The Blog of Keith Kalfas

Creating and growing a business is hard. Really hard. Just when you finally figure out how to get more clients, increase your profits, and actually learn how to run your business, the ugly side of business shows its face. That's right, the taxes and legal side of the business can not be ignored! Even though we badly want to look the other way, the legal side of a business is extremely important, and if you do ignore it, you will pay the price later down the road.

I did the same thing in my business. After years of running it and needing this document or that document for all kinds of circumstances, I thought it would be helpful to gather them all in one place for you guys. There are basic documents every business needs, but as you get more and more legit, you need more and more legal protection which directly correlates to more documents and forms. Exciting stuff I know, but the 16 documents I put together for you guys could save you a lot of money in legal fees. 

When You Are...

This year I am promoting one hell of a deal for all of my followers. I decided to make one mega bundle that I call the Entrepreneur Bundle. This bundle includes all of my courses that thousands of people have used to accelerate their businesses. If you added up the prices of these courses individually, this bundle would cost well over $2,500 but during this holiday season, I am only charging $247 for everything.

The amount of content you will get in this bundle is mind-boggling. There are hundreds of hours of content across all of these courses where I share everything I have learned on my long and hard journey of building a six-figure landscaping business. Plus a lot of this content shows you how to run a small business, which you can take and apply to any industry, not just landscaping.

In this article, I am going to go over everything that is included in this bundle and show you just how much you will benefit from it. I will go through each course and explain the nuances behind...

Whether you are just starting, or have had a lawn care business for a decade, there are things you can do to make more money. If you are just getting started, the most important thing you can do is nail down your craft. You also need to go full force into marketing and customer recruitment. Although you don’t need to keep those same customers or prices forever.

Today I am going to tell you just how you can take a small lawn care business and ramp it up to be a successful and professional business. It takes time, and hard work, but it is very possible. Taking your business from $1,000 a month to $1,000 a day is much easier than going from zero to $1,000 a month. Implement these tips, and with a little dedication, you will be there in no time.

Get Efficient

Alright so to make a lot of money in lawn care, you have to care for a lot of lawns. Plain and simple. You can’t charge a million dollars for one lawn and take forever to do it. Ideally, you should be able to do four...

If you are serious about landscaping, or run your own landscaping business, a quality mower is a must. As a business owner of a successful landscaping business, I have had plenty of mowers over the years. I actually have multiple for my crew to use. So I have gotten exposed to just about every brand out there and tried most of them first hand. The one mower that I have always relied on, was my Exmark.

If you spend more hours on a mower than you do on your couch, then you need to read this article. When I first started out landscaping, getting my mower to run reliably was one of my biggest stressors. If you are in that same boat, or don’t love your current mower, let me show you just how great of a time I have had with my Exmark mowers.

I Have Been Using Them My Whole Life

Like I mentioned before, I have been using Exmark mowers for a very long time. I have spent thousands of hours on an Exmark seat and after all of that I can confidently say they are my mower of choice. Like...

If I had to pick which business decisions have made the largest impact on my small business, Jill’s Office would certainly be in the top three. After you figure out your marketing and grow your business to a point, you are going to get a lot of phone calls from people in your area. So many in fact that it will keep you from actually working.

That is what happened to me, and Jill’s Office was the answer to my problems. For starters, Jill's Office is a receptionist business that can answer phone calls for you, and book clients. Here I am going to go over the whole process I went through and what happened once I finally decided to call Jill’s Office.

I Was Drowning

I am the type that will always work as hard as possible. When a part of my business is lacking,  my first reaction is to work harder. The problem is, I only have so many hours in the day. I was getting so many phone calls that I could not keep up with the actual landscape work. Plus, my phone...

It doesn’t happen very often, but every now and then, I will find something that I really enjoy or benefit from, and I just have to share it with you guys. The Equip Exposition is one of those things. This is the exposition/conference to go to if you are in the landscaping industry. The amount that you can learn at this event is absolutely wild. I have been in the business for a long time and learn something new every time I go.

You may have heard of the Equip Exposition before. It was formally called the GIE Expo. GIE stands for Green Industry Equipment, but the expo has morphed into something more than just a landscaping event. So to properly represent what you are going to see, they renamed it to just Equip Exposition.

You will see plenty of landscaping equipment and classes, but there will be plenty of goodies for other types of outdoor industries as well. If you want a quick overview, check out this video I did at the last one. You will not want to miss all of the awesome...

As a landscaper, pressure washer, or window cleaner, it is easy to get stuck in a “nose to the grindstone” mentality. Don’t get me wrong, you should be working as hard as you can, but every now and then you should take a step back to see if you can do anything in a better way than you are now.

That’s where the Huge Convention comes in. If you can carve out the time to attend this convention, I promise you will learn something new that can improve your business. Plus the cost of the time you lose and the price of your ticket will be quickly outweighed by the new money you are able to make with the knowledge you get from the speakers and vendors at the Huge Convention.

If you want to save $25 on your Huge Conventions ticket, make sure you use my link to buy your ticket!

What Is the Huge Convention?

The Huge Convention is the number one trade show in America for the home services industry. They live up to the name too, this is the largest convention you...

When you are going from job to job, you need to make sure your equipment is secured. It is not too awfully hard to rig up your own racks, and that is just what I did when I started my landscaping business. Those worked just fine until a shovel fell off my truck while I was driving.

Everything turned out to be fine and the shovel did not hit anyone, but it could have. So that woke me up and I realized I needed much better racks on my company trucks and trailers. To get those racks, I went to Equipment Defender. These guys have made a rack for everything and they are awesome.

Since I liked their racks so much, I reached out to Equipment Defender to see what I could do for my followers. I worked out a deal to get you guys 10% off when you use the code “keith10” at checkout. I love these racks, and I am sure you will too. Let’s look at their racks a little closer and see which ones are right for you.

Trimmer Racks

Their trimmer racks do more than what you would...

(Kory & Lindsay Ballard)

When you run your own landscaping business, there are so many things that you need to buy and replace on a seemingly daily basis. There is always something that breaks or runs out and you have to order it or go out and get it. Personally, I prefer to buy a handful of the things I need at a time from Ballard inc. They have so many products for landscapers that it is honestly amazing. I always find exactly what I am looking for, and I can get all of my gear in one place.

So I wanted to take some time to show you a few things from Ballard and show you just what you could get from them. As always, I would never recommend a product or service that I do not 100% stand behind. I have known the owner, Kory Ballard, for a while now and I love the way he does business. Not to mention he sells quality products. I am going to start by looking at some of their mower-related gear, but if you want to go ahead and check it out for yourself, visit Ballard here and save...

(Me & Dan Platta Blue Skies CEO)

I have spent years building up my business, and I have made plenty of mistakes along the way. One of those mistakes was trying to do all of my bookkeeping on my own. I used to spend days trying to record all of my transactions and balance my business expenses, and at the end of all my hard work, it was still a mess.

After trying it myself and giving my statements to my tax accountant, they basically had to scrap it and do it themselves. That cost me hundreds of dollars and wasted a lot of my time, and it was fairly embarrassing. So the next year I got a bookkeeper to do all of that hard work for me, and when I turned it in to my accountant the following year, they were super impressed with the quality of the work, and it helped me out a ton throughout the year.

What a Bookkeeper Can Do for You

If you only have a few things going in and out of your business account, you can probably do your books yourself. Although as your business starts...