Today in 5 minutes or less:

✔️ The More You Know… The More You Don’t

✔️ How To Sell (7 Tips From Experience)

✔️ Please, Please, Please Don’t Do THIS

✔️ What It’s REALLY Like Owning a Biz?

The More You Know… The More You Don’t

Ask Nolan Gore what he does for a living, and he’ll tell you he “cuts grass.”

“This is how I legitimately answer when people ask what I do,” he’s said.

And he’s not lying — the man really does cut grass.

Nolan runs Top Choice Lawn Care, a landscaping business he bought several years ago.

He’s also got a good sense of humor.

To give you a sense of scale…

When Nolan took charge, Top Choice was doing about $1.6 million in revenue.

And this year…?

“We’ll do about $7.5 million,” he told us. “Which is funny because that feels REALLY BIG compared to a lot of folks… but also REALLY SMALL compared to a lot of folks.”

… And that right there is a major theme of Nolan’s story.

That the more you learn, the more you realize you don’t know.

“Every year, I grow in my understanding of how little I actually know and understand,” he told us. “We’re performing better today than we ever have. And only now am I beginning to understand how much I really need to know to execute really well.”

Right now, you’re probably thinking…

Okay, this guy already seems cool… This business seems interesting… But how the HELL am I supposed to get started?

And the truth is, HOW you do it depends WHAT you want.

• If you want to do the 0 —> 1 thing and start small, from scratch, that’s one thing. (Want us to give that a try like we did here with power washing? Let us know by replying.)
  
  
• If you want to do the 1,2,3 —> 10 thing (AKA buy then build), that’s another thing.

Nolan went with the latter.

He bought an existing business and scaled it up. SUPER impressive.

But the experience also comes with a helluva lot of challenges, mistakes, and scars.

Lucky you, today you get to steal some of his homework…

But first, let’s back up.

Nolan didn’t just wake up one day and decide to go this route.

Here’s his journey up to that acquisition:

• Born in Austin. Dad works in the commercial landscaping space.
• Goes to Texas A&M to study finance. One summer, goes to work at a bank.
• During lunch one day, decides to call up the Marine Corps.
• Long story short, after school, goes on to join the military for 4 years.

Nolan’s learnings from those experiences?

• On school: “Gaining management EXPERIENCE is far more useful than learning management THEORY. But you do need to learn the hard skills of finance and accounting before you get the finance experience in the real world.”
  
  
• On the military: “My job as an officer was really to act as a sh*t umbrella, to protect my guys, and then also to translate garbage into results… I got very comfortable leading people that were technically more competent than me and were older than me.”

It’s no surprise those lessons came in handy later.

Fast forward…

…And somebody approaches Nolan’s dad about selling a small landscaping business. Here’s what they tell him:

1. “It’s not really making any money.” (Kind of a red flag. In general, we wouldn’t recommend…)
   
   
2. “You can have it for the debt.” (So, it’s kinda sorta like a business on sale… but with real risk)

So what did Nolan do? For him, the “economics of business acquisition” was a foreign concept.

But, he DID have:

• Leadership and management experience from the military
• Landscaping blood in his veins (through his father’s work)
• Some financial acumen from college
• “Unrealistic confidence” in himself

So he went ahead and dove in. That confidence led to YEARS of experience…

And those years of experience led to COUNTLESS lessons learned.

Now, it’s time to steal some of Nolan’s homework…

LESSON 1

For The Love of God, Don’t Do THIS…

As a residential landscaping business, reviews are super valuable for Nolan. (And when you own a business, chances are they’ll be critical for you too.)

Nolan’s team was using a certain software to gather reviews. Seems reasonable. But to him…

“It sucked. People know when a request is automated.”

Nolan says he learned this the hard way 43 times. Why 43? Who knows, it’s just what that man said — okay? Bottom line, Nolan will tell you, “Don’t over automate.”

What’d he do instead?

Nolan said hasta-la-vista to the tech and started making real calls and shooting real texts. Here’s his team’s new process:

• First: Nolan tries to make 10 customer calls per day.
• Next: Nolan has one of his teammates text clients the day after service.

Their text script?

“Hi this is [Bob] with [Top Choice]. I am a real human. I quit using automated software for feedback and just decided to text people. How did we do yesterday?”

Per Nolan:

• They learn more useful info
• They save more clients from leaving
• They get more feedback on good and bad crews
• They get more requests for more services
• They get more 5-star reviews

AI is a powerful tool, but for now — for Nolan — this is better.

Nolan’s Knowledge:

“You have to figure out the portion of the market you best sit in, both from your own capability set, but also from what the market’s actually demanding. Every business has sections and tiers of service... All these are different levels of service can command value at different price points.”

LESSON 2

How To Sell (7 Tips From Experience)

Nolan won’t call himself a sales expert, but the man sure has learned a lot about selling. And if YOU plan on being an owner — “selling” may be half your job.

So, Nolan’s biggest sales lessons?

(This is where you pay close attention and take notes…)

1. Follow ups are underrated

“Follow up more than you think you need to. A lot more.”

2. Surround them with communication

“Call. Text. Email. In person. Messenger pigeon. Just because you are a ‘text’ person doesn’t mean they are. They could prefer a call.”

3. Volume beats luck

“More quotes means more wins. Figure out how to quote more things. Even if they didn’t ask for it. Volunteer other services. ‘Hey — I know you didn’t ask for a tree in the front yard but I thought it would be worth a quote. Feel free to ignore it.’”

4. Make it easy to sell

“To increase volume, make it easier to quote. If you can make a 2 hour process take 1 hour, your team can double their quotes.”

5. Track it

Internally, show everyone:

• How many quotes were sent
• By who
• Close percentage
• Follow up percentage

6. Automate what you can but not too much

“Automation is powerful and useful. But people like working with people. Ex: use automation to track and remind the person to call.”

7. Get feedback and improve it

“Constantly. I am pretty good at the first iteration of a process but struggle to stay disciplined on the improvement side. I need to get better.”

Nolan’s Knowledge:

“If priced right, then profitability is driven by 2 things. Can you hit your budgeted hours? And how dense is your route? So what percentage of your day is actually billable? If you have to drive 30 minutes to get to a $100 house and 30 minutes to get back, that’s a lot less profitable of a house than one for $50 that takes 1 minute to drive to.”

LESSON 3

What It’s REALLY Like Running a Biz?

Nolan runs a business with 80 employees and a whole lotta these:

Whatever CAN happen probably WILL happen, especially when it comes to people.

“Humans are hard, illogical, funny, delightful,” he’s said.

So if you’ve ever wanted to own a service business like Nolan’s, you might as well want an idea of the sh*t he’s had to deal with. And when we say sh*t…

• “A client caught one of our crew pooping between their trash cans. Lost that customer and the employee.”
  
  
• “A drunk lady drove up the ramp of our box truck. Got out of the car giggling and hid in the bushes. She was arrested.”
  
  
• “A client canceled their lawn service because Trump was elected. This was their explicit reason for canceling. Had to add a new reason to our cancelation list. They came back when the world didn’t collapse.”
  
  
• “One guy was so annoyed by our performance that he gave us 7 copies of a business book for us to improve. We actually used it. Traction. It’s been great.”

But through all that, Nolan has also served thousands of delighted customers.

“If you want to run a heavy human business,” Nolan’s said, “you need to love people.”

“You need to enjoy the delights and the struggles and the celebrations and the imbecility. You don’t need to be a push over. That’s the trick. High standards while still loving people.”

Nolan’s Knowledge:

“It’s really hard to find core guys in these businesses that want to do this and can do this for the long term, for 10 years. That is often the limiting factor for success, even more so than acquiring customers… Also, allowing yourself to understand the personality of your organization is really valuable. We don’t take ourselves too seriously… And I know that has traction with our clients and drives a lot of sales…”

Know This: It’s NOT for everyone…

Nolan wants people to know that most people are not owners for a reason.

It’s hard.

“But, it is something you should know about and think about carefully because it could be really amazing for you,” he told us, “if done with the right understanding of risk and the right skill sets.”

“This is really freaking heavy and really freaking scary. I’ve got 80 people that expect to receive a check every week so they can feed their families. That’s hard.”

“Getting over that hump to where you can lead people as opposed to doing the daily work — that’s hard. It is in almost every single business.”

“But that’s also part of the value in buying a business — getting past that stage.”

And that’s what we look for in Contrarians.

People who choose their hard.

Nolan chose his. Will you choose yours?

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