“1” is a number to be afraid of. Treat it like the plague and eradicate it from your junk removal business.
Good morning guys! Good morning! I hope everybody is doing great on this Monday. Start your week out awesome. I’m heading to the office right now. I’m going to get there just a little bit after 9:00 o’clock this morning. I’m running just a tad bit behind. I had a couple phone calls that came in unexpectedly at the house. So, I will be in the office a bit later than I typically does.
What I want to talk to everybody today about is there’s a particular number that you want to be afraid of. You want to be cautious of and you want to avoid. That’s the number one. The only time you ever want to be with number one is going to be if you are number one in your market. Other than that, one of anything is your enemy in business, your junk removal business. One of anything is your enemy, so you don’t want to have one truck. You start out with one truck, that’s fine in the short term. That’s what you got to do. You need to have a backup option though. It needs to be renting a truck. Going to get a U-Haul, budget account or whatever set up, so you get a discounted rate. You get a commercial account setup, so you get a discounted rate. When the time comes, your truck breaks down because it is going to break down.
The other thing is you don’t want one key employee. So, if it’s you on the truck and you’ve got one other guy that you rely on to do the work with you and he goes out. You need to have another plan in place. Typically, you want to have two employees and not just one. That way if he quits, then you’re out. You’re out completely for every day. If he calls out sick, there’s a chance the other guy can come in early or can come in for that day and cover. You don’t want just one key employee. You don’t want just one advertising methods. So, we build our business on Google AdWords and it used to scare me because a huge portion of our jobs came from AdWords. It used to scare me that what happens if something on AdWords changes. If something happens to Google and they change this platform. We’re screwed on getting new business. So, I was always striving and working hard to build sales and get our name out there and try other advertising methods. They worked okay. Not Great. I always made sure that we had another advertising avenue. So, if something happened with Google, then our pipeline wouldn’t be completely blocked. It would be significantly restricted if Google went away at that point, but it wouldn’t be blocked. Now, almost 60% of our jobs are repeat business and referral business. That’s no longer the case, but still about 30% of our business is from Google. It’s a combination of AdWords and SEO. If we do $2,000,000 in a year, 30% of that is coming from Google. So, we’re still getting around $600,000 worth of business every year from Google between AdWords and Search Engine Optimization. That took a while to get. That’s years of nurturing. Our online reputation of bringing our SEO up. We’re organic ad ranking and perfecting an AdWords campaign. Then also, people will do a search on Google and they’ll see our name. Then they remember, “Oh, I’ve seen those guys driving around. I’ve heard of them.” Nothing is instantaneous for the most part in business. If you find something that works and then you nurture it. You massage it until it’s really bringing you in a lot of business.
You always try to avoid just one advertising method. One key customer should scare you. For example, we opened up our Charlotte location. We got a contract in Charlotte that was good for almost $100,000 for that year. It’s some apartments and every week they’ve got multiple complexes in every week. They’re bringing us a couple of thousand dollars in business generally. $100,000 there. We had a truck up for that. We had to add an extra truck there. We had to add more people. I was always worried what happens if this stop. We’ve made this investment. The location is doing great. We made this investment, but if we lose this customer. What’s going to happen? You hustle and you bang every single advertising method you can. At least breaks even or comes close to breaking even. You get as much business as you can because every single time you have a customer that’s another job down the line too. That’s another referral, that’s another repeat business down the line and you hit it just as hard as you can.
Now, we’ve got that location where if we lost that particular customer, it would hurt for sure, but we got a profitable location even without that $100,000 a year customer. One vendor on like a demolition job. Like one of the things we do is when we go out of town, we’ll go all over to do some demolition work. We don’t use our trucks on demolition jobs. We rent dumpsters and if it is possible, we never rent from just one company unless it’s a company we know. We’ve used a lot. They do a great job. They have best rates. We might make an exception there, but if we’re going to the market we’re not familiar with. We rent from at least two companies. In that way, if one drops the ball, hopefully the other can pick up the slack. Go through your business and determine anything that you have, just one. You need to be hitting hard to try and add a second or third of that particular thing.
Answering the phone, you got to think of yourself too. You can’t just rely on yourself on answering the phone. You would have somebody else trained up to answer the phone. What happens if you get sick or you get injured or whatever? That’s another good reason for you to get off the truck and not be on the truck. Because if you’re not on the truck and you have one of your guys call out sick or quit unexpectedly, then that always leaves you able to pick up the slack. At some point that needs to be no longer the case. At some point, you hardly ever need to be on the truck itself. Going out and checking on jobs is one thing that needs to continue getting done. Eventually you need to replace you in every single function of your business. Even running the day to day, the GM stuff. If you want true freedom in your life, you need to have somebody else running everything the day to day. You need to be overlooking at all. You make a bit less money, but you have more options. You make less money in the short term, but you have more options, more flexibility and less things that are going to sink you when a key person or a piece of equipment goes down, quits, whatever. You’re less left out to dry. Let’s just put it that way. You get a lot more options when you constantly fill in the things you just have.
The only thing in my life that I want to have is one woman because that’s all and some of you all want to get out and you want several of them. One woman and I picked a good one. That was one of my key things. A lot of guys settle on a woman and that’s the reason they go out there and they look for another one. So, I found one that basically I could check off almost every single thing that I was looking for. That’s the only thing I that I want. Everything else I’m going to back up and that’s kind of what I’m always going for. So far, it’s worked out pretty well. $2,000,000 a year in sales by year 5 with Junk Doctors. I’m able to focus almost all my time on Junk Removal Authority now, as we get out there and try and help as many people as possible. None of that would have been possible if had I been selfish. It would not be long-term. I’ve been looking long-term. If I was selfish and taking those short-term profits and not putting off short-term profits for long-term gains, long-term sustainability and security for me and my family. Then none of that would be possible, so I try to avoid one. The only time you ever be one is you want to be number one in your market. You only want to have one woman, but other than that you need to have backup options in place for everything else. We’re going to get trying several videos out today. We’ll talk to everybody soon. You all have a great and profitable day. Busy Day! Let’s make some money. Let’s recycle and donate some junk and let’s just have a good time. Talk to everybody soon.