Tree & Landscape Dude

Christ follower. SMB-owner. Ex-FAANG, current tech W2. Acquired a 7-figure tree & landscaping SMB. Live-tweeting the ins and outs, the ups and (mostly) downs

[Tree & Landscape Dude @treeservicedude]

November Financials

💵 Total Revenue: $85,468
💸 Total Expenses: $76,700
🏦 Net Operating Income: $8,768

Margins continue to hover around 10%, which is significantly less than I'd like. There are some personnel cuts I could make to improve margins (letting one of the office staff go, for instance), but I've been loath to do that because of the morale hit I'm not sure I want to deal with right now.

Longer term, margins have to improve, so I'll have to make some tough choices soon. The good news: I have figured out a profit-based bonus plan for my GM that should incentivize him to start focusing specifically on the bottom-line.

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Largest Expense Categories:
1. Wages: $37k
2. Supplies & Materials: $13.7k
3. Advertising: $3.6k

Revenue Breakdown:
1. Tree: $38k
2. Landscaping: $21k
3. Mowing/Maintenance: $18k
4. Firewood: $6k
5. Christmas Lights: $3k

[Tree & Landscape Dude @treeservicedude]

@themfgfellow Been there. GMB — especially verification — is such an infuriating but necessary pain.

[Tree & Landscape Dude @treeservicedude]

@lawnempire I refuse to do this. If a customer asks, we just tell them we’re not gonna

[Tree & Landscape Dude @treeservicedude]

@TCF294 @NC2020Anthony What percentage of revenue does $1k amount to? And do you have any good sense of the ROI on your print ads?

[Tree & Landscape Dude @treeservicedude]

November Financials

💵 Total Revenue: $85,468
💸 Total Expenses: $76,700
🏦 Net Operating Income: $8,768

Margins continue to hover around 10%, which is significantly less than I'd like. There are some personnel cuts I could make to improve margins (letting one of the office staff go, for instance), but I've been loath to do that because of the morale hit I'm not sure I want to deal with right now.

Longer term, margins have to improve, so I'll have to make some tough choices soon. The good news: I have figured out a profit-based bonus plan for my GM that should incentivize him to start focusing specifically on the bottom-line.

--

Largest Expense Categories:
1. Wages: $37k
2. Supplies & Materials: $13.7k
3. Advertising: $3.6k

Revenue Breakdown:
1. Tree: $38k
2. Landscaping: $21k
3. Mowing/Maintenance: $18k
4. Firewood: $6k
5. Christmas Lights: $3k

[Tree & Landscape Dude @treeservicedude]

Been pretty quiet / absent from Twitter lately. Mostly just haven't had the time to care enough to get on here. Things have been chaotic in personal and business life. When your day doesn't typically end until 11pm, it's hard to muster the energy to send tweets into the void.

But I'm still here. And I'm still fighting to build the business I want to have. A few changes have landed, and many more still to come.

[Tree & Landscape Dude @treeservicedude]

@DIBookkeeping Was gonna say, he isn’t dropping enough of them 😂

[Tree & Landscape Dude @treeservicedude]

@SBA_Matthias Boredom and the desire to challenge myself. Plus the potential upside of knocking it out of the park with business ownership.

[Tree & Landscape Dude @treeservicedude]

@jeffdtauzin Spend time with the kids, build custom cabinetry, renovate the house

[Tree & Landscape Dude @treeservicedude]

@jcolesimpson Formally documented expectations and consequences. It was all way too ad-hoc and poorly communicated by me previously.

[Tree & Landscape Dude @treeservicedude]

@DanielDoran313 Yep. Apparently this guy did the exact same thing to the previous owner two years ago. Wish I knew that before we took this job 😒

[Tree & Landscape Dude @treeservicedude]

Dealing with a customer refusing to pay because they claim the work “isn’t done.” We did exactly what we quoted to do, and now they want us to come back for a full day for free. Guess we’ll see how this turns out, but it’s a $6k invoice, so not something I’m just gonna ignore.

[Tree & Landscape Dude @treeservicedude]

@DIBookkeeping I'm assuming shared folders is Lastpass's way to support this stuff: https://t.co/wTji5TEbvJ

[Tree & Landscape Dude @treeservicedude]

@DIBookkeeping The sharing happens in the authenticator app itself. You don’t share the QR code, you share the stored login credentials.

Not sure how lastpass handles it, but 1Password has team/shared vaults, within which you can store those credentials.

[Tree & Landscape Dude @treeservicedude]

@MikeBotkin_ @LeadershipAcad1 Per man hour makes a whole lot more sense, yes.

[David Perell @david_perell]

I went from thinking the Bible was the most boring book ever to seeing the magic in it.

Years ago, I realized that the Bible is the foundational book of Western civilization. If I was going to be an educated person, I needed to know what it said. Though I was motivated to learn about it, I didn't have the patience to read it or the knowledge to understand it.

Generally, I try to follow my 4th-grade English teacher's advice to read things first-hand. But the Bible seemed too hard, too boring, and too confusing to read on my own. It was a snooze fest. The stories felt outdated in a world of smartphones and fast Internet. Living in the modern world, shouldn’t I be rooting my life in modern books, modern studies, and modern authors?

At the time, I was living in New York when a friend introduced me to the work of Tim Keller. I reluctantly found time to put down the self-help and picked up two of his books instead: The Reason for God and Making Sense of God. It was around that time when I discovered Keller's Questioning Christianity lecture series.

Instead of focusing on the Bible directly, Keller focused on Christianity's relationship with culture and the modern world. He spoke to career-driven Gordon Gekkos who were driven by the glories of the material world, but sensed the emptiness at the heart of such a single-minded pursuit. Instead of referencing scripture directly, he spoke about big-picture themes like identity and purpose, morality and meaning.

This was back when I thought all Christians had the intelligence of sidewalk pigeons. I would scoff at church-goers because I didn’t understand why anyone would worship a sky fairy or follow rules from thousands of years ago. Keller was the guide I needed.

For the first few years, I looked at faith through a cultural lens instead of reading the Bible directly. I literally knew nothing about Jesus or Christianity — and I came to realize how little I knew about my own atheism too. In school, while studying the Declaration of Independence, I’d learned that it’s “self-evident” that “all men are created equal.” Turns out, this defining American ideal is only self-evident if you assume that every person has inherent worth because they’re made in the image of God. I was stumped. Where did my moral compass come from? Do people have inherent value? And if so, is it because every human is a child of God?

In addition to advocating for the life of Jesus and the truth of his message, Keller revealed the many assumptions underlying my own atheistic worldview. He taught me that every worldview requires a leap of faith. Sure, Christianity couldn’t perfectly explain everything in the universe, but then again, neither can any worldview. Astrophysicists say that much of the universe is made up of “dark matter,” which is a scientific-sounding way to talk about a leap of faith

Though I did some Bible studies, I never enjoyed them. They felt more like reading tedious academic papers than drinking directly from the fountain of God’s wisdom. Instead of reading Scripture directly, I joined a small Christian reading group where I was the only non-believer. By showing me coherent ways to interpret reality besides my science-based materialism, books like The Story of Reality and I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist loosened the screws on my atheism.

My palate was beginning to change. Like a fine wine, the same flavors that were once repulsive to me started to appeal to my intellectual taste buds. I surrounded myself with wise Christians who were orthodox about scripture and eager to answer my hardest questions about faith. I asked them to dinner and invited myself to Church with them.

This marked a new era. Once again, I found some guides: books, Internet sources, and an in-person leader to show me the way. On the Internet, I'd turn to The Bible Project to answer my big-picture thematic questions. I picked up the ESV Study Bible, which I still read every day on the white boucle couch in my living room (if you like reading on the computer, I recommend The Bible Study App by Olive Tree).

For years, I’d stiff-armed the Bible. Now, I was skipping to a 7am Bible Study led by a devout believer who'd been reading God's word every day for almost a quarter-century, and wasn’t afraid to rebuke my theology.

What surprised me most was how carefully we read. I admired the integrity of our study. We live in a culture of binge-reading where people boast about how many books they can complete in a given year. We did the opposite. We never read more than ~20 verses in a single session and dissected every word, every verse, and every story. (I once spent two hours studying John 1:1-4 — just four verses at a strip mall Schlotzsky's in the Texas Hill Country.)

Never in my life had I read so deliberately. I spent months in the books of Ephesians, Romans, John, and 2 Corinthians, and there's no way I would've known how to read the Bible so diligently on my own. I learned to look beyond English translations, and I use the BibleHub to look up the original Greek and Hebrew whenever possible.

For a translation, I recommend the English Standard Version (ESV) (no, you don’t need to read the King James Version). And If you're going to pick two books, I recommend the Gospel of John and the Book of Romans. Either find a guide to read them carefully with you or follow along with The Bible Project and The ESV Study Bible. Whatever you do, read slowly.

I used to be a serial consumer who’d brag about how many books I read every year. I’d pick up anything and everything. The more, the merry. But the more I study the Bible, the more careful I’ve become about who I read and listen to. Gone are my days as a serial consumer. Frauds, charlatans, and false teachers abound, so be skeptical and vet your sources. In all this time, I’ve had no more than ten serious teachers. Fortunately, that’s all you need.

I became a believer on March 20th of this year, four years after attending my first Tim Keller lecture, and the Bible is alive for me now like no book I've ever read.

These days, I read the Bible and basically nothing else.

Opening it up is the best part of my daily routine. The words twinkle. The stories are supernatural. It's a living, breathing document, and I wholeheartedly believe it's the Word of God, which makes every other book feel dim by comparison.

[Tree & Landscape Dude @treeservicedude]

@OpenPhone This has just been fixed, fortunately.

[Tree & Landscape Dude @treeservicedude]

@OpenPhone I need some help ASAP. I'm in the process of porting our business number from AT&T to OpenPhone, and in doing so, the number just stopped working! But the transfer hasn't completed on the OpenPhone side, so I'm stuck without a business phone right now.

I've reached out to support, but this is urgent enough that I've gotta escalate.

[Tree & Landscape Dude @treeservicedude]

Also, when I call our number I get the following message, which I’m assuming is actually on the OpenPhone side:

“Thanks for the call. Configure your number’s voice URL to change this message. Let us know if we can help you in any way during your development”

So the number seems have to have been handed to OpenPhone, but it’s not configured on your side.

[Tree & Landscape Dude @treeservicedude]

If porting is shutdown on the AT&T side, why would my old line stop working? Is there no path forward to just expedite the transfer to Open Phone?

Also, shouldn’t this process ALWAYS be zero downtime? I don’t understand how anyone would ever be okay with the way this is currently happening.