In this podcast, Frank asks the question of what would you do with your lawn care business if you got injured on the job?  What would you do for your business to survive?  Frank shares some insightful tips on how you can be at ease if you pre-plan and have a system in place.

Lawn Care Frank:
What would happen to your business if you got injured on the job? Let’s talk about that today.

Announcer:
Welcome to the Lawn Care Frank Podcast! Where we help lawn care professionals, like yourself, start and grow their business. By tackling obstacles such as finding customers, hiring talented people, spreading brand awareness, and much much more. And now your host…Lawn Care Frank

Frank:
What’s going on lawn care pros? Hey so today I’m here with you and I want to go over some things when it comes to being a solo operator.

Recently I did a video on how much money can you make in the lawn care business. And I dove in and as one of my examples I used the solo operator doing x number of lawns throughout the year and making a certain amount of money. But today I want to kinda get into what happens if that solo operator gets hurt on the job. 

So think about this. What happens if you’re out mowing the lawn as a solo operator, you get hurt. What happens? Does your business go out of business? Are you able to recover? What do you do then? Maybe you’re, you know, mowing and you do whatever and you twist your ankle. You’re out for a couple weeks. Maybe even break your ankle and you’re out for 6-7 weeks. 

What do you do then? So we want to kinda prepare for that before it happens. 

Because let’s just imagine that does happen to you. Maybe you hurt your ankle. Maybe you know you hurt your back or whatever it may be. If that happens to you that’s kind of the last thing on your mind. 

You know what am I gonna do with my lawns that I need to mow tomorrow, or the next day or several weeks after that. And that’s something that you’re not really going to be honing in on when you’re hurt, right? The last thing you’re gonna do or want to do is call people out of desperation and try to figure out how you can cover, you know, your mowing schedule. 

And  I can tell you from experience , from seeing other lawn care service providers being in that same situation the customers are not going to wait for you. 

They’re not going to be waiting for you for a week or 2 weeks, whatever the circumstances might be. They’re going to move on cause your competitor is one phone call away. 

So you want to prepare for this kind of instance before it happens. So what’s some of the things that we can think of doing to prepare ourselves for this kind of crisis? Well one of the things that I recommend is go ahead and pair up with other service providers in your area and see if you know before this happens get to know some of your service providers and maybe some of them are, you know, into, you know, fertilization weed control. Maybe they have a small division where they do the lawn maintenance side and it might be a good fit for you if something happens that they can pick up some of your lawns while you are recovering ,right? 

And you can split the revenues during that time but the most important thing is you’re not going to lose all your accounts. 

And that’s one way you can prepare for it. Another thing that you can do potentially and this is something that I would get with a tax professional, is when you establish your LLC or however way you end up, you know, structuring your business you’re going to want to talk to an accountant and see, you know, how can we, you know, pay our taxes in a way where we can be a W-2 employee ourselves. 

And in most cases that’s hard to do if you’re the solo operator but there are ways to do that. So after you have, you know, discussed it with your accountant you want to get with the state you know depending on what state you’re in. And figure out how workmans comp works in your state. So if you’re a w-2 employee you can probably get workmans comp insurance for yourself.

And you’ve got to kind of weigh the pros and cons of that and see how much that costs. But that’s one way of kind of covering yourself just in case you do get hurt. But the most important way to cover yourself is to have a team of people ready that are able to take on some of the tasks that you’re not able to do like the mowing, the shrub work and all the maintenance that is going to come along