Business Culture Matters – Robert Clinkenbeard

Robert Clinkenbeard:
So those types of skills, very much I learned working for another company when I switched to becoming a business owner. Yeah, I made a ton of mistakes. You know, you just learn through experience. You learn by making mistakes. But I think I found within the first couple of years, I wanted to surround myself with other business owners to be able to learn from them. We partnered up with the janitorial company, a security company, and learned a lot of things by just, you know, rubbing shoulders with them, being able to share clients, but also then, you know, what do you do in this scenario in terms of just being able to manage the internal part of the organization?

Dana Robinson:
Exit Plan is a podcast for business owners and those who want to be business owners. I’m always in search of the lesser known stories of entrepreneurship. In the exit Plan podcast, you’ll hear stories from startup to sale and hear from the professionals who helped business owners achieve their exit. Hosted by me, author and private equity manager Dana Robinson. Along with my co hosts and guests, you’ll hear real stories, tips, and tools that will help you plan for the exit you want, whether you are still working at a day job or running a business. Let’s get started with this episode of the Exit Plan podcast.

Dana Robinson:
All right, everybody, it’s Dana Robinson on the Exit Plan podcast, and I’m pretty stoked to have a landscape business owner who actually helps other landscape business owners at this point in his career. Robert Clinkenbeard, thanks for coming on.

Robert Clinkenbeard:
No problem. Good to see you, Dana. Nice to meet you and be able to share my story today.

Dana Robinson:
Absolutely. So I met you at Aspires conference. Aspire, for just a plug is a software that landscape maintenance companies use to run their businesses and the part of the Servicetitan family of companies. I know from my experience in H Vac and plumbing that it’s one of those tools that really can help a company level up with systems and processes and tools that do a lot. So it’s good to meet you there, Robert, and get to know you a little bit. An expert that helps other people get through what could be the biggest exit in their life. But you also lived out that story yourself. So I’d love to know from the beginning, how did you end up an entrepreneur and a business owner? And then let’s talk about how you worked yourself into selling a company.

Robert Clinkenbeard:
Yeah, no problem. Yeah, it goes back a little while now, but, you know, obviously with my accent, you can tell, or maybe tell that I’m from Edinburgh, Scotland. After I left college, one college I went to to do a landscape college, got my degree there on the west of Scotland worked for some, you know, government agencies doing landscaping, and I got a little bit fed up with the, the weather, first of all. I mean, Scotland’s a beautiful place, but it can get pretty wet and rainy. And then, you know, I just. I just felt as though there wasn’t many opportunities for me to grow as an entrepreneur. So back in 99, after taking a beautiful trip out to Scottsdale, Arizona, I ended up moving there, you know, six months later. Did a few basic jobs, but ended up getting a job with a big company called Valleycrest at the time, and loved working with them.

Robert Clinkenbeard:
Got some amazing training, but I just felt as though, you know, they were very much, you know, looking after the corporate who was such a big company. I felt Zoro’s number, and I thought, well, maybe I should give this a shot myself. So in, I believe it was in early 2001, my partner and I, you know, who worked with Valleycrest left. We started up our own commercial landscape company in 2001. And, you know, we were out there early morning and, you know, you know, Phoenix pretty hot during the summer, so we were out there at 4430 in the morning getting beating the heat. We would go out there, do all the grass cutting, the shrub, pruning, you know, so work 8 hours in the heat, you know, go home, get showered, and then go out at night and network, go out and try and get new business. So, you know, it’s a pretty hard slog at the beginning, but we just started to get some, some new accounts. We eventually got enough that we could come in from the field and just purely working on operations and business development, and then over a period of 15 years, so pretty rapid growth, we grew to over 20 million.

Robert Clinkenbeard:
We had 350 employees, four branches in Phoenix, one up in Vegas. So it was pretty exciting growth. It was quite heavy lifting, but it was just great to be able to see all the employees and us have that tremendous growth now.

Dana Robinson:
How long did you work for someone else there? Sounds like ten years or so. If I’m putting the timeline together, between the time you worked in Scottsdale for, was it Valleycrest to the time you started your own thing?

Robert Clinkenbeard:
Yeah, I mean, really, it was only, you know, after I moved to the states, really two and a half, three years that we worked for Valleycrest and a couple of smaller companies. So, yeah, it was fairly quickly after moved to the states, and I suppose I was, this was living that american dream, per se, where I just felt as though, you know, if you work hard and put your head down, you make connections, you do a lot of networking, then usually you’re rewarded by having a pretty successful business.

Dana Robinson:
Yeah.

Dana Robinson:
So maybe I’ll test the thesis with you. I have this thesis that most entrepreneurs that are successful were grabbing skills aggressively while they worked for someone else, and that a lot of people miss that because they’re at a job and maybe they don’t like it and they’re in the standoff where they’re not really like, you’ve owned an organization, you probably have had employees that, you know, they’re not ambitious, they’re not extracting skills, and then someday they go open a shop and they make all kinds of mistakes that they could have avoided if they had taken their job, you know, in a different mental way. Do you feel like when you were working that two and a half, three years, that was that time for you to really grow in ways that allowed you to become a successful entrepreneur?

Robert Clinkenbeard:
Yeah, I think it did in some ways. I mean, certainly all the technical skills, it helped me with learning how to take care of customers. That was something I learned, you know, looking after some of the financial piece about job costing and, and how to really manage jobs and make sure your profitability. So those types of skills, very much I learned working for another company. I certainly, when I switched to becoming a business owner, yeah, I made a ton of mistakes. You know, you just learn through experience. You learn by making mistakes. But I think I found within the first couple of years, I wanted to surround myself with other business owners to be able to learn from them.

Robert Clinkenbeard:
So I was, you know, we partnered up with the janitorial company, a security company, and learned a lot of things by just, you know, rubbing shoulders with them.

Dana Robinson:
How did you do that? Did you create like a sort of intermingled best practice group or network of some kind?

Robert Clinkenbeard:
Yeah, it’s almost like a little informal mastermind group, per se. So, you know, we’d meet up maybe once every week, every couple weeks, and just, you know, it’s part of the conversation and be, be around being able to share clients in terms of who the client contacts were. But also then what do you do in this scenario in terms of cash flowing and finding a good bookkeeper? Just being able to manage the internal part of the organization. So that was a huge help because I had no clue up until that point.

Dana Robinson:
Interesting. You had visibility at the job into a lot of things, but not enough that you could just waltz into owning a business and not make those mistakes and not need to get those from some new source. So you found that. Was it important? I mean, obviously, you’re not networking the competitors at this point, so you can share clients and resources with these other businesses. Did that still leave you lacking something that you needed from the industry itself, or do you feel like that these other businesses correlated enough?

Robert Clinkenbeard:
Yeah, certainly some of the business practices and being able to, you know, find out who the right clients were. And so that sort of helped a lot. But in terms of business, I just felt as old joining a business groups, associations like, you know, the Landscape association. Early on, I joined the big group called the Entrepreneurs organization, EO. So just being around other business owners and learning through their forum meetings and learning other challenges they were going through. So that was a huge part of growing the business and just being able to make less mistakes learning from the challenges they’ve gone through. So I think that was certainly a big part in how I helped to scale the company successfully.

Dana Robinson:
When you went into business, did you have a grand plan for let’s grow this thing to $20 million and take an exit?

Robert Clinkenbeard:
Short answer? No. I. I don’t know. Maybe just coming from that, you know, scottish roots and, you know, my parents weren’t necessarily entrepreneurs. I think my business partner, he was a little bit more ambitious than I was, you know, being from the state. So, you know, I was thinking, you know, maybe we get up to two, 3 million ish range. And so I kept having to pinch myself as we went through those different thresholds. 5 million, 10,000,015, 20 million.

Robert Clinkenbeard:
There’s a lot of challenges along the way. And I think as we broke through some of those thresholds or plateaus, it gave me a lot more confidence. And then it was like, well, can we get to 30 million? Can we get to 50 million? And what needed to take to get to that next level is another software platform, is another manager who has that experience. Do we need to move to a different state? So you went through all those different types of thought processes?

Dana Robinson:
Yeah. That’s fantastic. I mean, I’ve seen so many the trades in particular, that kind of hit these hurdles at sizes. It’s maybe escape velocity is a problem until you get at 3 million, and then people get stuck between three, four, $5 million and can’t figure out why they can’t keep more money. What are some of the, you talked about plateaus? I think of them as speed bumps that people sometimes can’t get over. What were some of those for you, and how did you overcome them?

Robert Clinkenbeard:
I think the cash flow was a huge part of it. Early on, we made the mistake of just not billing enough. We weren’t collecting quick enough. So we changed our business model to, rather than billing at the end of the month, a lot of our maintenance contracts, because we were predominantly reoccurring revenue. So we changed to more billing at the beginning of the month. So that was a huge step for us, and then a big, another big step for us. We, rather than waiting for clients to ask us to do upgrades or enhancements on the projects, we went into almost moving from a landscape company to almost like a sales machine. You know, we read the book.

Robert Clinkenbeard:
We saw Chet Holmes, you know, with the sales machine. So we changed our whole platform to selling a lot more and getting a lot of our managers to be constantly selling and bringing in the tools that helped us to sell to companies. So that was a big step. I think the third thing was, you know, finding a ERP type system to help us, you know, like Aspire. We use boss at the time to help us to be able to job costs, to be able to estimate jobs quickly. Turnaround proposal really quickly. So that was probably the third piece, and then I would say probably the fourth piece, which is probably, I would say the most important is finding the right people. You know, we brought a lot of people into the company early stages, but they weren’t necessarily the same people to take us to the next level.

Dana Robinson:
Right.

Robert Clinkenbeard:
So we just went through that whole process of trying to find a players, replace some of the people that started off the company and just start to replace it with people who could take us to the next level.

Dana Robinson:
That’s an important but costly move that a lot of business owners that can’t figure out how it costs you out of your cash flow.

Robert Clinkenbeard:
Right?

Dana Robinson:
I mean, you’re the owner of the business. You’ve got a choice to pull a million dollars off the table in a profitable year or invest that into some very expensive humans. And that’s a, that’s a big bet that a lot of people are afraid of.

Robert Clinkenbeard:
Oh, for sure, for sure. Because people, I think people get into that comfort zone. They like having that lifestyle, taking a bunch of money at the business. But, you know, you’ve really got to be, you know, I think that was, I suppose, an advantage of where I came from in Scotland being, you know, we’re a little bit tighter with money. My partner was a little bit, you know, free flowing and spending. So, you know, I was definitely a little bit more conservative on spending. I was really careful about how we put our money back into the business. And, you know, I think, you know, he, he admitted to me eventually that, you know, we went through that period of 2008 to eleven.

Robert Clinkenbeard:
You know, if we weren’t like that, we probably wouldn’t have survived. So you’re just making sure. Yeah, it was a really tough time. We were doing a lot of heavy construction work and that pretty much dried up overnight. So we had been pretty conservative. We began to make that switch between being more focused on that reoccurring revenue. Yeah, but no, I love that money, which is reinvested and making sure we had the right people, we had the right software, was huge to our scaling our company.

Dana Robinson:
So in the trades, I see it in landscape with the assets we have in the fund. I’ve seen it in h vac, plumbing, electrical. There’s I think maybe some of those early hurdles or speed bumps or thresholds people have a hard time getting past have to do with not charging enough. And that’s easy to say, and I’ve heard it said from stages at trade events. Can you speak to that? That you have to charge more? But how do you charge more? And what is it that keeps the small businesses from charging more? How did you tackle it yourself?

Robert Clinkenbeard:
Yeah, I think early on we were definitely weak with our financials, as you said, I do a lot of coaching now with service companies and a lot of people are weak in the financial part. They don’t necessarily know the cost. So I would say back in 2007, 2006, seven, we did bring in a fractional CFO and he was able to slice and dice through our financials, come up with different type of reporting to figure out where we were, you know, gaining or we were losing money in the business. And he quickly identified with construction. We were losing business. So we started to scale back on bidding that work and moving more into the matrix side. And we knew roughly what the market rates were. We knew exactly what her costs per labor were or overheads, excuse me, our burden.

Robert Clinkenbeard:
So we had pretty good job costing. So we definitely, you know, during that first, this was ten years of business, we had no hesitation about bringing in experts in different fields to help us with identifying exactly what our costs were and what we should be charging our customer. So I think that was really crucial. Sometimes people, I don’t know if it’s just egos or just maybe not wanting to admit that they don’t necessarily know their numbers, prevents people from bringing in people. And I think through COVID and change of business models, I think there just seems to be a lot more of those fractional experts available, which I think is crucial.

Dana Robinson:
Yeah, I think in the businesses, I’ve seen the business owner does not sell to a specific gross margin, so they’re afraid to raise prices. And when you ask them how do they know they’re profitable, they say it all just works out. And some of that becomes very easy. With software, obviously you can have an outsourced CFO who helps you price your products. So, you know, when you install a tree of this size that it includes mulch and labor and all baked in, you’re at a 65% gross margin. Or you can use software that actually lets you kit all that into a price package so that your salespeople don’t sell and lose you money. But putting that into place so that you know that you’re getting the gross margin that you need to in order to run the business, instead of taking that stab in the dark that I feel like most small business owners do.

Robert Clinkenbeard:
Oh, for sure. No, I mean, I think you’re right. The software, once we got on to, we had almost like an early version of Aspire boss LM. And that helped us just get a bit more organized in terms of production rates, finding out what true costs were, how we were able to adjust gross margins depending on the service we provided. So we had different pricing structures for things like matrix, for things like trees, construction enhancements. So we knew very much where we needed to be in these different aspects of our business. But we also kept track of some of our rising labor costs, some of our rising material costs, and we’re able to build in increases and have that tough conversation with the clients rather than people shying away, being worried about losing that contract. We actually went and prepared to those meetings.

Robert Clinkenbeard:
We went in with budgets, we went in with examples of price increases for our labor or materials and did role playing before we met them. So we were able just to tackle some of those objections to a meeting. And that was really, really powerful.

Dana Robinson:
Yeah. Asking for a price increase is a sales job. Right. You really have to get the client on board on the sales issue. I think it’s interesting that a lot of the trades don’t approach their business with a sales process, a sales system, or sort of a sales culture. I think people shy away from it because they think sales are bad or icky, but I don’t know. You mentioned sales as a key piece of getting the growth. Did you buy someone’s sales system and then implement it? What’s a key way for landscape maintenance company to implement sales from the standpoint of getting their enhancement, penetration rate up, or, or just selling more effectively?

Robert Clinkenbeard:
Yeah, great, great question. I feel as though a lot of, especially me, being exposed to landscape companies, they don’t do a good job of selling. And I think that primarily comes around. The owners don’t know how to manage salespeople. They bring it as a salespeople. Maybe they have some experience, and they just pretty much push them out the door and tell them to go sell. We took a totally different approach. You know, we did adopt the Chet Holmes sales machine.

Robert Clinkenbeard:
I don’t, I don’t even know if it exists anymore. But we brought them in as consultants. We brought in our sales pitch or elevator pitch. We had, we did a lot of lunch and learns with our, with our clients, and we had the real well scripted sales presentations. And that was then adopted company wide, even down to sort of lower middle management. And then we brought in a bunch of tools to help that selling in terms of, you know, things like fact sheets. You know, we’d actually provide laptops or tablets with our account manager. So if they were meeting face to face with property managers, they were able to write that proposal right there and then.

Robert Clinkenbeard:
So just that quick turnaround. So, and then things like renderings, just all the added tools to, you know, we were at probably a 20% closure rate before we adopted this, and it took us up to, like a, you know, 60, 70% closure rate, and that helped us tremendously. And our penetration rate was anywhere from 100% to 120% over our base maintenance contracts. So it’s made such a big difference.

Dana Robinson:
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Dana Robinson:
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Dana Robinson:
Yeah, I had a trade show for the trades. Garage door and h vac plumbing and whatnot. I met a young man that owns an electrical contracting business, gave him a little bit of advice from having been exposed to larger businesses at scale. And on one of our calls, he said, hey, you said, I got to have a sales process. I’m almost done writing it. And I went, oh, no, you don’t have to. It’s so easy to just buy a sales process from somebody and implement it. It’s so much better.

Dana Robinson:
It’s already proven. You’re a contractor, you’re an expert in your field. You’re good at that. Productizing became an easy thing for him to figure out how to do and then measuring margin and creating some ascension model. Like, he nailed the product when it came to the sales process, he thought he had to invent it, and it took him months to write a process. And maybe it’s great, maybe he’s accidentally a sales genius, but it’s so easy for any business to say who is doing sales as a program that we can subscribe to, buy, implement, and manage to. And then you’ve got all these tools, KPI’s, to measure ways to incentivize success and reward people for doing what you’re asking them to do. And when you went through that process, did you have resistance? Do you have people that just didn’t want to sell? Felt like it was something that they didn’t like to have to do?

Robert Clinkenbeard:
Very much so. And they didn’t really last very long with us. So, you know, we found people that were willing to adopt the program, and we got some really, you know, it also allowed us to not necessarily rely on people that came with industry experience, we would. We rather would have, especially towards the end of our business, we would rather have people that were just good people persons. So we were able just to go in and talk, to talk to clients or potential clients. So that was definitely a lot more successful. We had so much expertise within our company that we’re able to bring in that, you know, that landscape knowledge. But we just wanted to bring in new, fresh people.

Robert Clinkenbeard:
Once we got sold, once we sold the business, the buyer actually put us through the Sandler sales training system. And again, we were learning new things from that and we adopted it. So I agree 100%. That stick to a proven sales system and then just make sure it’s adopted throughout the company. You’re constantly reinforcing people, bringing in these KPI’s. So I agree 100% with you.

Dana Robinson:
Yeah.

Dana Robinson:
And the reinforcement, I feel like the job then of the leaders becomes kind of serving the Kool aid because resistance takes a long way, a long time to go away. And when I’ve been in operations, I feel like I’m the cult leader. Just telling people, sales is not sales, it’s service. But follow this, because it’s better for the customer. The customer doesn’t want a dead bush. They would like to be sold an enhancement. They want to buy the enhancement. We have to notice those.

Dana Robinson:
We have to turn those over to our account manager. We have to be excited that we, we’ve sold, but it’s not sales for sale’s sake. It’s not some mercenary business. This is the. What we do to service our clients, whether we’re in any of the trades and getting that into our kind of boots on the ground team is. It’s always a challenge. And I feel like it’s almost a daily drip of Kool Aid that they have to keep believing that the customer is better served if we continue to sell 100%.

Robert Clinkenbeard:
Yeah, I actually just got back yesterday from a two day account management training course. Large company out of Raleigh. They had 30 plus account managers, and they hadn’t had training for a while. They’ve acquired several businesses over the last few years, so just the system had slipped. So just to be able to go in and you’re right. Remind people about, it’s all about relationships, it’s all about trust, it’s all about communication. And that was just a constant message coming through the, you know, two days of training and, you know, people just. Just a nice refresher for them.

Robert Clinkenbeard:
Or the new account managers were saying, oh, yeah, I haven’t heard this before. So it was just super cool being able to present that to people.

Dana Robinson:
Yeah.

Robert Clinkenbeard:
Yeah.

Dana Robinson:
And that is. That’s a tool for, you know, kind of important transition to a sales organization. Right. Is that you implement the system. Someone can sell you and then you have to be sure that it’s constantly being, you know, kind of put into the ether of the, of the business or it does. It’s. What’s, what’s the word for? Is it entropy where things just sort of devolve into chaos and you to kind of create gravity constantly around the. The value of that 100%?

Robert Clinkenbeard:
Yeah, I mean, you know, this, you know, it’s, you know, the book James clear, I think, you know, talking about atomic habits and it takes 90 days to. For it to become a habit. And so, yeah, I’m going to continue this training for the next six, nine months. Just again, that constant reinforce them and enforcement and just so that. So they are drinking the Kool Aid. So, yeah, 100% agree.

Dana Robinson:
I love that. So there’s a point in your business where you’re seeing it grow and you’re like, more, more, more. What’s the point at which you say, hey, we have something that’s got some value that someone might pay us a bunch of money for?

Robert Clinkenbeard:
Yeah, I think just, you know, we, you know, we had. We’ve got some valuations done before what didn’t necessarily look great. But then I think, you know, one of our moves, you know, going up to Nevada market was just to expand our footprint a little bit and make us a little bit more attractive. I think we realized we were onto something. We built a great brand. We’d kept things fairly small in terms of just within our state, built up a group band, and we thought, well, if there is a value here and we do want to eventually have an exit, we should start to just expand that footprint. So we did expand up to Vegas. We start to do some.

Robert Clinkenbeard:
Present some awards on a national level. We started to get more involved nationally just to get our name out there. So that definitely helped us out. And then, you know, we did look at, you know, we had some opportunities in Florida to take on some, you know, million dollar hoa projects. So that was something that was really exciting. And I think that at that point, you know, unfortunately, we just start to see some cracks in the partnership between my partner and I. Did we want to expand? Do we want to sit in our comfort zone? So just that started to gnaw weight a little bit, and then eventually that became a pretty big challenge because I was still driven to grow. I was part of the scaling up group.

Robert Clinkenbeard:
I was going to all these different programs through eo. And so I was still pretty hungry to grow, but eventually became, you know, you know, just a real challenge between us. So we started then to think about, well, what’s our next step? Do we sell to each other? Did we look at having an exit? And I think just by chance see an investment broker, you know, called us, you know, maybe on a bad day, and we started to talk to him. And then it just started to evolve. And I think within six weeks of that phone call, you know, we signed over a deal with him, and we, you know, he was putting together a pitch book. I think that was in August of 15. And then by end of the year, we probably had about 1720 companies come and look at us, which was, you know, exciting but pretty challenging because, you know, here we are trying to keep it quiet from all of our employees. So that was pretty challenging.

Robert Clinkenbeard:
We’re meeting them off site. We’re trying to make, you know, trying to gather all the information for people coming in. And I think by the end of January of 16, you know, we had three really. I think we ended up having seven offers, but we narrowed it down to three really good offers and signed that Loi, you know, towards the end, you know, beginning of February of 16. So, yeah, it was a pretty stressful time. Exciting. Didn’t know what quite we were getting into. We wanted to make sure we partnered up with the good partner who was going to take care of our employees.

Robert Clinkenbeard:
That was probably one of the most important things to us. Just give them opportunities to grow. And we thought we chose the right partner. We ended up closing may of 2016. So, yeah, that was pretty exciting. Stressful. There were so many highs and lows during that period.

Dana Robinson:
Yeah. You think this deal is going to go through now or what’s going to happen? Should we, did we pick the right buyer? The due diligence is tedious. A lot of deals fall apart during that process.

Robert Clinkenbeard:
Now, for sure, we were worried about that. We actually, during that due diligence, we lost quite a big contract. So that was pretty stressful to us. And again, just trying to gather all that information without necessarily sharing what we were truly doing, that was pretty challenging. But we got through it. It was obviously nice to get a nice check at the end of that process, and we had a commitment to stay on with the buyer for a few years. Didn’t quite last that long. But, no, I learned a lot from that experience that I think you said mentioned earlier that I’m now able to pass on to people who are thinking about an exit.

Robert Clinkenbeard:
And one of the things I probably wish I’d done a little bit better job is really planned properly for an exit. I just see so many cases these days of people almost being forced or rushed into some type of an exit, and they’re not necessarily capturing the full value of the business.

Dana Robinson:
Yeah.

Dana Robinson:
So what do you think is based on your own experience and now as someone helping with best practices, seeing a lot of other people transacting or trying to transact, what’s the ideal, what are the big pitfalls? And what’s the ideal kind of setup for someone who says, I want to be prepared a year or two years down the road to be sure I don’t make those mistakes and I get the best value I can?

Robert Clinkenbeard:
Yeah, I think that’s a good question. I certainly think, you know, making sure you have the right leadership team in place so that you’re almost at a point where you’re not necessarily involved too much on a day to day basis. You know, having, having some good software and good reporting, you know, making sure that you’re able to see the numbers. And obviously having a good three years worth of high performing business, making sure your profitability is where it should be, you’re showing consistent growth. I think those are probably some of the biggest things. Just making sure things are cleaned up in terms of entities and business structures. I think all those things are super important just to start planning ahead of time rather than rushing last minute.

Dana Robinson:
Yeah. Yeah.

Dana Robinson:
Because your buyer is taking on more risk. If things are a mess and they pay less for that or they hold more money back that maybe you don’t get, or they retrade because they say this is a mess and we, you know, you could wait a year and fix it, or we can pay less because we’re taking some of your mess. And so how far in advance do you think the business like yours needs to be thinking about? How do we put this business together and prep it for a sale?

Robert Clinkenbeard:
You know, I would say two to three years, to be honest. I mean, I think I feel as though at least start having conversations with, you know, finding, for example, investment banker or some type of partner that was going to help you through that exit process. Talking to your CPA, think about, you know, getting reviewed financials, you know, making sure you’re tightening things up in the financial ground. Talking to lawyers, just almost like building your, your seller team in place so that you all know where you’re going. So, you know, that’s probably some great advice that all of them can give you as you’re going through that two to three year process. So, yeah, just building that team, I think, is crucial.

Dana Robinson:
Thanks. That’s good advice. Sage advice. Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t decide to sell until they’ve had a couple of bad years or they have a partnership or a divorce or a death or something that sort of forces the acceleration. Well, as a, in terms, let’s talk about the best practice side. I think that’s a great entrepreneurial journey into the business and back out of the business. And at the end of that, instead of getting back into it, you’re now kind of the godfather of the industry, helping other people level their businesses up.

Robert Clinkenbeard:
Yeah, we definitely, we offer, you know, the different mastermind groups. We offer coaching, consulting. You know, we probably work with up to 100 companies, you know, from a couple million up to 80 plus million. So I think it’s just really nice to be able to go and share my experience and being able to position them so they maximize their value, connect the business. So, yeah, and, you know, we have now twelve people on the team. Three of us have all had exits. So to be able to provide that real experience to those up and coming owners, and a lot of them don’t necessarily have a clue. They’ve heard about it.

Robert Clinkenbeard:
There’s all the excitement about so many companies being involved in buying landscape companies or other service companies, but they’re just trying to figure out, well, should I sell now? Should I just wait and position myself for an exit in 3510 years? So just being able to give them little bits of advice and just making small improvements, I think it gives me a lot of joy being able to do that.

Dana Robinson:
Yeah.

Dana Robinson:
And I think people, I’ve heard entrepreneurs say to me, well, I’m not going to sell, so why do I need to be thinking about private equity or selling? And the reality is, if you run your business like you’re going to sell it to private equity, you’re probably going to be making more money, you’re going to be able to borrow when you need it, you’re going to be able to, you have choices if you run it that way versus the cowboy way, where you just say, I’m never going to sell it, I’m going to run a lifestyle business. Because then you really will take a big discount if you have to go to market or decide you want to change career paths or get out of the business.

Robert Clinkenbeard:
No, agree 100%. The term I use is build it to sell. So if you have a position to sell, then you’re in the driving seat. You’re able to sell under your conditions, or you can just, you, or you could just keep it and enjoy the cash flow, maybe you have somebody else running it. But if you build it to sell and just make sure you’re always just tweaking it and have all your, your KPI’s and your metrics in place, then, then you’re in the driving seat. So I agree with that 100%. That’s something I, a term I use all the time. And yeah, I have jumped back into my own ventures.

Robert Clinkenbeard:
I now have, I think, to the plumbing, electrical companies. So that’s, I still have that operational desire. So that keeps me in the game a little bit. But I really take great pride and joy and to be able to coach other company owners.

Dana Robinson:
So if you dip in your operational expertise into other service businesses, between what you know from your own and the best practice and other businesses you’re involved with, what are some of the key things that you think are the things everybody does wrong or the obstacles everybody faces that they’re probably easy to solve? You see some commonalities across that where it’s like everybody does this thing the wrong way, the same way some of.

Robert Clinkenbeard:
The things we’ve touched on, just no erp type system, no computer system, software system. To be able to effectively manage your business and give them insight into how they’re operating, that’s probably one of the biggest things. Very little sales and marketing, you know, they’re just relying on repeat business or maybe just word of mouth. Whereas if they actually brought some type of a sales process in and maybe bring in some digital marketing, then, you know, could they really scale the company? I think just there’s such a demand these days for, you know, different types of service contractors. They just feel resolved. They don’t necessarily need to do anything extra. So that’s pretty interesting. And I think just a lack of systems and processes.

Robert Clinkenbeard:
You know, we, you know, any company that I get involved in or by, that’s one of the first things I’ll do. I’ll just try and document all the processes so that we can, you know, make it scalable, you know, how do we expand? If somebody new comes into the business, they’re able just to, to look at what we already have in place and maybe even come up with some new ideas. So that’s just things that typically see happen.

Dana Robinson:
Yeah, yeah. Systems and processes is a common theme. You know, Michael E. Gerber wrote about it in the e myth and we all talk about it in every business. That sort of stuck. To what extent do you think we don’t actually, if you solve the thing that you first said, which is you’re not on a unifying ERP, you’re not on a SaaS that you can manage your business on. If you get on a SaaS and you join a best practice group or an industry association that has, for example, preloaded kits for your pricing and buy a sales process and put it in place and you go to an industry leader for your lead gen, to what extent does that solve most of the system and process issue? I think create it. You still need a system in process.

Dana Robinson:
If you’re buying your sales system, you’re buying your marketing system, and you basically have a SaaS, an ERP that you’re driving the business with.

Robert Clinkenbeard:
Yeah, I mean, that’s a huge part of iT. I think the missing piece is the people part. Having the right people, having the right culture have those couple things. The people on the culture part. I mean, that just allows they all use the system properly. They will use the ERP, they’ll use the sales, they’ll use the, the marketing piece. So if you have the right people using it correctly, doing the right thing, then I think that’s the winning formula right there.

Dana Robinson:
Yeah, I agree. That. Fantastic advice for people. Well, Robert, any parting words of wisdom? I mean, you’re the mentor to 100 landscape contractors and probably the mentor to a couple of electrical contractors at this point. For anyone listening, that’s a small business owner in the service space, blue collar businesses, home services, property services. Parting words of wisdom from somebody that’s done it.

Robert Clinkenbeard:
Good question. I would just say remove the ego. There are so many great people out there in the industry that are more than willing to help give you advice and be able to help you tweak a few things. And yeah, probably initially there might be some free advice, but I think if you maybe even look to pay an expert come in, then they usually find that help you get that ROI 510 fold pretty quickly and really help you start having fun again. I come across so many business owners that are just tired, they’re beat up and they’re just needing some type of a reset and feel energized again. And I think they’re just so in the weeds that they just. They don’t even know where to look.

Dana Robinson:
Yeah. Love it. Thank you. Thanks for that. That’s great advice. If people want to connect with you. I know you’re, you’re running Wilson 360, Wilson Dash 365 are you on social or other platforms people can reach you on?

Robert Clinkenbeard:
Robert yeah, probably the main thing is LinkedIn. Just Robert Clinkenbeard on LinkedIn, last name spelled with a c. A lot of people mistake it for a k. But yeah, reach out to me. I’d be happy to connect and jump on a quick call with you if you need any help, but appreciate the opportunity. Dana absolutely.

Dana Robinson:
Thanks for coming on, everybody. Remember, reach out to me hello@danarobinson.com with any questions or anything else that I can do for you. Thank you, Robert, for coming on today.

Robert Clinkenbeard:
Yeah, you’re welcome. Welcome. Thank you.

Dana Robinson:
Thanks for joining me on this episode of the Exit Plan podcast. I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to hit me up with questions or comments by emailing me@helloannonrobinson.com or leave comments and questions by calling 858-252-7785 and leave a message.