Business By Numbers
In this episode of the Green Industry Perspectives Podcast, Ty Deemer welcomes Jeffrey Scott, Green Industry Business Consultant.
effrey Scott runs the largest peer group in the landscape industry. His experience as both a business owner and the vast amount of time he’s spent working with other successful landscape companies has helped him uncover the best methods to grow your business. Jeffrey also holds events around the country where he brings together some of the best minds in landscaping. His next event is the Summer Growth Summit, which he talks more about in the episode.
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IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN:
- The importance of having a growth mindset.
- Which metrics are best to analyze growth.
- The definition of “throughput.”
- Why being personable can be just as important as being profitable.
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, in running their tree care or landscape business.
All right, everyone, welcome back to Green Industry Perspectives. We have a great episode for you. A guest who’s been on the show before but back and better than ever, ready to talk about some really interesting topics today. We have Jeffrey Scott on the show, Jeffrey, welcome.
Jeffrey Scott:
Thank you so much, glad to be here.
Ty Deemer:
Absolutely, so Jeffrey, you know the drill. We like to start off every episode with the same question, and even though you’ve already answered it before, we know that you work with a ton of different green industry businesses. Lawn care, tree care, landscape companies, and you definitely have probably a few other things that you can include, but we always ask, what are the top three things or common threads that you see in successful green industry businesses?
Jeffrey Scott:
I’m going to give you four, so you get a bonus.
Ty Deemer:
We love the bonus, for sure.
Jeffrey Scott:
Honestly, I didn’t look back at my notes so I’m giving you most contemporary thinking. Number one is a growth mindset, and it means two things, Ty. It means individually, personally, somebody who’s always open to new ideas. I’ve seen this where some of my most profitable clients, large companies, the owner is happy in a network with anybody of any size to learn to something. So that’s a growth mindset personally as a professional. Then the company has to really take a growth mindset of, that growth is good because it supplies opportunities to its employees. So those two things combined are absolutely critical, that’s number one.
Number two, a leadership team that’s really empowered to operate at the highest level, and where the owner brings in leaders better than him or herself. Then really empowers that team with the autonomy and the knowledge of information, budgets, et cetera. So that empowered leadership team is… it creates a platform to grow the company.
Number three, and I had to add this in, the leader is a nice person. I have seen this on the biggest most successful companies. I meet a lot of not nice people, but they’re not all running large companies, but on the really successful companies, there’s that book, Nice Guys Finish Last by Leo Durocher. It’s an old book, you probably haven’t heard of it, it’s a baseball book. Nice guys finish first in the landscape industry, and so that’s number three.
Number four is, managing by the numbers, absolutely critical but also, motivate with a larger purpose. It can’t… you as an owner may be motivated by money but that’s not how you’re going to motivate your team. So motivating them with a larger purpose and empathetic leadership, but an exciting purpose has to be married with the managing by numbers. So in total, I probably gave you five things.
Ty Deemer:
Yeah, for sure. That’s a great start to the show, we love a growth mindset at SingleOps, that’s one of our core values and something we talk through regularly. You really are so true, it’s really being open to those new ideas and recognizing that that’s where the innovation and the growth in your business is going to come from. We as humans typically don’t like change, but a growth mindset embraces it for the good.
Love the fourth topic, because that’s what we’re going to be diving into today with a lot of the numbers in the business. The last episode we focused more on the motivational side, what it looks like to have a mission and a vision for your company, but before we dive into the numbers, I’d love for you to share with the audience, in case they weren’t tuned into your last episode, your background. Talk to us about your career from when you started at seven years old then to how you’ve transitioned to become more of a leader and consulting coach in the landscape space.
Jeffrey Scott:
Ty, I always say something new, so I don’t do repeats. So whoever’s listening is going to hear a slightly different angle or at least a different way that I’m talking about it.
I’ve been in this industry, I just did the math, Ty, it’s almost embarrassing. I can’t believe it, but 50 years, if you take me from the age of seven when I got paid two pennies to work for my dad in our house and the business was run, family business near the house. So that’s a long time, man, that’s almost scary to think about it. I’m still learning, I have a growth mindset, I am still studying, learning, but I’ve been at that long grew up in the business, every day after school working in the business, summers, full-time.
Then I took a break, I took probably a seven year break from the industry. I studied chemical engineering and I moved to Europe, actually, where I earned my MBA and did consulting. So I’m really a global traveler, if you will, but then I came back and came back into the industry and ran my family’s business and grew it up to that next level. Then decided I really enjoyed the consulting the most, which I did in Europe and I’ve been focused. My wife just reminded me, it’s been 14 years now with this new, this next leg of my life venture where I’m now coaching and consulting.
So I really try to bring, just like I’ve done with myself by traveling the world and exposing myself to the big picture and then bringing it back down the nuts and bolts, and try to connect it too. I try to do that for my clients and bring that to the industry.
Ty Deemer:
Yeah, absolutely. The growth mindset part for you is definitely true. We’ve been connected on LinkedIn for a while and seeing all the different content you and your team regularly put out is really impressive. You can just tell that you’re always looking through it. Talk to the audience about the typical clients you work with. What type of landscape companies do you work with? What’s your ideal client to work with or better yet, maybe what clients get you most excited?
Jeffrey Scott:
Yeah, so growth mindset. So, is there a demographic know? Is there a… well, there is, but from by in large, know. It’s more of a psychographic. So I’m interested more in the psychology of the owner than the size or shape or geography of the owner. That’s the difference between those two terms. So I will work with a company to help them fix their business or scale their business or exit their business. So with exit, I’m also helping companies buy other companies, and so really, anybody with a growth mindset. Hey, I want to get my business to the next level, I need help, I’m willing to grow myself in that process. That’s what gets me excited.
Ty Deemer:
Yeah, for sure, that’s great. So let’s talk numbers, that’s what our goal is for this episode. In previous conversations that you and I have had on this podcast and just on what you produce, you’re a big believer in that business owners and leadership of landscape companies need to be like data scientists behind their numbers, it’s crucial to what they do. I think it’ll be important to set that context before we give them some examples of metrics they can track. So, what is your thought process on why that’s the case? Why are numbers so important to these businesses?
Jeffrey Scott:
Well, the numbers tell you the results. The IRS wants you to make money so they can take a chunk of it, let’s just start there. A lot of people are like, oh, I’m trying to reduce my profits so I pay less taxes. Sure, as long as you’re not reducing your profits only for that reason. Really, ironically, I want you pay more taxes all things being equal, by making more money. I want you to be able to use that money as a tool to freedom, whether it’s to help empower your team, give back to them or give back to the community or pay for your own retirement or set up your business so you can work part-time, it’s really just a tool.
So it’s the result, and we know how to measure profit, but if you don’t measure, all the steps along the way, the inputs and… yeah, if you’re not measuring all the things that add up to the end of the day getting you that profit, you won’t get that profit. You can’t just measure at the end of the year or next year or wait two or three months to get real data. You’ve got to be measuring it as you go and analyzing it as you go.
As some people know, I like to take my car on the race track. I told a friend a couple days ago, “Yeah, I’m going to the track,” she thought I meant the horse track. I took a client there last weekend and two days on the track and your body fills up with adrenaline. It literally took me all of the third day to just get that chemical out of my system. My friend is like, “What, you go to the horse race track and you need a day to decompress?” I’m like, “No, I’m going to the car race track.”
So when you’re driving, you’re always things about your inputs. Your result might be, win the race or a faster lap time, but you’re constantly driving and thinking about the inputs. The steering you give, the brakes you give, the oil pressure, the temperature gage, how hot are the tires? These are all the different inputs that create a successful results, and that’s… and you have to be a mechanic or we call it data scientist, but when you’re the best car drivers are both good car drivers and they know their car really well. They’re a bit of a scientist or a geek or a mechanic on their own car.
So you’ve got to be able to analyze and geek over the numbers and understand what’s happening along the way in order to get that result. You can’t just manage from the field. I mean, you may have started that way, but it certainly won’t end… it won’t end well if that’s how you’re… if you haven’t set up the systems to manage by the numbers along the way.
Ty Deemer:
Yeah, that reminds me of the Ford versus Ferrari movie, the Christian Bale character actually knows the car. He’s a great driver but he knows it and he built it, pretty much. So he knows how to get maximum output of it, that’s cool.
So let’s talk about the driver or the mechanic and the numbers they’re looking at in a landscape business. I think, for those that are listening, we have a little bit of a cheat sheet, we have some numbers or some metrics we’re planning on talking through. We’re just going to go down the list and we’ll talk about them, then maybe define them for the audience, Jeffrey. Then really talk to maybe some examples that you’ve seen some of your clients use these numbers really well.
The first one we have is billable hours. What are billable hours to a landscape business? Then, how can they be used to work back towards profit?
Jeffrey Scott:
Yeah, so when you say cheat sheet, you meant the sheet that I wrote out, right?
Ty Deemer:
Yeah, correct.
Jeffrey Scott:
Ty, I wasn’t sure if you had your own cheat sheet there. I was curious about that.
Ty Deemer:
Yeah, I wouldn’t leave you hanging like that.
Jeffrey Scott:
I wanted to see what you had, but okay, we’re going with my cheat sheet. So billable hours really is the fundamental. No matter what you’re doing, even if you’re design build, and I’ve had this debate, and we have it right here, but even if you’re in design build, you’re selling hours. Why is that? Because even if you’re in design build and you’re material heavy, you’re conveyor belt, your machine is based on crews doing the work. Those crews on your schedule, you have limited crews but you have to keep that schedule full and keep them busy in order to make money at the end of the day. So they’re billable hours, again, whether you’re maintenance or you’re design build, that’s the key driver to profitability, and it’s not really well understood.
I think maybe we spoke about it off camera here or off microphone, but I’m running an event at the end of August, you guys will be there, the Summer Growth Summit. It’s at LanDesign, which is one of my coaching clients in St. Louis. These guys are awesome, it’s some of my best clients, Ty. I’m just like, oh my god, look what these guys are doing. I’m in there like a mechanic, so to speak. Help, oh, let’s change this, let’s change that, let’s change that. Then boom, off to the races, and these guys are blowing up. They have done that, and George has done that by tracking one number, billable hours. The concept is that you make money by selling enough work at a high enough price that you can pay for not only all your labor and materials and subs, but all your overhead and profit.
So if you think about, well, ultimately I only have 1,000 hours of work, of labor hours to get my work done this year. I pick 1,000, it could be 10,000 or 50,000, but if it’s 1,000 hours for the year, you have to recover all your overhead and your profit on those 1,000 hours. When you come to terms with that and you realize, oh, if I hit my billable hours, almost regardless of any of the other hours or any of the other metrics that we’ll talk about, if I hit that one metric, that’s my… if I had to only choose one metric and I chose that one, that’s my best shot of ending the year profitable, making money at the end of the year by knowing that every month I’ve billed through enough hours per my budget and every week I’ve hit my weekly number, and then really, down to every day, I’m on track. It’s key because if you ever get off track you’ll know it because you’re measuring it, and if you’re measuring it on let’s say even a daily basis, daily, weekly, then once you’re off track, you can very quickly steer and get back on track before the week ends or before the month ends. [crosstalk 00:15:28]-
Ty Deemer:
So does bill… go ahead.
Jeffrey Scott:
No, I’m done, go ahead.
Ty Deemer:
All right, does billable hours… to me it seems like you’re saying that it provides a good set of guardrails for you, in terms of how you’re tracking for your business. I guess I’m curious, with people like George, do they check in on it daily or is more of a weekly thing or every other day? What’s your belief there, your suggestion?
Jeffrey Scott:
Ty, will you be there at the summit?
Ty Deemer:
I think I will, yeah, or I’m going to be back and forth.
Jeffrey Scott:
You’re going to find out then. So first off, it’s a way of life for them. So just like when you grew up as a kid and your mom was always like, “Wash behind your ears,” and whatever she would say, whatever those little mantras were that she would tell you over and over and over again. For them it’s a mantra that’s talked about all the time. So they’re looking at their numbers all the time, and so it’s even in some ways more frequent than daily, but certainly they’re looking at it and it rolls up. So that’s the key here, is this number can roll up. You can look at it throughout the day but I mean, you’re not going to be looking at your data throughout the day, but you can talk about it and focus on it throughout the day. You can look at results at the day, end of the week, end of the month, and that number rolls up.
You called it a guardrail, it’s really like the core assumption. Think about it as like a backbone for your body. It’s the core thing. Your body needs other things to live, but everything’s built on that backbone or the bone structure. When you understand your billable hours and what your assumption is and your goal is, everything else gets built on that.
Ty Deemer:
For sure, yeah, and we’ll make sure to link into the show notes some followup things that the audience can go into and if they’re curious about billable hours or maybe even just understanding it a little bit more. We’ll link to those, but I want to continue the conversation.
Jeffrey Scott:
Maybe link to it, Ty, on how you guys go about it with your software, because that… [crosstalk 00:17:35] there.
Ty Deemer:
Exactly, yeah. It’s a great metric to track. Then transitioning to what we have down on our list next is efficiency. How do the clients you work track their efficiency? Where do you see… I think I know the direction you’ll go with it, but talk to the audience, if they aren’t tracking efficiency currently, why they should be and what the benefits to it are.
Jeffrey Scott:
You know where I’m going, Ty? Well, if I knew what you think you know, then I would try to trick you here, but I have no clue what you’re actually thinking there. So let me just tell you what I’m thinking.
Efficiency, let’s define it. Efficiency for me, you could also call it job costing or labor tracking, it’s really, we budgeted for this many hours, and how many hours did it take to do the work? Now, there’s a lot of nuances with efficiency but I don’t want to get too much lost in the weeds here, but let’s say 100% efficiency is, you’re doing your jobs per budget. So you want efficiency, you want to be 100% efficient or better. So you have billable hours, we’ve got to do, I said 1,000, let’s call it 12,000 billable hours so we have to do 1,000 a month. Imagine you lived on the equator where every month had the same number of billable hours.
So 12,000 hours, 1,000 a month, yep, we’re on track. Let’s say, hey, we’re on track, we’re doing it, but how’s our efficiency? Are we doing it with super efficiency or lack of efficiency? Chances are, if we’re doing it with extra efficiency, then we’re actually going to increase the number of billable hours, so it tells you. If the opposite, if you’re being really inefficient, chances are you’re actually going to have trouble ahead in your billable hours. So if you can hit your billable hours and but also hit your efficiencies or do better, chances are you’re going to beat your billable hours. By doing so, that’s when you’re going to make very high profit. So the two are hand in hand.
Let me tell you why it happened in this order, Ty. Let’s say you’re running an efficient operation but you’re only working three days a week. Just an extreme example. Now, we’re only working three days a week, we’re very efficient but the dirty secret is we’re not pushing through enough billable hours to recover our overhead and we’re not going to make money. So you can be highly efficient and still not make money.
Ty Deemer:
Yep, exactly. I think the cool or the interesting part about tracking efficiencies is it’s there’s so many… talking about growth mindset especially, when you look at job profitability and understanding how to really make sure you’re making money on a job. That’s where you’re able to push, push your business in so many cool ways. Businesses that aren’t tracking it don’t even realize what they’re missing out on when they aren’t.
Jeffrey Scott:
Yeah, so I’m… oh.
Ty Deemer:
Go ahead.
Jeffrey Scott:
Go ahead. So, another thing about efficiency is like I said, we could get into the weeds here. I mean, these are important weeds, but I don’t want to get too far, I feel. The question is, do you estimate your travel in as part of job time? What’s billable versus non-billable, as opposed to… yeah, so what is billable versus non-billable? It’s always better, I believe, if you estimate as much of the time as possible into the job. That way, efficiency, the more you do that, the more leverage you get and more insight you get into your operations with that efficiency number.
Ty Deemer:
Yeah, I think just too, it reminds me of, I have a good friend who works in the construction industry. These big civil engineering firms, that’s what their whole bread and butter is. They bid a job to a municipality, they keep reports all throughout the job so they better understand how to bid it the next time, that’s where a lot of the value is as well, and that’s what you were touching on.
Let’s continue down the train of just interesting numbers that these businesses-
Jeffrey Scott:
So if I may, Ty?
Ty Deemer:
Yeah.
Jeffrey Scott:
With that big, big construction company, they may care less about billable hours the way their company’s set up with temporary labors and temporary project managers coming in to do work. Efficiency for them might be the number one driver. That is now how I would operate in the landscape world, but that might be how a really big engineering company that has a lot of temporary labor and a lot of flexibility to how they operate. For them, those two might be flipped.
Ty Deemer:
Yeah, that’s fair. So continuing the conversation throughput, let’s… I think that might be an interesting one to define for the audience. Tell me what your view is with throughput and why it’s important for businesses to track.
Jeffrey Scott:
So in my cheat sheet here, I put throughput as number three. Throughput has a couple variations of definitions. So throughput could be as simple as revenue per hour, which, well I’ll get to it. I was going to explain something but I’ll come back in a second. So it could be revenue per hour or it could be something that is similar to gross profit per hour. One definition of throughput is, revenue minus the cost of materials and subs, divided by the hours. So revenue minus the cost of materials, minus the cost of subs, is almost like gross profit except it leaves the cost of labor in. It does it on purpose because it’s a leverage at how well you’re leveraging your labor. So that’s a second definition of throughput. Some people just measure gross profit per man hour, so that’s a third, but I don’t, but you easily could.
So throughput really tells you how much additional profit you’re attaching to each man hour or woman hour, person hour. So billable hours by in large, going back to the first metric, if you’re pushing through enough billable hours, all things being equal, you’re going to hit your budget and hit your profit goals. If you can elevate the throughput either through what you’re selling or how you’re producing, and it can be elevated just through selling different things, then you can actually attach even more profit to each man hour and have an even better chance of beating your profit goals and having a winning year. So-
Ty Deemer:
Yeah, so.
Jeffrey Scott:
Go ahead.
Ty Deemer:
I just want to click in on something you just said. You mentioned that you can improve throughput by what you offer or offering additional services. What do you mean by that, specifically?
Jeffrey Scott:
You can sell… well, I’ll give you some extremes. Let’s say what you were selling was all labor and it comes with a certain revenue per man hour and it’s not a lot. Let’s call that mowing. Then you could sell other things to the clients, a flowerbed that is 50% materials or whatever, a nice chunk of materials and labor. So the revenue per man hour of that work will be a lot higher and the throughput, which is like I said, a variation, will also be a lot higher. So you’re attaching more, so because you’re marking up those materials, you’re attaching more profit to each man hour that you’re selling.
Ty Deemer:
Got it, yeah, that’s a helpful explanation because I think no matter what space you’re in, there’s always an opportunity to offer enhancements and cross sell/upsell. We see it in the tree care space, that the PHC side of things. That’s one way people are able to do, plant healthcare. Then I mean obviously you gave the example of a lawn or a lawn care company offering flower bed services. That’s helpful explanation.
Jeffrey Scott:
So Ty, it’s not only the enhancements, which is, I mean that’s a great way to do it, but it’s also just what the sales people are selling in general and changing up the mix from less profitable types of work to more profitable types.
I’ll give you a design build example. Let’s say you do a lot of hardscaping. You do flat work and you do walls. You may find that you can be a lot more effective on the flat work and realize a lot higher throughput, gross profit per man hour on that work than you can on the walls. So if the salesperson starts selling more flatwork versus more walls, all of a sudden the crew’s going to be more productive, the throughput number’s going to go up, you’re going to make more money. So same crew, same number of billable hours, but the ability to squeeze out more profit let’s say, per man hour.
Ty Deemer:
Great, yeah.
Jeffrey Scott:
That’s just a simple definition. We could take any company and dissect it by its throughput or revenue per hour and it would be eye opening.
Ty Deemer:
For sure, and then just continuing down our list. I think this one I’m interested to hear your explanation of it and why it’s an important metric to track, is just property or non-billable time. So again, let’s define it and talk about why it’s valuable to understand.
Jeffrey Scott:
So the first three we just talked about, I would say are, make up the golden triangle, if you will. Those top three are it, but hey, if you want to go crazy and depending on how your historical metrics are that you’re tracking, you might also track non-property time. How much time do my crew spend not on the property, because you’re only making money when you’re on the property. We’re in the business of selling hours, and you’re only making money when your crew gets to the job site. That’s the only time your clients are going to be happy is when they see your crews on the job site.
So for multiple reasons, client reasons and budget reasons, you’d almost like your crew to live on the property and have no non-property time. Wouldn’t that be interesting? That’s how it is on some really big jobs. Drive to the job, in some states you only start paying when they get to the job. So in some niches, that is how it is, but in many it’s not. So some people will measure that and make sure that they’re maintaining a certain metric of property time.
Another way to look at that is billable versus non-billable. Again, it depends on what we count as billable time. Did we count travel time in that or not? Some will measure non-billable time even separate from property and travel and set up. They might measure meetings and other types of non-billable time. So those are two types of related metrics that some companies will use to just maximize efficiency. I don’t think it’s as important as the first three but for some companies listening, it’s already part of their DNA secret sauce.
So, and you need to make an assumption on non-billable time because you have an assumption on billable hours. So those two are related when you’re building your budget. So for that sense, the non-billable time one is important because it’s the converse of when I’m building out my assumptions for how many billable hours my crews will produce in a day, week, month, year. You basically have to figure the non-billable time out.
Ty Deemer:
Yeah, for sure. A few followup questions there. When we talk about property time, obviously tech solutions have made it easier to track when you’re on a property accurately, but how do you see different companies track property time in general?
Jeffrey Scott:
Well, they’d only do it by tracking when people clock in and out of properties. So either clocking in and out or maybe it’s automated through GPS. Is that what you’re asking me, or are you asking for-
Ty Deemer:
Yeah, sort of. I think that’s part, there’s definitely a need in the tech space for those solutions. We see GPS solutions pop up, like SingleOps offers a similar functionality and it provides a safeguard to make sure you’re providing accurate numbers there, instead of… I guess there’s a certain point of transparency with the client that it is tracked honestly, but it also holds your crews accountable. I’m curious with that aspect of it. How do you see if companies don’t have one of those solutions in place? How do you know your numbers are accurate there, I guess, is my question.
Jeffrey Scott:
Well listen, I mean if crews are stopping for lunch too long or driving out of the way, that’s important. It’s the billable hours and the efficiency and the throughput really are your most important unless you have a setup where your estimated hours are inaccurate, and somebody can get the job done and still drive out of their way to lord knows, do what with their time.
So there are situations, I think it’s more situational where that’s an issue. GPS helps with quite a bit, but or and, if your estimates are just inaccurate, and this can be more in maintenance related situations, then it becomes an issue.
Ty Deemer:
Got it, cool. So last number, and then we’ll shift the conversation to a little bit of a different topic, but overtime in general. Why is that something green industry business should be tracking? Where have you seen it useful in the businesses you work with?
Jeffrey Scott:
So first off, you want to make an assumption on how much overtime you’re going to spend. That should be your man hour rates should take that into account. I will say that the industry is… there’s mixed feelings in the industry about overtime. I think in some parts of the industry, the myth has taken over where overtime is bad, but really, if your labor is low as a percentage of your cost of goods and of your total revenue, and you have more materials and more equipment, then overtime is not going to kill you because you’re going to get leverage out of your equipment and your materials. On the other hand, if you’re selling only labor, maintenance, and you sold it at a low margin, commercial maintenance, then you’ve got to adhere to that overtime budget strictly. So it really depends on how much leverage you have.
I’m going to go back to billable hours, if you’re not hitting your billable hours for the week, well, because it rained on Wednesday and Thursday, well, you may not have overtime on Saturday, but you might want to be working Saturday. Or if it’s going to rain next week and you want to put overtime in this week so you can stay on top of your monthly billable hours, then it’s going to be helpful.
So it depends, I hate that phrase but here we have to use it a couple times. It depends on the situation, but either way I would track it because I’d want to know because if I have a high overtime and low efficiency, then I’m in trouble. Then I’m just paying time and a half for what? For waste, complete and utter waste. So I do think it’s important to track either way to make sure that you’re spending your overtime dollars in the right place.
Ty Deemer:
Yeah, I really like that explanation of it, and I think it covers why it’s important to know what your goal is with overtime and understand how to work backwards.
We’ve covered and gotten in detail in about a good bit of the metrics that we wanted to talk about. I want to spend the last 10 minutes or so of our conversation letting you move away from the numbers and just share how you work more on the cultural and the mission side of the businesses. A lot of that has to go with how you’re a motivator with the companies you work with. We had a question lined up where it’s basically asking you personally, if you could go back in time and speak to your younger self, whether it was when you were in your businesses really early on in your career or as you moved into consulting. What’s one piece of advice you’d give to yourself then?
Jeffrey Scott:
It’s funny you’re asking this because this showed up on a Facebook feed last week. I’ve been told, don’t ever answer those Facebook feed questions because it’s just somebody trying to gather data on you so, but I answered it anyways. I’m like, what the heck?
So I thought it was fairly benign, and that question was, what’s one thing you… oh, in three words, if you could go back to your younger self, what would you tell yourself in three words? I wrote down, you are okay. Hey man, you’re okay. You’re going in the right direction, keep going with gusto.
So I’m going to say the same thing here, if I could go back to my younger self. Hey man, you’re… in some ways you have more, you take more chances when you’re younger, and in some ways you have more doubt, it’s both. More confidence than you might deserve and maybe more doubt that you should have. So I’d go back and say, “Just go with gusto, you’re going in the right direction.” You gave me chance, I would say two more things to myself. You said one but here’s three things I would say.
The second thing, ignore the naysayers, because I look back, those naysayers have popped up in the forms of friends that even subtly saying, “Oh, don’t do that,” and then trying to help you, but they’re in essence being a naysayer. This could be your best friend, by the way, or somebody you highly respect who says, “Don’t go in that direction.” It could be an advisor, I had an advisor very clearly tell me, “No, don’t go into consulting, you don’t want to do that.” This was a marketing advisor and somebody I highly respected, so I had just steel up and say, “Well, I don’t know why that person’s saying that but I know he’s wrong, I know I’m right.” You have family that tells you this, plenty of family are naysayers and they’re either mean spirited naysayers or ignorant, or they’re well meaning. So you have to really have a good filter to ignore the naysayers and listen to your inner voice, keep that louder than these out voices. So that’s number two.
Number three, don’t take a break from learning, if I look back in my life, there’s been times when I said, “You know what? I’m tired of reading books. I’m going to put books down for a while,” or, “Hey, I learned enough, I’m going to coast for a little bit.” I don’t do that a lot but if I look back I’d say, “Increase your learning,” I would tell my younger self. If you had a mentor, even before you think you need one and if you’re tired reading, change books and read different kinds of books. I’m a big believer in, don’t just read business books or self help books. In some ways these books are repetitive, they play off of each other and there’s not always original thoughts in those books. So that’s why it’s good to just read books on science and fiction and historical novels, and that’s how you’re going to get a lot smarter. So, keep learning up, find mentors. Those would be… everything I just told you is what I’d go back and tell myself.
Ty Deemer:
Yeah, and I really think all of those things are applicable to anyone, whether they’re in the green industry or not. It’s a lot of… and I think the great green industry leaders I’ve interacted with, they’re pretty in tune with some of those lessons learned or things, number one, just confidence. Not necessarily, like you said, they need to be a nice person. There’s a lot of overly confident people out there but if you’re confident and you believe in what you’re doing and know you can act with gusto, those are the leaders that inspire a business. That like you said at your very beginning answer, that’s just as equally important as knowing your numbers. You’ve got to be able to lead in a way where people get excited by working with you.
Jeffrey Scott:
Absolutely.
Ty Deemer:
So I always like to finish each episode with this question because a lot of times on this podcast, we focus on a very specific topic like we did today or we reflect, if we have like a CEO of a green industry business come on, they just talk about what they’ve done in their company in the past. So I always like to finish with a forward thinking question, it’s really straight forward. It’s just, what comes next for you and what are you most excited about throughout the rest of this year and beyond?
Jeffrey Scott:
Well, I mentioned it briefly, right now I’m in the middle of setting up my Summer Growth Summit. I am excited man, because we have some crazy serious industry leaders that I don’t think a lot of people may know who they are. There’s always the same old industry leaders, oh, that guy who runs the biggest company, yeah, we heard of him, but. So I’m bringing, I mean first off, I said George Tucker’s place, this guy’s going to come out of nowhere and be a huge leader. When he came to me, he was six or eight million or 10 or I think it was like eight going on 10. Now he’s like 17 going on 30.
Ty Deemer:
Wow, that’s awesome.
Jeffrey Scott:
So he’s the host and then I have Todd Pugh and people know him maybe, as the inventor of Mulch Mule. They don’t realize, man, he runs a kick-butt landscape company in the… oh, don’t take this the wrong way, the boring state of Ohio. I think of Ohio as just the middle, it’s a great state, it’s not necessarily… it’s just a good old values in our country but in this soft spoken state, if you will, he’s just kicking butt and has built a hugely successful business in these medium sized towns spread throughout all of Ohio. I mean, I love Ohio, I’m just saying it’s in the middle and it’s not-
Ty Deemer:
We’re going to have some podcast guests giving you some emails saying, “Why you hating on Ohio?”
Jeffrey Scott:
Oh no, no, no, no, because I have so many clients in Ohio. I’ve been there so often. It’s got maybe one of the best court programs in the country there. So, it’s got the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, hello? Cleveland may not count as Ohio, I [crosstalk 00:42:45] that, that’s a whole separate thing. It’s like New York City and New York State.
Ty Deemer:
Yeah, for sure.
Jeffrey Scott:
I guess what I’m saying is, he’s mastered his business and a lot of towns that aren’t these huge towns that everybody brags about. That’s what I mean, it’s not like top of mind towns and yet he’s just killing it.
Then Kurt Bland from Bland Landscaping, really soft spoken gentleman, very polite, and him and his brother built a family business, took it to an incredible level. Then sold off part of the ownership, they call it recapitalizing, bringing in private equity and now he’s under the next level of his business talking to other businesses about, hey, do you want to sell, we’re looking to buy, and they’re both on a platform. So really, I’ve got three speakers and there’s even more, there’s leaders within LanDesign that are speaking, including their CEO from outside the industry who’s… George brought into lead the charge with him or for him. So they’re really, gentleman that have all shown this growth. People that have all shown this growth mindset and different ways to grow their business. So I’m really excited for just this level that we’re going to bring.
So I have clients coming there, I have people signing up for it, people bringing their teams. Oh, can you still hear me?
Ty Deemer:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, I can.
Jeffrey Scott:
All right, good. My speaker just said that my Air Pods picked up. [crosstalk 00:44:36].
Ty Deemer:
No, you’re good.
Jeffrey Scott:
All right, good. So I’m really excited about that. I’m going to be doing a virtual event coming up in the fall, we’ll announce that later, I won’t tell you what it is, nobody has done this kind of event before so I’m excited about that. Then next January, I’m going to do my financial master class again, that was a huge, fun success, really brought a lot of people to help them understand their numbers.
Personally, I am going on vacation to Mexico City.
Ty Deemer:
Nice.
Jeffrey Scott:
Everybody I’ve talked to either says, “That’s amazing,” or, “You’re crazy.” So I’m collecting a list of people with comments on both sides. So I’ll be there for a couple of weeks in August. Apparently it’s like 7,000 feet high so it’s not that hot, at least in the evening there. So I’m excited for that too.
Ty Deemer:
Awesome, well, we’ll be sure to link to the Summer Growth Summit in the show notes of the podcast so anybody interested in going can sign up for that. That’s at the end of August, early September, right? At the 31st and the 1st, correct?
Jeffrey Scott:
That’s correct, yes.
Ty Deemer:
Yeah, great. So we’ll make sure that anyone listening has access to that. Jeffrey, I’m excited for you. I think it’ll be a great event. Just thank you for taking the time to be on the show with us, we covered a ton of good topics around the numbers of the businesses we work with. I think the audience will get a ton of great value out of it.
Jeffrey Scott:
Ty, I really appreciate it. You did a great job here facilitating this. We, through your work facilitation, we really did cover a lot. So, thank you so much.
Ty Deemer:
Yeah, absolutely. We’ll be in touch, talk again soon.
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