When you first get going folks, you got to control your emotions. When you first get started, you sitting there. You wanted to get into business. If you went out and you might’ve bought a business package through JRA or you got a franchise. You just went out and decided to do something on your own. You get started and expect to get out there and let the world on fire and the jobs really don’t come in. Don’t get discouraged. You got to keep doing it. You got to commit to really make your business successful. When you first get started, no matter if you’ve just been doing it a year, working on a year. You haven’t made a serious commitment. You’ve got people you’re competing against that have been going at it for several years.

 

You’re not going to be able to make up a couple of years, 2 to 3 years of decent work by one year of hard work on your end. It is going to take a little longer. You’ve got to control your emotions when you start slow. If you start fast or you get to the point where you’re making good money. You got a lot of business coming in. You’ve had four weeks in a row of just awesome work. You’ve been doing it $25,000 to $30,000 a month or something like that. Then you’re doing great.  The next thing, you want to go out and buy a new pickup truck. Buy a new car, and an expensive wedding ring. Something like that.

 

Maybe junk removal truck is doing good. You’re not ready to add a second truck because of business yet. You’ve got a junk removal truck that is doing decent. It’s a bit older and you want to upgrade. You go out there and you start buying stuff like crazy. All of a sudden business starts slowing down. You’re like, “What the hell happened? Where’s my work?” Either you start swaying, worrying and wondering.  “Am I doing something wrong?” You start trying questioning everything up to that point. You’ve been doing great and questioning. You’re saying, “I am not getting business. I’ve been slow for three days, two days a week or two weeks. I’m going to change everything that just worked for a couple months in a row. I’m going to change it all because I got to. I got to because I bought this new truck, F150 truck.” I got an $800 a month car payment on a lease payment. I got these bills to pay. I got this wedding ring I just paid for. I’ve got an expensive wedding to pay for. You’ve made all these commitments because you started doing good and it slowed down. It’s going to happen guys. This business and most businesses in general are very cyclical. You can’t even explain it sometimes. You’re going to have busy and slow times especially at the start.

 

Once you get a bit more established, it might be busy and slow, but you don’t go dead slow. You could be so busy that you can’t hardly keep up, but you never really going to go where you have no jobs and really slow. You get little going on. If you’ve made a commitment, you’re doing what you should do. You’ve been in business 2 to 5 years. You aren’t going to really have the times where you’re just like depressed, but the other part is you’ve been through some downturns when you first start. When you first get going, you’ve got to control your emotions. You can’t let the highs get you too high. You can’t let the lows get you too low. You can’t let the lows or the highs have you make irrational decisions. If you’re extremely busy, you can’t be going out there and buying a bunch of stuff you really don’t need. The only stuff you need to be buying when you go through your first busy spell, is the stuff that’s going to lead to you making more income. The luxury’s got to be put off. You got to put off today so you can have a better tomorrow in this business or in any business you’re in.

 

You got to be 100% committed. On the other end of the spectrum, you can be just as dangerous when things get slow. Making wholesale, website, advertising, words, webpages and truck graphics changes. Firing and hiring people, changing your pay rate, starting to pay people more because you stay around. You know you don’t want to make those decisions when you’re slow. If you’ve been busy before, what you’re doing is working. You want to tweak very little when you’re slow. Maybe you want to look into it and see what’s going on. See what your competition’s doing. You want to understand and get data. Don’t make very many changes when you’re slow.

 

Certainly, don’t make wholesale changes because you could’ve made a good change that is masked by bad change. When racing, we used to race. The car might be loose or tight. The entry is loose then center of the corner coming off and you’re tight. The car didn’t want to turn. You don’t want to try and fix both problems at once. You want to fix one issue to start with probably the loose entry to start with and then worry about addressing the other problems. If you try and fix all three things at once, you make three different adjustments on the car. You could have made a good one that didn’t turn into a bad one. Control your emotions. You’re going to be successful in this business. If you let your emotions go all over the place, then you’re going to be out of business within a year, year and a half or six months maybe. You’ve got to control your emotions to be successful in any business, especially in a business-like junk removal which is very much feast or famine.