The $250,000 line

The business

A property management company in Moncton, New Brunswick. Three years old and a thousand doors.

This first one is mine.

What it already has

In 2013 my partner and I sat down with the books, and one number stopped me. We were paying $250,000 a year to landscaping, snow removal and exterior maintenance vendors.

We owned no mowers and no plow trucks. But we wrote the RFPs. We built the schedules. We took the complaint calls. We were doing half the administrative work, and someone else kept the margin.

The business hiding in it

I’d paid that bill for three years without really seeing it. That’s not on the vendors. They did the work.

It wasn’t a cost. It was a landscaping and snow company with one customer already signed.

Us.

So I asked my partner a simple question. Why are we paying someone else to do this?

The unfair start

Think about what a stranger needs to start that company. Trucks, a crew, and then customers. The customers are the hard part.

We had the hard part before we owned a mower. We were the first customer. The schedule already ran through our office. We knew every property, because we managed them.

So we bought a franchise. Three years later that company was twice the size of the one that created it.

The honest filter

Here’s what would make it a bad idea, and I’m not guessing.

The first year we did a lot of things wrong. We quoted badly. Equipment broke. For the first time, we had to chase customers to get paid.

And mowing never made real money for us. It was supposed to open the door to better-paying work, and we never built the discipline to sell that work. After almost ten years, we sold. It was one of the best decisions we ever made.

A big bill tells you the work is there. It doesn’t tell you the trade fits you.