Scoring points (getting income) should be your primary focus for success in your junk removal business. Playing defense (watching expenses) is secondary to success in Junk removal. Lee Godbold with JRA elaborates.
What’s up guys? How’s everybody doing today? By doing great on this Sunday. We had a good day yesterday. Had a lot of money wise. I think we want to make it about $7,000 to $8,000, something like that. I think the final report was like $7,300 income yesterday, so that was great. I did not get into the office yesterday. I did just a little bit of work at the house. We had a wedding to go to and we had an event earlier in the day that we did as well. So, yesterday was most part kind of family social time and all that sort of deal. It makes me glad. Like I said in my last video, we have depth in our organization.
One of the things that allowed us to get to that depth to have several people that can step in and do the different jobs with our company. Which allows us to have freedom and allows us to make a lot more money. Otherwise would be able to, is the willingness to go on offense. We’re always playing offense where we played okay defense. We watch our expenses. We don’t spend unnecessarily, but we’re going to go after it. We’re going to be throwing the ball. We’ll be aiming at four or five-yard runs. There’ll be some four or five-yard runs mixed in with some long passes down field where we’re really going after it. We can work very much in offensive in organization. You’re not going to play defense and you’re not going to save your way to success. You can have the best defense in the world on the football, but if you don’t have an offense to go out and score points, you’re not going to be successful.
If you’re watching every single penny and you’re playing good defense. Watching every penny, but you haven’t gotten the offensive players. You haven’t spent the money on the offensive players. You haven’t invested in the offensive players to go out there and score points. You’re not going to win games. That’s how we’ve always approach business. You need to do the same thing. There’s a lot of different things you need to invest on. One of the very first things is, invest in yourself. Invest in more knowledge for yourself. Conferences, go to conferences. Invest in books. I’m reading all the time. I averaged about a book a week. Probably, I’m reading about 40 books a year. Just under a book a week is what I’m reading. I’m always gathering knowledge and getting out there. I’ve already written one book on Starting Junk Removal Business. I’m writing another. Probably this next book will take a year and a half to release. It’s about on just more general business and stuff and all of that. It’s going to be a couple hundred pages compared to this last book. I think it was 52 pages.
So, invest in yourself. You got to invest in the people and equipment, so you have the availability to help more people. You need to have right before you actually need to have, must have a new truck. You need to be buying another truck. You need to be adding a second crew right before you the point where you start to get booked out day after day.
You need to be adding a second crew. You need to hire people. You need to have enough equipment to run multiple routes. I say this all the time. You got to invest in advertising in sales, so you have to put the time to yourself into cold calls. Unless you’re running your business in absentee. Which JRA, we can really make a junk removal an investment for you. We don’t require you to be in their day to day. We’ll run your dispatch. We’ll run the call centers. There’s only about 10 to 15 work a week that you have to do. We can take care of anything else, make it a great investment for you. If this is your day and if this is your full-time job, you need to be in there. You’re going to be making the time. You need to be doing sales calls. You need to be hosting Luncheons for realtors. You need to be attending the Chamber of Commerce meetings.
You got to get your name out there and reach more people. Remember, the most important thing in business is the number of people you can help. If that number goes up, your business goes up, you become much more successful. Everybody goes through slow periods. We all go through a slow period. What do we do in a slow period is what helps separate us. It is the reason we were able to get to $2,000,000 after our 5th year. It is the fact that when we get slow, we go on the offensive. We’re getting after. We’re making sales calls. We’re researching new advertising that we might try. Our theory in advertising is if we can break even on the advertising, we’re going to do it. Sometimes we do advertising even if we lose a little money. Keep that truck rolling.
That’s a repeat customer. That’s a review that’s going to come in. That’s a potential referral. Once the trucks are on the road, that’s a potential that somebody else is going to see it going down the road. We have those moving billboards going down the road. We need to keep them moving. People get out there and see them. For example, football team, if you get out to a 2-3 touchdown lead over a competitor. Some teams will just start, they’ll get a little axe on offense. The other team is going to start coming back. They think they’re going to try and hang on defense. The other team starts coming back. Then it gets to the point and then narrow it down to a touchdown or two.
I want my defense to try and prevent them from scoring, but I’m going to do everything I can to keep scoring. At that point if I can match them, touchdown to touchdown. I’m going to win the game. Just recently if you have a slow period or if your expenses go up. I’ll give you an example that we had in the second. We got a really large bill just recently within the last year. We had some expenses that all of a sudden started going up. Our workers’ comp, we had a fraudulent workers’ comp claim in addition to a good claim a slightly before. Our workers’ comp rates are 30 to 40% more than somebody else. We’re paying $50,000 dollars plus in a year on workers’ comp.
What we did is we went on the offense. We got out there. We hired somebody to come in and manage the advertising and AdWords. We spent more money instead of trying to save money to fix some things we had going on and get out and reach more people. That’s what a lot of you all are doing incorrectly is you’re waiting on having the money to spend it on advertising, investments and stuff like that. Instead, you actually have to almost spend it before. If you wait to have the money, you’re never going to get it. You just got to go out there. When you have just a little bit of money and you might have to put off paying a bill or something. There might be something you have to put off to do it, but you got to go ahead.
You got to get in the game and you got to spend that money. You got to make that investment. That’s the only way you’re going to grow. If you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’re going to get the same exact results you always have. That’s just the name of the game. That right there has been probably the largest thing, that separated us. That’s the reason we’re at where we are. Some of our competitors has been in business the exact same time as we have or not, is we spent money before we had it. We went out and got something before we needed it. We hired somebody before it was required. We always ahead of the game instead of behind it. If you can get ahead of the game, then you’re good.
Listen, like in a football game, a lot of teams they mess up and the sports teams will mess up. They get ahead and they let off the gas. All of a sudden there’s been a comeback that has happened because that the team has let off the gas. The team ahead let off the gas and that other team starts to narrow it down. Well, the problem is the winning team lost the momentum, that team is coming up from behind. They’re after it. They have nothing to lose at that point and they’ve got the momentum. If you lose the momentum, it is going to be hard to recover. It’s going to be hard to get it back. If you’re ahead by 3 to 4 touchdowns. You stay on the gas. You do not let off the gas. You don’t put in your second string until just a couple minutes remaining in the game.
You stay on the gas. Otherwise you’re going to lose that momentum and that leaves a comeback open. A potential come back open for the losing team. We’re here to help everybody. Call us at +1 919-466-9322. Working all day to day. Give me a call or you can email me, [email protected] or visit us junkremovalauthority.com. We got an awesome new website. We’ll be getting into the details on. In about three weeks, it’s going to be live. Three to four weeks, it’s going live. It’s going to provide more information, a lot of free information. It’s going be a much better site than our present site, which is kind of like a placeholder. So, call us again at +1 919-466-9322. Thanks guys!