Quote:
Originally Posted by woj
That's bullshit dude and you know it... you were making fuck all, that's why you shut it down... no one EVER shuts down a highly profitable business... they either sell it, or they hire a manager to run it for them... but in your case, there was not enough profit to sell it or to pay for a competent manager, so your only play was to shut it down...  |
I never said it was highly profitable, I said I made good money. Lawn services are not highly profitable. It's a service business, you make x percentage profit.. The more you do the more profit you make, but it's limited.
The diffrence is I wasn't greedy. I decided upfront when I bid a job, my labor was going to be x amount.. ( 40% payout to a crew) I paid that 40% regardless of the hours it took to complete the job. I had crews of 2 to 3 guys and that percentage of 40% per job was split between them.
Example say a job paid $100/month on a yearly contract. The pay was $40/mth for that job or $10/week. Split between 2 guys that's $5 each guy per week on that job. Those 2 guys are going to do on average 20-25 of those type of jobs each day. Meaning on average they are making about $100 a day each.
After expenses I made about 20 30% profit off a crew on average. I also ran my own crew which did most of my big commercial jobs. As I said I was hands on.
If a new guy didn't preform, then the guy running the truck was loosing money and working longer hours, so it was in their interest to help me keep guys whom preformed. It didn't matter to my costs if a new guy was a loafer, it mattered to the guy he worked with so it was the guy running the truck whom had to make an effort into making sure his helper was worth his percentage.
It's a very simple concept, of course it's not going to work for burger flippers, but it worked very well for me. As for getting rid of the businesses, as I said I got bored and very burnt out, I let my brother take over the lawn service and he thought he would be mr big guy and drive around in a truck all day not running the main crew..
He killed it in less than a year, I was doing my auto sales and the cleaning company at that time and basicly handed him the keys to that business.