How to grow the business ideas

[Jamie Jones]

4 hours ago, Rob D said:

I'd say you'd find it hard to scale a business like this given what you have said and gut reaction is I'd either look to stay where you're at or find another business you can scale up easier. Always hard to find good reliable workers and if you do find them it increases admin time and organising work for them.

 

And in itself can cause large headaches ie. if particularly bad weather or low volume of work available now you have workers standing around costing money but with no work to do.

 

On top of this it's hard to do several different tasks well ie. equipment wise to scale up a tree business you need expensive equipment and that means you then need to have it working more hours or it's not efficient to have it. A catch 22.

 

If it were me I'd look to see which are of the business is the most profitable first, which do you enjoy doing the most and try and become a master of this area with best equipment and most efficient service.

 

 

Fair and understandable comments. But  I want to push on and not give up.
There is also an age issue for me being 54, I need to bring younger in to do work and manage and grow the business. There will come a point when age will get the better of me....

[Vedhoggar]

You'll need to employ something like about 10 workers before you can step back from the manual work and just focus on management furthermore you'll need good supervisors otherwise your reputation will be on the line.  Small 2-3 man specialist team plus casual workers as and when required would be less stressful, that middle ground between large and small is the worse place to be. If fit and healthy you should be able to carry on doing manual work until 65-70 but as time goes on will obviously need to slow down a bit and leave some tasks to those younger. Most businesses I've seen fail in my time have been in that middle sector.

[topchippyles]

You will have the added stress combined with staff coming and going. If you trained someone up and they see you making a good living they will want to go on their own.

[Retired Climber]

I'm not a fan of doing more and more work to increase income. You are much better off finding ways to charge more for the amount of work you currently do. There is a trend among small business owners to judge success on the amount of staff you have. Usually, nothing could be further from the truth. I'd rather sit on my own at the computer for a couple of hours a day than spend 12 to 14 hours a day chasing jobs and staff.