Hey Mike Callahan here I want to make a quick video talk about mindset of business growth and some of the lessons I’ve learned in building my second seven-figure business and going out to build that second figure business to break a million and beyond. The first go out it was obviously in the lawn care landscape snow removal industry and in that service business started at freshman year in high school worked through college and didn’t really know how to go out and scale a business and basically it was just hard work and determination day in and day out knocking doors grinding and grinding some more to build and scale that business pretty quickly. Then once we figured out that sales machine how to grow the business became a massive second challenge to kind of that glass ceiling of growth and what that glass ceiling of growth really encompassed was the owner’s mindset or the leadership mindset mainly the owner’s mindset being myself and the problem there is I was ready to delegate or at least I thought I was but in order to delegate you really need to emotionally detach yourself from the things you’re doing on a daily basis. The fact that the business owner traditionally thinks that they’re the only one that actually can go out and sell and grow the sales is a crazy idea but honestly is all business owners we think no one can sell better than usand in order to grow and scale the business with our sales machine that the business owner needs to be out there selling. It took several years after college to realize that I was not the best person to sell the lawn care I may have been the figurehead but there was those folks in our organization could sell just as good as me if not better and to put that in perspective so Simple Growth are our business where our mission is really to help entrepreneurs or basically service business owners take their life back from their business that’s kind of been my mission with Simple Growth. Very similar as we scaled Simple Growth that the mindset shifted and I forgot about the conscious decision I made at Callahan’s Lawn Care that I was not the only one that could sell and I wasn’t the probably the best salesperson nor did I have a good return on investment but I knew that at Simple Growth originally that our overhead didn’t really allow for us to have a full-time salesperson outside of myself so many of the folks are probably watching this video live or recorded probably talked to me in the earlier days or even in the last up to last five or six months on the sales calls um and that was pretty predominant. Now Dillan and Kevin on our team have stepped up and I’ve realized that you know Dillan and Kevin are just as qualified if not more qualified to talk the sales process and where Dillan, very similar to myself in Simple Growth, brings expertise is he’s lived the trenches for fifteen to twenty years in the service industry those wounds are still fresh and we can relate to what’s going on and make sure it’s a good fit . It just didn’t have to be me and I had to step back from it and say wait a minute if we’re going to break that seven-figure mark again in a secondary business and continue to grow in scale past seven figures and provide good customer service I’ve needed to step back and allow Dillan to run that sales machine at Simple Growth. That wasn’t enough and that’s where my biggest mistake at Callahan’s Lawn Care happened originally when I went to go delegate it I thought I had put process and systems in place but I really didn’t I walked through it I talked with with the salespeople how to do it but it took several years to figure that out it really didn’t drive home where their sales basically lapped in overshadowed mine which I was good with but the only way that happened was for me to actually create a standardized process of messaging and qualifying and that’s what I think we’ve done this really good in the second seventh figure business that. We’ve built here is that we’ve created a sales process that’s standardized it qualifies to make sure the clients a good fit and if they are a good fit it’s the same exact process day in and day out. Now obviously the salesperson should have put their own spin on it and there’s room for them to make it personal and their own but to the core of it the sales process and really the qualifying process is standardized now this doesn’t matter the service business whether it’s Simple Growth, lawn care, or home cleaning but the first thing that I’ve realized is a I’ve got accept that I am NOT the only person that could sell I’m probably not the best fit to sell I need to create a standardized process that can be trained especially after COVID now we built everything in a online learning hub with videos and testing and for reinforcement of that training. Now that we standardized that process the second biggest mistake I made at Callahan’s Lawn Care was there wasn’t an accountability factor out the gate ora support factor so what we do is very similar to the big three so basically we have three metrics that we track the driver monthly and quarterly goals and driving to our yearly goals but those metrics are tracked daily for accountability and we have a weekly meeting so I meet with my sales team and a few other individuals on Monday but the sales team has an individual call with me it’s a standing virtual 10 to 15-minute call or in person after COVID or before COVID but basically we’ve got those three metrics we talk about how many people have come in the pipeline how many are qualified how many we’ve committed to that are actually potentially become a sale within the next say 30 days or the end of the month and some other factors but we’ve called in the top three there and we don’t only look at it for basically the week were in or the week that had just happened before but we look at it that week the week before that and then three weeks so now we have a historical trend of how many leads are coming in how many leads are turning into prospects they’re qualified and then how many sales are closed and what is that lifetime value so CAC to LTV is cost of acquired customer to lifetime value. These are things we’re tracking metrics to make sure that the sales team knows where they’re at and where they’re going and then management as myself can go in and support them and give them the tools they need. Now in addition to that the salespeople kind of pick in where those leads come into that sales funnel so one of the other meetings I have on Fridays at I believe 2 or 3 p.m. but it’s a recurring meeting and I think actually it’s 2 o’clock every Friday is with my marketing team not necessarily the sales team now they do communicate because that’s important but my marketing team is talking about all the different ways we’re advertising and going out organically and paid across the different social medias such as Facebook advertising. So not only do we have to have those conversations with our sales team but we also have to make sure that funnel is full with qualified contacts for that sales team to do their job. As you grow and scale that business to that seven-figure markand beyond some of the mistakes I made the early years is I didn’t create a process so the business owner after you get to a certain point whether it’s 750 to a million in sales maybe a little before or a little after that but the idea is the CEO the business owner the only way in my opinion that you’re to grow and scale that business is become the visionary the strategic force so you’re setting the vision you’re studying the strategy and you’re setting metrics in place with team buy-in to track those things such as your yearly, quarterly and weekly goals driving into that BHAG that big hairy audacious goal so that’s your 10 to 15 year goal and that is been instrumental in scaling Simple Growth significantly quicker that’s seven-figure mark the Callahan’s Lawn Care which took quite a while on through college and beyond. The idea is that when we have the CEO pulling out of the field and jumping in when needed to support the team we can set the vision we can set this strategy and then have meetings on a recurring weekly basis or daily basis with the key stakeholders to reinforce where we’re going and continue to push relevance. The first thing that this video is about is do you have the mindset to pull yourself out of that and have you built the structure to allow that to happen and not only be built the structure but have any of you set a recurring support mechanism to grow and scale the business of seven figures and beyond and we can dive into more detail in later videos. Those are the things that in my opinion are going to scale the business successfully whether in a million or beyond a million five million those things need to happen and then that five to seven million mark now we’re taking that strategic vision and strategy of the leader as the CEO and we need to distill that through the other managers and leaders and continue to replicate that throughout the larger organization. Main thing in the video today is make sure your mindset is right you are going to be the single point of failure and scaling your business if you think that you have to do all the jobs in the business and you think that you’re going to be the best at them because the truth is and the ugly truth that business owners are gonna have their strengths and weaknesses and traditionally we can find somebody as good if not better than us and then we can bring our real value to scale the business and have a good work-life balance as just a strategic leader and build that vision and strategy and scale the business. Comments or questions drop below I want to say it’s up to Jake and Dustin both crushing it out there in the lawn care world what’s up guys