Entrepreneurship vs Passion for Landscape and Hardscape business owners is represented by a heart and a gear
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Passion vs. Business Skills: How to Become an Entrepreneur

As a small business leader, your success depends on two things: passion and business skills. While passion for your work can get you far, entrepreneurial skills are essential if you want to create and maintain growth.

What Is an Entrepreneur?

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines an entrepreneur as one who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise. 

But the reality is that in the landscape and hardscape industry, many small businesses are started by technicians suffering from an entrepreneurial spasm, rather than by seasoned entrepreneurs. 

Passion can be a great starting point, but it’s only one step toward success. It may seem like a hard truth that few business leaders launch their companies with the proper skill set to run a business effectively, but the good news is that skills can be learned. 

First step: recognize and understand the difference between a passion for the business you’re in and the process of managing a business.

Staying Competitive

It’s not getting any easier out there.

Costs are rising, labor is getting harder to find, and prospective clients are becoming more savvy. (This is a good thing! It keeps us honest and improving.)

Business owners need to take the reins to succeed. To do that, it’s imperative to start with the end in mind.

One excellent practice is to define your key performance indicators (KPIs). It’s something I often walk my coaching clients through, and it’s an essential strategic process to learn.

For business owners, understanding your KPIs and what it takes to run a business will help you know what’s working and what isn’t. And in the end, it will help make it easier to stay competitive.

So learn the process. And if you’re not sure where to begin, let’s talk.

Developing Your Entrepreneurial Skills

Anyone with a shovel, wheelbarrow, or lawn mower can jump in and claim to be the “best” landscaper in town.

In fact, when I got started in this business, I didn’t even know what a brick paver was. At the outset of Decra-Scape, my partner was going to be the doer, and I was going to handle the business side of things (with no idea what that really meant). 

Looking back, I had one super power at the time, which was the ability to assume risk. At my young age, with no real responsibilities to speak of (no family, no home of my own, etc.), there wasn’t much to lose. So I dove in headfirst without hesitation and without testing the waters. 

I made many mistakes and learned along the way. And I quickly discovered that I needed to study business and evolve into a true entrepreneur if we were going to succeed.

Running a Business vs. Working to Work

For the first few years, my partner and I didn’t know how to actually sell—let alone estimate a project. 

What we did know was that at the time, other players were charging $5.50 a square foot. So guess what we did? We charged $5.00 per square foot. 

“We don’t have the overhead of our competitors,” we’d say, “so that’s why we can sell it for this.” 

If only I’d understood what overhead was… 

And when you think about it, what does a square foot really mean? 

From start to finish, this “method” of estimating was no method at all. It was a mess.

But my lack of business savvy impacted much more than sales and estimating. 

Every October, when the weather and the market started to cool in Michigan, I literally shut the business off and went to work somewhere else. Then when spring bloomed, I would jump back in. 

After 3 years of working to work, I realized that when I thought I’d become an entrepreneur, I’d really just bought myself a job. So I told my partner that we couldn’t do it like this anymore. We needed to figure out how to truly run and operate a business or go our separate ways. 

He chose the latter. And I decided to learn how to run and operate a business.

No, the rest is not history. It’s an ongoing journey—a long walk uphill that I’m still taking—and an incredibly rewarding one.

Building a Successful Business

Whether you are a technician in the field or the owner of a business, we need to enhance our skill sets to strengthen ourselves, our teams, our companies, and our industry. 

To the owners out there, ask yourself this: 

Did you sign up to be a not-for-profit company? Or are you doing this to create wealth and a better life for yourself and your team?

If the latter, you need to build business skills that will keep you going, bring in customers, and ultimately help you find success.

Pitter patter, let’s get at ‘er.

Matt!

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