Austin Gray: Welcome back to the OWNR OPS podcast. I'm your host, Austin Gray, and in this episode, we are going to be talking about working on the business versus working in the business.

Now, you might be thinking I'm going to say the same types of things that you've heard a million times: you need to work on the business, you need to hire other people, you need to scale, blah blah blah blah blah. We've heard it a million different times. EOS, all these gurus online telling you the same stuff. I call BS.

The reason is that the most practical way to start the business is to take a service that you already know or a skill that you are already good at and offer that to your market. In the early days, you're going to be the one fulfilling the work. Either you are the one who knows how to fulfill the work, or you are just the person who is best suited to do that in the business.

When I started my business, I assumed this OWNR OPS role. I went into it with the mindset that I was going to take on the owner/operator roles. There are different types of roles associated with the owner part of the business, and there are different types of roles associated with the operator role.

Now, we both know that both are very important. See, what everybody online is trying to do is, "Oh, well, I want to be the owner. I want to sit back and play armchair quarterback. I want to hire an operator." That's what everybody is trying to do right now. So, do you want to be like everybody else and keep doing that?

Everybody's biggest problem is finding an operator to operate their business. So, you know what I said? I was like, "I'm just gonna assume the OWNR OPS role, and I'm going to start a business. I'm going to be an owner, and I'm going to be an operator as well, and I'm going to be the operator for as long as the business needs me to be that role."

What does "operator" actually mean? Well, it means filling in wherever your business needs you to. In the early days, like for the whole first 18 months of my business—I started in July of 2022—I was in and out of the equipment. In the beginning, I was the only person operating the equipment until I met a trusted subcontractor who we brought on to the business.

Until I met people to hire for general labor, in the beginning, I was doing literally everything: sales, marketing, bookkeeping, fulfillment of the work, operating in the field, you know, final grading. I was out there with a rake; I was out there operating the stump grinders. I was doing all the equipment purchasing.

I'm not saying this to brag; I'm saying this to explain that there is a different way to start a business than what you're hearing about all online right now. Everybody is talking about, "Oh, you know, let's go start a business that can be run remotely," and "I'm just going to sit back and hire other people to do the work."

It's like, you know what? I care about delivering a great service to my community and building a great team that enjoys coming to work together. That's fun to me. It's like, where's the fun in playing football if you're just going to sit on a beach in Thailand and tell a football team what to do over here in South Carolina? That's no fun!

Like, I like playing the game, you know? I like blocking and tackling; that's fun. It's the same in business. And look, I may be the only one who thinks this way right now—I may be—but I guarantee I'm willing to bet there are other people, especially those who grew up working blue-collar jobs. I grew up working in my dad's concrete business. It is so foreign to me to just sit back and tell other people what to do early on.

In my mind, I need to earn the trust of other people. I need to go meet team members in the field who can come on board our team and sort of embody the same mindset and commitment to excellence that I want my business to deliver.

But that's only done by being in the field, earning the respect of the other people who you are hiring or bringing onto your team. See, when they see you in and out of a piece of equipment or when they see you pick up a rake because you're doing a landscaping job and there needs to be something graded, they will respect the fact that you're out there busting your butt doing the work.

Now, in order to grow the business, I should say this with a caveat: at some point, yes, you will have to work on the business. I think, and this is just my opinion, there are way too many people right now who think this business ownership thing is about sitting back behind a desk, playing armchair quarterback, telling other people what to do—and it's just simply not that way.

I'd be willing to bet most baby boomers who have very successful businesses right now for sale on the open market—businesses that are doing millions, tens of millions of dollars in revenue in unsexy services, you know? Call it excavation, call it cleaning, call it tree service, well drilling. I mean, there are tons of businesses right now with baby boomers out there who are either retiring or selling, but they didn't get there by just sitting back behind a computer and sending Slack messages to other people telling them what to do.

They got there because they got out in the market early on, busted their butt, delivered great service, and built a team around them. You see, that's why I've embodied this OWNR OPS mindset. Your business will require you to be an owner. Yes, you're going to have to study your financials, set up bookkeeping systems, hire the right people to fulfill those bookkeeping services, manage your cash flow, and negotiate salaries with employees.

That makes it so you can be profitable upon your services. Yes, you have to do all those things as an owner. But guess what? Early on, when you don't have employees, or when you don't have a partner or team members, news flash: I don't care what other people on X or Twitter or YouTube say, it's not a bad thing to jump out there and just deliver the services early on.

You can always hire people, but guess what? If you're delivering the services, especially on a skill that you know how to do, it gives you time to document those processes for how you want the service done. You see, this is your baby; you're starting this business. You are going to care a lot about this thing. But if you're able to get out there, get those initial customers, and deliver a quality service for your first 10, 15, 20 jobs—and then get five-star reviews for all of those—you are setting your business up so well.

You are building a reputation around a quality that you can personally control. You see, when you deliver those first 10, 15, 20, 30 jobs, you're controlling the quality because you are going to care more than anybody else is going to care inside your business. I can tell you that right now.

You may find people who will care 90 or 95% as much as you, and they could be considered rock star team members, but they are never going to care as much about your business as you do. So, if you can fulfill the services early on, you can control quality.

And look, I'm just so tired of this, like, "Oh, read a business book," you know, "work on the business." Everybody talks about the E-Myth business book. Have I read it? Yes. I think I read like half of it or something. But the premise is coaching you to just work on the business and not in the business.

Now, yes, at a certain point, you should do that. But I think, like, right now, I see so many people trying to skip a step. There’s a step of working in the business that comes before working on the business. That's the whole point I'm trying to make. I'm not trying to say that those books are irrelevant, because if you want to grow a big business and if you want to scale, yes, those principles are going to have to apply.

You will have to pull yourself out of the daily operations. Look, our first year in business, I was three months in. In the second year of the business, we had about seven operating months. We're a seasonal business out here right now—we do land clearing and excavation in Colorado. So, when the snow happens, our work slows down a lot.

So, we've had about 10 total operating months. You know, right now I have like a year and a half in my mind of actual timeline, and it's taking that long to get to a point where I can actually remove myself from operating the equipment on a day-to-day basis. But guess what? If one of my guys is out or if our lead operator can't get there that day and the job needs to get done, guess who's going to operate that equipment in this phase of the business? Me.

I’m still willing to operate if the business needs me to. My point is it took me a solid 10 operating months of blocking and tackling in the field, building the field crew, to get to a point where now I can remove myself from the machine. But that doesn't mean the work stops. My workload increases.

Now that I've got a crew and now that I have three pieces of equipment, my OWNR OPS role just transitions from equipment operator to sales and estimator. My whole point here is, yes, those business books have value, but only at a certain point. You've got to earn your stripes early on.

Nobody else is going to do that for you. You either have to recruit somebody to do it right out the gate and earn their respect, and for those of you who can do that, hats off to you. It's just not my style. My style is to get in the market, start selling the jobs, start fulfilling the work, build relationships with customers, build up the Google My Business reviews, do all the marketing work early on, and crank out content for SEO services so that we start ranking in Google's algorithm and start getting phone calls.

Once we start getting phone calls, guess who's answering the phone? I am. We're 18 months into the business at this point, and guess what? I'm still answering the phone. I'm not going to stop answering the phone anytime soon.

Did I work hard to get myself out of the equipment? Yes. But that was only so I could focus more on sales and estimating. My operator hat has not been taken off quite yet, and it's not going to be taken off anytime soon. I felt like I had to get on this podcast this morning and share this, because I see so many people asking me—well, they reach out on Twitter, asking me how to start a business, and in my mind, it's very simple.

You've got to start with your mindset. You've got to be willing to be an owner and an operator, and I think some people come into business ownership with the wrong mindset.

Especially nowadays, I'm a millennial so I can state this about most people in our generation. Most people want to start a business because they think that there’s this aspect of freedom attached to it. And yes, there is eventually—at some point you want a business that is operating without you. At some point down the line, that is the goal.

But you've got to be willing to sacrifice early on in order to get there. You see, right now when I started this business at 32 years old—excuse me, I'm 32 right now—when I started this business, I had a decade approach. It was like by the time I'm 40 or 41, I want this business to operate on its own. But from now until then, I'm taking on the operator hat.

I have no expectations of just sitting back and going on vacation. Guess what? You go on vacation—I don't know about y’all, but I enjoy going to the beach and spending time with my family. But three days into that beach vacation, I’m ready to work again. So I just know I’m wired to work.

Rather than try to build the business with all this, like, you know, the four-hour workweek, that’s the one I get most jacked up about. In my 20s, I read that book, and it radically ruined my approach to entrepreneurship. It convinced me that I should start a business where I only had to work four hours a week.

Guess what? If you do that in your 20s and 30s—I've talked to multiple people who have done that and experienced a rapid onset of depression. It's not even what you actually want. What we actually want as humans is to have a challenging goal in front of us and to be actively working on a challenging goal.

So once I accepted the fact that I'm wired to work and I'm wired to go after challenging goals, I just accepted it and said, "Hey, let's make this a 10-year play. Let's make it a decade play and commit to working in the business."

Now, like I said, that doesn’t mean that you stay in one role the whole time. You consistently try to find good people to replace whatever role you were doing, and then you go fill the next role. But that’s what being an OWNR OPS is about to me. It’s not about staying a solo owner/operator; that’s never been my goal.

But it’s also not about immediately starting a business and wanting to be this armchair quarterback, sitting back and calling all the plays. Some people out there can, the serial entrepreneurs of the world—they’re good at it. They can launch a business; they can go recruit the people to run the business very early on. That's what they're good at.

That’s just not my style. My style is to get in the business early on, figure out all the nuts and bolts of how everything works. Yes, I had equipment experience coming into this business; I knew how to operate a skid steer and a mini excavator. But until I actually ran a business offering services where I had to charge money for that profitably and hire other labor and pay equipment costs—all that stuff—you don’t actually figure out how to run the business until you get in the weeds of doing it. I still have a lot to learn—that's why I'm keeping my operator hat on.

I don’t plan to pull myself out of the business anytime soon. I’m not trying to go sit on a beach and run a business from Costa Rica. I'm just not trying to do that. I'm trying to own and operate a freaking business.

I'm getting jacked up; it's kind of a rant right now, but my point is: you guys can start a business. The people who are reaching out, asking me how to start, it’s simple. You’ve got to first figure out your mindset—put your operator hat on. That’s what you’ve got to do. You have to assume that operator role.

That's my opinion; that's my approach. Some of you may disagree with it, but you can’t deny what has worked. And that's my point: If you're willing to be an owner and an operator early on, and you're willing to put in the time, do whatever the business needs you to do—sure, you may have some road bumps—but if you just don’t quit, you’re going to create something successful.

It's inevitable. If you take that approach—like, “I’m here as an owner,” I’ve read all the business books, they're all the same concepts, right?

At the end of the day, in a business, you need to generate revenue. You need to manage your expenses, and whatever is left over between the two—that's your profit. The goal of any business is to generate a profit. News flash!

And then, if you want to go donate that money and find a good cause to help with, that’s great! But if your goal is to create a successful business, you better prioritize profit. That’s the only way your business is going to be sustained over the long term.

In order to do that, yes, you have to prioritize the people in the business, you have to prioritize the equipment you purchase. But, you know, if you're not generating a profit, you're not going to have the money to pay the people.

I’ll save that for another rant, but for right now: the OWNR OPS mindset—start a business, be willing to fulfill the operator role, be willing to work in the business. Just commit to doing that for like, even if you're fulfilling the work for two busy seasons or two full years, and it takes you that long to find someone else to lead your field crew—that’s fine.

You’re going to be way better off at that point because you know how you want the business to be run. I also believe that you meet the people in the field who are going to help you run your business in the field.

So, look, I’m going to get off on too many different topics here—we need to wrap this one up. So we’re approaching 20 minutes here. My point is: don’t be afraid to work in the business early on. There’s plenty of time to work on the business later, but you've got to get the business up and running first and foremost. And that requires you to work in the business.

Anyways, thanks for listening, guys. I'm going to wrap this one up. We've got some exciting stuff going on. If you haven’t checked out the past episodes, we’ve had some great guests on the podcast—lots of topics about local SEO, about sales processes, about going and getting your first customers. Go check those out.

I'm going to continue to do these short-form episodes where I talk about topics from my viewpoint, and we’ve got some exciting new things coming out. We are doing an online group called OWNR OPS. The name came from being an owner and playing off the pun of the "owner operator." This is where the "Ops" comes in: we want to talk about the actual operations of businesses.

So, anyways, OWNR OPS is a group online. We just have a Slack channel for other local service business owners. It’s industry agnostic for this group, because the thought process is that all of us business owners, whether in services, trades, or contracting, have very similar processes.

The sales process is similar, the lead generation process is similar, how we need to think about online marketing is similar, hiring, firing, retaining talent, doing benefits for employees—all that stuff.

This group online, it’s a paid group. We are launching it as we speak; it’s going to be 49 bucks a month to join, or you can do an annual plan and we’ll do a two-month discount on there. I don't even think the landing page is up yet, but if you are listening to this and you are interested in joining, we have like 40 people in the group from all industries.

There’s landscaping, masonry contracting, cleaning businesses, solar sales, pest control—what else do we have? Dumpster rental, pressure washing—a blend of different industries. But we're all sharing best practices to help each other grow our businesses.

So if you're interested in joining that, just reach out to me directly on Twitter. The best way to get a hold of me is at theownerop on X, I guess is what it’s called now.

January 2024 is just starting, and the goal is to keep the hammer down and keep growing the businesses. If that's you, let me know. I’m also doing some land clearing-specific consulting, which people have been reaching out and asking for. It kind of blew my mind that this many people across the country want to start land clearing businesses, but if that’s you, you can go to ownrops.com/consulting, and then you can get the land clearing growth.

I’m doing a four-pack of hour-long calls, and I'll basically just go through everything I’ve built for our land clearing business, and we’ll go through those calls and help you grow your business. So I’m doing a few of those right now with clients across the country.

If that's you and you’re looking to start a land clearing business, let me know. It’s like $495. So what does that come out to? I don’t know—495. It’s early; my brain isn't working. It’s like $123.6 an hour. I’ll go up on that in the future, but for right now, one of my clients down in Austin, Texas, who’s starting a clearing business said that was what seemed like a fair price and what sounded like a great amount of value.

So if that’s you, reach out. And anyways, I'm going to wrap this up. We'll see you guys in the next one. Don’t forget: work hard, do your best, never settle for less, and good things will come whenever you do that. See you in the next episode.