Austin Gray: Hey, welcome back to the OWNR OPS podcast. I'm your host, Austin Gray.

I've got three exciting updates to make.

Notice how I introduced this podcast as the OWNR OPS podcast. It was formerly called the Owner Operator Podcast, but if you guys are watching on video, you see that I have the OWNR OPS shirt on.

What is OWNR OPS?

OWNR OPS, the brand, specifically to me, whenever I had the vision for this brand, was to be a place for tools and resources to help local service business owners grow their business. Very simply put, the inspiration came from Mountain OPS.

If you guys are watching on video, you see some supplements up there. What is Mountain OPS? Mountain OPS are supplements that help you perform in the mountains. I like hunting elk with my bow, and so I use these supplements for exercise and working out throughout the year. But then I also take them into the backcountry with me.

When I saw this brand, it screamed at me: Mountain OPS—tools and resources to succeed in the mountains.

So, I want you to think about OWNR OPS as the brand and as the podcast, and then the content that we're creating as tools and resources to help you grow your local service business.

That's update number one.

Update number two is we have 35,000 listens, and I wanted to say thank you, guys! Thank y'all for just supporting and listening. I had no idea that this would end up where it is today.

We created 40 episodes throughout the winter. If you guys have been listening to this, you know that I started Bearclaw Land Services a couple of years ago, and in the wintertime this last year, we did not plow snow.

Oh, if you know anything about me, you know I can't sit still, and I have to be working on something. So, I started this podcast. The goal was over the winter to sharpen the sword and learn from other successful business owners who have built service businesses in industries like tree services, power washing, and foundation repair.

All these service businesses are basically the same whenever you look at it from a business perspective. You have to do a couple of things really well: you have to recruit, you have to sell, you have to market, you have to fulfill, and deliver five-star service.

All of these businesses are very similar. It doesn't matter if you're a roof contractor or a tree service business owner.

So, the thought process was I'm going to go bring on people from different service-related industries and interview them about how they thought about growing their business. In turn, selfishly, I get to learn from people who are smarter than me, and then we'll just record it. Hopefully, it can help people like yourself who are either interested in starting your own business or you have a business, and you just want to learn how to grow it.

So, that was the whole thought process behind starting the podcast, and for whatever reason, you guys are listening to it. So, I wanted to say thank you.

35,000 listens—that's total over Spotify and Apple right now, so I do appreciate it.

I wanted to do a free giveaway here. I've got these OWNR OPS shirts; I've got five of them to give away.

In order to enter into the giveaway, here's what I'm going to ask you to do:

1. Leave us a five-star review on Spotify and Apple.
2. Go sign up for our newsletter. You can go to ownrops.com/playbook, or you can just go to ownrops.com. That's O-W-N-R-O-P-S.com.
3. Subscribe to our YouTube channel. The social media profiles are all at Thee OWNR OPS (T-H-E O-W-N-R-O-P).
4. Join our free school community, and whenever you do that, please tell us that you've completed all these.

All the links to everything will be below in the show notes here, and you should be able to click those links and sign up for all that stuff. It's all free; it's all free content.

We are committing to delivering all free content to help you guys grow your business.

Once again, the value I'm getting from this is having the opportunity to go bring on and meet people smarter than I am to selfishly help me grow my business. Right? And then, in doing so, we’ll create the content so that you can take the tools, resources, and strategies to implement into your own business.

Alright, I kind of mentioned it already: all of this content is going to be free. I experimented with doing a membership business model with the school platform, but I realized that it was not the right business model.

I’ll just very clearly state it: it was not the right business model.

We had paying members, but for those of you who were paying for access to the school account—for those of you who don't know what school is, it's a platform that allows me to record videos, implement those, and then there's a community aspect as well.

So right now, we have documented all of the tools, tactics, resources, strategies that we've used to grow Bearclaw—everything from like our sales strategy to our marketing plan, how we think about hiring, who to hire, when to hire, SOPs related to invoicing and job quoting.

Pretty much everything you need to go from zero to 500k in any service business. You can apply all these strategies to a service-based business, and you should be able to get to 500k.

I was charging $49 bucks a month for it. Like I said, we had paying members, but I made a decision to make all of this content free.

So, everything that you get on the podcast, everything that you'll get on the YouTube channel, everything that you'll get inside the school community—it's all going to be free.

And to be very clear about this, I will make money at some point because I have strategic partnerships in place with service providers to help you grow your business. Right? So, that's the business model for me.

Once again, I am an entrepreneur and I'm a capitalist, and so therefore, if I'm allocating time to something, I need to be making money off of it.

I'm not to a point in my life where I can just focus on 100% giving everything. It's just not where I'm at. So, that's being very clear and straightforward with you guys.

All the content and everything will be free, especially that content to help you in the video course trainings to help you go from zero to 500k.

The last update that I wanted to make is Local Service Marketers has been launched. Local Service Marketers focuses on growth through paid ads and unlimited content creation.

I partnered with Josh, who has helped me grow Bearclaw, and we are taking a generalized service and focusing it on a specific niche and industry, I guess niches—those two being anything related to trees or dirt, so tree removal, land clearing, excavation.

The reason why we're choosing that is that we have found a content creation plan that works for Bearclaw, and then, two—sorry, I've got a call coming in—two, we have found a paid ad strategy that works.

The reason we launched this business is that we had other local contractors— not local to my area, but local to my state—ask how we were doing this, how we were getting leads. In telling them, it just lent itself to connecting them with Josh, and then the conversation led to, well, let's launch an agency and focus specifically on this.

I absolutely love—my favorite part of the business is the marketing—outside of strategy, but I love, love, love the marketing. So, it made sense for Josh and me to partner up on this, and I do have a financial stake in this.

So, if you guys go do sign up for Local Service Marketers and you’re in the tree or dirt world, then I will be getting a cut off of that, and I want to be very clear about that.

To kind of reiterate, all the content that we're creating is going to be free. We have completely nixed the membership model for school.

It just makes sense for all that to be free. If you really want to go start a business, you should have access to the content to go get started.

Once you get to that 500k mark, if you want to work with us or if you're in our specific industries, we believe that we can help entrepreneurs in the early stages just with this content.

In turn, for the right person and the right contractors, it will lend itself to us creating a better working relationship. You’ll get to know us inside the community, you’ll get to know how we work, and we’ll be talking about all of our growth strategies in the open.

Then once you get to the point when you're ready to grow, you can just use us for the growth services.

So those are the quick updates. Once again, 35,000 listens, and I'm very thankful for you guys.

Don't forget to sign up for the giveaway to get a free t-shirt. Just follow the links in the show notes below to do that.

OWNR OPS—I want you to think about that brand as tools and resources to help you grow your business, very similar to mountains.

If Mountain OPS are tools and resources to help you succeed in the mountains as a backcountry hunter, OWNR OPS are tools and resources to help you succeed as the owner of a local service-based business.

Finally, all the content is free: YouTube, podcast, obviously social media is free, but Local Service Marketers will be a paid growth service specifically for business owners who are already generating at least a minimum of 500k of revenue per year, and you have to be in the tree or dirt world.

We're not taking on anybody else in any other industry specifically just because we want to guarantee that we can get results.

So those are the funnels that we know.

We also know that if you operate equipment, and if you get footage of the equipment operating, that that is very engaging content right now in 2024.

So we know that we can get you traction and get you exposure to more customers.

This is what a lot of people don’t think about: we’re leveraging our content plan to hire the top talent.

Case in point, we just had somebody start yesterday. He moved across the country from Missouri out to Colorado to work with us because he’s been watching us on YouTube and he’s been watching our Instagram content.

This is my point for why you should be investing in professional content creation. Notice how I didn’t say social media management—that’s just boring, right?

It’s no longer just static posts. I’m saying content creation because there is a way to create content right now, and if you operate equipment in the tree or dirt world, we want to help you.

Those are the updates.

It is August 7th, 2024. We are going to continue bringing on guests here on a weekly basis.

I have two exciting guests coming up—well, three exciting episodes you should go check out right now.

One, I recorded another episode with Casey, the pest control guy. He did his first acquisition.

So if you haven't listened to the first episode with him, he started a pest control company out on the western slope of Colorado, and then he just bought his first pest control company as an acquisition for his growth path.

We talk about how to do a deal, how to get SBA debt, what types of terms he got, and why it made sense to buy versus just grow organically.

Second, I've got Bar Klein Smith coming on. Bar owns a portfolio of self-storage investments, and he manages his self-storage business with an offshore team out of Latin America.

This led to him co-founding a business called H LATAM. He pairs Latin American talent with U.S. business owners at a fraction of the price of what it would cost to go hire talent here in the U.S.

So, where we're at currently right now—our office manager, she was great for the first couple of years of business. She took another role to go further her career. Rightfully so, she was incredible.

I was sad to see her go, but we both knew that she was overqualified to be doing what she was doing here. She was formerly a financial analyst at Bloomberg, I believe.

We always knew that this was a short-term position, and I am going to be replacing our office operations manager role with offshore talent.

So, I'm going through the process with H LATAM right now. The first call with them was incredible.

It's going to be really interesting to see how it goes. This will be my first offshore hire, and so I will be sharing more about this because it's something I'm interested in, and it is something that I believe every U.S.-based company—even if you're a W2 employee—like at the price at which you can hire top talent in Latin America, it’s a win-win.

These people are making great money for their lifestyle, and it's less expensive for us here as American business owners than to hire someone here full-time in the U.S. to do something that could be done remotely.

So, I'm really excited about this and I will share more about this process as I go through. But go look and listen to the episode with Bar Klein Smith because he gives a master class in the second half of the episode about how to think about hiring remote talent.

You know, what's the pay structure? What's the fee structure for these talent agencies? You know, what do you need to be prepared for? How do you pay them?

We cover all those things in the episode.

Finally, the next episode—really excited about—is Wednesday, August 7th right now, recording. I have a recording scheduled with Brandon Dixon, who's a former MLB player turned small business owner.

We are recording on Friday morning, I think at 5:30 mountain time, but that will be published in the weeks to come.

Keep an eye out for that one because, as a former athlete myself, I’m really interested to have the conversation with Brandon about, “Hey, what's it been like transitioning from the sports world to the business world?”

And what correlations did you take or what correlations do you see in sports and business?

What sort of mindsets or skills did you take from playing sports and transition into business?

I’m really interested to talk about that. I’m also just interested in talking about the street sweeping business in general.

This is another interesting one. He bought a street sweeping business in California but lives in Arizona, and he’s managing this business remotely.

He’s doing this with offshore talent, so I have a hunch that the episodes coming up are all going to be about how you implement offshore talent into a U.S.-based business.

I have a hunch about that, and the reason is because I’m really interested in this personally and I think this is how we can fill roles specifically within our own service businesses—specifically for me, Bearclaw.

I’m excited to talk with Brandon about how he has done that.

Anyway, I want to give you guys a quick update. Thanks again for 35,000 listens! I really do appreciate it.

Never in a million years did I think that we’d start a podcast and 35,000 people would have started it.

So many more episodes to come; this is only the beginning.

This is a real quick reminder here: think about OWNR OPS. OWNR OPS are tools and resources to help you grow as a local service business.

Tons of free content wherever you want to consume: podcasts here, YouTube channel, school community with tactical training.

Local Service Marketers—I already mentioned that. If you want to grow your business, check out localservicemarketers.com, only if you’re in the tree or dirt world, though.

Finally, stay tuned for more fun episodes. If you have somebody who you know would be a good fit, I think you guys are kind of starting to see who the ideal guest is: it's anybody who has started or acquired a small local service-based business.

When I started this, I believed the biggest opportunity right now in entrepreneurship in America is to go back to the trades and go back to the services.

Why? Because the smartest people are competing in tech and e-commerce—just go back to doing the unsexy thing.

If you do that and you block and tackle and you implement some of these marketing principles that we’ll be talking about on the podcast, on the YouTube channel, if you learn from the people I'm bringing on, I guarantee you can go start any local service business in your market and be successful with it.

So, I want this to be the last podcast you listen to before you start taking action. I’ve said that before and I’ll continue to say it.

I hope this is the last podcast you listen to before you start taking action because that’s when results start to come.

So, we're going to wrap this one up. Don’t forget: work hard, do your best, and never settle for less.

We’ll see you guys in the next episode. Thanks!

I wanted to introduce you to two of my growth partners.

Striker Digital specializes in SEO services specifically for local service businesses. Bod and Andy, the two co-founders, have helped me get Bearclaw Land Services to the number one search result on Google inside my state for my specific search term.

If you want to learn more, visit stryker-digital.com. That’s S-T-R-I-K-R-D-I-G-I-T-A-L.com.

Secondly, Local Service Marketers specializes in paid ads and unlimited content creation.

I've been working with Josh since the beginning of Bearclaw, and all I’ve had to do is upload my content—photos and videos—into a shared iCloud album or Google Drive album, and they handle everything else from there.

Thank you, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook—all that is taken off of your plate. It saves you so much time as a local business owner.

In doing so, you end up with a very professionally designed social media presence. After the presence is created, then a paid ad strategy can be implemented to help bring you more leads and win you more jobs.

If you’re interested in learning more, you can visit localservicemarketers.com.