Fire Your Worst Clients This Spring (And Make More Money)
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Why is spring the ideal time to fire low‑paying, high‑maintenance lawn care clients?
Hello and welcome to the Green Industry Podcast, your go-to guide for building a more profitable and thriving lawn care and landscaping business. Your host, Paul Jameson, is the author of five bestselling books, including Cut That Grass and Make That Cash, and his latest, Level Up Your Money, all available on Amazon and Audible. Now, get ready for more expert insights and practical strategies to boost your business and level up your life. Here's Paul Jamison.
Welcome back to the Green Industry Podcast. I'm your host, Paul Jamison, down here in sunny Florida. And today on the program, we're going to talk about firing the bottlenecks. Those customers that stress you out. They're always complaining. They're texting you late at night. They seem to always find something wrong with you and your company. And honestly, why do we keep serving them? We're going to talk about how we get ourselves in these pickles today. And most importantly, how to get out of those bottlenecks. bad customer relationships and replace them with new, better customers. But it gets tricky because you can't mess it up to where then they give you a one-star review and things of that nature. So these are muddy waters, folks.
And I feel like I got some pretty solid solutions for you. If you're new to the program, I've actually been a small business owner myself since 2011. I started my first lawn business back cutting that grass making that cash in lawrenceville georgia oh those were the days uh hot summers in old lawrenceville and i quickly quickly quickly got a whole bunch of bad customers And what happened was a real estate agent, I started working for them and they were the number two real estate agent in Atlanta. So long story short, they had properties all over Atlanta. Now, if you're not familiar with Atlanta, It's a big city, so I'm going from Lawrenceville all the way over there to Johns Creek, and then why not do some yards in Duluth and Suwannee while I'm out there, and I come back to Lawrenceville, and I'd be going out to Winder, and I'm all around town, and I was grabbing coffee with my friend Kenny at Panera, who's
been around the industry for about 20 years. And I was just basically talking to him like, yeah, I started my new lawn business and I got all this business. And, and he was just staring at me, shaking his head. He's like, kid, he's like, yeah, that's, that's not good business. I was like, no, no, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, you know, sunrise to sunset. I'm, I'm crushing it. He's like, you're driving all, he explained to me what windshield time is like, this is horrible. And he's like, you got to pick a neighborhood and just dominate that neighborhood. And so I quickly realized, oh, wow, this this whole thing of working for this real estate agent. I mean, I don't work for her, but she gave me, you know, real estate listings usually all over the place.
Right. Like the actual geographical location, all different locations. yards in all different neighborhoods all across metro atlanta and here i am thinking that i'm this uh new hot shot business you know lawn care business owner not realizing i didn't even know who my ideal customer was and why i had so many bad customers so anyway that's what we're going to talk about on today's program the famous um philosopher jim rohn shared a unique, I guess, insight into the Pareto principle, which the Pareto principle or the 80-20 rule is, for example, you probably... Well, let me just share what Jim Rohn said, and then I'll break it down, all right? So 80% of your headaches in your business are likely coming from only 20% of your customers.
Think about it. Take inventory of your business right now. What customer... is the bottleneck for you. What customer creates problems and challenges in your business? What customer, when you see them calling your phone, you're like, oh man, here we go again. Do I answer it? Do I let it go to voicemail? You know, that decision you got to make in the moment. Who are those customers for you? So, Jim Rohn is probably spot on. It's probably only a handful of our customers that are causing us this problem.
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