Austin Gray: Hey, welcome back to the OWNR OPS podcast. I'm your host, Austin Gray. I'm joining you this week from Austin, Texas. As some of you may know, if you follow me on X, I've been hired as a consultant to come down here and launch a land clearing business. And the reason I'm sharing that with you is that it's a really good opportunity for me to jump back into the owner-operator role.

For those of you who are just now listening, I own Bearclaw Land Services in Colorado. We also have Snow Shovelers. I've built multiple service-based businesses in local markets, and we've grown those businesses and built those teams. But this is an opportunity for me to jump back into that solo owner-operator mindset and go back to the startup phase.

So, what I'm going to do now that I've done it several times is document this process. I'm going to do a short podcast series this week where I record an episode every single morning and just share what I'm thinking about.

The reality is that in the beginning, when you don't have jobs, there are so many different things you could be doing. A lot of people get hung up on overthinking starting a business. My goal with this miniseries is to showcase exactly what I personally would focus on. Everybody has different opinions on this; everyone's going to focus their time differently, but I’ll just share my experience and how I think about starting businesses in hopes that it encourages those of you out there who have been listening to the podcast.

If you want to start your own business but you’re wondering how, or if you're in that phase of overthinking things or just not taking action, my hope is that this miniseries can encourage you to push you to move faster.

Okay, so I'm just going to jump right into it. I have created a checklist to follow to start service-based businesses, and you can apply this checklist really to any local service in any market. Because whenever you think about it and break it down to a fundamental level, every business has these three functions: you have your operations, you have your sales and marketing, and you have finance.

In my service startup checklist, I created this just for myself to follow. When I came back to start this business, I was like, "Okay, I need to think back through exactly what I did when I started Bearclaw and when I started Snow Shovelers, and then just think through that process and get it onto paper."

So, I broke it down into those three functions: operations, sales and marketing, and finance. I believe that was taken from a book I read, EOS Traction or something like that, a long time ago. I haven’t been reading much in the last two years since I’ve been operating. But starting with those three buckets enabled me to fill in the checklist.

When I was hired for this consulting gig, it’s a three-month project—it’s a 90-day deal. The goal is to just launch the business for my client. Now, I have a family back home and two businesses, so it wasn’t realistic for me to just fly down and move to Austin for 90 days. So I said, "Okay, what could I do remotely?"

And the main things that I've done remotely are set things up that can work for us in the beginning, refine the brand, set up all the social media accounts, create ads, start thinking through what our offer will be, refine the website, outline the SEO plan that we’re going to target, and get all of those teams moving in the right direction for this business. So that's where a lot of the work has gone up to this point.

Now, I also wanted to start recruiting. In any business, you are going to have different roles that you need to recruit for. As I think back about Bearclaw in the early days, you're filling everything. You are fulfilling every single role of the job. You're playing coach, you're playing quarterback, you're playing running back, you're playing receiver, you're playing center, you're snapping the ball, you're reading the defense, you're throwing the ball, you're running underneath the ball, you're catching the ball, and then you're running it into the end zone.

Right? If you guys follow Stump Guy Tai, he's in this phase right now. He is the solo owner-operator of Grind Time Stumps, and he is playing all positions on the field right now. And in my last episode with him, that I recorded over the weekend before I flew down here, I asked him, "Where's your energy right now?" Zero being like completely dead tired and ten being "I've got so much energy, I've got more energy than I know what to do with." He said, "I'm at a nine or a ten."

And as an athlete, if you were playing all positions on the field—think about it. If you were snapping yourself the ball, if you were grabbing the ball as a quarterback, if you were throwing it way high up in the air and then you were running down the field and catching it and then running it into the end zone—you could do that if you're in shape. You could, but it’s going to tire you out fast.

A lot of people can ride that adrenaline of scoring the touchdown and just keep doing it. I was very similar to Tai when I was starting Bearclaw.

But my point with this is you can only do that for so long. So, as I came into this business as a consultant, I'm thinking more strategically about who can we put at center, who can we put at quarterback, who can we put at receiver, who do we need at running back. I'm using football terms to make this relatable to those of you who played sports.

Because you know, as well as I do, it's not realistic to play all positions on the field. So, as you think about starting your business, think about it from a team perspective. And as I think about Bearclaw and how we built that, I very quickly went and found a receiver that I could throw the ball to. I very quickly, as I was handling the sales and the project management and marketing and customer relations, went and found a receiver, which was just somebody to help me in the field—a general labor field crew.

That's the first person I hired in Bearclaw. Secondly, I needed to find a quarterback in the field; I needed somebody to run the place. I made it very clear that I wanted him on our team and I wanted to work together. He is the field crew leader. After that, we've slowly started filling in positions. You know, throughout the phase of the business, you recruit a running back. It's like, "Hey, you just need somebody to hand the ball off to and just run straight down the middle."

Then a running back decides he doesn't want to play on the team or doesn't show up to practice, right? So you have to cut the running back, and then you have to try to find the other running back. From a hiring perspective, you're just building the team. So, as I approach this business, I want to have hiring in the back of my mind.

The reason I say it's in the back of my mind is that right now, the most valuable thing that I can do is go play quarterback. The most valuable thing that you can do in your business in the beginning is play quarterback. There will be a certain point where you step into the coach, the head coach role, and then maybe at some point you hire a head coach and you step into the general manager or the owner role. But I'm going to tell you right now, if you go put that on your business card, you're just skipping a step, in my personal opinion.

Because somebody has to play quarterback until a quarterback is found. All right? Somebody has to go execute; somebody has to make things happen. In that beginning stage as a quarterback, you're thinking like a coach and a general manager. But my point is here that you need to execute.

So here's how we're going to execute: I believe the most important thing you can do—it's like, what's the goal of the quarterback? The goal of the quarterback is to score touchdowns. Your goal as an entrepreneur is to go get jobs, very simply put, and get revenue.

Football, hockey, basketball—whatever game you play, there's always a scoreboard. And your goal as the leader on that team is to make things happen, to increase your score on that scoreboard. Entrepreneurship is no different. In small business, when you're creating a service business, your goal is to drive revenue and get money flowing into the bank.

So that's why I say hiring is in the back of your mind, because the first and most important thing that you can do is go score touchdowns. All right? And here's why I say hiring is in the back of your mind. This is my perspective; this is how I approach it.

There are going to be people out there who are seasoned entrepreneurs, veteran investors, and they're just going to completely disagree with this. But what I will tell you is if you can step into this mindset, then you will attract your teammates. Think about it this way: if you played high school ball or if you played college ball, what was it like to be on the winning team? How did that feel? It felt pretty good.

Now think about a time that you lost or when you had a losing season. That sucks—nobody wants to be on the losing team. If you are winning and if you can put points up on the scoreboard, other talented players will want to join you. That’s what I'm trying to push here on this episode: The most important thing you can do as an early-stage startup service entrepreneur is to put points on the scoreboard.

And that is very simply put; your job is to go get cash into the bank account. And in this five-part series, we're going to talk about how to do that.

So today, the focus—the most important thing—is I've got a million different things that I could be focusing on. Right? We don’t even have a truck and trailer for this business yet. We seriously don't have a truck and trailer. We have a skid steer, but we don't have a truck and trailer.

Okay? But what I'm trying to show you guys is that should not hold you up from going and getting jobs. If you have a skid steer sitting there, you need to go get the jobs and then figure out how to get that skid steer from point A to point B to fulfill the job. And you can figure all that out on the fly, but if you procrastinate the most important thing, you're never going to have a business.

So today, the focus is I'm stepping into a new market with zero connections, and I'm going to share with you my thought process here for how I'm planning to go and find these jobs. My goal is to get jobs.

All right? So, how do I plan to go get these jobs? All right, this is going to be fun. I was trying to tee up the whole episode, but now I'm in operations mode. By the way, I could not... I'm in a hotel for the first time in a long time. I'm also in a city for the first time in a long time. And I live in a pretty rural town— I live in the mountains; I love living in the mountains. The city thing is like, I'm going to be ready to leave by the end of it, I'll tell you that.

People, you know, it's like there's too much energy going on here. But side note: like I'm here to execute for the week. I didn't sleep much last night—maybe four hours if I'm lucky. But I could not fall asleep because I was just thinking about this principle: How are we going to get jobs?

All right? It is 7 a.m. right now. The way I'm thinking about this is first, you have to identify your ideal customer. Who is your ideal customer? Get as clear as you can. I've heard really good marketers say this before; they actually create what's called a customer avatar. They will go either online and get a picture of somebody and paste that picture onto a Word doc or a Google doc, and then they will answer things like: What is their name? What is their age? How much money do they make? What do they do for a living? What are their pains? What do they want to pay for? What will they pay for in the next week? What are their deep desires? What are their fears?

I've said this before on a podcast, but your job as a marketer is to become a psychologist. If you understand people and understand what drives them to make purchases, selling becomes easy because you're not selling them anything—you're just plugging your service into something they were already going to pay for.

But if you try to sell... I'm trying to think of a good example here: If you try to sell a concrete truck to an excavator or an excavation contractor, it's not going to be useful. If you try to sell something to the wrong customer, sales is going to be really hard.

But when you plug your service into the equation of a transaction that was already going to take place, now sales becomes easy. So you first have to define who your customer is.

So look, I've spent a lot of time thinking about who our ideal customer is. I've defined exactly who that is. I know exactly what their persona is; I have images in my head from researching who these types of people are that own the types of ranches that we'll be offering our services on. But these are very high-net-worth people.

So the second thing to this equation is: How do you get in touch with those people? How do you get in front of them? How do you put your offer in front of them? I've thought a lot about this, but the way we're going to do it is by first creating an offer.

A lot of people will tell me, "Hey, I tried Facebook ads and it didn't work." And it's like, "Well, my question is always: What was your offer?" Oh, we're just running like general land clearing services in Kentucky? Cool. You know, it's like, why is somebody going to stop on that? Maybe if they absolutely need it, like if it's a burning pain that they need the service, they stop scrolling.

But no, that's not how this works. You have to understand what their fear is first. What is their fear or what is their pain? Okay, their pain is something they will pay for. So we're going to create an offer that's irresistible. That's the first plan of attack—the irresistible offer.

What is the most no-brainer thing that you can think of that if somebody had that pain, they would pay for it right here, right now? In the early days, I am a big fan of free or heavily discounted. Now, not completely free, but offering something free is the most important thing.

Here are some offers that I'm going to be testing: free day of land clearing. That’s the only thing I'm putting in the offer when I go down. I'm going into...yes—free day. When you book three days or more, get your fourth day free. You have to spend it in a way that makes sense for the customer but also makes sense for you as a business. But by offering something free, you're stopping them in their tracks on their ads.

All right? So we're running ads. I'm also going to be doing limited-time offers. "Hey, this week only I'm going to be doing something 50% off." There are going to be so many people who will blast me on this, like, "Dude, why would you ever run anything for 50% off? Your gross margins are going to go out the window." It's like, dude, we don't have a business. The most important thing we can do is get operating in the market.

Because once you understand that if you just get your equipment operating, you're doing—you're starting the ball rolling. You're giving yourself an opportunity to deliver great service. You also create an opportunity for you to figure out your operations during that process. And then you get an opportunity to get a five-star review.

And in this day and age, the engine works off of five-star reviews. I'm telling you this right now: The most important thing you should be doing is getting some cash flow going. Well, I'll make it as simple as this: You should figure out a way, if you're starting a business, for people to pay you some amount of money to give you a five-star review.

When you think about it, think about that for a second. It now shifts from, "Hey, I need to go sell this full-price service to get this business going," to "No, no, no. My goal this week is to get people to pay me some amount of money to leave me a five-star review."

That sort of sounds crazy when you think about it like that, right? Because if we're agreeing—and we should be agreeing—that five-star reviews are one of the most important things you can do in this day and age, then if people are paying you dollars to leave you a five-star review in return for some service you're going to offer them, now we're moving in the right direction.

So then that flips the script: The only goal I have this week is to get somebody to pay me to leave us a five-star review. That is the most important thing I can do this week for the business. Because now, once you do that, you set multiple things in motion: You set your cash flow in motion, you get some bank...excuse me, you get some cash in the bank, you set the word-of-mouth portion in motion.

Every time you do a job for somebody, and every time that you deliver a great service—it's not a one-to-one or linear relationship. That one person knows hundreds of people oftentimes. So you're opening yourself up to that one person to be able to go tell more people about your services, which then creates what's called word of mouth.

And all the old-school people talk about like, "Oh, I don't do any marketing. It's just word of mouth," right? But that's because they've delivered a great service to somebody, and then that somebody goes and tells two or three people. And then those two or three people go tell two or three more people about you, and then you get calls from your phone.

And, oh, by the way, if you get that five-star review, now Google's doing the same thing. So you want all of these things working and getting into motion. Like, that's your job as the entrepreneur—to get this ball moving.

Okay? It's not about, like, throw gross profit and all that stuff out the window right now. Your job is to get the ball moving. All right? I know I'm bouncing around a lot here, but I'm trying to get all my thoughts out.

The third thing that you can do is create a referral program. All right? I'm going to state it right now—what I'm spending my time on this morning. If you've listened to this episode, we're 25 minutes in. This is where the gold is right here: real estate agents referral code.

I'm going to create a list of the real estate agents that I want to call in the area. I want every single real estate agent to know who we are and what we do. I also, before I get off the phone with that real estate agent, want to leave them with an offer.

"Hey, you like making money, right?" Yes? No real estate agent out there ever does not like making money. They can tell you that they're, you know, altruistic, and "I just really do it to make sure that my family's, you know, my clients have great homes." It’s like, okay, maybe. But you're really in real estate because you like making money, and you're motivated by a commission.

Let's just cut straight to the point, right? So why don’t you incentivize that real estate agent to go make some commission with you? They're used to working on commission. Okay? My goal right now is to go hire sales reps. How do I hire sales reps? I just pay real estate agents.

I want the real estate agents selling for me. So I'm going to go create an irresistible offer. All right? I'm going to create an irresistible offer for the real estate agents to sell on my behalf. "Hey, you like making money, right? Yeah? What if I paid you $2,500 this week—do I have your attention?"

Okay, maybe in this market, $2,500's not enough. Maybe in your market, $500 is enough. I don't know. But what I'm willing to do is offer somebody, "Hey, I'll pay you $500 a day if you get me a land clearing job, and it's a five-day job."

Let's say I charge $2,500 bucks a day; I will pay that real estate agent $500 for each day that we book for. So if that's a $10,000 total job, I will pay that real estate agent $2,500 all day long. Especially in the early days, all you're sacrificing is your time.

You're the one going to be operating. Okay? This is why I'm such a big proponent of bootstrapping businesses as an owner-operator. Once again, I know that there are plenty of veteran entrepreneurs who are probably going to be listening to this and blast me for it. I don't really care because this podcast is for you if you are in the entrepreneurship phase of starting your first business.

And I'm telling you that this works because I've done it multiple times. When you sacrifice your time and you play sales, project manager, equipment operator, and customer support—when you fill all of those roles, all you're sacrificing is your time.

But guess what? It's going to pay off when you do all of this. So I can afford to go lose some gross profit by paying out a commission to a sales rep. And guess what? I'm just going to test it in the market. I'm just going to say, "Is this something that interests these people?" If I'm not getting great feedback on it, I'm just going to increase it.

It's like, "You want to make $1,000 bucks a day? Go find me a client that needs land clearing right now, this week!" This week, I'll pay $1,000 a day.

I just got a text from my client, so we are going to rock and roll here. I'm going to wrap up this episode here. Recording these podcasts helps me get my thoughts into audio, which eventually will go into paper.

All right, so stick around. We're going to be doing thoughts on how to grow this business. Today, my main focus is calling real estate agents and getting that referral program in front of them so that they can go work for us and sell us jobs.

Okay, so takeaway: if you're starting a business, figure out your customer avatar—who your customer is, what they like, what they do, what their age is, what their fears and what their pains are. Understand those first. Secondly, create a no-brainer offer. Third, figure out somebody else who has access to that person.

In this case for me, the real estate agents are the people who are going to understand how to get in front of these people who I want to offer services to. So I hope you enjoy this episode. I'm going to have a lot of fun with this.

And I really genuinely want you guys to take the episodes and implement this because I'm sort of at a point right now, and this is not trying to be like—I really wish I could jump on a call with all of you who reach out. I hate to have to do this, but literally, I think the most valuable thing that I can do is keep doing what I’m doing and then document that.

So if you have reached out to me, I'm sorry that I do not have time to jump on a call with you. Please listen to these episodes because I'm trying to do this in a way that I can answer all of your questions in a format that helps you go and grow.

All right? So the goal is for you to take this stuff and grow your own local service business in your own market. I hope you enjoy this. Stick around for the next five episodes because we are going to drop a ton of value, and I'm going to be sharing in real time what works and what doesn't.

Don't forget: work hard, do your best, never settle for less.