How I Started And Grew My Successful Handyman Business

all right well i'm sitting here waiting on primer to drive and i thought it'd be a good time to just kind of tell the story about how i got into this business where it's been where it's at where it's going because i've labeled the channel bulletproof handyman business and there's a lot of things that i think make it bulletproof and anti-fragile so most of my life i've worked on planes avionics installing communication systems upgrading navigation systems just troubleshooting and fixing running wires and i hate it the air force had me do it when i was 18 and joined it's a skill i learned it's a good paycheck anywhere in the country but i just hate working for other people i can't stand it so i had this friend who needed a new kitchen and she asked me to do her kitchen and i was already working like 20 hours a week of overtime on top of my regular shift and i told her i didn't have time i didn't have time she kept asking and finally i just thought well what would it take how much money would i actually make how long would it keep me employed because i wanted to become a full-time handyman and it seemed like maybe this is a good step into that world so i ran the numbers and i went to her and i said okay it's gonna be about ten thousand dollars and she said that sounds pretty good and i was like okay well i need to know before i quit my job because i don't have time to do this while working 20 hours a week over time so i need to know before i quit my job are you serious do you have the money in the bank right now and you're ready to go so that when i quit my job i show up at your house the next day and i put a kitchen in and she said yeah so this is just kind of the way i've always done life i just took the leap just took it turned in my two week notice i figured well i've got two weeks before i start that kitchen and then it's gonna take me maybe two weeks and by the end of that two weeks i better have some more work so i did and back then i was literally 25 an hour because i was stupid and because it was a friend but the way i looked at it was well i'm making 25 an hour now at this job roughly so if i do this kitchen for 25 an hour i'm employed for two weeks at the same rate of course i didn't take into account the insurance and all of that but my wife got all those benefits at her job and i just did it and while i was there i started sending out a lot of feelers and what ended up happening was this one girl called me i had a craigslist ad and this girl calls me and she's like hey i've got a it's a bedroom door and one of the hinges is off the tenant said that when they put the screw in the screw just spins and spins and spins and i've seen this before because i've been doing this kind of work my whole life both on the side and professionally whenever i'm not doing planes so um you know i said yeah that sounds like something i can do i said but you have to know i have a 80 trip fee now i really didn't the truth was i just had enough work lined up that i didn't need more work so it was kind of my way of being like well it's a win-win either i don't have to do this job or if i do this job i'm getting paid 80 for a job that i know is going to take me five minutes and i thought that was a lot so she was just immediately was like yeah that sounds good and i was like wow and then she said do you mind that we're a property management company like is that okay with you and i had no clue about the property management world but i was like why would i care for your property management like i don't care who you are as long as i do the job and i get paid she said well most handymen hate property management companies because you have to pay for the materials yourself and then invoice us and then we don't pay you for a couple weeks and i thought about it and i was like oh it's not gonna take hardly any money and materials it's not gonna take five minutes if i have to wait two weeks for the 80 bucks then so be it so i took the job just went out the very next day it was five minutes in and out just plugged the hole with a little stick and then put the screw back in expanded the stick out you know everything sealed up just fine but then i started thinking and i was like man if she had more of these especially if they don't take a lot of materials i can charge way more for a property management company than what i charge my normal clients and if i can charge more then i make more and if i make more then i can use that more to put into materials so that i can do more jobs that i'm charging more money for and i figured eventually if i cycle that up far enough i should reach a point where i've i've just always got invoices out that are always rolling in but where i'm charging way more and i was just like okay well let's give this a shot so i told her send me more work if she wanted she did i didn't have a lot of money i couldn't take every job because i didn't have that kind of money to put in the materials because i mean just one job might be like a kitchen faucet takes less than an hour to do but it's a hundred dollars in materials so eight hours a day if you did eight kitchen faucets a day you need eight hundred dollars worth of materials a day and then you do that for two weeks five days a week so now you got ten days that's eight thousand dollars that you don't have that's just an example but the point being i took on a few jobs um things were going well but it wasn't a whole lot of work and it did reach a point where i needed more work and i thought i wonder what the ceiling is for trip fees so you know i told her that i had a minimum eighty dollars that that was my trip fee um and what i did was i got online i found 10 more property management companies and just basically emailed ten companies introduced myself said hey my name is ray i do this for a living i provide these services uh my minimum trip fee is a hundred dollars and i figured you know if 10 of them say no well i can go back down to 80 and i can send that to 10 more i think there was 60 or 80 of them listed on google so out of the 10 emails i sent back i got two responses both of them were excited both of them were like that sounds great we can't wait we need another handyman really bad our last handyman just fell out of touch and by the way that seems to be how i get on with new property management companies is they have a handyman and he's a good handyman they like him they send him all the work he's making money they're getting houses taken care of and then one day he just falls off the map like maybe he got a stimulus payment and he just didn't need to work for a month because i got a big ol stimulus payment so he just falls off the map or maybe he went to jail maybe he's on a bender maybe he divorced his wife i don't know but handymen tend to not be reliable so these two companies started sending me some work and i was now at a hundred dollar trip fee and i was like well that's pretty nice let's see what happens at 125 and i picked 10 more companies sent out 10 more emails this time i got one reply for the 125 and they weren't excited about the 125 they kind of asked some questions about what i would charge for different jobs but i stuck to my guns and i just answered them real directly like no emotion involved and then you know they said well what about if it was just this kind of job i said well that'd be 125 that's my trip fee even if it only takes five minutes that just is my trip fee and i understand if you feel like that's too much please feel free to send those tiny jobs to other people and to only send me the ones that you feel are worth 125 an hour and that's what we did but here's the thing and this is the secret about property management companies these are all investment properties they're not paying you to fix a leaky kitchen sink drain they're not paying you to make a hinge on a door work again the reason that they're giving you their money is because there's a homeowner and that's an investment property and that homeowner if he wants to make money on that investment property he needs it to always be rented he needs the tenants in there and it's way better for him if the tenants stay because when you do a move out you end up painting cleaning carpets you hire me to do a thousand dollars worth of some other work and you spend all this money and maybe it doesn't get rented for a month or two so now you've lost a month or two of rent you've also spent a couple thousand dollars and your property manager themselves they're getting a cut of that and they want that property rented and they want happy tenants because when they have tenants calling them non-stop complaining about issues that haven't been fixed that takes time out of their day and these guys their goal they want to have as many properties as they can possibly handle having while getting their percentage cut from every single property so their goal is they want a guy like me where a tenant calls them and says hey my toilet won't stop running here's what's best for them they sit down and they type or they send a text to me and the text has the address it has the tenant's name and the tenant's contact info and a very brief description of what's wrong now they send that to me they don't even hear back from me i don't text back and say okay i got it i'm gonna get this fixed on wednesday they send me the text and then three days later a week later if it's busy time of year maybe three weeks later they just receive an invoice and if it's not an invoice that a homeowner is going to be super pissed about they don't really care i mean yeah if they have ten handymen and two of them are insanely expensive and two of them are really cheap but also drunks they're gonna go with someone in the middle but the bottom line is the service you're providing is that you are allowing them to simply shoot off one text or one email and then suddenly get an invoice back and they you don't need to call them they don't want you to show up at the job and say hey i noticed that the sink is stainless steel and the faucet is stainless steel but i was looking at home depot and they didn't have a stainless steel one that looks just like this but they do have a brushed nickel they don't care okay these are rental properties um most of them are not super nice ones i work for a couple companies that have a lot of super nice ones but i find that those tenants are so much pickier and they want to get involved in stuff and what your goal is to get in and get out your goal is to show up with proper tools proper parts get the job done and get to the next job because you're charging a trip fees you're not charging by the hour so the faster you get this job done the better and they don't want you to call them so don't call them unless you really need to get in there pretend like this is your investment property and your goal is just simply that sink needs to stop leaking or that toilet needs to stop running or that stain on the ceiling needs some paint on it and you just get it done and you move on to your next job and the secret with this is now i personally right now am at 125 trip fee it seems to work for me it's it's the level where going above that i tend to meet a little bit of resistance but here's the other thing is i've been doing this long enough for the companies i've done it for it's not as if every job is 125 sometimes they're 165 sometimes they're 350 sometimes they're 999. i do stay under the thousand dollar mark because here in arizona for some reason they do stings to look for handymen who are doing jobs over a thousand dollars i've literally received text messages that i'm pretty sure were part of a sting it's just you talk to enough homeowners who want you to do work there's a certain way a homeowner approaches a handyman to do work there's certain questions they ask there's certain tones they take and you can tell when they're different you can tell when it's a guy whose job is to pretend to be a homeowner so i keep them all under a thousand bucks i just won't do it if it's over a thousand it's not worth my time and i make more money if i do six small jobs at 125 dollars each then if i do one medium sized job for 999 so that's where i'm at these days and the trick to the whole thing is to understand that you're not a handyman exactly the the product you're selling is not the fixing of an item there's the homeowner themselves can fix a leaky toilet they can get on youtube and figure it out and the property management could probably pay them 50 bucks to do it but what they need is to not have to sit on the phone to sit on the computer to answer a bunch of text messages to hold your hand and walk you through it they need a guy who they can go to a move out and the tenants just left and they walk in there and they have a notepad or they've got their phone open and they're typing stuff in and they're walking around they're going smoke detectors beeping this outlet covers cracked the kitchen sink is dripping they'll send you a nice long punch list and they want to just make that list send it to you and then get an invoice that's that's the service you're providing is you're saving them time and you're keeping these properties rentable so that's where i'm at now um right now i tend to do if i had to say there was an average i would say i average four to five jobs a day that doesn't mean every day is four to five jobs today is two jobs one of which is an all-day job and the other one is a five-minute job in the unit right next door so you know today's gonna be a 625 day as far as my labor and yeah you need to deduct gas and other stuff from that but when you just separate materials from labor 625 for labor i i frequently do seven or eight hundred dollar days like maybe every third or fourth day is a seven or eight hundred dollar day and i have horrible days where just tenants cancel on me or i didn't schedule things properly just stuff gets messed up i've had i had a day last week there was a 125 day i just found myself in a position where it wasn't feasible for me to go do any of the jobs that would have normally been feasible on that day i can't even remember what the details were but i was pissed because 125 is a joke you know that's i made that this morning in the first 20 minutes after i arrived here so your goal your goal is to be the guy who can do everything now my next goal right now there was a time when 600 days were like my dream where i was looking at what i was doing i was going man i'm making three or four hundred a day and that's great but you know i just had twins i have identical twin boys they're eight months old today and i'm driving around town you know when they were a month or two old just going man i'm doing three or four hundred a day but it's just not enough i need to do better so i got better i got better at my scheduling i tried to start scheduling blocks of town where i have three jobs right here and then one job that's 20 minutes away and one job five minutes away from that and then shoot home and i've gotten to the point now where i don't have a real inventory you know i have a lot of leftover parts and stuff that i use frequently but i've gotten to the point where between what i have in the truck and what i know most of these jobs are gonna take i can stop at home depot one time in the morning pick up a bunch of stuff for the day head out on the town and i'm pulling the six to 700 today put it this way it's a bad day if i don't reach 600 i go home kind of disappointed i'm like man i should have been able to do 600 and i didn't do 600 today and that kind of sucks so the next step for me however is uh an inventory because although i do often stop at home depot one time there are days i swear to god that i go to home depot six times and every time i go to home depot or ace hardware it's it's minimum a 10 minute drive 10 minutes in the store and a 10 minute drive back or it's 15 minute drive 15 minute drive back and i'm in there for 30 minutes trying to get paint matched or trying to get blinds cut and there's never anybody to cut any blinds so what i really have to do is i need a real inventory in fact i'm in the truck right now i don't need an inventory in this truck i have a van coming from mississippi that my father acquired for me and he's bringing it when he can it's a big one ton chevy express the cargo is 12 feet long five feet wide things like five and a half feet tall which is about as tall as me so what i'll be able to do and i'm gonna need to probably take out some kind of loan either that or just kind of buy two of everything every job i do and slowly build it up but the idea is if i have everything that i could possibly need to cover let's say ninety percent of my jobs you know because i do the same thing over and over i go through one or two garbage disposals a week i go through one or two kitchen faucets a week i go through two or three bathroom faucets a week all the plumbing underneath them is basically the same the sets of supply lines and quarter turn valves are the same a lot of stuff is just the same it's over and over maybe there's eight varieties of one particular thing but i can buy two each of those eight things so buy 16 things put them in a drawer but now every time i do this job like say a shower cartridge you know a shower your tub spout is just kind of dripping all day and it's because the cartridge is bad i can just go buy let's say there's i'm gonna say there's probably about eight of those maybe 10 or 12 that are the most common they cost anywhere from 20 to 50 bucks each but if i can just get one of each then when i show up at that job when i have a leaky bathtub i'm not going to show up with the full intent of walking in taking everything apart shutting off the water pulling out the cartridge figuring out which one it is taking it to home depot comparing it to all the ones on the shelf buying the one that i need coming back to the house putting it in turning the water back on and testing it out that takes an hour that's that's a little bit of time to take the damn thing off and then it's a whole lot of time to go find the one i need and a whole lot of time to come back and then a little bit of time to put it back on so i could turn what normally is an hour maybe hour and a half job i can turn that every single time well strike that ninety percent of the time with the exceptions of when i find the really old or really weird ones that didn't get made for very long that are discontinued other than that ninety percent of the time that will now be a 30 minute job instead of an hour job so if i can do that with say three jobs a day that gives me an extra hour and a half in the day well if i'm knocking these jobs out and 30 minutes to an hour that gets me an extra job a day and the better my inventory is the faster i am so all these little one-off you know changing the kitchen sink out if i have to cut the faucet off because everything is rusted on if i have to cut that faucet off worst case scenario that's a 40 minute job if i don't have to cut it off in fact if i can reach up under there and i can start loosening things up with my fingers or maybe just real quick with a pair of pliers and it's not disgusting that's a 15 minute job and if i already have the faucet in the truck and i don't have to go to home depot if i have the customer especially i'll have the tenants send me pictures of whatever it is that i'm going to be working on most of the time with the type of inventory that i want all these jobs are going to be 30 40 minute jobs and then you've got if i schedule them correctly where there's 10 or 15 minutes of driving between jobs you're looking at for sure less than an hour per job and these these days right now that are six or seven hundred dollar days where i am going back and forth to home depot and ace hardware they're quickly going to start turning into you know 800 days day after day where i'm disappointed if i didn't hit eight hundred dollars and i honestly see no reason why i can't hit a thousand because there's another thing let's say uh here's one i just did actually like two days ago porch light wasn't working tenon reports they've already changed the bulb now first of all don't ever listen to your tenants um i don't know why but they're just not good at giving you the information that you need so i showed up first thing i did was i assumed that the tenant probably didn't change the bulbs so the first thing i did was i took the bulb out and i have my meter with me at all times i have a backpack loaded up with all the most common tools that i just keep on me so i showed up put the meter on it took the bulb out put the meter in there 240 volts you don't do 240 volts to to any household light bulb ever so right away i know that we've got wiring wrong so took the two little screws out took the porch light off went back there the wiring's just it's a disgusting mess but suffice to say there are three wires coming out of the house there's a red a black and a white and two of those wires are hooked up to my light fixture and i know because i measured 240 that the two wires hooked up to my light fixture are two opposite phase legs of 120 and i know that that third wire has got to be the right wire so i just disconnected one put it on flipped the switch real quick the light didn't come on turned it back off took off the one i put it on and put it on the other one flip the switch real quick light came on boom 120 volts lights on close it back up all in all it was less than 15 minutes maybe as few as 10 but here's the thing when you have to hire an electrician like a certified electrician to go out and work on a rental house or a certified plumber almost all of those guys talking about every one of them that i've ever heard of they have a 200 minimum trip fee and that comes just simply because they have this certification they're certified and that's all people care about and they'll pay that 200 bucks so here's what i do now my trip fees 125. 125 is if i swap out a faucet or fix a leaky p trap you know something simple maybe hang a ceiling fan you know i'll do that for 125. but if i'm going to troubleshoot your electrical system i'm not going to charge 200 because i don't carry a certification with me but i'm going to charge 165. so now we've got 15 minutes for 165 dollars so as you can see the more jobs i get that are legit plumbing or legit electrical things that require some troubleshooting some sort of specialty tools or just more knowledge than your typical like drunk with a truck and some tools that's just going to show up and try to make some money for the weekend you can charge more for those and eventually you start getting to the point where you start figuring out like okay you know if i change a smoke detector like one smoke detector let's say i don't change it i just put a nine volt battery in it i mean that's it's five minutes uh and i'm gonna be nice to the companies that give me a lot of work and for that five minutes i'm gonna charge them 100 instead of 125. i just gave them a discount but i still made a hundred dollars in five minutes plus drive time which if i scheduled correctly wasn't more than ten minutes drive time so long story short where this business is gonna get to and this is my way of bulletproof where this business is going to get to is i'm going to have this van it's going to have every tool i could possibly need for 90 of my jobs not 100 because then you'd need way more than just a van but 90 of my jobs i will have the tools and the inventory necessary on a daily basis enough of them that i won't run out even if i have repetitive jobs you know i'll have 30 smoke detectors back there so even if i had five houses with six smoke detectors each never gonna run out no matter what this should easily get to a thousand dollars but the reason it's bulletproof is because i'm doing property management and with property management the thing is is like i said when you become that guy that they can rely on when they think to themselves uh i really need this done and i really need this done right and i need it done soon i know if i send it to ray ray has never just dropped the ball worst case scenario reyes called me and said hey i'm really booked out and this is a lower priority type of job it's not something that's leaking it's not an electrical issue this one's gonna have to wait for like three weeks that's the worst case scenario they will send you those jobs and let's say there's a recession in fact covid was a great example with kovid all of a sudden people were allowed to stop paying rent right uh that's really bad if you've got a homeowner who's renting a property and he's not getting rent it's kind of hard for him to pay you but if you're a property management company there are just certain lines that don't get crossed if your toilet doesn't work it has to get fixed the money will come from somewhere most of these owners have some sort of small account a lot of these companies also have their own account and they'll get the money back from the owner later but with property management that's your investment you have to keep it rentable if you don't keep it rentable it won't be rented and then you don't have any money and you've still got a mortgage and property insurance and all that that you've got to pay so my work doesn't slow down just because people stop paying rent or just because homeowners stop having money another thing is i'm not doing any big fancy jobs you know when i started this i really had this idea i was going to do custom kitchens i was going to do custom like workout stations with special alloy metals cemented into the backyard for people's pull-up bars i was just gonna do all this custom you know i put in bids for some really wealthy people in the nice part of town where it was essentially i was gonna make a thousand dollars a day and they were happy with that and i did some of those small projects but the thing is is these people that have money they have money because the economy is doing a certain way or because their business is doing a certain way but that money is not permanent and you never know what's gonna happen but here's the thing with these rental houses yeah maybe i'm just replacing the fill valve on a toilet i do five of those a week and yeah that's boring it's not fancy it's nothing to brag about cleaning out p-traps under sinks and stuff that's stinky man i go home stinking there's nothing fancy about what i do you don't get to brag to people about the actual work that i do but here's what i want to brag about is when i get this business to a point where i personally can pay myself 150 a year maybe eventually 200 a year where i have other people that i contract some of my work out too just good reliable people like just a doorknob guy just a toilet guy just to this guy just to that guy and i can send them the work order and say hey man you want to replace toilet fill valves i know that's a thing you know how to do they're all the same i'll pay you eighty dollars to do that in fact you don't have to do what i do with the property management companies i will pay you eighty dollars and i will pay for the materials the same day and when you send me a picture that the job's completed and me or my secretary or whomever gets word from the homeowner that the job is in fact completed the toilet works i'll sell you the money right now or whatever program you want to use whatever quick money transfer we'll get you your 80 right now so you don't have to spend any your own money and you get paid the same day maybe you just got like a college kid who just wants some extra beer money every now and then that's fine here's 80 bucks for doing that but then i'm gonna invoice 125 bucks and when you deduct the time that i have to pay the secretary or whatever admin person for maybe some different insurances that i need to take on board i'm still out doing what i'm doing where i can charge 150 to 200 000 a year labor depending on how many days of work days a week i work plus i can start building up this network of other people so i'm not going to brag about changing a toilet fill valve there's nothing fancy about it but i am going to brag someday about how i started with nothing with just this crappy this is not crappy i love this truck this is 72 chevy c20 so it's the three quarter ton got the full eight foot bed everywhere i go people compliment it i love this truck but it's not what i should be working out of but i've literally started with just pickup truck and i've got busted up plastic bins in the back and one of them has a bunch of plumbing junk in it one of them has a bunch of electrical junk in it but i'm pulling 600 a day with this busted up old truck and a bunch of plastic bins and someday this is going to be a business that i'm gonna pass down to my sons and or daughter if i have any daughters in the future which i hope i do but anyways so that's where we're at that's where we're going this is bulletproof because oh yeah one more thing um covid right there came a time when they were finally allowed to start kicking people out of their properties six or eight months went by where people didn't have to pay rent and they couldn't get evicted well the bill finally came due and people could get evicted and i'm not happy about anyone getting evicted but here's an upside to what i do is even when people are getting evicted not only is that not less work that's more work because now somebody has moved out and i now have to go in and fix all the things that were broken so that they can rent it out to new people so it just it doesn't matter what the economy does it doesn't matter if you have lockdowns for covid it really doesn't matter as long as people are renting houses those houses need to be fixed to remain rentable and guys like me need to fix it and if you can be the guy that they can just send the text message or send the email to some of them have other software systems and you just you just assign it to ray and then boom a week later there's the invoice the job is done nobody ever complains nobody ever has to go back behind me and fix my work you're now bulletproof you're now i have more work than i can ever do it rolls in daily every day i get three four five new jobs and every day i finish three or four or five jobs and it just keeps building up and then i have some bigger ones like i'm on today where just the one job is a full day and it builds out and when they see me getting where i'm three weeks out when i start calling saying hey just so you know keep sending me all the work you want just know i'm booked about three weeks out so none of these people unless it's an emergency are going to get taken care of soon and they'll slow it down a little and they'll speed it up when you start knocking them out quickly again but you always always always will have the work and it isn't fancy work it's nothing to show off but if you're like me and you've got a wife and three kids two of which are eight month old you know newborn identical twins and we want to have more and i want to provide i want my house to be a nice house i want to upgrade it i want to improve it i want us to have reliable cars i want my wife to feel secure i want to take my kids to washington dc i want them to stand in front of like a big old t-rex skeleton and just be in awe and dream about their future i want to provide for my family the way that most people can't or most people don't because they're just in the system they're you know i thought 25 an hour was great when i worked at bombardier i was doing avionics system on business jets for 25 an hour and man i was proud i'm like dude i'm making 25 an hour but i eventually figured out i can do way more and my family deserves way more and your family deserves way more so there's other ways to be a handyman and good luck to you if you're going to do some of the other ways there's nothing wrong with them you can do commercial you can do residential you can work directly for homeowners you can work for property management companies you can only work for the rich you could be a guy who goes around town knocking on doors and you could probably make a lot of money just knocking on every single door with tools ready in a backpack and just fix their leak real quick for 40 bucks with no overhead there's a lot you could do but what i'm doing is what i think is bulletproof it's what i know i can grow it's what i know the business will always be here for and it's what i know is going to take care of my family until the day i die or retire and hopefully some of them take it over so if you have any questions comments let me know i'm excited about what i do i'm excited about helping other people and giving them the information i tell people all the time if you want to do what i do just let me know i'll tell you how to get your business license what tools you need i'll give you the rundown i'll even set you up with the companies that i'm doing work for and say hey here's a new handyman you can use i'm not going to vouch for you but i'll give them your info and i'll say shoots and this guy three or four jobs you know see what happens because you never know and maybe you can do what i do at the same amount of money or maybe more money or maybe a little less you make what you want but that's what i do so let me know what questions you have give me comments tell me what you do i'm excited to start this channel because i'm growing right now and i'm gonna get to look back on this channel and watch myself as i grow and y'all are gonna get to watch me grow you're probably gonna get to watch me make mistakes you're probably going to get to watch me try to take a new path and then quickly figure out that's the wrong path but that's the point just get up and do something don't sit around don't be satisfied which is good enough is enough because it's not your family deserves better and hopefully you get there hopefully i get there we'll see

Channel: The Bulletproof Handyman Business

Views: 45,198

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Id: hIrT-RfqSLU

Length: 36min 47sec (2207 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 20 2022