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The Most Important Thing Owning A Business Has Taught Me

Ben_Weider

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Here is some backstory before I begin. I am a 14 boy who lives in Ohio. A couple of years ago I started a lawn care business to make money. It has been a long journey but after 3 years it has really paid off. I have gotten to the point where I am not just trading my time for money but having employees and trading their time for money. In this post I would talk about a very important lesson that I have learned.

1- Marketing is something that cannot be done in one step.
There were many obstacles being so young and starting my first business. The biggest one was acquiring customers. When I started out I would go to every door in my neighborhood soliciting my services and to no prevail it didn't work. This method only got me 1 customer and I had spent countless hours doing it. In more resent times I have developed my own marketing tactics. I learned that in order to get the customer when I went door to door two other things would first need to be done. The first step would be to inform my customers of what I was doing and offering. Even though this was used in lawn care it still holds true for other industries. You MUST let people know you exist before you try to go for a direct sale. After I made flyers and distributed them to everyone I moved on two the second step ACTION. The second step was to make a flyer that called for ACTION from my potential customers. I did this by handing out cards that said my business name and a short message stating that they could redeem the card for 10% off a given service. The beauty to this was that the service that have the discount was often the one that I wanted to promote so instead of making a general flyer this flyer / coupon basically told them to use me for a mulching service or tree trimming. Using this I could generate interest in a specific part of my business. The reason why it's important to have the 10% off a set service it to give the customer a reason to call you. This is import because no matter how much value your product has the only way they will ever see it in action is if they use and and why would they want to take a random shot at hiring you when they may be uncertain. Using the discount it gives the, a reason to call you and therefore ACTION is taken on their part. They will hopefully either call you or have you in their mind when they think about hiring someone for lawn care. These two steps are important because without them sadly most people will turn you down immediately when you go to their door. I have noticed that this method of advertising and selling exponentially increases your conversion rate when the door to door selling comes in. I was able to get every other person to say yes because I was on their mind. This is by far the most important thing I have learned and I hope that in the future if you ever need to market a basic product or service then give this method a shot! Thank you for taking the time to read this.
 
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smarty

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Keep it up man, you're on your way to becoming a shark ;)
 

PhotoKid95

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Are you working on any other projects at the moment? At this age, I assume you have a lot of free time. It's definitely a great idea to start achieving something big.

Nevertheless, it's great to see that you've already gotten a head start, keep it up! :)
 
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pds

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Welcome to the forum and it's awesome that you've learned this at such an early age. Goes to show that taking action and improvising as you go along is far better than reading about it in a textbook.

You should check out the "I Love Marketing" podcast. Joe Polish, who used to own a cleaning business, goes in depth about all the marketing tactics he learned from Gary Halbert and other copywriting legends.
 
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Journey2Million$

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That's great. You sound like a natural entrepreneur. I also like that your grammar is so much better than that of most other teens online. You sound a lot like an adult.
 

Vansita

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Hey,

Lawn mowing is no easy thing to scale, and I find if you can grow a lawn company, you can do anything. Lemonis (famous business guy) did the same thing, and by the time he was 18 he was generating $6,000 a week off his lawn company, and it didn't require too much of his time.

When you are able to grow to at least $10,000 a month, I'd suggest either keeping it going, or selling it based on a 2.5 year model, but advertising it for a 4 year model.

What this means is sell it for 10,000 times 12 times 2.5 ($300,000), but advertise it as available for sale for 12 times 4 ($480,000). It would be great cash after taxes (capital gains so figure on 300k you keep 255k) to utilize for other businesses, or, just keep it going!

Either way, great job on building to the point where you are.
 

Ben_Weider

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Hey,

Lawn mowing is no easy thing to scale, and I find if you can grow a lawn company, you can do anything. Lemonis (famous business guy) did the same thing, and by the time he was 18 he was generating $6,000 a week off his lawn company, and it didn't require too much of his time.

When you are able to grow to at least $10,000 a month, I'd suggest either keeping it going, or selling it based on a 2.5 year model, but advertising it for a 4 year model.

What this means is sell it for 10,000 times 12 times 2.5 ($300,000), but advertise it as available for sale for 12 times 4 ($480,000). It would be great cash after taxes (capital gains so figure on 300k you keep 255k) to utilize for other businesses, or, just keep it going!

Either way, great job on building to the point where you are.
Thank you for the advice!
 
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