Good morning!
I type this from my car while I wait for my son to finish cross country practice. I woke up at 3:45am by accident and decided to replace the drive belt on my mower right then. So that’s how my day has been so far.
Let’s get right to it today.
Remember my Grind to 5 email from last month? Well, I have a follow up!
We spoke to 177 landscapers and 89 tree trimmers. But we had to make 1,221 calls to talk to those 266 people!
Isn’t that crazy?
That means that if you live in Houston, TX and need some landscaping done, you only have a 1 in 5 chance of getting someone on the phone when you call.
That alone is an opportunity…
But what were the results?
Landscapers
50.2% of landscapers offer stump grinding today, and of those, 49.4% have their own equipment, 29% sub it out, and the rest “other.”
You can look at this a couple of different ways. This means that half of the market could subcontract this out to us if they wanted to, and the other half could start offering stump removal (outsourced to us) for the first time.
Which is the bigger, more realistic opportunity? I’m not sure.
Tree Trimmers
73% of tree trimming companies offer stump grinding today, and of those, 69% have their own equipment, 14% already sub it out and the rest “other.”
It’s clear that tree trimmers are more both likely to have their own equipment and offer it as a service, which is not surprising.
One note that my cold caller made was this:
“Most of them don't have time to do do any jobs and are booked out for the next four weeks.”
To be fair, part of this is due to recent storms that had come through the area. But I imagine this is likely the case in many markets.
Home services is a great industry to play in!
So how do I interpret this data?
This data reinforces my believe that selling to home service business owners is hard. It’s hard to get them on the phone, it’s hard to get them to be more organized and it’s hard to get them to pay more than a few bucks for anything.
Asking them to subcontract to us is selling in every sense of the word, to be sure. We might as well try and sell them CRM software.
I was hoping for the data to be stronger.
My hardest earned framework is this:
When you get a business idea, don’t ask yourself “Will this idea work?” Ask yourself, “Assuming this idea would work, is it the right idea for me to spend time, money and headache on?”
Most ideas would work, especially if you have a good distribution strategy or it’s already proven.
If you have no other good ideas and you really want to start a business, ok, I can see that.
But that’s not usually the case. We usually have to pick between ideas 1, 2 and 3, or between idea 1 and job 1.
At the same time, this advice somewhat contradicts my other hard-earned advice:
Just act. Stop over-analyzing. Sell it before you have it. Start talking to people and making moves and the path will show itself.
But these two thoughts can and do work in harmony. Give yourself a defined time period to do a limited amount of research, and know going into it what will you do if you get X or Y result.
I have too many irons in the fire to launch this right now. It would take longer to get to 7 figures than I originally assumed. We could get our first job in a day or two, but by month two we’d likely only be at $8-10k of revenue.
If you can’t tell by now, I’m always optimistic about ideas working out. That’s both a feature and a bug. If you see me hyping up an idea on social media that seems half-baked, just know I really, actually believe what I’m saying!
If I didn’t have that personality trait I would never launch things.
It would be 2 live classes per week for 4 weeks via Zoom. Part tactical instruction from me, part Q&A, part 1 on 1 personalized help. We’d all be in the same group and would network.
I did this for both the tree biz and RV park acquisitions, but this would likely be 1/10 of the price of those, affordable to almost everyone. I’ve gotten rave reviews from both previous live cohorts and no one has ever requested a refund.
Thanks for your vote! Let me know after voting or by replying if you have any other thoughts or comments.
Everything Else
We sold our first 5 perfume vending machines! Very stoked about that. Texas Snax just had the best sales day of the year, and our other businesses are all over the map. Some are always doing better than others…
Thanks for reading!
Chris Koerner
chrisjkoerner