Entrepreneurship lessons from a lawn mowing business

I stumbled upon a video about a guy who built a lawn care business. And it is good.

The video is pretty long, I listened to it like I would listen to a podcast, and did work on the side, taking some notes from time to time.

Why? Because the guy starts talking in a voice over after a few minutes, and there he talks about his business practices while showing footage from the lawn work. And the voiceover content is actually pretty good, the video I can not say, I did not watch it :)

Who is he?

Apparently he has been building his gardening care business for over two years now, so he says, and he did a ton of things wrong.

And in this video he shares and talks about a lot of business building topics that are very valuable, especially if you want to go down the road of creating a business that offers physical labor in some sorts.

In other words, if you want to create a company where you trade your time for money by working for someone, he gives good advice.

This could be gardening, window cleaning, cleaning in general, delivery service, logistics whatever.

His principles are great, simply explained and I think it is worth the time to take it in if you want to build a business yourself.

What he said is a nice quote to me:

You don’t want to be a small fish in a big pond, but you want to be a big fish in a small pond if you start out.

A small pond means thinking locally, where you can control the ones around you better, you want to stand out where you are instead of trying to compete in a much larger pond against everybody else. For instance, tying to build globally from the get go is not optimal for a service business like his.

Much better if you are exceptionally well positioned in a small market to build a base before branching out. Makes sense.

One takeaway stuck with me in particular.

If the cost of entrance is low there will be, inevitably, a lot of people that try to enter the market as well.

This means you need to stand out if everybody else can enter as well.

Which is obvious but we tend to forget. If everyone can do it without any real difficulties, your service needs to be especially good overall and details will matter a lot - if you want to stand out.

In the case of the video, for instance, he mentioned that your invoice should look professional, prepare a cost estimation sheet to present, then deliver exceptional service, show communication skills, be polite in negotiations, show confidence in what you do...

I find that interesting. You see, to start, you can definitely just use what you have. But once you realise it is a business, even small things will, for one, set you apart from competition, and two, simplifies your own work in the long term.

 Think about bookkeeping, which is hell a lot easier with an online service or, at least, with a standardised form that you number and date. Once you have to do the bookkeeping work, you save hours, and so will your accountant who checks the stuff at the end of the year.

So, I think that is well put.

Maybe I'll pick that up more in detail another time.

If you find good videos like that, send them to me.

Happy yo have you here

Oliver