My Introduction - 1 Year of Business (The Man in the Arena)

[Splitlight]

Hi all,

I’m Splitlight, 29 years old from the UK and I own a service business. I have been going for almost one year now, and want to share my experience and ask for advice.

In my first year I haven’t made a huge amount of money, but I’m pleased with my progress - profitable from month 1 and steadily growing - and the general framework is in place for things to iteratively improve on.

TMF (along with loads of other business information sources) is something I bought around 1.5 years ago and I thought the content was incredible - I just got bogged down in setting the business up and actually going out into the world and doing jobs, and the advice in the book I absolutely could have benefitted from implementing earlier in greater detail.

Full of doubt, often second-guessing my decisions and feeling like everything I did in the business was imperfect, as time went on, especially in the latter half of the year I just focused on smashing out jobs as I felt the system was working well enough.

Now I have some time to sit down and think about things as I am the only person home for ~1 week (my current home situation is quite chaotic and I’m planning to change that this year), I’ve been going through TMF and realizing once more what a great resource it is – I would like to use this introduction to ask advice on pretty much everything. Anything you see here which could be improved, or advice imparted, I will listen, it would be much appreciated.



About the Business

I provide homeowners a service which is manual labour work, using a variety of tools and machinery to get the job done.

Pros (to the business):

• There is genuine demand for the service – people need this thing done all over the country, and the nature of it is something that will never go away. Not something lost in an AI revolution, the work will always be there
• I have a deep knowledge of the industry through my work experience, education, and consistent research over the course of ~6 years (books, industry specific forums, youtube, etc). Turning the theory into practice though has been an eye opener.
• The potential pay is good for me as the business owner. A standard business in this industry is a 3-man team, expected turnover £225,000 a year, my profit roughly half that (depending on very many variables), lets say ~£110,000/year. Not as much as some heavy hitters here, but it would put me in the top 1% bracket in my country.

Cons (to the business):

• It’s manual labour
• I, as far as I can tell, will always be the key person. I’ve been listening to podcasts about selling businesses, and buyers want to buy into something profitable and well-run, which they can take over. The nature of this business is such that I forge all the relationships and make all the decisions. How a buyer would slot into this I don’t know, I don’t think it is sellable.
• The nature of the work is so variable, it’s very hard to automate things and give employees standard operating procedures (SOP’s). It’s more of a loose trust built up over time with regard to their skills to undertake certain jobs, with certain tools.
• It’s dangerous, and I am fine because of my experience but there is a liability concern for others. Sending employees out to jobs without lots of training is tricky.

Marketing

Leaflets (did not generate many calls – older generation likeliest to respond to this marketing)
To launch my business I designed leaflets in a free graphic design software, and ordered thousands of 2-sided leaflets online. The front has my logo, and the back has a description of the services I provide and my contact details.

I posted these through letterboxes until I got busy enough with work that I didn’t have to. Because my work has a seasonal busyness and lull, I could probably do this again right about now to get leads coming in.

Online
I get a good amount of customers through a small advert on my countries version of Craigslist. Costs ~£8/month and I renew it each month.

Local Publications
In my city there are companies that post (for lack of a better word) ‘publications’ to every household in a postcode. I pay for a small advert in this publication to serve just one postcode currently.

It’s £60/month, but the targeting of customers is supercharged compared to my online advert, and the publication is full of random local stories and information that people like to read, so unlike my leafleting they are less likely to instinctively throw it in the bin, and is a sort of ‘trusted’ directory.


Future Marketing Ideas

• Social Media – I have only acquired customers through the previously mentioned marketing strategies and word of mouth (the best form of marketing). All my competitors have Facebook & Instagram pages which should vastly increase leads when implemented
• Google/Facebook ads. (Are there other kinds to consider?).. The previous forms of marketing I did because I understand them and can see their effectiveness. The realm of google ads I don’t really understand and need to research more to see if it would be worthwhile

Implementation

Logo & Website
I used a drawing tablet with my computer to create a logo which I’m proud of. It took weeks of designs, making tiny changes over and over again until I was happy with it.

I looked up old adverts for inspiration (imagine Victorian-era, or early 1900’s - 1950’s style marketing), where brands and adverts were portrayed with actual art. The drawings or paintings were intricate and detailed and they had something to them. Nowadays the average logo I see looks like it was made with the most minimal effort, in some cartoony childish low-effort manner. Minimalism for its own sake results in nothing interesting.

Then I used a website creator to make a drag-and-drop site, which again I am proud of, and spent many weeks trying to get the perfect colours, proportions, I use simple shapes to highlight areas of text, and tried to keep it clean and slick as possible. (How something looks is subjective, but when I show people the site they respond very positively and ask what company I got to do it, which feels good)

I have a huge leg-up over my competition because I am certain none of them have done this. Their websites look dreadful, they aren’t clear in their services offered, and mine is just like > here’s what we do > here’s how we can help you > ‘About’ page showing the proof and the backstory > contact us here for a quote. I spent a long time making it have precisely the required information, and no more. “A confused mind never buys”.


Doing Jobs & Providing Great Customer Service
From my marketing efforts and word of mouth, I get customers calling up. I visit them ASAP to quote, and send the quote as soon as possible to try provide great customer service (i.e I am available, I am here to help, and here to solve your problem as soon as possible).

If they accept I arrive on time – I’ll generally park round the street corner early and wait until the exact time we scheduled, as I believe this is also providing great customer service. Then I’ll undertake the work doing as good a job as I possibly can. 99% of customers have responded extremely positively to me and refer me to family and friends. I think my formal manner and adapting to the customer, for example calling older people by their surnames (“thanks for getting in touch Mr Smith” etc) is appreciated because that was the polite and ‘done’ thing in their day, but much younger customers would find it weird to be quite so formal (if he says hi I’m Dave, he’s getting called Dave).

Some customers will never be completely happy, and they’ll try it on with me but because I’ve done everything mentioned in the quote (very descriptive so it’s a standard to hold me against) they can’t try and pay less or whatever silly game they try to play. I can always tell who these people are at the initial quote too. One woman on a £350 job bank transferred me £345 after invoicing lol, as if I’m not going to immediately notice and contact them about the remaining money due.


Pricing
I’ve not overanalysed this aspect of the business, it’s very much done by ‘feel’, and ultimately going as high as I feel I reasonably can (taking into account labour, and time, and mentally comparing it against previous jobs to see if it works). If it goes too high they don’t accept the quote.

In the very beginning one day I was coming up with quotes for a few jobs and I was seeing my dad at the time, of course he was interested in what I was doing and I showed him.

“See that £200.. Try £215. Something about it just looks better.”

And I completely agreed with him. Now a £250 job is £255, or maybe £265. A nice round figure with a few zeroes for whatever reason seems like it is pulled out of a hat and I’m full of shit, whereas a 5 on the end feels like the price was calculated somehow.

If the client is for whatever reason not very amenable at the quote, I’ll put the price slightly lower because I want the job - £400 becomes £395 or less and it looks more inviting but the difference is minimal.

Finally, the power of many small jobs adding up is incredible. I’ve decided that the smallest price a customer barely has to think about to accept is £45, with £50 eliciting the first ‘hmm’. Some days I’ve priced a big job into many smaller ones, and it looks great to the customer to see a list of £45/£60/£95/£80 etc, but those have been some of my most lucrative jobs where I’ve made almost £1k in a day doing small very achievable things.



Problems Faced, and Limiting Factors

Manual Labour is Punishing
When I first started out and went to the shops who supplied various tools and machinery, I had a weird interaction with the boss of the main supplier shop. He, I thought at the time, completely insulted me.

Essentially saying that people start in this industry all the time, people come and go, and those who carry on F*ck up their bodies, etcetc. It felt like he had personally attacked me and I thought he was an arsehole for saying that. He could have kept his mouth shut or offered encouragement at my new venture, but he couldn’t resist. All I could manage was “Eh okay”.

But having done this for over a year, I don’t take it as an insult – it was completely true. I can see why there is a high turnover of businesses starting up in this industry. I come home most days and feel absolutely dead, I am physically worn out and in a bad way.

I’ve completed this year with the view to getting the ball rolling, and it has, the snowball is building. Now I need to be serious about getting other people in to take away the heavy load.

People are Tricky (and I am inexperienced with employees so don’t really know what to do)
I have had quite a few people work in the business the past year. Six subcontractors, one short-term employee. They were all for the odd job, I did almost everything myself.

The first ever person I got in, I’ll call him X. Like everything at the start of the year I spent a lot of time worrying about how it would go, how to approach it. But it went fine when he worked his first day, I had arranged a simple job for him to do and he did it as I asked.

As time went on however in hindsight I was too nice, I even had a book on how to be a good boss and flicked through it in the evenings trying to do well by people. X took advantage of my niceness and asked for a pay rise after barely working with me for a few shifts, more than I had ever made at his experience level (I said no). He liked to turn up in the morning not at all ready to work, had a big smoke at inconvenient times, and just suddenly became lazy. He had an attitude which questioned everything I wanted done, and it was grating. I stopped asking him to come in.

A few months later I had a big couple-day job and needed help. I advertised for a short-term employee on a jobsite, and the pay was very low, almost minimum wage, as I didn’t need experienced help (I was less generous than before). The guy that came along (I’ll call him Y) was the polar opposite to X. He worked like a Trojan all day, and did not for one second stop. He was a great worker, and I hope to work with him next year. Just weird how I naively thought the pay would correlate with results. It doesn’t, there are good and bad people and it’s a matter of finding them.

I have read in some books, and also seen some smart ideas from JohnnyBoy on here about incentivizing people. I don’t need to be yelling at anyone unless they do something flagrantly dangerous/inappropriate. I praise people when they do something right and they keep doing it.


I need more jobs coming in
I feel like people are pretty easy to get in to work, I just need to create the system which brings frequent jobs in. And the answer until the brand is built up enough and I have become properly established, is to advertise a lot more.



Motivation & Critics

Countless times over this past year I have felt incredibly low. Especially when it’s a grueling day and I didn’t make as much money as I’d like, or there was something difficult with the customer. Or machinery broke and cost me lots to repair.

There were also lots of people who doubted me or said things which cut deep. Some comments just sting.

I can’t remember where/when I came across it but one night after a big unforgiving job I was on my computer and came across a quote from Teddy Roosevelt, from a speech he gave in Paris 1910. The speech was called “Citizenship in a Republic” and over time became better known as “The Man in the Arena”.

In the speech Roosevelt defends men who are trying to make the world a better place from sneering cynics, who sit at the sidelines and watch with gleeful anticipation for you to fail and stumble:

“The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticize work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life's realities—all these are marks, not ... of superiority but of weakness.”​

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. Shame on the man of cultivated taste who lets refinement to develop into fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a work day world”​

I have failed so many times and felt like giving up so often. But each day I got out of bed and did another job, and kept doing it again and again. Covered in dirt, my arms and hands cut and bruised, this has been my daily ritual. I am the man in the arena.



Conclusion

It’s pretty late here at the time of writing, so I have probably descended into incoherent ramblings.

But for my first year of business I’m proud of myself for a few reasons:

• I broke out of the cycle going from low paid to low paid job, and have created something. It has value, people like it!
• It's so hard and yet I keep going
• I’ve learned so much about business from trying to create this thing from scratch. From all the research to implementation, I feel like I have gained valuable skills to produce things of value. I want to keep going and continuously improve these skills.
• I now genuinely believe in my ability to carve my own path out. Before this business I was crippled with doubt and my brain full of negative and limiting beliefs. If you create a plan, then go out into the world and try to make it work yes you will stumble and make mistakes but your actions determine how your life pans out.
• MJ writes in the book that Fastlane is a process, a way of being in my choices, actions and thoughts and processes.. But it haunts me that I could be doing something better with my time. I will stay the course; adapt, pivot, and improvise to keep things moving, all the time while researching Fastlane success stories and methods. Whether I pivot to something new when the time comes, or I bolt on Fastlane systems to my current business I don’t know. But I’m here to keep going, I want a better life.

 

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