutions. Sell them enhancements. A partnership means meeting their needs. Generally people’s needs require them buying something to serve that need. A little sidebar here, something kind of interesting. I didn’t know this but I learned from a politician that whenever a law is made, it needs money and budget behind it. Every law or everything that a legislature or government decides needs money or a budget. I never kind of put those two together but without the budget, you can make new laws but there’s no way to either enforce it or enact it. So, money is critical to governance and money I think is critical to servicing and partnering with your clients. To give them what they want, you’ve got to provide them the solutions. Often that means selling them those solutions.

Ty Deemer:
Yeah, that makes complete sense. I want to go a level deeper there, kind of break out the two subjects I guess you just dove into. The pre-sale, defining what services you offer. There’s a lot of companies out there that will pretty much say on their website unless it’s fencing or decking, we pretty much do it all and you’re talking about something in the complete opposite direction there, really honing into what types of services you’re offering, kind of defining your bread and butter services. I’d love for you to speak just a little bit deeper on why that’s so important and kind of the nightmares you can avoid by doing that. Because I couldn’t agree more with you.

Jeffrey Scott:
So, defining the services, defining the clients, defining the geography. You should know what is a green light, what works for you how you can make them happy and they’re happy to pay you to do that versus the clients you cannot make happy or will frustrate your own organization to try. And so, the only way that all things to all people might make sense is if let’s say you’re in a rural community and there’s only 100 clients in your town and boy, you better sell them everything. I’m exaggerating. But okay, I’ve seen that work out of necessity. It has to if the owner wants to grow their business. But if you’re trying to scale in any area of the country that has a lot of people, you’re not going to make everybody happy. Your systems simply won’t work for selling two-hour jobs versus two-week jobs versus two-month jobs. A company can’t really succeed selling brand new clients all those different things. Now you might sell existing clients two-hour jobs. That’s called customer service. But you can’t build a successful, scalable operation that is literally going to succeed in all those areas or all the geographies. So, coming back to your question, you want me to give you examples of failure?

Ty Deemer:
Well, yeah. So, what I was thinking might be helpful here is we can play a hypothetical or if you have a like a real example of it, we can go there too. But imagine my name’s Greg and I own a full-service landscape company and I’m talking to you and you just gave me your spiel on specializing your services. And I go well, Jeffrey, we’re currently offering everything but decking and fencing. How would you encourage or how would you coach someone through what to decide to offer? What are some of the things you would kind of put them into? What should they be thinking through when deciding what to specialize in?

Jeffrey Scott:
Well, I’m going to give you the process I would work with this person to figure it out. I would look at their numbers. I would look at where they’re effective what they’re selling, where they’re ineffective, where they’re making good gross profit, where they’re making bad or low gross profit, where they see growth, where there’s turnover, no growth. So, I would analyze through the numbers. And from that, the numbers leave a trail, right? And I follow that trail, look at the data and then I come back to them and say I know you’re trying to do this as a strategy. But look, you’re making money here and here and you’re losing money here and you’re making some money but you’re totally inefficient in your sales process over here. And so, generally, it’ll come down to what areas should we really focus on scaling—remember pouring jet fuel on it—wat areas need to be fixed and tweaked in order to grow and what areas should we just stop doing because it’s become a distraction to the company? And sometimes those areas have to do with size of job or client type but it could also be the service. You think you’re making money in hardscaping but look at these numbers.

I’ll give you a great example. So, I’m working with a client. His name is Dustin. If he’s listening, he’ll know I’m talking about him. And he does—it’s very basic, right?—there’s maintenance and he does really beautiful projects. And when we got the numbers, I showed him. I said Dustin, you are killing it in maintenance. I mean better than I’ve almost ever seen anybody. And I said your installs are okay. They’re not great. We can fix it. We can make them better. But this maintenance, we should double, triple, quadruple. And he came to me as a guy who hates maintenance, wanted nothing to do with it and saw it as eh, it’s just part of the company. And he’s a smart guy. We looked to the numbers and after a short time of working together, he’s a believer. He’s like wow, you’re right. I want to say he must have seen it but maybe he didn’t. So, we looked at the numbers together and the story was super clear. And so, now his whole strategy has changed. And so, the same products but a whole different strategy on how he’s going after them.

Ty Deemer:
Yeah. We’re about to touch on numbers. But before we do that, I do want to talk about one other subset of the conversation we just had. And it was what you touched on, after you build the loyalty with your customer, after they trust you, they look at you as an expert for their property, it’s where you talked about enhancement services and it’s selling them things. And I love that topic because we’ve heard it phrased as just being an advocate for your client. No matter what space you’re in whether it’s tree care or landscape, there are so many opportunities to upsell work strictly because you are advocating for your customer’s property. And once you’ve built that trust, it’s really something that should be a non-negotiable. You should be doing it. It’s easiest for me to explain it from the tree care perspective. If your team has a plant health care operation, like going onto the property yearly and just being like hey, I noticed these different things on your property. Would love to just schedule you into a regular plant healthcare program just to keep everything alive and well. Once that relationship is built, that should be a non-negotiable for your business.

Jeffrey Scott:
So, those are recurring services, Ty. Think about it even more starkly where you’re selling them, let’s take mowing but you’re probably not killing it on mowing. And so, you need clients that are going to spend another 50% of their contract with you on upgrades, enhancements. And those upgrades and enhancements you can sell at a much, much higher profit margin and I’m going to say higher than most people actually know or think. When I’m working with clients, they think well, they can get to here. I’m like no, no, no. You can get to here. And mathematically when you combine that back with the mowing, all of a sudden, you’ve got something that eh, made some money to well, this thing is making money now. Now we really want to grow it.

Ty Deemer:
Yeah, that’s a good point. It’s not just with the recurring work. It’s about like kind of the bigger projects as well. Well, that’s a great segue into the next topic especially since when you were talking about how to drive those decisions about where to specialize or what regions to go into and what size jobs to go and do, you really have to go back to the numbers. You got to go back to the data. And you’ve mentioned it as if you’re going to be an owner, you better become pretty much a data scientist. You’ve got to know really the numbers that run and mean a lot for your business. So, I would love for you to go into just some of the things or the numbers that business owners can track to really make sure that they are benchmarking for profit improvement.

Jeffrey Scott:
Yeah, numbers are so key. And by the way, this is something I wished I had learned a long time ago. And even though, I have an MBA, right? I studied this stuff. And even then it wasn’t enough. And so, it’s one of the things I really wished I had gotten even better at way long time ago. And then when I went into consulting and again, I had a lot of experience by then, but even then I decided for myself I’m going to get even better and better and better at the numbers. And so, I have personally been on a lifelong journey of learning about numbers and teaching numbers. So, you’re never too smart to learn something new about numbers even if you’re a finance major which it’s funny. I’m seeing more and more landscape business owners that are finance majors. I don’t know about you, Ty. But that it seems to pop up more and more these days. So, you may have that major but do you know really which metrics to track. So, I’m going to answer this from a couple angles here. First off, you have to be conversant with numbers. You got to be comfortable reading them, discussing them with your team. You have to be comfortable with all the terms which sounds kind of simplistic but it’s a great place to start. You have to be comfortable with accrual based accounting which most people aren’t because most people run their taxes in cash. Did you know in Canada by law, your taxes are done in accrual-based accounting?

Ty Deemer:
I did not know that.

Jeffrey Scott:
And that in a way is a big advantage to Canadian business owners because to run a successful business, you’ve got to learn accrual-based accounting. So, I hate to say it to you Americans listening but those Canadians have a leg up. So, you’ve got to learn accrual-based accounting. You’ve got a useful chart of accounts. If your chart of accounts have anything in alphabetical order, they’re probably not set up correctly. And I have a few clients where I look at it and their overhead’s alphabetical in a long list. I’m like are you kidding? That right away is a sign of a problem. So, those are some fundamentals. The biggest metrics, the most important metrics are divisional metrics. So, gross profit by division or by service. That’s the simplest place to go to. A lot of companies have it revenue by service but no expenses or profit numbers by service. So, divisional accounting, I can have such a big impact on a company. You give me any company. Give me Mariani’s company and you give me their divisional and by service accounting and I’ll go in and I can show any company where and how to change their mix of services and their pricing and their incentives based on the divisional accounting. So, that is such an important one. So, that’s really the most important one.

Other benchmarks to look at, well, it really depends on the type of service. I’ll pick one and I’ll tell you just for an example because we don’t have time to go through everything here. But like if you take irrigation service which by the way can be insanely profitable when you scale it correctly. And irrigation service the two metrics are revenue per hour that each person is producing. So, at the end of the day, what was the revenue per hour? That tells you how much they upsold and how efficient they were on the jobs. By the way, we’re assuming that you’re not selling your irrigation work hourly because that sort of defeats the purpose and it’s hard to make money. So, revenue per hour and then revenue per week. So, the person was efficient in the given day but did that crew create enough throughput that week to hit the budget goals we need to hit for the department for the week, for the month, for the year, right? So, there’s like an efficiency metric and then a weekly throughput metric. So, when you can get down to the daily and weekly metrics of each of your divisions and what they need to hit, that’s going to make it so much easier to manage your divisions and then manage your company.

Ty Deemer:
Absolutely. In this kind of note I have in here, you mentioned benchmarking and I think benchmarking is always an interesting discussion to have but especially as we’re in Q4, going into 2021 and a lot of people are going to be forecasting for next year, making 2021 plans. What type of strategies do you encourage business owners to make when it comes to benchmarking?

Jeffrey Scott:
Yeah, it’s something I am doing all the time. I benchmark all my coaching and consulting clients against best practice benchmarks, best in class. In my peer groups, we benchmark numbers against each other. So, this is something you should always be doing really on a quarterly basis and then on an annual basis to get a sense. There’s really three or four benchmarks to think about. One is internal, how did they do versus last year. You should always be doing that. Number two, setting the budget. All right, what kind of budget do we need to have and then how am I doing versus my budget? And then number three is how am I doing versus best in class, outside benchmarks? And then you can look at industry-wide benchmarks. They are misleading, by the way, industry-wide because it’s sort of an average and averages are meaningless. The average family has two and one-third kids. What does that mean to you and me? My hope is there’s not a third of a kid out there. So, you want to be careful the averages and really have best in class and make sure the best in class are applicable to your business.

Ty Deemer:
Great. Yeah, that’s helpful. All right. Let’s move onto the next topic. This will be the last big one we discuss today. You talk a lot about, coincides with knowing your numbers, achieving 20% net profit. Let’s go into what strategy is required to achieve 20% net profit. We’ve talked a lot about strategy overall. We’ve talked about numbers. I’d argue achieving that is probably going to be one of the most important things. So, what is the strategy to achieve that?

Jeffrey Scott:
That’s a big question, Ty. So, I’m just going to give you a few things here because that could be an all-day workshop.

Ty Deemer:
Yeah. We’ll have you back on in a few weeks and we can just dive into that.

Jeffrey Scott:
So, first off, you have to believe it’s possible. That by far is the biggest obstacle slash solution. I read a lot of finance books as I just told you. I’m a constant student and I’m reading one book written by an accountant. Uh-oh, there’s a warning sign right there. And it’s a good book. But he claims 15% is all you should aim for. Where does this guy come off writing a book where all companies in the world should fall under that umbrella? That’s just like shocking. That’s almost, that’s a crime basically for someone to make such a generalization. So, you have to believe it. Stop listening to people that write stuff like that in their books or people you’ve met that are quote unquote successful on the street. You have to believe it. And then once you believe it, you’re going to find the ways to get there. I started talking about the most important benchmark is the divisionals. And so, if you were a client of mine, I would dive in, tear apart your numbers and show you how to get there.

But as a general answer, you need to have that A team. You’re not going to get it with a B team or C team. You’re just not. And you’re going to burn out trying to get there. And so, you need a great team with the right people in the right places. You need to have a good system set up. A good software is going to help you. You can get there without a software but you’re only going to grow so big and you’re going to burn out. So, a good software will help you get there. I’ll give you one silver bullet here since we don’t have a lot of time and you want some value upfront. So, make sure that your sales people and the people doing the work, if there’s any incentives, that those incentives are aimed at helping you achieve that 20%. If those incentives are aimed too low or not on the bottom line at all, then chances are you won’t get there.

Ty Deemer:
Yeah, that’s great stuff. Okay. I always like to finish with this question with the guests on our show just to provide really just—we got context at the beginning about where you’ve been but I love kind of finishing it off with where you’re going. So, love to ask kind of what comes next for you, Jeffrey and what are you most excited about whether it’s the rest of 2020, going into 2021? What are you excited about?

Jeffrey Scott:
Well, funny we’re talking about numbers here. I am putting on a financial master class that I will be rolling out shortly. It will be virtual. It was going to be live. It will be virtual. First week in January. So, I’m really excited about that to share everything I’ve been studying for years here. I’m excited about, I’ve been taking my owners and people I coach down here in New Orleans to teach them about life, the good life as well as great business I’m just excited about continuing to teach entrepreneurs how to be successful or facilitate them to be successful in their life and not just in the business. That really excites me. Those are two things that really excite me.

Ty Deemer:
Okay. Awesome. Well, Jeffrey, I really appreciate you taking the time to be on the show today. With all the things that you’re doing, all the companies that you’re working with, I would love to give you the chance to let any of the listeners know if they enjoyed what you had to say, found it insightful, interested about some of the things you’re excited about, just for you to provide a way to let them know how they could get in touch with you. We’ll include a lot of the links to your website and social media and different blog posts you put out in the show notes. But would love for you to kind of give them your little pitch about working with you.

Jeffrey Scott:
Well, as I said before, Ty, thank you by the way. You’re very gracious for letting me say a bit more. As I said earlier, if you need help fixing your business or scaling your business or working on a succession plan and or exit strategy for your business, I’m the person to speak with. If you’re looking for sort of transforming the business through consulting or becoming a better leader entrepreneur through my coaching to you or really joining my community through my peer groups, I run the largest peer group network in the landscape industry and if you want to become part of a successful community. Somebody pulled me aside a couple weeks ago. Frank Mariani said, I had him speak at my event. He runs a, what is it? $50-$60 plus million dollar business? I think it’s more with his other businesses. He said Jeff, the people that come to your events are smart. These are not like the typical events I go to. You attract some smart people and that was such a compliment. I attract people that are ambitious. They may be smart and not know what to do but they figure it out when they’re working with me in my community. And so, I don’t want anyone to feel embarrassed. You just have to come with that achievement mindset and wanting to learn and I can help you in any of those ways. So, I put out a weekly newsletter. It’s free. You can sign up for it at JeffreyScott.biz. I put out every other week a podcast as well, The Ultimate Landscape CEO. You can hear me interview people like Frank and a lot of other people. So, those are a couple free resources to really help you up your game and start the journey.

Ty Deemer:
Awesome. Well, Jeffrey, again, I can’t thank you enough for spending the last 45 minutes with us. Really enjoyed our conversation. I think we were able to break down a few just really practical ways that some presidents, owners, leadership teams can start implementing. So, excited about that. And again, for any of the listeners out there, check the show notes. There will be links to some of the things Jeffrey just mentioned. But Jeffrey, thanks again for your time.

Jeffrey Scott:
Ty, thank you so much.

Conclusion:
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