Society has set the job standards so high that it potentially becomes a toxic environment for most employees. What’s worse is that people often treat trades, seasonal, and gig economy workers poorly when in fact, these people are working noble jobs that deserve the same level of respect.
And as a values-driven entrepreneur, our guest Jessi Burg is always on the lookout for ways to spread her advocacy of teaching companies how to grow equitably and sustainably. She launched her business called Outgrow Your Garage with the sole purpose of helping business owners find the proper resources for them to utilize. In this episode, let’s take a glimpse and hear how this industry expert has been able to amplify her voice and use it to inspire many.
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The Future of Blue-Collar Workforce: Filling in the Gap to Grow Trades and Service Businesses
Welcome to Actions-Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. One thing that often keeps a lot of people settling for less is perceptions and expectations. These could be expectations placed upon you based on your race, your gender, your family name, family history, or could be perceptions around certain specific pursuits, perceptions that will prevent you from pursuing what you really want to pursue.
My guest today has some different ideas around some pursuits that have been placed at a lower level by some segments of society. What I’m talking about here is the traits, the people who do the home construction, the electricity, heating and air conditioning – a lot of things that require a lot of skill, a lot of knowledge, and are also very important to our lives. For some reason, we’ve placed them at a lower level.
Jessi Burg is the founder of Outgrow Your Garage. Not only does she help these people form their own businesses but is an advocate for correcting these misperceptions.
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Jessi, welcome to the program.
Yeah. Thanks for having me.
All right, let’s begin. Tell me a little bit about Outgrow Your Garage. You help people in the trades deal with the business side of their affairs essentially.
Yeah. There’s a couple of things that are true about how trades businesses operate that are different from the way that a lot of other businesses operate. One is they are mobile, inherently mobile. You want your trades person to come to you and do a job onsite. Some of that actually is changing really interestingly, where you have construction that is now happening in factories, and then being carted to job sites. You still have to do that actual building onsite. Even if you have factory-produced walls, which are really interesting, you still have to install the HVAC. You still have to install the plumbing. You still have to install all of the different pieces of putting a house together. That has to happen onsite.
Same thing with maintenance. You have these different maintenance pieces where the plumbing breaks in your house. You want somebody to come to your house to fix your plumbing. You do not want to watch a YouTube video on how to fix your own plumbing. Some people do, but most of us are like, “Please come fix the plumbing.” You have this inherent mobility that’s hard to plan on a business front.
The other piece is that if you are, for example, a plumber, and you are a residential repair plumber, you’re spending all of your time learning about updates to the plumbing field itself. You also need to know about every single plumbing system that has happened in your area for the last 100 or so years, whenever indoor plumbing became a thing in the place that you’re living, and that timeframe varies. You don’t have the time to learn about business in the same way, because your field changes all the time. There’s new technology. There’s new advancements in landscaping and construction right now.
We’re seeing this huge shift out of diesel-powered and gas-powered engines into electric. Suddenly, you have to rethink, as a company, the entire way that your business is operating, the tools of your trade that you’ve been using for the last 50 years. It doesn’t leave you a lot of brainpower left to learn about how business works.
Outgrow Your Garage really fills in that gap of – here is how basic business concepts work. Here is how to find somebody who can help you apply that to your business. It’s presented in a way that works for people who are moving all the time. We do online courses. They’re downloadable to your phone. You can watch the videos in 10 minutes or less. You do an activity. It applies directly to your business that day. You also are able to then have a list of “here are further resources”.
On our hiring course right now that is out, we talked about how to write a job description, and how to start an employee handbook, and how to figure out the difference between a W2 and a 1099 employee. You also get this list of people at the end who can help you with any legal requirements in your state. You get a link to the SBA to be able to say, “Here is some free consulting that will help you figure out what your business specifically needs to be able to legally hire in your state. Here’s how to talk to an insurance broker to figure out if you need worker’s comp and unemployment insurance”, all these different pieces
Now, when people pursue the trades, what percentage of them are starting their own business? What’s the lay of the land? Are there a lot of companies they end up working for, or most of them end up being independent and starting their own thing?
That’s a really interesting question.
One of the other things that's true about trades is you can start a trades business without any capital. Click To TweetNo one really knows how many of these businesses are out there, because we all know somebody who runs a handy person business on the side. “Oh, they fix cars on the side.” Those are all businesses, but they might not be registered legally. The other thing that’s true about trades businesses is so many of them are side hustles to start with, and then they might turn into real businesses.
Yeah, their main hustle. They’re what they primarily do.
Not real businesses but more full-time businesses. It really depends on how you count it. There’s not a good way to know exactly how many. What we do know is that of all the people in trades, the vast majority will work for some of your larger companies.
One of the things that I find really entertaining about the trades as a whole is it contains a lot of the largest companies you’ve never heard of. My background is in landscaping. BrightView is one of the largest landscaping companies in the country. It services most of the western United States, and most of the western United States has never heard of BrightView even though they probably do the mowing for every single corporate campus that you’ve seen in town. A lot of people will work for those styles of companies, because they have apprenticeship programs. They have training programs. They’ll do that. What happens is, as people shift, they tend to break out into smaller companies.
What is the advantage for, say, someone in landscaping to work for a company versus try to strike out on their own? Is there a certain point where you outgrow it and you have more earning potential by starting your own business?
You will always have more earning potential starting your own business, particularly in what is colloquially known as the unskilled trades, which is a term I hate.
There is no such thing as unskilled labor. Click To Tweet
Landscaping is a great example. House cleaning is another great example of this. There is this idea that, “Oh, I can do that myself. I can pull my own weeds. I can mow my own lawn. I can clean my own bathroom.” Sure, we all can, but that doesn’t mean you want to, and not everybody can. Some landscaping involves shoveling several tons of rock at a time. Not everybody can shovel several tons of rocks at a time. We have this idea of that.
In that style of business, there’s always more money to be made if you own your own company. You get to then set your own rates, and you get to keep a larger percentage of those dollars. The other thing that’s true is, in some of the trades you operated — and this really cutthroat level — a good example of that is apartment cleanouts. If you operate a company that goes in and does commercial cleaning for apartment buildings, that’s a very, very cutthroat industry. Generally, people who own apartments are going to take the lowest bid on that. Your margins are already so small, which necessarily depresses the wages of anybody working for those companies. Owning the company is really the only way to make a viable income for most people.
That being said, a lot of people don’t want to do it. It’s a lot of work. There is an advantage to being an employee where you get the stability of a paycheck. You get to show up to work at the end of the day. You go home at the end of the day. You get to put it down. You don’t have to spend all day at a computer. Nobody goes into trades, because they want to answer emails at the end of their workday.
It reminds me of something that I often talk about when people are trying to figure out their paths and figure out their business of just the idea of lifestyle versus scale. When I think of people who are doing their side hustle that they’re trying to turn to their main hustle, it’s a little bit more of a lifestyle versus a scale is the people that are trying to build something bigger and probably make larger amounts of money. Do you see that same dichotomy amongst your clients?
The way that you grow trades and service businesses is a little bit different in terms of scaling. The smaller businesses tend to stay smaller. There’s not this push to scale in the same way that there is for, say, a tech company where you really want to see that exponential growth. With the trades, every time you scale, you have to hire another person. There’s no point at which you can shift to an automated process.
Yeah.
Even if you migrate to something that’s more efficient — you buy yourself a nice piece of machinery — it helps you do stuff a lot faster, you can dig faster, you can do all these pieces faster — you still need somebody to sit in the driver’s seat of that, and maneuver the machinery, and make sure that you don’t knock down somebody’s house. In that sense, there is a limit to how big trades companies tend to get before you start hitting that same issue of how much you can make in overhead to cover that before you start really limiting the wages of the people who are actually doing the billable hours. The scale of that becomes really funky.
The other side to that is most trades businesses tend to stay on the smaller side, because you like what you do. The more you scale a business, the less time you spend in the field doing that thing that you like. Again, you go back to that piece of nobody goes into the trades, because they want to spend all day at a computer. As a business owner, that’s always the thing I say. You have to decide first what is the thing that you want to do. Do you want to hire somebody to help with the billable hours? Do you want to hire somebody to help with the back-end office work? One of those two things is almost invariably that first hire. That really dictates how the business owner’s life operates for the next several years. Most people stay small.
The third reason that they tend to stay small is there’s a geographical limit on how big your company can get before you have to open in another location. We all like to hire local tradespeople, because they understand the local area. My background was in landscaping, and I would have family to say, “Hey, what should I plant in this area over here?” “I don’t know. I do landscaping in Colorado and you live in Boston. I don’t know anything about plants in Boston.”
I think one of the things a lot of people struggle with when they’re starting their business, when they’re scaling up, is that there’s business concerns, but do you like doing the physical work? Some people that start a business, they’re like, “Okay. I was on the computer, something, passing all that work. Now, my job becomes mostly about building the business, about coordinating the job of a C level executive, I think about.” Are you saying that most people who start their own trade-related business hire off things like accounting and want to actually continue doing the landscaping, the plumbing, the heating and air conditioning, or whatever it is that they’re actually originally physically doing?
That is true in a lot of cases. It’s not true in all cases. Certainly, there are some people who really discovered that they liked that building, that business management aspect. They like project management. They like those C suite style things. They like those aspects of running a business, but a lot, they like what they do, so they want to stay in that piece. There is a limit to how big their company will get before they have to just be out of the field. Generally, people will stay a little smaller because of that.
The other thing that’s true, and I think is important to differentiate, is one of the things that we do when we talk about businesses, we tend to conflate startup and small business as a similar term when we talk about business a lot. They’re not the same thing. You might have a new small business that’s only been in business for a couple of years, but it’s never really going to be a startup, because they’re never going to aim for that large scale, rapid growth. You’re always going to grow slowly. You’re always going to be in a little town. Even if you eventually become one of these billion-dollar companies you’ve never heard of, you’re still going to have these little franchise locations that know everybody in their area. You’re still aiming for that small-scale-each-location set-up.
It’s a really interesting dichotomy on that front. When we talk about business, we think that the goal of all businesses is to scale, but a lot of us don’t. You just want to have your little small business. It provides your family. It provides for your life. You provide a couple of people jobs. When we talk about job creation, those are the ones who create the most jobs.
They get less attention.
You have one business that’s creating. It’s also an economy of scale. One business owner who is starting a new trades business, who has to hire people to expand, might create five to 10 new jobs in the course of two years as they grow. A larger company isn’t going to be able to create jobs on that same scale. They’re not going to create five to 10 new jobs per manager at a large company the way that you can with small businesses.
Yeah.
When we really look at job creation, it’s these little local businesses, who are starting a new business, who are hiring two or three people per business owner, per manager, effectively. That’s a huge, huge boost to local economies.
One thing I’m wondering is that, given people in the trade businesses are less likely to be scaling to the point of becoming a “unicorn” as a lot of investors are looking for, is it a challenge finding investors that are willing to invest in these businesses that aren’t shooting for the moon, but maybe you’re more likely to just double or triple in value?
It’s huge. Of the trades businesses that I know, almost none of us even think about investors as an option. You look at small business loans. You look at how your bottom line operates to fund your own growth. We’re not even on the radar of that type of investment. That bears out if you look at pitch competitions, right. When was the last time you went to a pitch competition and saw any business in the trades or services at all? We’re not even in that world. It is a really interesting way that manages, because it doesn’t provide that exponential growth. Also, the way that you grow a trades business is inherently slow, so it’s not as interesting to people who are looking to make that exponential growth.
CDFIs, your community development financial institutions, do a ton of loans to small trades businesses and a ton of loans to small service-based businesses. These launch programs and business accelerator programs, who work primarily with underserved communities, do a lot of trades business work. If you don’t speak English as a first language, if you have any criminal record, if you don’t have a college degree, if you have a bunch of competing things on your time — you’re a single mom, or you are trying to care for an elderly family member, you’re in any of those caregiver roles and you’re trying to work on the side — then starting your own business becomes a way to be able to create more options for yourself.
The Rocky Mountain Microfinance Institute is an organization that I love. Their motto is that they are creating class mobility through entrepreneurship. A huge percentage of their businesses are trades and services, because you can start them with a really low amount of capital. You can start it with a car and a mop. You can start with a car and a shovel. You can start out with a car and wrench. Because the buy-in is so low, you can really start a trades business without a lot of outside investment.
One thing I’m also wondering, as you bring up people who are just doing the side hustle, just doing that my-neighbors-know-I-fix-their-car type of thing, what is the advantage for this group of people forming a business a bit more seriously and try to learn things like marketing, and payroll, and things like that, to scale up to where you’re looking to bring them?
Yeah. A lot of times, it’s going to be time, it’s going to be energy, it’s going to be a change in circumstances. Maybe you are running your side hustle, because you need a little bit more money, because the job that you have doesn’t pay very well. As the side hustle grows, you realize that you can make more money doing your side hustle as a full-time business, so you leave your job. Sometimes, it might be that I personally am an entrepreneur in part, because I had a slew of really lousy managers. I just got tired of working for other people. That was why I ended up going into business full-time. I went from coaching people about how to do vegetable gardens on the side to starting a full-time landscaping business.
Sometimes, it’s that your circumstances change. We have just had two years of a massive pandemic. A lot of people who ran side hustles of trades or service varieties probably went to full-time business in that, because those businesses had zero turnover, because the trades are all essential businesses. You had to keep working.
That was one thing we really learned in this pandemic. It’s this idea of what is essential for our society to function. Our plumbers, and our HVACs, and our electricians, and our house cleaning companies, and all of these businesses that we tend to think operate in the background became really essential. If you ran one of those businesses on the side, the pandemic was a great time to turn it into a full-time business. You might not have been able to do that with your full-time job. Maybe that laid off. Maybe you just didn’t have as many hours. Maybe you couldn’t handle working at home. Not everybody loved that work-from-home shift.
Yep. Not everyone did. Some people got really antsy. That’s a good segue into another topic, because you do talk quite frequently about how people view the trades, how people view these types of pursuits. I’m wondering if you’ve observed this changing as a result of the pandemic when people saw what was essential. They saw what they really needed, and people found a newfound appreciation for people who do this type of work.
I think we’re starting to see a little bit of a shift on that even pre-pandemic. One of the things that’s been happening for the last 30 or 40 years is we’ve had this push where everybody needs to go to college. You have to go to college. You have to get a good job. We forgot that there were plenty of good jobs that existed that didn’t require a college degree. Even I would argue some of the jobs that currently require a college degree — you don’t need a college degree to be a graphic designer. There’s a lot of things that happen out there. I don’t think you need a college degree to be a virtual assistant or an office assistant. There’s a lot of things out there that you don’t need a college degree for, but that’s beside the point.
We went through this period of time culturally where we said, “Okay. You have to go to college. You have to get a good job.” We created student loans. We created this system where people could do that relatively cheaply until it wasn’t. Now, we have this dual problem of, because we push people to these college degrees and said, “Hey, you want to get a good job” — by good, we mean white collar.” In fun facts, I learned this week the term white collar was coined by Upton Sinclair in the jungle, fun fact, out of the New York Times crossword puzzle.
It is fascinating to know the origins of these terms that we just take for granted, but make no sense outside of the cultural context. If someone from another era, another planet, Korea came in and heard the term white collar, they’d be like, “What does that mean?” Yeah, exactly.
We have this big push to go into these white-collar professions. Now, we have this actual shortage of people with skills. As soon as we hit the tipping point in the last five, 10 years, where the number of people who are really skilled in these professions, master tradesmen, have started retiring. Now, there’s just, straight-up, not enough people. The trade schools and people who are working with teenagers and school kids who are working on figuring out what those career paths might be, there’s a huge push right now to say, “Hey, the trades are real.” That’s different even when I was in school. I graduated high school in 2003. There was absolutely no idea that anybody could go into the trades. That was certainly something you did if you weren’t good at school.
That’s the other thing that’s true about our educational system. If you aren’t good at traditional learning, where you have the ability to sit and absorb material for six or eight hours a day, you get pushed off into the trades. That was seen as “Oh, you’re not capable of learning.” In reality, very few of us are able to sit, and listen, and learn, and memorize things for six-eight hours a day. We have this idea of “you’re not smart” if you go into the trades.
Yeah, exactly.
That’s where a lot of that comes from. Now, we’re really realizing it’s a different kind of smarts. It’s a different way that you operate. We all have these different learning styles. As that’s become more common, where we talk about different learning styles, different strengths, and different pieces, some of that is starting to unwind. Now, what we need to do is unwind it in the wider consciousness. It’s one thing to say, “We need more trades people,” and then it’s a different one to say, “I want to go into the trades,” even though the job stability and the pay grade in a lot of the trades is better than what you would get anywhere else. You can make $150,000 a year as a plumber.
I think about how sometimes getting a new HVAC repairman, for example, has been all of a sudden a pretty daunting pursuit, probably just because of exactly what you’re saying. A lot of the older people who pursued that back in the 60s and 70s, back when we still respected that line of work, were starting to retire. Talking about 2003, I remember around the time when people were talking about getting rid of shop class from our education, from our high school and middle school programs. A lot of us have observed there’s a five-month wait for me to find someone to fix my furnace. That may be a force behind changing what I’m thinking about is the attitude of the average person, the way the average person looks at the person that does a computer office job, and then looks at the person who does plumbing, or landscaping, or something like that.
That link is not intuitive in any capacity. What happens is, the average homeowner, who may or may not know anybody who works in the trades fields, but who might be reading about labor shortages, or might be reading about those things, they know that there aren’t enough people. They get that might be this five-month waiting period. They’re not recognizing that part of that is caused by this long-term decision that we made, that the trades were not a place you want it to be. This problem of not being enough people — it’s going to get worse before it gets better. You have to wait for the catch-up. You have all these people who are now pushing to put shop class back into schools to say, “Hey, we need to expose people to the trades.: Tech schools are doing some really great work around the country and making sure that people are aware of what the career paths are.
The industry organizations and the unions are, of course, working on this also, but it still takes time to catch up. You have to fill in that gap, because we have this 20- or 30-year period where the numbers of people going into these fields wasn’t enough. We just have to wait until you can get those numbers back up. In the meantime, we’re all going to have these five-month wait periods.
The other piece to that is the trades have a really bad rep for communication. Some of it is labor, and then some of it is, if you are spending time handling clients, that’s one more person in your company who isn’t out there fixing things. As a small business owner, you have this constant poll of — I have these people who are calling me and want me to do work, but also, I need to be able to set up invoices. I need to be able to write my schedule. I need to be able to go and do estimates. You have to figure out a way to balance that time. That’s a really hard thing to juggle.
Something that Outgrow Your Garage works with a lot is how do we teach business owners how to do that juggling piece? How do you make those decisions? That style of decision is very different from how do I put a humidifier into this house, and what is the wiring, and what are the pieces look like, and where’s the best place to connect it? That’s all stuff you can be trained in. You can certainly be trained in business things too, but everybody has their own method of balance in terms of what works for them in their business.
This communication piece that you just brought up, is this alongside of your desire to not work for a boss, part of your motivation for starting Outgrow Your Garage?
Yeah. My motivation for starting Outgrow Your Garage is partly because, as you mentioned, I don’t want to ever have a boss again. I’ve also learned as an entrepreneur, I’m actually a pretty lousy employee. My employees are all better employees than I was, and that’s fine. I don’t have to be a good employee. I work for myself. I have to be a good boss now — different skill set.
Before I started Outgrow Your Garage, I started a landscaping company called Pears to Perennials. I thought I would go into vegetable garden coaching, and I ended up running a full-service landscaping company. It was so hard to grow that company from the early stages. Those first couple hires, figuring out how to get things off my plate, finding somebody who was able to help me understand what was going on with my finances, and how my money should be allocated, and all of those pieces, was so, so hard. I would have these other issues like parking. If you have an all-day job in an area of the city, where it’s two-hour parking, where do I park my vehicle to be able to have access to my tools? How do I solve those kinds of issues?
I would try and find these resources. I was spending all this time on the phone trying to figure out these answers to these questions. When I talked to people who are business coaches, they’d go, “Oh. I don’t know anything about your industry.” I would go to the Office of Economic Development, and I would say, “Okay, I have these questions,” and they go, “Oh. We don’t know anything about your industry. We’ll maybe see what we can do.” I was just getting the door shut in my face over, and over, and over again around “We don’t know how your industry operates. It’s very weird.”
Instead of getting the “you shouldn’t go into the trades,” on a personal level, I was getting “your business doesn’t count as a business from policy people, from the Office of Economic Development in the city, and at the state level, from the SBDC, from all these different places and saying, “Hey, we’re not really sure how this business operates.” People certainly tried. The SBDC and the SBA have amazing resources, and they can hook you up with free mentors. I love recommending them to small businesses, but you have to be really specific about what you need, so they can try and find somebody who can help.
A lot of times you get “Oh, your business is too small. I only know how to deal with companies that are making $1 million or more in revenue.” You’re like, “Great. I make $150,000. I am a one-person shop.” That experience really is the impetus for Outgrow Your Garage. How do you, as a small trades company, grow through that first stage of growth? How do you hire those first five people? How do you go from five-digit revenue to six-digit revenue, or from the low six digits to the higher six digits? How do you figure out how these operations work when your operations are constantly changing?
Landscaping is a great example of this. You have a different thing that’s happening every season that gets managed a little bit differently. You don’t manage your spring planting operations the same as you manage your winter snow plowing operations.
Yeah. It changes over time.
Outgrow Your Garage is fundamentally an operations company – how do you organize your operations so that they can scale in a way that works so that, as you grow, you are using that money in a way that makes sense for your business, your values, and how you want to grow?
One of the things I observe about your story is that it’s a common story where someone identifies a need, and turns it into a business. What I’m wondering is, for everyone listening out there, if you have any recommendations as far as what mindset, whether it be presence, whether it’s not being distracted all the time, believing in yourself, or anything else, does someone need to adapt so that if someone listening doesn’t necessarily have their inspiration yet, but they want to be open to whenever their experiences and their observations turn into an idea for a business that they want to build, that they can actually harness that, and go through with the business that they observed is needed the same way you’ve observed that this was needed.
I’m going to preface this with, I am originally from Philadelphia, and we are blunt and mean people. We have a pretty nasty reputation for not being kind.
You’re sports fans especially but yeah.
The way that I talk about these things tends to be a little blunt, and it’s a little off-putting. I think a lot about the conversation I had with the owner of Odyssey Beerwerks, which is a brewery in Arvada, that I frequent. Chris and Deana are the owners, and they are really spectacular people. When I was thinking about starting my landscaping company, I said, “Hey, Chris. Can I pick your brain about starting a business?” He said, “My advice for starting a small business is don’t do it,” and then he went on with his day. That was our entire conversation. I don’t even think he remembers that conversation at all.
Yeah.
I think about that a lot. At the time, even as a person from Philly, I was like, “Wow, that’s really blunt, and that’s kind of mean.” That was a lot. I hadn’t been expecting that from him, because he’s generally a really jovial dude, and then I started my business. I was like, “Oh, this is actually awful.” Everything about the process of starting a business is terrible. It’s hard. You have to lit your entire life on fire to do it, because you have to be willing to sacrifice every single thing in your life for the sake of this business.
One of the things I’ve really come out of this experience with is, you don’t start a business unless you don’t have any other options. You cannot have any other options for a lot of reasons. I didn’t have any other options, because I’m a really bad employee. I don’t like working for other people, so it just wasn’t an option for me in terms of my ability to move through the world. I didn’t want to keep changing jobs and being unhappy. I figured out how to make that work. I know other people who have started businesses, because they had a life situation where their schedule was really funky, and they needed to make something work.
It comes down to — you have to be able to eat. You have to be able to have housing. You have to be able to do the things in your world. For some number of people, for a wide variety of reasons, entrepreneurship and business ownership is the only option they have. Unless you exist in that world of “this is my only option” for whatever reason, whether it’s circumstantial, whether it’s “I have this idea and I’m so passionate about it that I can’t think about anything else”, whether it’s “I really want to be able to have control over my freedom for X, Y, or Z reasons, and that is important enough to override every other concern in my life” — if you don’t have that kind of ability to compartmentalize, your business ends up failing, because there are easier ways to make money.
There are so many easier paths.
If you’re not willing to do that, it’s really hard to get through these first two years of business.
When you say light yourself on fire or light your life on fire, what are the most common roadblocks or the most common areas where people say, “Okay, I have this idea. I think it’s really cool,” maybe they’re even passionate about it, and like the idea of being their own boss, but there’s something that they’re not willing to light on fire, there’s an aspect of their life they’re not willing to let go of — what’s the most common circumstance that makes people hit that wall?
The desire to put your business down at the end of the day. I came upon a quote recently, and I think it’s originally from Nora Roberts, the romance writer. She talks about being an author, and a mom, and running this business, and doing all of these pieces. Authors are all inherently business owners. Writing is another great example of you don’t have any other options. For whatever reason, you don’t have any other options. That’s why you’re a writer, because it’s the hardest path. She talks about how, as a business owner, as a writer, as a mom, you have all these balls in the air all the time, but some of them are glass, and some of them are plastic. You have to know what balls you can drop, and it’ll be okay, and what balls you can not drop.
Sometimes, those glass balls are going to be family balls, but sometimes, they’re going to be writing deadline balls. You have to be willing to say, “Sorry, kids. I can’t hang out today, because I have to do this business thing. This is a glass ball. I can’t drop it.”
That makes sense.
If you want to be able to put your business down sometimes and not think about it, entrepreneurship is not for you. You might have days where the reverse is true, where your business has to wait because something in your life is the glass ball.
Yeah, like personal health. You need to get heart surgery or something.
You have to figure those things out, but that first bit of time where you’re really figuring out [with the system], you really have to be able to think about that business most of the time, and be able to make sacrifices in your life. Every entrepreneur has a story of friends that they lost, because they didn’t understand that there was this thing that was occupying most of their time. I do not have children, but I have known people to start businesses who also have had children. They say it’s a toss up which is harder — starting a business or having your first kid.
The flip side to that is that, as your business grows, that should calm down some. I am a firm believer that every single person in a company, once you start to figure out how your company operates, should be able to take a vacation, including the owner — every single person. If you have a person in your company who is indispensable and your company cannot function without them, that person is burned out.
Yeah. There should be enough cross-skilling that every single person in the company has the ability to take a vacation, or take some time off, or attend to the other areas of their lives too, whether it’d be their health, their family, their friends, all these other things.
Yeah.
I always say everybody should be able to take a vacation. What we really mean though is everybody should be able to have an emergency. Click To Tweet
Yeah. The other glass ball. If it’s like both my kids are sick, and everything is just haywire, and I just need to be here focused on this instead of work.
Yeah. I am in the middle of moving across the state right now, so I have been commuting back and forth between Grand Junction and Denver for the last chunk of time, and I’m under contract for this house. My staff knows that. I have to take time off for things. There are times when I’m not available, because I have to be at the home inspection, or I have to talk to the mortgage lender – I have to answer the phone every time my realtor calls. Working out these different pieces, that’s an important thing in my business — that I can do that.
Avoid the ski traffic driving across I-70 as much as possible.
Yeah. We drive west on Sundays and east on Fridays.
Okay. You see the traffic going the other way. For those that don’t live in Colorado, I-70 gets really jammed up on winter weekends from people going from the Denver or Front Range cities up to the ski resorts. It tends to be Friday, Saturday morning up there, and then Sunday back.
That is a conversation we’ve had in my house. I own my own business. My husband works for a startup. We both have these really hectic schedules. We’re in this business world of trying to figure out what we need. One of the conversations we had with this moving process is how we want to intentionally limit the amount of chaos. Both of our jobs involve a lot of chaos, so how do we limit that in our personal life to the greatest extent possible? Part of that decision was, we’re not going to leave after work to drive across the state. We’re going to do it on the weekends, or we’re going to do it on days that we’re not working.
Yeah. Regardless of what the situation is with your lives, or with the traffic patterns of the city or state you live in, you have to find a way to put these pieces of the puzzle together and say, “How do we make sure nothing gets overwhelmed?” Sometimes, that means finding the most efficient timing and also respecting that not everyone desires to cram days together — 8:00 AM this, 9:00 AM this, 10:00 AM this, 11:00 this — even though I know a lot of people in the trades end up doing that with some of their jobs.
Yeah. You have to figure out how to take time for yourself. You have to figure out how to do it. Once you finish lighting your life on fire to start this business, you have to build something new out of the ashes. That’s the part a lot of people miss. I think this idea of you have to be go, go, go all the time is something that we are really grappling with as an American culture right now. There’s a lot of pushback on that from business owners. My husband just sent me an article the other day about CEOs who are not taking other C suite positions, because they’re tired of the burnout, and they want to hang out with their kids.
Yeah. I’ve been referring to this period as the great resignation on this podcast. I’ve actually changed my thoughts on this. I’m referring to it now as the great reshuffle, because that’s really what it is. People aren’t suddenly deciding that they don’t want to do anything. People are just reevaluating what they really want. One of the things people can reevaluate, which is what you’ve been saying for quite some time now, is how we feel about certain positions, how we feel about certain industries, and how we feel about this idea that we’ve always put things into tears.
Same way you talked about the white-collar jobs versus what some people refer to as the blue-collar jobs or the trades, we also have this idea that management versus being an employee has a tear as well. There’s possibly another way to look at it, what you were alluding to before — there are just different skill sets. The person who takes the initiative, starts the business, coordinates his work, is one skill set for people that are good with people, probably good with motivation — they’re with empathy. People that are good with the technical work are probably better off as employees. Do you see these attitudes, that whole idea of tearing being reevaluated right now?
Yes and no. I think we are pretty conditioned in this culture where everybody likes things to be in this hierarchy, and then some people don’t. Those different systems are going to work better for different people. I operate my company though fairly flat. There’s only three of us, so it is easy to have a fairly flat hierarchy. Landscaping worked better when we had a point person, so it was a little more, “Here’s the crew. Here’s the crew lead.” I think you find different things work better in different situations. We are starting to see that type of paradigm shift.
The other thing that’s true about this great resignation, as people are calling it, is it’s pretty segmented. What we’re really seeing is a lot of people in what have historically been lower-wage jobs, and the wages have not kept up with the cost of living, particularly in areas like Denver, where the cost of living is just skyrocketing — you’re seeing these people who are saying, “I’m not willing to work 60 hours a week for $8 an hour.” There are a lot of fields where that’s the expectation – what do you mean I have to pay you an actual living wage? You’re like, “No, really. I need to make a living wage.”
There is this great shuffle around that. Part of it is that employers have to pay more, but part of it is that we have to grapple with the real cost of services. That’s something we haven’t done in a long time. Back to my earlier example of apartment flipping, you need somebody to come in and clean out an apartment when somebody has gotten evicted and trashed it. That’s a real thing — has to happen. This idea that anybody can do that, and we’re going to pay the least amount of dollars we can get away from to do that, without regard for quality of work, we got to get over that. What happens is, as we go through reshufflings, you don’t have people who are willing to do that kind of manual labor full of gross stuff and who are also getting paid $12 an hour.
In some areas of the country, $12 an hour is great. In Denver, it does not qualify as a living wage. Really looking at the amount that we’re willing to pay for these jobs that are unnecessary and figuring out what that really means, because that’s really where you’re seeing a lot of these pushes. Grocery store workers, and low house cleaning companies, and landscaping is another example of one that the wages haven’t really kept up, because it’s hard to get people to pay more for lawn mowing services. They’re like, “I could mow my lawn. I don’t want to pay you.”
You’re not just paying for the hours that somebody is onsite. You’re paying for the hours that they take to get there. You’re paying for the hours of maintenance on the machines. You’re paying for somebody to answer the phone when you call. You’re paying for all these other pieces off these billable hours. You have to be able to pay a real wage plus that overhead in a way that you don’t in certain other industries. I think we really need to reshuffle what this idea of a living wage is. We have this idea of “do they deserve that?” I think we really need to divorce the concept of deserving from base-level wages.
I even admit that growing up in suburbia, I always thought of these things as things that magically happen, but understanding and seeing people in a way. When you go to the grocery store, you see the fact that there are people bringing in boxes from trucks, and people stocking the shelves, and people helping you with the checkout. No matter what other place you go, the same thing. That person weighing the table at the restaurant, the person mowing the lawn, those are human beings, just like any human being that you encounter at your white-collar job or anywhere else.
That’s not even to mention — in recent years, we have the rise of the term pink-collar jobs.
The caretaking.
Your caretaking, your house cleaning, your beauty services, hair cutters, estheticians, all of these kinds of pieces, and those are even more undervalued. We really need to grapple with that. We talked a lot about the trades, but then also, those service-cleaning companies. House cleaning companies were huge in the pandemic. How do you make sure that janitorial services and cleaning companies are keeping these public places safe, making sure that we have basic sanitary practices, even as we were learning that COVID wasn’t sticking around on surfaces, it’s airborne? We didn’t know that at the beginning. You have all these people who are literally shifted to the night shift, so that you do not see them. It’s how janitorial services tend to operate in commercial buildings.
These people who are actually hidden in a lot of real ways, we have to pay those people living wages also. Click To Tweet
You can tell a lot about a person by how they treat people like cleaning staff, waiters, and waitresses, and stuff like that. There’s this idea — I think it’s relatively recent, since the turn of the century at least — that if someone treats these people like shit, it’s probably a really poor reflection on their character. We’re hopefully seeing that percolate a little bit more.
One final thing I want to ask you, because I want to give all my listeners a chance to get a hold of you, if someone is say, going into the trades, if someone wants to start a business, wants to learn a little bit more, if someone wants to join you on the mission of getting these people who take part in these businesses the proper respect, what will be the best way that someone would get a hold of you?
Yeah. We are online. Obviously, we have a website. It’s just www.outgrowyourgarage.com. We’re also on Facebook. We’re on LinkedIn. Any of those ways are really easy to find. If you want to shoot us an email, we have info at outgrowyourgarage.com. That’s monitored by me and my operations manager. Those are the easiest ways. We have a contact form on our website. Yeah, check us out online. It’s the easiest way to find us.
Definitely. Any last messages for anyone that is listening out there that may be interested in pursuing a career in one of these trade services?
Do it. The trades are awesome. They get you outside. They get you moving. They do different things. If you are the kind of person who does not want to sit and look at a computer all day, go into the trades where you don’t have to.
Excellent. Great last message – a lot of great topics covered. Jessi, thank you so much for joining us today on Actions-Antidotes. Thank you to everyone out there listening. Hopefully, these discussions continue to expand your mind, open us up to all these different ideas. I encourage you to tune back into Actions-Antidotes and future episodes where we will continue interviewing people who have pursued their passions in one capacity or another with some stories to tell about what we’re observing about how the world is in transition right now.
Thanks for having me.
Have a good rest of your day.
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About Jessi Burg
Jessi Burg, founder of Outgrow Your Garage, has spent her entire career in seasonal industries. From summer camps to outdoor education to landscaping, she brings a unique perspective on company organization. In 2017, she started Pears to Perennials, a landscaping maintenance company based in Denver. Over its five year history, Pears to Perennials has had near zero staff turnover and averages an 85% client retention rate. As she built her landscaping company, she discovered being a business owner amplified her voice and began advocating for the trades, and seasonal and gig economy works.
Jessi started teaching other companies her strategies after earning a reputation for meaningful staff engagement and values-driven culture. As a values-driven business owner, Jessi absolutely adores proving that you can make a profit while breaking down class barriers. Through Outgrow Your Garage, she is building that advocacy work and teaching other trades companies how to grow sustainably and equitably.