Lee just got back from a Florida “vacation” and talks about how vacations don’t cost him money, but are instead some of the best investments he makes. In this episode of Trash Talk he will talk of some actual improvements he thought up for Junk Doctors and JRA and why Gary Vaynerchuk, despite being super successful, is wrong about vacations. https://junkremovalauthority.com/
Good morning, everybody. I hope everybody is having a great Monday. I hope you’re kicking the week off. We’re wide open in springtime right now. Everybody’s businesses should be booming. I just got back from a Florida vacation, I had a great time down there. Every year we go down to an air show in Lakeland Florida call “Sun ‘n Fun”. We get out there, we look at a bunch of airplanes, watch people tumble planes through the sky, look at the military jets, and enjoy our evenings with some good friends, smoke some cigars, drink a little whiskey, and just have a good time. I was also working a bit down there.
Whenever we go on vacations, one of the things I find is that’s probably my best thinking, so I’ve got some ideas in mind to help us get more team members, because we’re short staffed. Help us retain more team members by creating a little bit better working environment than what we’ve necessarily provided in the past. One of things we’re going to work on is getting enough people in place where we can have shifts, so we can still do our same day service without demoralizing our guys. It can be very demoralizing when they think they’re done for the day, and all of a sudden, we put another job on our schedule. We have to do it though, because it’s 20% of our business. I also got an idea: we’re going to do a very basic business package. We’re going to have three levels of business packages on JRA instead of having just the one. There’s going to be a very introductory basic, it will get you started. It’s pretty much no expenses other than CAM will be covered. You’ll pay everything else, but you’ll get our expertise and our set-up, and you’ll still get your consulting, that sort of deal. I had some great ideas there. It will be a better idea on who to put into different parts of our business. Some of our current guys we’re going to increase the level responsibility. Christian is running so ragged right now, he hasn’t said anything about it, but he’s got a huge amount of responsibility right now ever since we started Junk Removal Authority. He’s pretty much running the entire company, and responsible for almost all the individual parts. We are going to be turning over some truck maintenance to a pair twin brothers that we’ve got. We’re going to increase responsibility, not running U-Hauls or U-Haul rentals, but something else on items sales. We’re trying to get him where he’s only responsible, well he’s responsible for everything, but he’s directly supervising only one area of the business. There were several other great thoughts and ideas.
I get around these guys. These guys go with, I’m the youngest at 28, all of these guys are very successful. Anywhere when we go down these air shows, the direct group that I’m around are anywhere from 28 years old to 88 years old. The 88-year-old has been super successful multimillionaire several times over. He got it from really hard work, and then we also get exposed. Unfortunately, the other guy in his 70s, he no longer goes with us, but he’s got three jets. Three citations, it was big in real estate development, and he also was one of the few people to take a gamble on this revolutionary concept back in the 80s known as cell phone towers. He was going around developing the cell phone towers and made just a bunch of money. I’d estimate he’s somewhere between $400,000,000 or $500,000,000. Just getting around those people, just being around successful people is amazing what that does. Of the core group of people that I go down to the show with, the 88-year-old will be most successful, though he hadn’t worked much in 20 years, I’m probably the third most successful. We have a whole group down there, and there’s maybe two or three people more successful than I am, and just being around people that are more successful than you are just provides amazing amounts of motivation. People that have achieved that level success think so much differently. That’s what’s crazy. That’s what’s really neat about getting around those people is to just experience their thought process. There’s something they’ve got where they just see things so much clearer than you or I. If you get around that, eventually you’ll get to seeing that level, and then you’ve got to move up your level. If you ever get to the point where you become the most successful out of your group that you hang around, I’m not saying these guys are so successful that you leave them, but you need to expose yourself to people that are even more successful than they are. You might have to go out there and pay. You might have to pay for a mentor, or a consultant. I’ve got consultants, especially one consultant, that I pay for. If I bounce stuff off of him every so often, not all the time, but if I’ve got a big idea, then I’m willing to go out there and pay a high price tag for it. Exposing yourself to those people are awesome.
Down in Florida, I met with Dennis Miles from Miles and Sons Services in Tampa. We recorded that interview. We’re trying to get everything pieced together, because we did on two different phones, and we got to get a kind of upload together. I said interview but wasn’t an interview. It was just a conversation. It was just two successful Junk Removal Business owners just bouncing past excesses, failures, challenges, what’s coming up, passing ideas off of each other. It was really neat to meet Dennis and his wife down there in Tampa. I stayed working throughout the vacation, but I did really have a great time. I’ve come back with a lot of ideas.
I’m always enthused, but even more enthused to really kick this week off, and start getting these ideas implemented. I’m confident and hopeful that it’s going to help our business out tremendously; both Junk Removal Authority as well as Junk Doctors. We will keep you updated on those changes as they come through. All I suggest is you need to have people in place to be able to go on vacations. Now when you’re on vacation, don’t not work. Anybody that owns their own business is going to be thinking summer vacation, but really take advantage of that time to step away from your business, and truly think about your state of your business: the challenges you’re facing – ours right now for example was we’re way short staffed – how to fix those problems, and where are you going to go next, what’s the next step. Piece that stuff together. When I’m in town, it’s hard for me to do especially back when I was doing most of the day to day stuff on Junk Doctors. I think a lot bigger picture now. I’m very involved in the Junk Removal Authority end of things, but I do take the time to think big picture, but not like when I go on vacation. When I go on vacation, I could piece stuff together and come up with ideas that I’ve likely never would have come up with if I never took a vacation. You got guys like Gary Vaynerchuk, and they say they went ten years without a vacation, and they got where they are just from hard work. What I kind of wonder is had he taken a vacation a couple times – out of ten years had he taken 20 vacations, so two a year, and it didn’t have to be weeklong vacations either, it could be three, four, or five days – had he done that, I wonder the level of success Vaynerchuk have accomplished. Don’t feel guilty about vacations. I do a little bit, if I go to a five-day vacation, on that fifth day I’m ready to the swing of things. I find that in my three and four-day vacations, I get a lot of great thinking done. I generally get most of my great thinking done within those three days, and by that fourth or fifth day if I’m still in vacation, I’m ready to get back and put them into place. Still enjoy yourself, but what I find is after vacation, you come back super enthused and ready. Just do great to implement your great ideas. Get a vacation schedule, the first thing you have to do is have your business in a position.
Now listen, those of you on the truck 100% and have nobody else to go at your place when you leave, by no means are you ready to take a vacation. You need to have it where you can leave – you might have to be taking some phone calls or whatever when you are first starting – and your trucks can still run, you still have an income. Don’t go into a four or five-day vacation and miss out on four or five days of income. Not only have you missed out on four or five days of income, you’ve missed, depending on how many jobs that you’re doing, that could be 15, 20 plus customers. You’ve missed out on them as repeat customers, as them as referral business, so that four or five-day vacation in addition to direct costs you paid for that four or five-day vacation, it could cost tremendous amounts over time. Get your business in a place where you can still have an income when you leave, get out of town, take the time to really think about your business, and create good ideas. Big picture. Get away from the day to day, big picture ideas.
If you’re going somewhere else out of your market, which you need to be doing, you need to get out of your market, otherwise you’re going to get swept into the day to day operations. Look up a Joke Removal Business owner around there say hey I own a business, and so wherever. Meet with them, talk with them what’s worked for you, get around people that have done what you’re looking to do, and you’re going to be just tremendously more successful. There is a huge opportunity to really have a great million dollar plus a year business on Junk Removal. You’ve got to get around people that are going to help you think like a million dollar plus business owner. Your current group of friends likely isn’t going to do it. If you’re sitting there on your truck for a year or two, you’re not around the right people, you’re not thinking big enough. You got to get around the right people in order to start taking the steps necessary to build you a super successful business and help you and your family achieve a level of success, achieve your dreams beyond your wildest measures. It starts with getting around the people that have the thought processes necessary to get you to that level.
We’ll talk to everybody later this evening. We have a Junk Removal Made Simple episode that we’ll upload overnight. I probably will do one more trash talk, because unfortunately I missed out on some drone on an episode or two while I was gone, so we’ll probably have one more trash talk episode coming up today. Hope everybody has a great day. Let’s really get a bunch of jobs done today, let’s make some customers really happy, let’s help a bunch of people, and let’s just kick this week off and have a great week. We’ll talk to everybody real soon. Be back before you know it.