Hosted by Mark Bradley
As a landscape entrepreneur, it is easy to let work and work-related stressors bleed into your personal life and free time. After all, managing a landscape business is an incredibly stressful and time-consuming effort. Or is it? As Tim Ferriss expresses in his book, The 4-Hour Work Week, individuals can enjoy the mini-retirements and rewards of millionaires without having to be one. It all comes down to how effectively someone can manage their time, effort, and energy.
At LMN, our goal is to consistently make the lives of landscape business owners simpler and easier. To do that, we have taken some of Ferriss’ most profound ideas and presented them in a landscaping context to help you streamline your business. Hopefully, this will help you spend more time enjoying your business than dreading it.
Reframing Your Expectations
One of the common mistakes entrepreneurs make in landscaping businesses is that they don’t know what they are looking for. In the first chapter of Ferriss’ aforementioned book, the writer explores the pitfalls of trying to achieve pre-established, unevaluated ideals.
Three common pieces of advice that up-and-coming landscape business owners will run into are: work for yourself, work when you want, and take early retirement. Unfortunately, all of this advice is ineffective at achieving what business managers actually desire; happiness and free time.
Ferriss challenges these ‘Deferrer’ mantras by presenting what he calls ‘New Rich’ perspectives. Rather than working for yourself, have others work for you. Instead of simply working when you want to, you should minimize the amount of unnecessary work and maximize your productivity. .
And finally, an early retirement doesn’t necessarily mean what you think it means. What is the purpose of not working, if you have nothing to build, manage, create, or work towards? For that reason, mini-retirement periods over the course of one’s life may provide more moments of rest and relaxation and can streamline your business.
While none of these wisdoms are definitive, they do force the reader to challenge societal expectations as well as your own. As a landscape entrepreneur, one should constantly be evaluating one’s goals, personal or professional, and determine whether or not they provide the outcomes you are looking for.
Streamlining your business is a great example of an objective that isn’t often pursued as much as it should be. To grow your landscape business, landscaping business owners have to spend more money on staff members, materials, and equipment. If your business model isn’t scalable, then growing your business may actually hurt your business.
Avoid Living by The Rule of Popularity
No one gets where they want to be by thinking like everyone else. At LMN, we understand that disruptors, those that challenge the status quo, are able to find opportunities for success where others have not. Take LMN’s time tracking app as an example.
Using our decades of collective experience in the landscaping industry, our team of designers and engineers realized that landscape businesses suffered from one common inefficiency: job management. At the time, most landscaping companies prioritized the skills of their crew members.
While that is important, the success of one’s business depends more on the efficiency of one’s operations. Through a cloud-based landscape business management app, crew members can manage client information, report job progress, and map out optimal travel routes. By digitizing some of your management practices, you can improve productivity and cost efficiency all at once to streamline your business.
As a landscape business owner, or senior manager, your goal should be to optimize your business activities as well as your personal life. One should never overtake the other. Podcasts are an excellent way to efficiently acquire knowledge and take a break all at the same time. For those looking for a new landscape business podcast, check out our list of highly recommended podcasts for landscape business professionals on our website.
If you are looking to streamline your business, and maximize your time in and out of the office, try LMN Free today.
