After hurricane Irma passed, my first appointment with my physical therapist was quite painful. I hurt my shoulder playing softball and I was sure I needed surgery but my physical therapist felt like he could get it back without surgery, hopefully as close to 100% as possible.
Marrow is a great guy and practices Australian physical therapy. He’s one of the best at it in the US and teaches it to others all over the country.
Our early discussion was about the hurricane and the damage to our homes, trees etc. Much like the conversation up north after the big snow storm, typical small talk but a worthy discussion nonetheless.
Lets face it we all want to connect on a certain level and we look for things to open a discussion and what opens it quicker than a natural disaster.
After a few minutes Marrow started to discuss how his patients were canceling left and right for the first 3 days after the storm and after hurricane Matthew he was down over ten grand.
This got me thinking about how hard Marrow worked to get through college and even though he has his own practice he is dependent on his ability to work to make his income. I am sure he teaches to supplement his income.
The tendency is when you own your own business is to do all of the work yourself. This is so common and is one of the real reasons businesses fail because one person can’t do everything.
But I find this trait to be extremely common among young business owners and contractors. Young referring to length of time in business not age. You start as an employee, learn what you think you needed to learn and finally you go out on your own. The problem is no one taught you how to be an entrepreneur along the way. Being self-employed does not make you an entrepreneur any more than riding on a train makes you a conductor. The difference between an entrepreneur and someone who is self-employed is this.
The entrepreneur owns the business the self-employed person works for the business.
If this is you don’t feel bad, I know this experience first hand because I have been self-employed for over 26 years and for many of those years my company owned me. Because I started it out as an apprentice locksmith and moved to master and then had my own company. It was on this path I learned a few things.
You can’t possibly do everything. I know you can and do but perhaps I should have said you shouldn’t do everything.
You need to outsource any task possible. My criteria, if I don’t like doing it, I want to find someone who does and pay them to do that for me.
The next thing I learned was no matter what business you are in you need multiple streams of income instead of relying on your ability to sell hours of time to people. If you charge $90 per hour and you send someone to a job you are at a maximum going to gross $90 per hour minus what you pay your employee on that job. If you operated on a 10% net margin you net nine bucks.
What if you could sell and install in the same hour two items that you purchase for $75 each and you sell them both for $100 each. You make an extra $50 and its all profit. More than five times the profit.
I have figured out the way to stop selling goods and services for the lowest price. How to get better, more profitable jobs and have them come to you instead of begging to be low bid.
I can show it to you but you have to ask. I won’t chase you. If you would like an endless supply of prequalified prospects that turn into profitable sales reach out to me and lets have a 15 minute discussion to see if there is synergy between us. You can schedule a call here.
To your lifelong prosperity,
David Mulvaney
P.S. Do you want next year to be the same or worse than this one? Do something about it, I can help. Schedule your free 15 minute profitability assessment. Click here.