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Introduction and Initial Challenges
Scott: That's the largest it got. With that came a lot of stress, some that aren't good. You've got to remember that you've got people out on their own in vans. And you quickly find out that not everybody is trustworthy. Domestic is great for getting money in. The downside of domestic is there's a ceiling of what to charge.
And people come into the industry. Six months later, they're out of business, so they don't have any work. Try to get into a commercial with small equipment, and then they drop someone in the lurch halfway through the year.
Welcome to the Podcast
Scott: What's up, IJ? Welcome to the Ritz de Revenue podcast, which helps small businesses grow.
Today's podcast is going to focus on taking a big business down to a smaller business. Usually, we talk about Today we're going to talk about downsizing. Before we get into that, let me tell you a bit about today's sponsor. The podcast is sponsored by Jobber. Jobber is easy to recommend as I've used it for the last 10 years to run my own business.
Not only does it do all my scheduling, invoicing, and quoting. It also gets me [00:01:00] paid faster, and my customers love it.
Jason: Hi, I'm Jason.
Meet Scott from SE Landscapes
Jason: In today's podcast, we have Scott from SE Landscapes. Do you want to tell us a little bit about yourself? I'm Scott. I'm from the Northeast
Scott: I am from England, and I run a small landscaping and grounds maintenance business that has been in operation for 17 years.
And I'm currently in the process of downsizing the business.
Robbie: Scott, you also run a YouTube channel, but we're going to talk more about that later. So I wanted to tell me just a little bit about how you got into it. Doing what you're doing now? Yeah. What was your story?
Scott's Journey into Landscaping
Robbie: My story is, I left school, I went and did an apprenticeship.
I went to college and took a computer course. While all my friends were making money, I wasn't. So I decided to find an apprenticeship. A local landscaping company at the time was advertising for apprentices. I quickly jumped on board, and I was getting 70 pounds a week, which was [00:02:00] a lot better than zero pounds on the college course.
It, everybody may have thought that it wasn't the ideal course. It wasn't an academic trade to be going into or anything, but I, the company I went and did the apprenticeship for, I quickly fast-tracked. Once I'd finished my NVQ, I quickly fast tracked through the business and 11 years later.
After being a team leader, I became a contract supervisor, managing multiple sites, multiple staff members, and multiple jobs, running up to 15 guys at one stage on various jobs. So it got to the point where I wasn't working as much, and by that point, I really loved what we did. I really loved the business.
I didn't really like the paperwork side of things. Two years into the contract supervisor's job, there was a huge downturn, and the company went out of business.
Starting SE Landscaping
Robbie: And that is when SE Landscaping was formed. And so you decided to start work for yourself, [00:03:00] were you already doing work on the side or did you just, so did you take your redundancy or whatever and put an end to the new business or how did you start, where'd you get the funds for the new business?
Yeah, basically, what happened was I was entitled to 11 years redundancy, and you don't get that for three months, but you already know from the liquidators tell you roughly what you're going to get. And I was entitled to 12, 000 pounds. So I knew that money was coming. It was two weeks before Christmas when the company shut down, they'd set up a side business of building houses.
There was a big economic crash, and they owed the bank 5 million pounds. So, a week before Christmas, I spoke to a lot of the customers I had because we also had a baby on the way. Some of them said that they would take me on and give me work. I had a client base, and I had customers who knew me.
So basically I had to go away over Christmas. I had to get insurance, I had to get a vehicle. And I did have a few bits and pieces of equipment because [00:04:00] I did used to do a few jobs on the side. After working on a weekend. So I had the basic bits of kit to set away to do planting jobs and to do small commercial.
Contracts, nothing big, because I didn't have any big equipment.
Early Challenges and Breakthroughs
Robbie: After Christmas, I went back. I had a bit of luck in the business because my dad was a health and safety officer for 20 years. Some of the customers I was working for were Balfour Beatty Civil Engineering, for instance. I was working on a large planting job, and there was 200, 000 worth of planting left to do, and that was the first job.
That landed on my lap now a nice little number, a nice little number to start with. It was daunting. Yes. And it dropped on my lap. There was various issues to go with it was one that the only reason they gave me the job, the only use you work with large companies. The only reason they gave me the job was the quantity surveyor knew me and he went to the people above him and said, look, I can vouch for this guy.
And they fast-tracked me through. So that was a bit of a [00:05:00] start. You need to bring your own staff right from the word go, or did you do that off your own bat? No, it was a matter of I didn't have any money, so it was a matter of I need to go out and start working 14, 15 hours a day. There was one major stumbling block was in order to complete this job I needed 30, 000 of the plants, which I didn't have.
Nobody will bankroll you, you're a new business, you won't get credit from the company for plants. I had to borrow originally from my dad, and then once you start, You might be asking how much money your dad helped you with, the whole pack figure. Yeah, initially he gave me 5, 000 pounds, and then what happened was I went to the company with 5, 000 pounds, they gave me the plants, and after a month or so, because they knew me as wealth rewarders, he was happy to say, look, we'll help you get the business off the ground.
So there was a lot of goodwill in the early days that I'm not saying everybody would get. It's I was lucky. Yeah. That was, but that was built up from a, but that was built with relationships and people know me and my thing. They already trusted
Jason: you. [00:06:00] Yeah. Yeah.
Scott: But it's it could have gone the other way and I could have done that first job and it could have been a struggle and I could have gone out of business as businesses do.
What size did they? Get the business to you; how long and what size did you get the business to Scott?
Managing and Downsizing the Business
Scott: It took 10 years to build the business up to; at one point, I was up to seven members of staff. That's the largest it got. With that came a lot of stress. It was trying to manage seven members of staff.
Some that aren't good. You've got to remember that you've got people out on their own in vans. And yeah, quickly find out that not everybody is trustworthy and some people will sit for two hours somewhere and not do it. Not do a day's work and not realize that some sites have CCTV and you will get a quantity surveyor or a site manager ringing up and saying your guy's never moved since he arrived on Monday morning.
And it's 11 o'clock and he's never moved and you quickly realise that when you ring them up or when you speak to them on the night that people will blatantly lie to you and say that they've done a full day's shift. [00:07:00] The stress of managing staff. Getting the work as well, getting the work in. Yeah. It becomes less of a, I enjoy working on the tools myself and whenever you're up to seven staff, did you have somebody in the office full time or was that?
Pretty much apart from the health and safety, which my dad managed, I was office staff. I was invoicing on a Sunday night. I was doing quotations through the day. I would go out and take an hour out of my day and go and do a quotation. I would get home on a night. I would send that quotation. I would manage supplies.
Everything. Were you using any software to manage your business? Nothing. It's something Even for your accounts? Or Everything has always been manual and even to this day I still do my invoices on a manual basis, which I know everybody's in the new world and it's something that I've just stuck by, a system that works everybody's very mobile phone orientated now.
Always. things. I still have a desk diary and I still use the diary. And it's just the way that you get stuck in a [00:08:00] rut. I think it might not be the best way, but it's just the way that it works. If it works for you, if it works and yeah don't why are they, why are there hassles? And what do you think?
So the difference is you do mostly commercials now.
Commercial vs. Domestic Work
Scott: What do you think the pros and cons of domestic stroke commercials is? Domestic is great for getting money in. The downside of domestic is there's a ceiling of what to charge. And people come into the industry, and they cut a few lawns for 30, 40 pounds and then they try to double the figures and six months later they're out of business, or they don't have any work.
See that so often on YouTube and on Facebook. People just trying to charge too much to the average man and woman who possibly just have a 20, 000 pound a year job. They haven't got seven or 800 pounds lying about to get a hedge cut yet. Someone thinks it's okay to go and charge them seven or 800 pounds for three or four hours work.
So that's the downside that there's only so much you can charge [00:09:00] commercial work. You can charge a bit more, but it's testing the market, knowing the market. So one of my tricks of the trade each year would be, I had a site a friend who was a state manager on a site. And every year, he would ring around my six competitors, get a price off them, and those would land on my desk.
And I could compare the market and see where I was. And it's it, you could say it's cheating, I call it market research, basically. But I knew where every one of my competitors businesses was for hedge cutting. How much so you could roughly work out their hourly rate from that? How much per square meter were they charging for grass cutting?
Sometimes, I would sit and think I need to increase my prices, or sometimes, I would sit and think we're not far away here.
Advice for Aspiring Landscapers
Scott: For anybody watching this that is maybe doing domestic and they're looking to get into gardening, is there, or they're looking to get into the commercial, what sort of tips would you give somebody that wants to take the step, the next step and go to commercial work?
I think you've got to realize that you can't [00:10:00] get through into commercial with a 21-inch mower. And basically once someone invests in me on a site, they're like a family member, I will go out of my way for them. And I've seen guys try to get into commercials with small equipment, and then they drop someone in the lurch halfway through the year.
And it's you can't do that. You're in agreement there. And I think it's equipment. You can't just need a basic bit of equipment, a decent ride on and things like that. You need tools, yeah, but you also don't need, in the commercial land, you also don't need one set of tools, you need two.
For instance, if I've got a big football field to maintain for a customer, and I'm cutting that with a Ransoms Parkway, which is now a 50 000 machine, if you're buying new, yes, he can get away with it. If that goes down, they've got a match tomorrow, and I'm halfway through. What do I do? They want the grass cut.
I'm letting them down. I need to be able to go back to [00:11:00] my unit and pull out a 48-inch mower. It's not the same mower, but it will do that job. It satisfies the customer. It satisfies me that I've achieved what I need to. But, if that machine was my only machine, and that goes down, and there's nobody else to help, there's no hire shops, this could be 5 p.m. on a Friday, I What do you do?
You've let that customer down; customer service is big for me. And I don't think a lot of people in this industry don't value customer service.
The Decision to Downsize
Scott: The business needs to downsize because, for the last, I would say, five, six, seven years of working round the clock. Work in 80, 90 hours a week.
It's the impact it's had on everything else. As I explained, when I built my business I had a son on the way and I would honestly say that my business has been very close to end and my marriage over the years [00:12:00] because working for yourself, what people don't realize is that business has to come before everything.
That business. is, it's not more important than your family, but it tends to mold that way. So that was the first thing on my mind. Most people don't, most people don't appreciate that don't work for themselves. Yeah. How much time does it take? Yeah, the time and everything. And like I say, my wife shouldered everything really with the business.
I'm going to even say a wee bit of behind-the-scenes. So we filmed a lot of the first episodes in January. We published at the end of January, nearly at the end of January. I was actually away on holidays whenever we published, and I had a lot of stuff scheduled and ready to go. But it was really stressful.
I didn't get time to think about my holidays beforehand. My wife had to plan everything. And then I was The videos were going live as I was lying on the beach sipping my pina colada, but it was really, it was, oh dear me, what a hard life, but you [00:13:00] don't expect, you don't expect to be lying on a beach, working, no, that's, most people don't, most people don't, most people don't think that.
I'd love to get this stage where I could lie on a beach all the time. I think in this business, if you try to achieve an eight to four lifestyle or a nine to five lifestyle, you ain't going to have a business. It's a 24 hours a day, seven-days-a-week business that from waking up in the morning, it's the first thing you think about.
You said at the high point, you had seven employees, and then you have to say that don't say because of the less stress. How have you gone about that? How have you managed that? A couple of guys left over the years, and the guys that were still on board obviously stayed and worked more hours, and I would do more hours just to keep to keep the money coming in, to keep the jobs covered, but I think four or five years ago it got to the point where I thought I need to slim this down even more because it's just not, It's not what I thought it would be and the stress and everything and [00:14:00] like you say you've got someone working for you eight hours a day you're getting probably after the load the van up on a morning and travel to a site which you've got to pay for.
Same again, when I worked for my old company years ago. Unbillable hours. It was, you got paid from on the job. That's against the law now. Basically, you're unbillable hours, so you're probably getting five hours a day out of somebody on site. Those five hours has got to achieve quite a lot of money just to pay their wages alone, the way the government keep ramping up wages and things.
Pensions and pensions added to it. Two pensions weren't a thing in years gone by. Sick. Sick pay as well of an employee sick if you do sick, PPE, you've gotta kick them out with PPE, the bottom figure. Once you sit and you take an employee on that bottom figure, if you are paying them 20,000 pound by the time you factor in the holidays, that's just as a rough example.
Yep. The days, like you said, the sick payer, the PPE, the bits of training they need. You need to be making close to sort of 25, 000, 26, 000 before [00:15:00] they even make you one penny. And you're not including pay, do you do the payrolls? Yeah. Again, payroll will be extra, as well as insurance. And then you've got to multiply that by the four or five people you've got on board.
And the bottom figure at the start of the year, the bottom figure once you add all your overheads up before you even turn a Profit, is staggering once you have employees doing insurance and your fuel bill, which you can pretty much figure out for the year and everything in advance.
Reflections and Future Plans
Scott: It was just getting to the point where I wasn't enjoying it, and I wanted to. I was on a mower most of the day, and I wanted to get back to what I enjoyed, which was gardening.
It was getting the point where it was making me unhappy. It was the decision that I'm gonna go down to, at the start of last year, I'm gonna go down to two employees and one of my guys. picked up a bit of a injury not through work, but he developed arthritis. Halfway through last year, I'd shrunk my workload slightly, but I was covering because he wasn't doing as much as he could have done.
It got halfway through the [00:16:00] last year, and I explained to the wife that I'm going to have to work more to cover, but that's it. The business is going down to me and one part-time person who will cover holidays and stuff this coming year. And that's as of the end of 2023. That's where we stand at the moment.
I have a young girl, which is a bit strange for the industry. She does litter picking for the business, weeding, flower beds, and things. And she is part-time, and apart from that, it's just me. And if you were your younger self, what advice would you give your younger self if you were to do it all again or somebody came along and said, Scott, I want to pay you?
I want to start my own commercial work. What advice would you give them? One bit of advice would be to be more ruthless because I've been too nice to people over the years in the business, and they haven't passed that on. I've been too nice with wages, too nice with hours, and just taking the fun home, and things like that.
And they haven't valued that. [00:17:00] So I would say we need to be more ruthless in treating people as a family in a business, which I thought was the ideal scenario. Hasn't worked for me. It could work for people. I'm not saying it won't work for everybody, but it hasn't worked for me. I just felt at times people taking a lend of you.
So that will be one, one big bit of advice. Just keep on top of everything in the business. Just remember that they're an employee, and you're the owner. If you're enjoying this podcast, don't forget to smash the like button. This podcast not only goes out on YouTube, but you might be listening to it on other normal podcast channels, such as Amazon and Spotify.
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Jason: Scott, we've run in your own business. Do you want to tell us some of the highs and lows that come with that?
Coming out of money? Initially,
Scott: the laws as I said, previous living on fresh air and being at breaking point [00:18:00] sometimes when you don't have money. The highs are when the business established and although I'm downsizing staff members, I couldn't have got where I was without staff. The business has been really lucky to me in the fact that it's paid off my mortgage.
It's allowed me to buy nice vehicles. From a personal point of view, it's paid for holidays, house renovations, and things like that. So it's been really good in that sense, although the stress probably outweighs the good things at times.
Scott's YouTube Channel
Scott: You're on a YouTube channel. Do you want to tell us a wee bit about your YouTube channel?
Yeah, I started watching YouTube four or five years ago. I think I'd been to SolTechs and I was chatting to a couple of guys who did YouTube, went home, started watching a few videos and thought I could give it a try. So I did a few grass cutting videos and was quite surprised. I thought if I could get a hundred people watching these videos, it would be great.
And within a. Matter of months, I was getting 500 [00:19:00] people watching it. So I thought to myself, how can I benefit people watching these videos? And how can I increase me following it slightly? So I started doing business tips and offering advice and quickly, I was getting phone calls, I was getting emails from people who are looking to establish businesses, so I kept the business, I kept the reviews of tools going, And I kept the business tips going of how to build the business.
So a lot of the stuff we've talked about today are in some of those older videos. And I think from a pride point of view, there's four or five people I speak to regularly at the moment who have built quite good businesses who will openly come out and they've commented on my videos to say that they've built the businesses from.
You talk about a lot of really good business tips. If you want to, if you want to grow your business and you're interested Hearing especially about the commercial sector. Yeah. Your videos are really good and the information you give away is, I'd say, priceless. Some of [00:20:00] the stuff you talk about is really Yeah, what I saw was only one or two guys was doing commercial videos.
I thought the ones who were doing commercial videos didn't really have a commercial background. They were still people who had just come into the industry, and I didn't think the advice was great. So it was a bit of a niche. The channel grew to a point—I think it's just over 2,000 people now subscribe to the channel.
The downside was it got to the point where I was receiving too many phone calls to offer advice. So I had to actually end that and I had to actually say to the new people, I can't keep giving the advice, but the videos are there to watch, which is the best form. And I just keep a small number of people now who I still deal with daily or weekly basis who I still offer advice to on price, and that could be anything to do with a business or they are having a bit of a problem.
I'll still help them out. No problem.
Conclusion and Farewell
Scott: Listen Scott, where have you travelled from today? We have travelled via airplane from Shildon in County Durham. Up to Newcastle and then [00:21:00] across to Belfast. Thank you very much for coming over and coming to us on the podcast. Yes. Thanks very much guys.
