[00:00:01] Speaker A: Welcome to the Grow show, brought to you by Marty Grunder's Grow Group, where we specialize in helping landscaping companies to clarify their platform, grow their people, build their processes and realize profits. Everything we teach is grounded in real experience. Our team is actively involved in the day to day operations of Southwest Ohio's Grunder Landscaping Company.
New episodes are released weekly on Wednesdays and are made possible with the support of Bob Yard. Remember to subscribe so you never miss an episode. Now, here's your host, Marty Grunder.
[00:00:27] Speaker B: Oh, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever the case may be. This is Marty Grunder from Grunder Landscaping Co. And the Grow Group. Thanks for downloading the Grow Show. Today we're going to talk about the lies that get in the way of growing a business. Very exciting topic. Really excited for this one. These are things I've experienced firsthand. But first, a reminder. You can get the latest edition of the Grow show delivered to your phone, tablet or computer by subscribing wherever you get your podcasts or Watch us on YouTube for an enhanced learning experience. The Grow show is the greatest thing since a great partner. Vince Torchia, my partner at the Grow Group is a tremendous young man. He celebrates his 16th year this month running alongside me. Folks, he's a leader. He's a big part of our growth here at the Grow Group. He's a big part of our growth at Grunder Landscaping Company.
I could go on for days about what that young man means to me and what he's done. Vince, couldn't do it without you. Thank you. Speaking of growth, let's talk about the lies that get in the way of growing a business.
One of the biggest reasons, ladies and gentlemen, businesses stay stuck isn't because the owner or the leadership team lacks talent. No, that's not it. It's because they believe things about growth that simply aren't true. And. And the dangerous part is most of these lies, they sound very reasonable. I've heard people repeat them. I believe them. They sound responsible. They sound smart. Again, they're believable. But if you build your business based on the wrong assumptions, eventually reality shows up. And reality that is expensive.
So today I want to walk you through some of the biggest lies that get in the way of growing a business. And because once you can see them clearly, you can stop making decisions based on lies. I know this all firsthand. Again, ladies and gentlemen, lie number one.
If I do the right things, growth will be predictable.
Sounds reasonable. Doesn't it make sense? A lot of business owners secretly believe growth should look like a straight line. Okay? Kind of like this. If you're watching on YouTube, you put in effort, you get results, you launch something, you work hard, you customers show up, profits follow that, you market consistently. Revenue steadily climbs. But growth, folks, it's almost never. It almost never works that way. Growth is messy. It stalls, plateaus. Sometimes it even looks like failure right before a breakthrough. I think grow looks like a staircase. And if you're watching me on the YouTube version, you can see my hand gestures here. I don't think growth is like this, folks. I think growth is up across. We grow, we grow. We grow. Bam. Oh, gosh, man, that's a mess. We got to make some changes. We grow, we grow, we grow, man. We got to level off. Bam. We got to make changes. I think it's more like a staircase. Okay? And by the way, why don't you subscribe to the YouTube version of the grow show? That's the best way to get this. This may sound weird, but I watch all of my own grow shows on my porch on YouTube in the summer, and. And in my home office on my TV in the winter. I think it's a better experience on there. Sometimes I listen to them as well in my trucks. If you do that, keep doing it. I just think if you watch some of these on YouTube, many of them, you're going to have a better learning experience. Anyway, back to the lies. A lot of people quit when things get tough. Not because the business was broken, but because the growth didn't happen on a timeline they imagined. And they get. They get frustrated. It's taken too long. You're not seeing results. The truth is, business growth is often delayed compensation for consistent effort. You work without seeing results. That's what happens. And then eventually, momentum catches up. All right, we opened up a branch office.
Good stuff has come from opening this branch office, but there have been a ton of obstacles that I didn't anticipate. Number one, call me an idiot, but I didn't realize. To Cincinnatians, Grunder Landscaping is a new business, and we have to prove ourselves to them. We have to go on calls. We have to tell them about our company. Now, once we tell them, we've been in business 41 years, we have 140 employees. We've been in Dayton. You know, it helps, but like it. There's some things down there, okay. And when growth slows down, all right, and we. We go through this thing, and we're not really prepared for it, and it's a little bit messier than what we Thought when it slows down there and you start maybe getting a foothold on stuff, there's another lie that shows up.
And that lie is, man, I got some issues here. I'm going to have to figure this out on my own. You know, this one, folks, destroys more businesses than people realize. Somewhere along the way, entrepreneurs start believing that asking for help is a weakness or that nobody else cares as much as they do. The best mentor I ever had in my life was Clay Mattil. Love that man to death. We lost him in August of 2023. Please go back. Please go back and listen to episode number 48. It's a tribute to Clay. I talk about the 16 things I learned from this wonderful entrepreneur. Human being, father, grandfather, friend, mentor. The guy was amazing. He took the IMES Corporation from 10 million to a billion, sold it to Procter and gamble for 2.3 billion. He made an impact on the Dayton business community. He's made an impact on the business community on a nationwide level.
Go back and listen to that episode. I think you'll love it. We'll put it in the. In the show notes so you can learn more about Clay. But the reason I share it with him is one of the things that I remember him telling me. He probably said it to me 10 times, to be honest with you. And I heard him say it when he would speak and teach as well. He said the hardest thing for an entrepreneur to say is, I need help.
I need help. So true, Clay. So true.
So what happens, folks, is we isolate ourselves. We don't ask for help. We feel like we're on an island. We try to wear every hat. We think we have some strange, incurable disease. None of which is true. In fact, that's what I love about our ace peer groups. Your peer group can help you solve your problems. You don't have to go at this alone. You can solve every problem, learn every skill with the help of others. I truly believe that. All right. And please understand, businesses don't scale through isolation. You don't shut your door, feel sorry for yourself, have a pity party, keep reading books, using chat, GPT and everything else. They scale through leverage. You leverage through people. You leverage through systems, through partnerships, through mentors, through the community that you can become of in something like a peer group or whatever you're a part of. Don't do this on your own.
The irony is the people who grow the fastest usually are the ones to admit that they don't know everything.
They are humble, hungry and smart. Has great consultant and business author Patrick Lencioni says they are hungry, humble, and smart.
Trying to do everything yourself doesn't make you strong. Eventually, it just makes you the bottleneck. Because everything has to come through you. And that will not propel growth.
I thought everyone else was the problem. But you know what? I found out? I was the problem. Your team wants to help you, but you have to let them help you. You can't do this alone. Get a men or join one of our peer groups. Come to one of our events. Don't isolate yourself, folks. And once you finally realize you need help, sometimes you run into the next lie, and that is that this shouldn't take too long or cost that much. Yeah, I gotta laugh at that one.
Every entrepreneur, Marty Grunder, all my friends that are entrepreneurs, many of you watching, I'm sure you've done this. We underestimate the time it takes and the money it takes. Marketing costs more, Hiring costs more. Mistakes cost more, and almost everything takes longer than expected because growth exposes problems you couldn't see at the previous level.
What worked at $5,000 a month breaks at $50,000 a month. What worked with 10 clients fails with 100. Scaling requires rebuilding parts of the business over and over again. That is normal. The problem is when people believe growth should happen quickly and cheaply, they interpret normal friction as failure.
The Loveland office in Cincinnati that we opened up, it's going well, but it's taking longer than what I thought. It's costing more. Okay. And it takes a while for new people to be effective. It takes a while for a community, even though they're seeing all our green trucks and everything, to embrace us. It takes a while. I don't even know where I'm driving down there when I. When I go down there to help. Okay. There's just a lot of things that, I mean, I guess. Well, I'll be honest with you. I probably could have talked it through better with people that had opened up a branch office. I'd done a lot of it, but I didn't do enough.
Because if I would have done more, I might have been able to sidestep some of the mistakes we've made.
And what happens when things start costing more and it takes longer? You get frustrated and you could give up because you're just getting so frustrated. You're like, I just want to go back to where I was before. I wish I've never done that. Now. I can't say that about our second office. It's not that bad. But I'm just saying, like, this is what happens when you grow. And maybe you've seen that picture we're going to put up on the screen right now. I found it on Google of a guy digging for gold and he gives up not knowing that gold was right on the other side of his pick. Matics. That's kind of what this is. That's the danger here. So you got to plan as much as you can, because success might just be around the corner.
Lie number four. I need everything to be perfect before I move. That was Marty Grunder at his worst. And this is one of the most socially accepted forms of fear. I think people call it preparation, research, planning. But most of the time, it's hesitation disguised as productivity. It's ready, ready, ready, ready. Aim, Aim. Aim.
Ready. Ready, ready. Aim, aim, aim, Aim. Hey, Marty, are you done yet? Not quite. Aim, aim. Aim. Aim.
Fire.
You get me. The website isn't ready. The trucks aren't all properly branded, the offer isn't polished enough, the content isn't perfect. I don't think we have the right team. Meanwhile, you know, what happens here is someone less talented but more willing wins.
They gain experience, customers, feedback, momentum. I've seen it, folks. I had clients in the Grow group that were growing, and I wasn't growing my own business because I was sitting there doing the Ready, ready, ready, aim, aim.
Ready, aim, aim. Ready, aim, fire. Right, it's ready, aim, fire. Oh, man. It didn't quite hit it. But you know what? We made progress. Let's go.
Because business rewards execution far more than perfection.
Perfect businesses don't win. Businesses that adapt quickly win. You've got to move quickly, but don't be sloppy. If someone else can do the task 80% as well as you can, let them do it. And here's maybe the most important thing I have to say on this entire episode of the Grow show, episode number 165, by the way, you weren't very good at all this stuff when you started either. So why are you being so critical of someone working for you? Give them a shot. Let them have the number of hours that you have in this. And by the way, if you're any good at training and inspiring and mentoring, they're not going to be starting at a baseline. They're going to learn from all your mistakes, and then you're going to let them go.
All right? So get out of the way. Let other people do things.
Now, in doing this, this leads to another dangerous belief. And the belief is that if I work hard enough, the business will grow. Well, hard work matters. I can't argue that. But hard work alone is not a growth strategy. A lot of business owners are exhausted, not because they're lazy, but because they're solving the wrong problems. You can work 14 hours a day and still stay stuck if your positioning is weak, your offer is unclear, or your systems don't scale. At some point, growth stops being about effort and starts being about leverage and clarity. The goal isn't to do more work. The goal is to build a business where the right work compounds.
I used to say, and many of you have been following me for more than 20 years, you'll remember I used to say this. I had this cute little moniker that said, the harder I work, the luckier I get.
I would prefer if no one remembered I ever said that, because at age 58, a full 30 plus years after I first started saying that, I don't agree with that. I think it's the.
The smarter you work, the. The luckier you get. You got to learn how to work smart. And I don't even know if luck is something that we should be talking about there, because now that I realize what it takes to get someplace, it's about focused, it's about preparation, it's about all these things. And hard work alone isn't going to get you there. You got to work smart.
That moves into line number six.
More customers will solve my problems. I can't tell you how many times I thought that was the case. And this one really surprises people.
Sometimes the issue isn't that you need more customers. Sometimes what I found, you need better retention of the ones you have, better messaging, so you're attracting ones. You want better onboarding and expectation setting so that they don't get frustrated. Better pricing, better systems, on and on and on.
Because if the foundation of your relationships with your customers is weak, more customers is just going to amplify the chaos.
Growth doesn't fix broken systems, it exposes them faster. A lot of businesses, ladies and gentlemen, they don't need more traffic. They need more clarity.
They need more clarity. All right?
They need the right customers, not just any customer. Who is your ideal client? The ideal client is the person that is profitable, you enjoy working with. They make you feel good, and they're sustainable. Sustainable from the perspective you can build a business around them.
Think about that. Line number seven.
Once I hit that next level, this is going to be easier. The finish line is moving in entrepreneurship, folks. People erroneously think, once I hit six figures, this is going to be great. Wait till I have a team that'll Be great. Once I have enough clients, it's going to be awesome. And then you start feeling stable. But then every new level introduces new complexity.
More revenue often means more responsibility, more decisions, more pressure, more leadership. Your span of control Lessons. All right. When you have 20 people working for you, you can't be everywhere those 20 people are working every day. The problems change, but they don't disappear. It's just a little bit bigger, more complex problem. And honestly, that's the part of growth. You don't grow by reaching a level where there's no problems. You are a problem solver. As the owner and a leader in an organization, you grow by becoming the kind of person who can handle bigger problems, the kind of person who is inspirational to their team and is a beacon of hope in everything that goes on in that business.
At the end of the day, folks, most business owners are not being held back by a lack of potential. They're being held back by beliefs that distort how they see growth lies. Beliefs like growth should be predictable. I have to do this alone. This should happen faster. It shouldn't cost as much or I need to be perfect first. Hard work will guarantee my success.
Business growth is rarely clean or linear. It's messy.
It's expensive.
It's emotional. And honestly, today on the Grow Show, I gotta tell you, that's normal. The moment you stop expecting growth to feel easy, you stop interpreting every challenge as proof that you're failing. It's a challenge. It's an opportunity to get better. And that mindset shift alone can completely change how you build a business. Because the truth is, growth isn't about avoiding friction. It's about learning what friction actually leads to improvement.
I sure hope I've helped you. Today on the Grow Show, I'm growing myself.
Much of what, if not all of what we just talked about is in my history. And I sincerely mean you don't have to go at this alone. Get involved in our grow group community. Come to an event and by all means ask for help. I think you might be surprised what you learn if you show your vulnerability and ask for help. A great first step, if I can make a recommendation to you, will be to come see me at one of our field trips right here at Grunder Landscaping company in southwest Ohio. See details in the show notes. I promise you, if you give me a day here at glc, I'll show you how to grow and win at this game called business.
Well, that's going to do it for this week's edition of the Grow Show. If you haven't done so already, subscribe to the Grow show and if you can give it a rating or share a comment that helps more success minded landscape professionals find us. And if you really want to help us, share that YouTube link or take it out on your phone right now and text it or send it to somebody that you think would benefit from what we're doing. Thanks for joining us on the Grow show this week. We'll talk to you next week.
[00:18:01] Speaker A: Join Marty and the Grow Group team at Grunder Landscaping Co. This year we host GLC Field Trip events at our living laboratory Grinder Landscaping company where we show you how we operate and how you can too. This event features small groups so you get the one on one attention you need and features a full 27 hours on site at GLC where we dive deep into everything from operations to sales to administration.
Find more information and sign
[email protected] and do it quickly. These events sell out every year.
