One of the greatest mistakes I've made in business is one that is very common for new business owners to make. Letting the ebbs and flows from busy to slow weeks affect their mood, outlook on their business, and the strategy they take moving forward. Controlling your emotions in both slow and buys week is vital your success. Lee Godbold with Junk Removal Authority tells you why it is so important. https://junkremovalauthority.com/
Hey guys, how’s everybody doing today? What I want to talk to everybody today about is your current state of the business. You got to be very careful that it doesn’t change your mindset significantly. So that your mindset significantly is going from way over here to way over here or way up here. The way down here, you’ve got to be more even keel and this can be something that’s very difficult for somebody that is new in business. What I’m talking about is slow weeks can really make you doubt your future, but busy weeks can make you overconfident. This is one of the biggest mistakes that a new business owner or a new junk removal business owner or whatever can make his business fluctuate. This is definitely not a business that is consistently busy, consistently slow.
Even during busy seasons, you might have a month or something like that. Every single day, you’re completely booked. It’s everything you can do to keep up. You got guys working, either you’re working. You’ve got guys working from 6:30 AM till 9:00 PM every single day. You got to get out there and get after it because you’re going to have a slow period that comes up a somewhere in there. It can be right smack dab in the middle of what’s generally the busiest month of the year. Our busiest months of the year are June, August, and October. We’re busy as hell from May all the way through December. So, January, February, and March we’re kind of our three slowest months. Absolutely almost every single year, our busiest months are June, August, and October. Almost every single time. It wouldn’t surprise me if we get into June and then all of a sudden, we have one slow week. It’s not going to bother me all that much anymore.
Even a couple of weeks of being slow, it is not going to bother me that much anymore. We’re working with some guys that just a couple slow days and they’re thinking that the worlds about to end. They got bills to pay. They’ve got some debt that they got to pay. They’re worried that they’re not going to be able to meet those obligations. I have been there, I understand that. Even just recently, it was about a year or two ago. It took me a good 4 or 5 years in business before I got to that point. Part of that was, we’re not stretched out quite as thin now. We have a little bit more cash reserves. Not a whole lot because we’re the big time investment. Everything, all the money we get goes back into the business.
It’s another investment tool we work on, but normally everything’s back into the business. It’s not like we have a huge cash reserve. I’ve learned that everything is always going to work out. So, your slow weeks can be a time period where you really can screw yourself up in business and that’s mental. What will happen is you start thinking real negative. Once you start thinking negative, that hurts your complete outlook on business. Some people will shut doors and make it negative. They’ll quit answering the phone even though all they want is that phone to ring. They want because it could be business on the other end. They can get feeling so depressed that they stayed home. They watch TV. They pig out on food. They’re low energy at that point and when they answer the phone, they’re not at their best. Not answering that phone on their best.
When you’re busy, that’s when you do the best work. When you’re busy, you’ve got all that energy. You’ve got all that enthusiasm. You’re out there. That’s when you pick that phone up and you’re super enthusiastic with the customer. You just have great energy, but when you’re slow you don’t bring that energy to the phone call. On the other end of it, you’ll get into a busy season or you get into a busy period. A lot of people are balls to the wall busy right now. Don’t assume that it’s going to stay that way. You’re going to have slow weeks again, even right in the middle of busy season. So, you get so super enthusiastic.
You’re on this huge manic. I think it’s called mania, manic or whatever. You’re way up here. What you don’t want to be is way up here and make some stupid business moves that when you get slow, they almost sink you. That’s easy to do, so you don’t need to go out. Necessarily, goodbye to a personal truck. Go out and buy a plane, boat, new motorcycle, home or whatever, just because you’ve had a couple of busy months or a couple of busy weeks and everything. You need to have at least a year, go through a complete business cycle and see how your business goes. You might even want 18 months. You might want to see a good year and then you might want to see another 6 months of growth. That you’re growing and you just hit a random streak of luck. You got to be careful with that. Buying toys and making a large monthly payment can hold you back if you do too much. Sometimes going out and getting something new or expensive is a good thing. This is something that I’m going to say that a lot of people won’t say. What are the best business moves I’ve ever made is go out and buy an airplane? Why? Because my entire life, I’ve been around planes.
I’ve wanted a plane and I finally got a position where I could go and buy one. It’s a great business tool. I use it for business. I get to all of our different locations. I get to meetings, we buy equipment with it. Especially now with JRA, visiting potential business partners. As far as customers of JRA, I can go there. I enjoy doing it. I enjoy flying. It puts me around people with a lot of money. For the middle aspect, going out and buying that airplane is one of the best business moves I’ve ever made. We make a monthly payment on that plane and it costs thousands of dollars a year to have an airplane. You got an annual, generally costs about 2,500 bucks a year. You’re going to have some repairs, oil changes and all that kind of stuff.
You’re going to put another couple thousand dollars a year on that. It’s about 4 to 5 grand. You got hangar rental, that’s going to be another 3 grand. You got the monthly payment that you’re making on it. It says another $12,000 right there. Every single year that airplanes cost in $25,000 to $30,000 and you’ve got general wear and tear because all that stuff don’t last for so long. You have to be kind of banking that money for future repairs. An airplane probably cost you somewhere around, that type of plane I have was somewhere around $25,000 a year. One of the best business moves I’ve ever made. It keeps me motivated, it keeps me happy. That’s a good thing. It keeps me from thinking too inexpensive. One of the biggest mistakes I made when I first started, first three years in business was way too cheap. I’ve made it a priority.
I’m trying to bring my wife for this, is don’t say anything is expensive. I don’t call anything expensive no matter what it is. Now, does that mean that I’m going to give you my money if I don’t think it’s one going to work or two? If I think it’s a way overpriced. Being overpriced and expensive are two different things. Expensive other than using it in this video. I do not use the word expensive because what I found is generally the most expensive things are what brings you the greatest value. For example, harbor freight.
You all going to harbor freight and buying a tarp and get some tools. Every single thing I’ve ever bought from harbor freight is a piece of crap. The nickname from that place is China freight for a reason. The stuff is no good, it’s cheap. If you go out and you get some snap on stuff. You go to a tractor supply or aggregate supply, the stuff there is much higher quality. You’re going to spend 2 or 3 times more, but it’s going to last a lot longer. It’s going to prevent you from having that downtime. It’s going to last a lot longer and you’re going to save money long term because you don’t have to replace it as much. Get the word expensive out of your vocabulary.
You got to determine value. You make purchasing decisions based on value. The price tag, it doesn’t matter what the price tag is. If that thing is going to return more than what you’re going to pay, that’s probably a good move. If you’re spending $10,000, it’s going to make you $15,000 or $20,000. It could just be knowledge and it doesn’t matter how long it takes. There’s a self-improvement seminar. Some of these seminars you go to and these are big events. 10X Growth Conference or whatever, that’s a $2,000 convention. If you go there, you spend $2,000 and you gain knowledge. It doesn’t matter how much knowledge gain, even if you just gain a little bit, it’s worth that $2,000.
I just try and get the word expensive out of my vocabulary. The other issue with the word expensive is when you start thinking cheap on your expenses then you think you can earn as much money. So, you think cheap on your income. When you think cheap on your expenses, you think cheap on your income. That realization that I made in the last year has been one of the greatest realizations I’ve ever made. I’m very philosophical. I’m always thinking about life, business, where I want to go, where I’ve been, what I wanted to do and how will my body look. About what kind of relationships do I want with friends, family and my wife. I consider everything that I’m doing. I look to make things. I think about it all the time.
By thinking about it, I can kind of sculpt it and make it come to fruition. Controlling your thoughts is one of the greatest things you can do to show your success. It starts if you want to achieve great wealth. If you want to build a very successful business. Very successful junk removal business. Whatever business you’re in, you got to quit thinking cheap. If you keep thinking cheap then you’re not going to live the life you want to live. You’re not going to have the freedom you want to have and you’re not going make as much money as you ultimately could. When you’re in a busy season, you will be retaining money, so you can spend it on repairs and maintenance. When you get slow because that’s the point where you have the time to fix things.
Don’t go out and spend all your money when you’re busy. Then when you get slow, you won’t be able to keep busy by working on stuff, repairing and improving stuff. All that kind of stuff. When you are slow, you need to be out there, fixing things. You would be calling on realtors. You need to be attending Chamber of Commerce meetings, strategizing your growth. Taking a family day or two is okay. You need to stay busy throughout that family day. Whether it’s working on work or staying active with your family. Not just sitting around watching TV and not paying attention to your family members. You need to have a purpose. You need to be crossing stuff off. Items getting crossed off. What’ll happen is when you’re doing stuff, even on your slow days you’re thinking busy. Again, we’re controlling our thoughts here or keeping positive. We’re not letting negativity creep into your life. One thing you got to remember is when you’re slow, the business is always going to come. Just if you had one slow week, that business is still out there. What it means is it’s going to pile on all at once. It’s going to be trouble for you to really keep up. Take advantage of that time to get your people some vacation time. Some time off, so they can recharge because they will have to come back. They’re going to have to hit it hard once that business comes. It’s always going to turn around.
We’ve been doing this for 6 years now. It’s turned around every single time. We started a recession, so it was always turned back around. Always remember that. Don’t just start changing things when you get busy for the sake of changing things. This can be a huge mistake, it’s what we made in the past. You’ve been doing something consistently for a period of time. It’s been working. All of a sudden you have a slow week or two and you’re like, “What am I doing wrong?” One of the worst things you can do is get on a customer online booking. Competitors online booking systems and see how busy they are. That’s one of the worst things you can do because if they’re busy, then you really start thinking about what I am doing wrong. In our case, any of our proteges that are paying attention to what I’m saying on this YouTube channel are working with us. I always preach. You have to be able to get the same-day booking and same next day bookings. Quick turnaround time otherwise you miss out a lot of business. If you’re able to get that same-day service and a lot of your competitors will be booking out. So, your competitors might be booked down close to a week. That means because you had a busy week, you did 8 or 10 times the amount of business they did. You cram that business into that period the week. All of a sudden you have a slow week when you got a lot more done in the past week. Your slow week and your definition of your slow weeks going to be a lot less than them too. A slow day to us is under 20 jobs. So, 19 jobs and under is a slow day for us. A slow day for all of our competitors is 2 or 3 jobs in a day. That’s what I’m talking about right there. You got a little bit of a difference on what you consider slow.
One of the other changes people make is they go out there and they’ll make these changes to their marketing. Forget the fact that it’s been working consistently for months and months of time. They’ll change it and that’s a mistake. Don’t make too many changes when you’re slow. If you make a change, it would be very gradual and small. I can’t be a big swing. It can’t be out there swinging for the fences. You might just want to try for a bunny. You swing for the fences and you foul out. The guy throws out you. Your guy turns a double play. You could have bunt and advance the runner. That was the wrong thing to do at that time. Don’t always swing for the fences on your changes. A lot of times, I would not make changes when you’re slow. Make changes when you’re a bit busy or when you’re consistent, that’s a good time to make changes. Always, when you make changes don’t make too many at once. Make it small and gradual.
Pricing, don’t lower your pricing when you get slow. This is a very common thing. As people get slow, they lower the prices. If you just raised your prices just because you have one slow week or a couple slow of days especially after you raised your prices, don’t lower back down. We have never in 6 years of operation and we’ve probably had 10 or 12 price increases. In 6 years of operation, not one time have we had a long-term negative reaction to a price increase. Of those 10 or 12 times we’ve increased prices, probably 80% of the time the following week were a bit slower. I think it was just a coincidence. Whatever you want to consider it, but don’t lower your prices back down. If you’ve had several slow weeks, you bought equipment back down. You might have found that friction point that you need to avoid, but again never once we had a long-term negative result from a price increase. You might negotiate with customers a bit more than you normally would because you’re slower. You’re not as tight on your schedule. If somebody tries to negotiate the price down otherwise you might not get the job. You probably will let price come down. Don’t do that too soon. Don’t do the negotiating for the customer and lower the price before the customer actually asks for it.
You need to limit negativity at all times, especially when you were slow. All the time, always control your thoughts. Limit negativity, take advantage of slow periods to improve your business. Let’s be a lot evener keel and don’t get too excited when you’re busy. It’s too easy to go out and spend that money and then all of a sudden you need it when things get slow. All I can say again, limit your negative thoughts. If you limit your negative thoughts, you’re setting yourself up for success in the junk removal business.