610: How a Teenager Built and Sold a 6-Figure Lawn Care Business

22:57So we'd open up the notes on a specific day and we would just scroll down to the notes and we would see that there's 23 lawns in there and we would just go and order. And the office manager that we had essentially would just make sure to put them in the right order, which was the most efficient route for that day. All right. So we've got Google Suites, a super powerful tool to help keep everything in one place. Anything else on the tools and tech front? We also use QuickBooks for a while. We also looked at entering into working with like Jobber and some other like CRM as well as scheduling projects.

23:27Those were all really helpful because before it was honestly just me running everything off a whiteboard in my bedroom. And when we had a team in an office and two different crews, three different crews and subcontractors, they all can't see that whiteboard. So from there, that's where we really started leaning heavily into the softwares, which for us saved us so much on cost, made us so much more efficient, actually created a good opportunity for us to grow. At what point was the call volume such that you needed an admin staff to help answer calls and get things scheduled? Honestly, it was probably close to the fifth year when we were doing about north of$100 ,000 in revenue.

24:05I think I hired it a year late. And that was when we were doing about$300 ,000 in gross revenue. For us, one of the worst days of my life was it was about 10 days after quarantine started. So this was the first week of April of 2020. We had one person post some next door saying, oh, we gave Yard Boys a call. They were super helpful. If anyone needs anything, you should give them a call. That one post, I had probably 30 clients that we had worked for before respond to the bottom of it saying, oh, they're great. They're awesome. Everyone give them a call. Okay. Everyone in the world was on Nextdoor in that time.

24:37And I think I got 40 calls in 24 hours. And I realized how much I was over my head. I hired, so I have a younger sister. Her name's Evelyn. I hired Evelyn, who was 13 years old. And I said, Evelyn, when this phone rings, you need to call. You need to answer. You need to ask for their email. And then I'm going to get you your own personal email. And then you're going to schedule an estimate to follow up with them. And we'll figure out how to best train you along the way. But right now I can't answer 40 calls, run two crews and figure out all these new clients all along the way. So that was where it was basically like as the plane was flying, kind of like you said earlier, we were building all the processes and services as we went.

25:18Was this through Google Voice or was this through Jobber, like how you managed the phone system or just like your personal cell phone? So I had a personal cell phone, which was one of the worst decisions of my side hustle idea. In that moment, we went to two phone numbers. So we had a strictly an office number and then I got my own personal phone number back, which was one of the most. It took out so much stress for my life because it gave another kind of barrier for clients being able to reach me. Okay. So we've got the social media and that's great to have like customer testimonials and have that kind of go live right at the start of the season.

25:52Basically anything else? You mentioned some paid traffic, but what else worked on social and the marketing front to get some new business in the door after the cold calling days? Honestly, it was word of mouth. That was king for us. We had a lot of also old-fashioned branding. So all of our trucks, all of our employees had employee shirts. They all looked professional when they drove by. We had yard signs with these little stick-on card holders. So when you're taking your dog for a walk in the neighborhood, you would see this professional crew working and go, oh, we need that same thing done in our house.

26:22They'd grab a card and keep walking. Eventually, the last two years got into more of a paid social media marketing campaign. we worked with a couple other contractors in the area who were north of they're around a couple million if not like five or ten million in gross revenue and that's what they said they had noticed the greatest change and so we started breaking into that but even near the end that wasn't our bread and butter our bread and butter was next door organic lead generation and then honestly just paying my office manager to sit there and monitor it the whole day if any new inquiries came in of someone saying hey does anyone have a good recommendation to redo our backyard and put in a patio, we were the first one to comment.

27:01And then because we had such a high reputation and quality of work, typically we'd have two to four other clients we'd worked for in that area also comment below us and say, oh, we worked with Yard Boys and Jack, they're phenomenal. Give them a try. And the best part is that stuff stayed on there forever. So I still get calls to my personal number right now. And that's why my voicemail personally now, it says, if you're trying to call Yard Boys, give this number a call, just because we have such like a longstanding relationship on next door with all those people. Okay. I like the yard signs with the little stick on card holders.

27:33That's kind of cool as people. And then just like the word of mouth reputation, as you know, it takes years to build and moments to ruin if something does go wrong. So like, you have any horror stories of not being able to fulfill the work or anything like that? In all of my time doing my company, I got one bad review. It directly corresponded to that week period where I got so many calls right during COVID and I usually didn't have the volume control set up. It was an elderly lady who I had answered the phone and said, I'll get back to you in a couple of days. And I had misplaced her number, lost it completely on my phone, couldn't call back.

28:10And then she posts on next door and says, yeah, I called yard boys, but they haven't responded and they totally lied to me. and I was like, oh, I can't find your number. That's not my goal. I just completely lost it. And so I messaged right away. I'm like, I'm so sorry. We'll get that fixed. I call her up. I say, I'm so sorry. So we actually, she won, I think, lawnmowing at the time. We didn't offer that at that time. But I said, I've got three hours on a Saturday. I don't have any other work to do. I'll come by and personally do it. I didn't actually do any work anymore. But I was like, oh, well, she seemed like she was in her 60s, 70s.

28:41I was like, I'm more than happy to stop light is what it is. I was like, would you mind deleting that just because that was totally my bad. our reputation is everything. And she goes, Oh, of course, not a problem. I mowed her lawn for free, didn't charge her. I watered her trees when she was there. She asked me. And then about two months later I checked and it was still up. And so I called her and I said, Hey, is it okay if I get that taken down? I just like really want to make sure we keep our reputation good. And she goes, Ah, I'm sorry. I'm having a bad day. My dog dies and hangs up on me. And so that thing is still on next door.

29:11So I unfortunately never got it taken down, but that's the only one at the time that we had before I, so our reputation was everything. All of our Google reviews were five stars. Yelp was five stars. Nextdoor is as good as it could be. Okay, yeah, I was going to ask about what role the Google Maps listing and the Google local business or Yelp played in this. It sounds like, yes, we did create profiles on there, even though starting out like almost subdivision specific, like starting out super, super local, but going a little bit broader and setting up those profiles. That's correct, yeah. So there's so many competing.

29:42There's Yelp, there's HomeAdvisor, There's one called Angie's List. I think it just got rebranded. I can't remember what it changed into. But oh, there's also Thumbtack. There's probably about 10 to 15 places where you can get reviewed on. And so for us, we had to pick about five that we really focused on growing. And for us, that was Nextdoor, Yelp, Facebook, Instagram the very last year, and Google reviews. Okay. And because with those kind of four to five, we had them tied into our website. So it automatically showed on our website the best reviews popping up there. So that was kind of where we got all of our work is word of mouth, organic, which is honestly the best marketing you can do.

30:23Then just your standard old fashioned business cards out in the driveway next to a lawn sign. Like what's cool about the service industry is it's still a good 10, 15, 20 years behind everything else. if you just kind of implement some technology, but still tie it in with those fundamental old timey marketing things back in the 1950s or earlier, old fashioned, clean branding, you're going to be miles ahead of most of the other people in the industry. Yeah. That's one reason I like businesses like this. It's like a lot of the existing competition. They don't have a website. You see like fax us for a quote type of stuff.

30:57Like, no, no, no, just make it easy for me to do business. I'm used to Amazon prime. Like I just click the button and it shows up at my house. Like easy, right? Like make this easy. We had Johnny Robinson from squeegee God on Twitter, like doing his window cleaning business. It's like so much of the branding and reputation is online. It's the digital presence. It's the, how you answer the phone. It's like, you show up, if you're uniform, you show up when you say you're going to do and you charge what you say you're going to charge, like make it easy, make it seamless. So that's one reason I like it.

31:25The other reason I like these types of businesses is just growing demand. Like just people like, I don't want to bother with this anymore. Like people hiring out the service and a diminishing labor pool of people who want to go into blue collar type services. So I think it's a great place to play and one that you've done really well with. Did you do anything specific to solicit those Google reviews, Facebook reviews, Yelp reviews as you're wrapping up a job? Yeah, of course. So with all of us, like how I view it is, we want our reviews to be an accurate representation of who we are. And the nice part was we always had really happy, really awesome clients.

31:58And that was just because we went above and beyond kind of the service because with landscaping construction, we are not a product business. We are a service business. And so does that mean if at the end of the job, they say, Hey Jack, we'd love to talk with you about the project. Do you want to sit up in the front porch and just look at the yard? I will sit there for two hours and generally enjoy my time talking with a client that we just did a big scale project for. And so through conversations like that, if I can tell that they were really happy with kind of service provided and how it worked, I'll say one thing that's really important to us is getting these reviews and it's something the best thing that we could do Would you be comfortable filling out a review?

32:32We won't tell you what to say We'll just send you a couple examples what other people have done and for us It was 95 % of the time they would say oh, of course we'd love to In those reviews since they're all organic They would highlight different factors that I might not even thought to mention But they're like, oh they got back to us on time. Oh jack took his shoes off before he went in the house Like those little details that kind of sets you apart because you are a service-based company Okay. Yeah, that's kind of cool. And then it allows you to branch out to hopefully other nearby cities or suburbs that might be looking and can find you in maps where it's like, oh, that was outside of our cold calling radius, but they still found us.

33:06Exactly. At least with us, it was our reputation was everything. And that's kind of a misnomer is I think a lot of people kind of look at service industries of whether it's plumber, electrician, landscape construction company as like a lower paid, lower wage job. And it definitely is for some, but it's funny. Most of the time from what I've been hearing through my experiences, starting out, even as like I was 16, 17 in high school, I was making about$500,$600 a day in profit four years ago. And that was me waking up. Yeah. As a high school, it's insane money. Yeah. And it's not rocket science.

33:43It was just cutting grass. And I would listen to a bunch of business podcasts, whether it was from the wall street journal or Guy Raz, and I was learning about business. Somebody cared about making money, making$500 a day, getting a really bad farmer's tan. But at 17 years old, that's all really pretty straightforward. So it's funny that like, there's a huge opportunity here and people just, they just don't really know, which is kind of what the cool part was, is it's like, it's overlooked because it's so obvious. Yeah, there's a lot of people toiling away, looking for that elusive passive income stream where you might be better off in the near term, especially just going out and solving somebody's problem.

34:20Yeah, no, that's a good way to put it. More with Jack in just a moment, including dealing with imposter syndrome, bidding on some of these bigger projects, and setting up the business for a six-figure exit right after this. As a business owner, you worked hard to make that phone ring, but missing a business call? It's like watching money fly right out the window. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q-U-O. It's the smarter way to run your business communications. Quo is the number one business phone system built for 2025, not 1995. In fact, it's rated the top choice for customer satisfaction with over 3000 reviews on G2.

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35:41That's No missed calls, no missed customers. Toward the end of this thing, what was like a day in the life logistics for you? Was this bidding jobs? Was this trying to play puppet master on the different crews? You got to go here. You got to go here. What was your role at the end of this thing? I think probably about midway through or to the end of running my business, I realized that when you run a business, you make your money when you don't spend your time running the business, but you spend your time fixing it and making the business run better. And that was a hard transition for me because I'm used to, oh, we're short a crew.

36:16I'm 17, 18, 19 years old. I can go move some rocks for eight hours. Yeah, yeah. I'll just go do it. Right. Yeah. Right. And so for me, one year I set a hard line of this year, Jack doesn't do any work. And it's not because I'm lazy. It's just because if I move rocks for 12 hours, I probably already had 15 hours of other stuff I need to do. And that's going to be late now. And so a day in the life for me those last couple of years is I woke up before all of our crews woke up. So we started our projects at 7.30 in the morning. I woke up at 6.45, 7, went downstairs, opened up my laptop, my phone, responded to some emails, responded to some client questions, followed up on estimates.

36:53Then typically by 8, 8.30, I went to the job site, talked with the manager, walked around, really having that hands-on, making sure that everything was done up to my standards. because as the owner, like you're going to catch things that a client would catch that just the people doing the work, they're there the whole day. They're just going to miss. Yeah. This was like mind-blowingly frustrating for me when I was running painting crews in college. Yes. It's like, you can see from your truck on the sidewalk, like before you even get out of the car, did no one notice that the masking didn't come off that upper window or whatever?

37:22It's just like, I don't know. Like the attention to detail just like was really frustrating. It's like, come on guys. Like if you don't have time to do it right, when are you going to have time to do it over? all the guys we worked with were really great. But occasionally we hired some people that I had to let go. And I do remember just as one funny story, I remember going to a job one day and telling one of the guys, okay, you can go ahead and start planting those plants. Cause he was sitting on a shovel, not moving it. And he goes, okay, sounds good. And he like brings a couple of plants over and they're all in those plastic Home Depot, but we didn't have them from Home Depot, but those standard plastic buckets that are disposable.

37:57And I remember he looks at the plant and he looks at me and he goes, do I take the plastic off before I plant it or do I plant it with the pot in? And I remember being like, like, okay, it's a good thing I'm here. Just double check certain things because when you go and you plant all these different plants in the buckets, you're supposed to take off or just little things where we had one time, the guys were so tired at the end of the day, we had two different shades of mulch and they had mixed them and put them all throughout the yard. So we had like a red and a brown mulch mixed together, which to me, it's extremely obvious when you look, but they've been there all day.

38:28So they were just moving. They're trying to get out of there. And so when my day in the life, it was wake up emails, real quick, double check to make sure everything's going in the right direction. No plastic pots were in the holes and then run some deliveries also on the phone with suppliers, clients confirming questions or answering things while I'm doing deliveries. And then from about 11 to two in the afternoon, I went to the same Starbucks every single day, I sat on my computer and then just worked on whatever as the business owner, whether it's payroll, fixing a glitch on the website, running our next email ad campaigns, answering questions from the office.

39:05That's kind of how the day in the life was near the end. Yeah, that's helpful to hear. Still a little bit of hands-on. I got to show my face and be the leader for these crews and hopefully plug any holes before it sinks the ship. But also being this business owner, having a higher level view of things. Where's the business going? And did you ever run into like the imposter syndrome of biting off more than you could chew or bidding a five figure job for the first time or a$25 ,000 job for the first time? And you're like, can we really get this done? Do we really know how to deliver? Yeah, I think that's a place I perpetually live in is imposter syndrome.

39:44It's funny, even when I was getting ready to do this interview, I was like, oh my gosh, what if I forget all the stories I did for the last nine years? And what if I just don't have anything to talk about when you ask me questions? And then, of course, my next thought was, well, that's okay. I'm sure you'll remember as you go along. But so I think for me, it was big too, because I went to college out of state, I was still running things from an operational side from my dorm. But I was in class full time, I was studying, I played on intramurals, I went to class and did homework and went to the library and at the cafeteria.

40:17and then in spring break, I would jump on a plane while all my friends went to Florida, do whatever they're gonna do. I would jump on a plane, I would do 25 estimates back to back to back, put on my Carhartt work boots and ride around my truck and estimate out a couple hundred thousand dollars of projects and then go right back to college and then go back to being a college kid again. And so for me, it's always been an area where I don't think I've ever felt qualified and still weird to say, like if I told a client, oh, that'll be$25 ,000. Like in my head, I'm like, oh my gosh, what if they know I'm just like 18 years old or 19.

40:52And they're like, no, that totally makes sense. Sounds good. And then we'll do it. And they're so happy. And then I get in my truck and I close my eyes and I go, all right, you're doing it. You're doing good. Just keep on going. So that's a place where I feel like I'd never fully gotten out of, but it's a place where I'm trying to continue to grow in. And he didn't start there. I think that's probably the important, like you started doing the work for 275 an hour, like, you know, level up over the course of, I'm like, I see these big highway construction crews and they're working on building like this light rail across the I-90 bridge.

41:22And it's like, I'm just curious, like, or was like four generations ago, was this like a little handyman service? And they like slowly started bidding bigger and bigger jobs. I kind of asked myself that question. Like when I see these people tackling these projects that are probably multimillion dollar bids, it's like, where'd they start? Like, I'm always curious the origin story for that. So thanks for sharing them. The imposter syndrome never really goes away. And it's just every time like, okay, let's learn as we go. Let's deliver this and do right by the clients. I want to transition into a portion of getting out of this business or exiting this business.

41:56I think to have an exit, a six-figure exit under your belt at this age is something that a lot of entrepreneurs will never see. I think the stats are, you know, most businesses end up getting shut down rather than sold. And so I think it's a really cool plan to say, I don't know if this is what I want to be doing forever and to have set it up in such a way that somebody else could take it over. My transition kind of was two different phases. So in 2020, I started college for the first time. I moved from Colorado to Virginia and we subcontracted out about 100 weekly clients that we had and as well as fall cleanup services.

42:31So all in all is probably about three to four days work of full time crew work. We found another reputable contractor. We had an agreement written up by my lawyer and he signed. We agreed. I think it was probably the end of that year after we'd fulfilled that agreement. I went back through and ran the numbers. And it dawned on me that basically I'd broken even for subcontracting out for those three or four months. And so in my head, I go, okay, well, is breaking even a necessary evil? Like it gives me the increased income over the summer, but then it's a hassle in the spring and fall to manage.

43:03Is there an opportunity to essentially sell off these clients? And then that way I can just solely focus on the landscaping side, which was higher margin, which we had already done about$200 ,000 in that previous season for the first time we got in. For me, I reached out to the guy that we had subcontracted to and said, hey, we'd love to offer you to purchase these clients. Is that something you'd be interested in? Then that was the summer of 2021. We signed a deal for$55 ,000, which was the purchase of all our client book, residential maintenance client book. So any services that were basically with the lawn mowing or an aeration client, spring or fall cleanup, things of that nature,$55 ,000 was like six months or so of the net profit from running that.

43:48And in the lawn maintenance industry, that's pretty uncommon because none of them were under contract, which is where most of the value comes in typically. But for us, it made sense because we were trying to transition out and they already had a really great working relationship with that new service. And the clients had, I think this is what blew me away. The new service had a retention rate, I think, of close to 90 or 95%, which is completely unheard of. I told him, I said, I'm going to be honest. There's no guarantee. I think if you do it right, you'll probably keep 70, maybe 80%. And he goes, okay, that makes sense.

44:23And in the back of my head, I was like, you never even really know. And I think we checked back from the following year, and he had close to 90, 95 % retention. And I was like, wow, that spoke directly to his quality. because we actually had trained him to how we ran it. And then also that ease of transition between the two. Okay. So for the buyer in this case, they're looking at, okay, these recurring maintenance clients are not under contract, but they have this ongoing need. Currently Yardboys is solving this problem. We can step in and buy that book of business and hopefully retain those clients.

44:52This is in lieu of any marketing expense to go out and get this volume of business ourselves. Like we could shortcut that by just buying up this volume of work. Exactly. And that's where the value came in. It's not that these are so precious and valuable. It's just that the time it would take to grow it, that was a deal for them if they're able to retain it. And even from the numbers, it turned out to be a major success for them as well as for us. Cool. All right. And then that was part one. What was the second part? The following year is 2022, my junior year of college. And I was like, all right, I do know for sure I'm not going to be going back in and doing landscaping after I graduate.

45:23Let me shop around and see if there's a buyer for the rest of this company, essentially. And so. Which is more challenging because it's one off projects, right? Yeah, it's one off projects. It's employees, but there's so much turnover in employees. And this one was even way more tricky. A couple years ago in high school, I had applied and won first place in the local Colorado competition for the top youth owned business in that state. So I called up one of my former mentors there and said, Hey, I think I was 21 years old. Then I said, I'm 21 years old. I'm trying to sell business and I've never done this before.

45:58Do you have anyone that I could just talk to that? Like, I mean, I've already checked with my mom and my dad and got their opinion, but like, is there someone that like I can just talk to? One of the ladies I knew there has been majorly helpful over these years said, let me give you a contact. This guy's worked on, he works for a private equity firm, and I'm sure he'd love to talk with you. And so I met with him, he had a free opportunity at 645 in the morning downtown. So I woke up and ran downtown, got breakfast with him. And it was so helpful. He basically, he said, don't overcomplicate it.

46:32You check a couple websites to see what the current market rate is for those things, see how your company compares, and then create an offer that basically looks similar to what you're seeing open in the market. And I remember walking away and going, that's not that hard. For his standard stuff, it's months and months and months of CFA. Yeah, due diligence and everything. Of course. But I just appreciated that you even took the time to talk to a 21-year-old kid that had a landscape construction company. So went home, ran a bunch of numbers, looked at our financials, compared us what was kind of out there, then reached out actually to the person that had bought our landscape maintenance clients and said, hey, essentially, would you be interested in purchasing the rest of this business and then transitioning the name as well over?

47:16With him, he said for sure he wanted to get some more time to continue the maintenance side. I want to get some more time to finish running this through college. But we set up an agreement basically that it was a year, year and a half training program where he got to basically, I had a shadow for 16, 18 months and it allowed me to really show him what it looked like on a daily basis. So that transition concluded in July of 2023. And from there, he took over and started running the business without me. Now I still, in theory, you think you're done and you can pop the confetti. Since then, I've learned a bunch what it actually looks like to do a proper transition.

47:51And even since we have transitioned, we've definitely have experienced some troubles just because when it goes from you're literally running everything to someone that you worked with for even a year, two years, three years, taking over, there's a lot of stuff that can come up with that. So that's kind of how that transition worked is it was an opportunity for me because I can move on past that. And then also you could enter a new industry that he didn't necessarily have enough experience in to enter on his own. Okay. So it wasn't putting it up for sale on any online business brokerage, like a biz buy sell or anything.

48:22It was like, look, I already have a relationship with this potential buyer and just kind of like floating that idea. Hey, you already bought our maintenance business. What do you think about the other side too? Exactly, yeah. And with our lawn maintenance clients, when we first, that first transition period, we did shop around with some other local areas. And just the impression we got in from the research I did, it was just the issue of when you transition from one company to another and there's no contracts involved, the dollar that they would be willing to spend would be lower than this other person since they already had the relationship.

48:55And so that was just, we did with the first time around. And then the second time I was like, all right, there's a lot being said that you already in your network, you already have relationships with people and you know how they work and you know how they run their business. And we already had seen success in how he transitioned before. And that's why I decided to go with him again for that second term. It's an interesting one because it's like for one-off projects, yeah, you're buying basically the team and their expertise, but like you said, there's a lot of employee turnover or there can be.

49:20It's like almost you're buying the online reputation and the goodwill that you have built, like the marketing engine almost like to, even though these are one-off projects, like I'm reasonably confident that more lead flow is going to be coming through on the basis of this foundation that you built. Yeah. And the other thing that I would add as well too, is it wasn't as simple as, oh yeah, we'll sell you our website for a couple hundred grand or whatever. That wasn't it. It was, we'll transition mid-season. So July's peak everything and it'll come with whatever contracts we already have under contract as well.

49:51With, since we did the year previous, there's no guarantee. So when we actually ended up did transitioning. We transitioned over contracts and then basically worked on training up his guys as well too. So, and then it's also, and this is kind of going into kind of my next endeavors is a lot of the stuff I learned along the way. It took me a total of nine summers to basically make the wrong choice or decision. You started when you were practically a baby, you know? Yeah, I was a little baby. Yeah. But like you make the wrong choice and then you do something wrong, you fix that and then you know what the right thing is.

50:25And so the real value came in that training along the way is don't do this, don't do this. This is how we do it. And there's always opportunity for more growth, but this is what we found that works. This is how you run your employees, your operations, your whatever it is that you're actually working with. Yeah, absolutely. So that leads us nicely into what's next for you. What's got you excited these days? Sounds like you're kind of winding down the transition phase and now off to the next project? I walk in graduation in May. So I'm super excited. Not even graduated yet. Well, congrats on that.

50:57Yeah. No, thank you. I'm all finished. What I really learned in high school is yes, I made a really good amount of money. I paid for my college debt free. I was able to, I've been to Europe twice. I paid for, I went to New Zealand for an internship in real estate development consulting. Like I've had a lot of great opportunities and it's paid for a lot of opportunities for me to grow into. However, the real growth was in learning what it looks like to actually be an entrepreneur and like learn how to talk to clients and how to know what it is to actually figure out if you're profitable or how to sell services.

51:33And I learned all that in high school. For what I'm working on now is basically I'm building an online course that's going to be launching June 1st, where it's really designed for other high school students to really start businesses that they want to start. And from my perspective, like my parents all the time were asked, how did your son learn that? And for me, it was because of the practice and like the failure. Yeah, I was doing the thing, trial and error. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And for me, I just wanted to be able to basically create a course where you're able to follow. It takes kind of the guesswork and that scared like, oh, like, do I get clients?

52:09Do I buy a lawnmower? Do I go on social media? Like whatever it is, like I want to be able to create an opportunity for because a bunch of my friends in high school, the only difference between me and my friends in high school is I knocked on doors before I fully realized how difficult it was going to be. Like there's nothing real special about my story. It was just the fact that like I did it before I really thought it through. So I wanted to create a course that allows students to know what that next step is, what it actually looks like and to take a lot of the guesswork and the nerves out of what it looks like.

52:38And then also give parents a way to allow their kids in high school to maybe, whether it's mature, grow up, learn what it actually looks like, how business works, how to manage money, how to talk to people, whatever it is that they're really looking and want to actually grow. And I guess my generation would be called like adulting, how to adult in a better way. So, yeah, you know, instead of looking for a job, go build yourself your own job, build your own income streams. And I love this call to, well, I didn't really give myself a chance to overanalyze or overthink it. I just started knocking on doors and sooner or later people said yes.

53:09And then I had to figure out the next step. Well, how am I going to deliver this work? And then enough people said yes, that I needed to hire help to go deliver this work. And then I hired my sister to answer the phones. And it's such a cool story. So this is mudlabscourses.com. You can find Jack's upcoming course offerings over there. We'll be sure to link that up in the show notes as well. Again, mudlabscourses. Super inspiring story. Really appreciate you stopping by and sharing the goods on how you built and eventually sold this thing. Let's wrap this up with your number one tip for Side Hustle Nation.

53:41Wherever you're at, you probably have enough information to get started and you know what you need to do to start. You're probably not starting just because you're nervous too. I think there's a lot of, for me, even like when I was going to start this new, like building the course, I was like, oh, like, do I need to do some more interviews or do some more podcast interviews or really understand my business more. No, I have an understanding of what knowledge I've grown in. And so I just need to take that next step and offer that and not get stuck and overthink or get nervous. I just need to go for it.

54:14And so for me, I think there's a lot of beauty in just kind of stepping out before you really know exactly what your next step is, but you know what the first thing you need to do is. So for me, I would say that's going to be my number one takeaway and that I really built my business around is I didn't let myself overthink things because I'm a natural overthinker. I just landed a project for 20, 30 ,000 and then went, oh my goodness, I need to figure out how to do this one part of the project that I've never learned before. And I need to, what does it look like for me to get there? That was how I just, I set a deadline and then I had to fulfill it by that time.

54:46And I was impressed with how things were able to work out. And I'm definitely totally believe that that's an opportunity for everyone else as well too. Yeah, this is the entrepreneurial skillset. It's figuring it out. Every step of the way is up against the ceiling of your skills and ability. And it's your job to figure it out. Where do we go from here? So I like this call. You probably have enough information to get started. You don't need to know steps two through 10 to get started. You just got to do the first thing. So I like that one. A couple of takeaways before we wrap up. One is this mention of yours to be the business owner and not the business doer and trying to get out of that as soon as possible to kind of wear that CEO hat.

55:23And if that's where you want to scale the thing, if you love cutting grass, like, hey, that's fantastic. We had somebody like, if you love teaching video game classes, keep doing the thing, right? You don't want to get rid of a job you love in the name of growth and scale. But if that is where you want to go, then you got to be the CEO. You got to be the business owner. Second thing was reputation is everything. And to have that foresight as a teenager and to show up on time and be respectful. And especially with people's property, like they've got a lot of equity and money tied up in these things.

55:53Like it's not that anything isn't reversible, but like there's potential damage to screw something up. And so you'd be a reputable and respectful person there because all the branding that can happen in person can also happen online with the example of people flaming you out on next door. You don't want that to happen. Again, your listener only bonus for this episode is my list of 101 service business ideas that you might be able to apply some of Jack's tactics to, to grow a side hustle of your own. You can download that for free at the show notes for this episode, or just follow the link in the episode description of your podcast app.

56:25We've got a whole host of blue collar service business examples. We've covered the pooper scooper business, the window cleaning business, mobile car detailing. There are lots of examples kind of in this ballpark if that is up your alley. So we're trying to link up a few of those other examples in the show notes as well. But big thanks to Jack for sharing his insight. Thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. You can hit up side hustle nation.com slash deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place. and thanks for supporting the advertisers that support the show.

56:56That's it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you find any value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend. So fire off that text message. Hey, check out the story of this guy who started this teenage business and grew it to six figures, paid for his college, really inspiring stuff. I hope you help spread the word in that way. Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen. And I'll catch you in the next edition of the Side Hustle Show. Hustle on.