How To Quit Your Job And Start A Handyman Business

welcome back handyman and women to the bulletproof handyman business YouTube channel so what I want to do today is take you all back in time a little bit and tell you the story about what led up to and how I managed to quit my job which was a very good job that I was very grateful for but I managed to quit my job and become a full-time handyman and I didn't just become a full-time handyman I don't just go out and fix some stuff for money I've actually built a business around it a business that here in a few months will be three years old and I will have supported my family very very well very comfortably by being a handyman and on this channel we focus on servicing property managers working on their rental houses that's the the depth and the detail of this channel but what you get from this is you get a very nuanced understanding of one of the many ways that you can become a handyman and really make good money and turn it into a career and build it into something that's going to support you and your family full time so we're going to go back and I'll give you a little background I grew up in West Texas in a just a blue-collar family every adult male in my family worked with his hands with his body most of them for themselves most of the time we all helped each other out as a young teenager I was always on the job site usually not getting paid until I was a little bit older learning all of these skills and then I joined the Air Force and the Air Force taught me how to work on planes and unfortunately for most of my life the situation was Plains is where the money was planes were where the health insurance was it was where the good paycheck was the PTO the sick days and it was very comfortable but if you're like me and if you're on this channel if you even clicked on this video there's a very good chance that you're like me in that you need something more that life is short and you need to be doing something that drives you that you're passionate about me personally before I quit my job to become a handyman I was working at Bombardier here in Tucson out at the airport and I was getting paid good money with a very good company Bombardier had me installing communication systems navigation systems all sorts of avionic systems upgrading and installing new and working on business Jets so I've been on business jets for most of the biggest companies and a lot of the biggest celebrities in the United States but you know it was a graveyard shift job it was different shifts that we worked sometimes it was 6 30 P.M to 7 A.M and you just don't get to have a life and even had it been Monday through Friday eight to five I still would have felt like I was missing out on something deeply because I wasn't able to pursue my dreams and my passions because to pay the bills I had to pursue somebody else's dreams somebody else's passions and put money into somebody else's bank account and that just didn't work for me so I've been a handyman a few times in my life on and off between different jobs I went through these phases where I would get sick of these highly technical jobs and I would decide that I want to work with my hands and I would go do that but I would end up needing to work twice as many hours to make the same amount of money and I was still not super I guess taking it seriously I didn't I didn't know enough about the system and typically these times were when I was single when I didn't have much going on in my life and I just kind of put some ads out did some work for some people never took me anywhere but I never tried to make it take me anywhere so we fast forward to the last time I was working for Bombardier I think I was making something like 26 an hour which is definitely not a bad wage for the United States that comes out to close to you know 50 a year so about median income the health insurance they had was absolutely great tons and tons of pto's sick days lots of understanding from the supervisors all the overtime that you ever wanted you know it was not a bad job but I need it out and I thought about the handyman thing but I knew that the handyman thing didn't pay well or at least that's what I thought because that had been my previous experience so I had a friend her name was Donna very close friend of mine and she wanted a new kitchen and she kept coming to me asking me about putting in a new kitchen for her but at the time because I was working for somebody else the situation I was in was I needed to put in about 20 hours of overtime every week at a job that I couldn't stand you know I mean the job was a good job in terms of pay and benefits and whatnot but I don't like planes I don't have any affinity for planes I have no passion for planes I don't find them interesting they were just a means to a paycheck and she kept asking me for this kitchen and I had to work all this overtime and I just have to had to keep telling her like Donna I just don't have the time I can't do it on evenings and weekends because I don't have evenings and weekends I barely see my family and finally one day she was asking again and I just kind of stopped and I was like Donna do you have the money for this in the bank like do you actually are are you truly seriously do you have the money and you're ready to pull the trigger and you really do want me to build this kitchen such that if I turned in my two week notice after my last day of work I can show up at your house and start tearing out your old kitchen and putting in a new kitchen and the money's there to pay me and she said yeah so I talked it over with my wife I thought about it real long and hard because leaving a secure job that you have to have to go and jump into an industry that's not exactly famous for paying well in order to do that that's a very big risk so I talked it over I thought it through and finally I said okay Donna if you've got the money and you're ready I'm gonna turn in my two week notice and I'm gonna have about two weeks to work on your house and once that's done I'm a handyman so I'll have two weeks was the plan I'd have two weeks to drum up more work to get me continued going after I finished her kitchen and I did I worked on her kitchen while I was working on her kitchen I put out a bunch of ads you know just Craigslist and Facebook and whatnot I tried to get my name out there I had some phone calls in between working on her kitchen I went and looked at some jobs I submitted some estimates and things were going relatively well one thing I did have going on though that was negative which is one of the things that led to me running my business the way I run it today which I'll tell you about shortly was I was my mindset was that I wanted to be a badass handyman I wanted to be the kind of handyman that the rich people up in the Foothills were hiring making 800 to a thousand a day doing Special nuanced complex projects the types of projects that you take before and after pictures of and put them in a portfolio to show your other high-end clients and what I found happening quite frequently was very rich people were contacting me and I was giving them estimates in fact I was given them really great estimates I was going to hardwood suppliers and looking at like zebra wood from Africa to build their uh you know their mud room bench out of I was really jumping through hoops trying to show them that that they're going to get a top quality product from me and my prices were very high I was trying to pull 800 to a thousand a day so I was given my estimates based on how much labor I thought I would have to put in and then figuring up 800 to a thousand dollars a day for that and they didn't blink at it you know they were used to those numbers they pay people that kind of money but they kept coming back to me and wanting me to drop the price a little bit because they always had some other guy that gave them an estimate that was like half my estimate and I knew just because of my background and my experience anybody giving them an estimate that was half of mine most likely didn't have the experience to actually carry through on that project and give them the quality they were looking for so I would not drop my price and I would lose that client and then inevitably of course later on they always come back and say hey that guy messed things up he didn't do a good job can I get you to come back and do the rest of the work and fix his work for the price that you originally quoted but unfortunately when they came back I was already doing too well in another sector of the handyman industry which is again where this is leading to so in this time this interim after those two weeks and for say a month after that so when I'm between two weeks in and a month in um I'm going around I'm doing a lot of work you know and I'm getting homeowners that I don't like like somebody would call me and say hey I need an outlet looked at it's not working and I tell them you know yeah I can come over there uh 50 minimum you know maybe more than 50 but I'll show up for the 50 and if it's a quick fix we'll just go with 50 bucks because I didn't know what I was doing and I didn't know what I should be charging because I wasn't I was experienced with the work but I wasn't experienced with the industry and even the fifty dollars they would complain about because I would figure the outlet out in about five minutes and get a wire hooked back up and then want my fifty dollars and then they would want to either pay me less because I wasn't there long or they would want me to do extra work for that fifty dollars so in this interim time when all these homeowners are annoying me and I'm driving all over town trying to drum up work and it was exciting I wasn't unhappy but during that interim time I had a property manager call me and she didn't identify herself as a property manager right away she just said hey I've got this house that has a door and the door hinge an interior door one of the screws just keeps spinning and spinning or actually one of the hinges all three screws on this one hinge just keep spinning you can't tighten them down because they just spin inside the hole well I knew what kind of job that was I knew that all I was going to be doing was just putting you can use a piece of a paint stir stick you can use a golf tee you can use a wooden bamboo skewer you can use a lot of things but essentially you take the screws out you stick a piece of wood in that hole and then you put the screw back into that new piece of wood and it expands the wood out and holds everything firm but at the time that she called I was actually doing fairly well in terms of I had a lot of leads I had a lot of people that wanted to hire me although I did have to always bargain on the prices because everybody wanted a cheap handyman so I told her because I was doing okay and I didn't really need the job I said hey I can do that um I've got a 80 minimum though so it's it's gonna cost at least eighty dollars and I knew this was a five minute job but I didn't need the job and I really expected her to say No in fact I was kind of hoping for her to say no because I was pretty busy so I said yeah I got a 80 minimum but I can do that if you want and she said oh okay great that sounds great and my brain just sort of fried because I just told somebody that this very easy five minute job was gonna cost them eighty dollars and they didn't blink and they didn't complain in fact they sounded excited she sounded excited that I was gonna do a five minute job for eighty dollars and then she said well is it okay that I'm a property manager and I was like I don't really care who you are I mean as long as I get paid to do the work you know I don't really care that you're a property manager why would I care and she said well the thing with property management is you have to buy the materials yourself and then you don't get paid for two to three maybe even four weeks so you have to purchase those materials and you have to wait for a while to get paid and I only thought about it for maybe two seconds and I was just like this is eighty dollars you know and it's five minutes of my time it's twice what I could make doing this for most homeowners so uh I'm gonna say yes you know and I went by and I did the job and it just worked out so nice and I thought dude this is great so you know I called her and let her know the job was done and said hey by the way you know I don't have a lot of money to put into materials but to the extent that I do if you have any other work you'd like me to do you know I can do some more work for you with that eighty dollar minimum and she seemed to like that idea so she sent me a couple more jobs and I did them and then I was out of money because I put my money into the materials for those jobs but she got me paid quickly she called the head office in Phoenix and they got my money deposited relatively quickly so I had the money I had made more money doing that than on other jobs so the money that came in for that time was more and I took that more and I said give me some more work and I took that more money and rolled it back into more materials for more jobs and she got me paid quickly again because she needed a good handyman and I was a good handyman and before I knew it I was like I enjoy property management and I started thinking more and more and I'm just going my goodness if I can charge twice as much to work for a property manager and I have to wait a while for the money the downside is waiting a while for the money because if I have to wait two or three weeks if I did this full time I would need two or three weeks worth of materials money to invest into these jobs and I don't have that but I thought well if I do as much as I can for her and leave just enough in the bank to cover my bills and whatever else I need then once that money comes through I now have more money than I would have had doing the same work for lower paying clients and when that money comes in I'll roll that I'll double it up and I'll double that up and I'll double that up and I sat my wife down and said hey okay so here's the deal um I think this is the way to go I think that even though we're going to be broke for a while while I continue recycling this money back into materials over and over the end result should be that I can make twice the money doing this than I can make with regular homeowners because one of the other things I've noticed too is you need less time per job because the the property manager doesn't want to talk to you very much because she just wants to give you a job so you can do it and she has other things she needs to do and for the tenants at these rental houses it's not their house and because it's not their house they're not emotionally invested into picking out the faucet for the kitchen they just want a faucet that works the owner of the house most of the time lives in another state in fact that's why their houses are getting rented most of these homeowners are not investors they're not people who are looking for five investment properties to get rich many of them are but quite a large chunk of them are just regular Joes like you and me who owned a house and then needed to move to another state and decided instead of selling the house let's turn the house over to a property management company rent it out and the rent that comes in will cover the mortgage and in 20 or 30 years this house will be paid off and we won't have paid the mortgage and we'll build value in our lives so the homeowners they're also not emotionally invested in picking out the faucet that you put in your in their house they just want you to get a good faucet and install it correctly and have it not leak so that they can continue renting to the tenants so I explained all this to my wife and she trusts me quite a bit my wife is a really she's an amazing wife she she allows me to take the lead in terms of financially supporting and protecting the family and she takes the lead in terms of keeping the household together and keeping our diet good and clean and just all of the the Myriad things that a good housewife does and so she trusted me I said okay you know we're gonna go through a big bottleneck because what's going to happen is every penny we have to go into materials it means we can't spend any money I'm going to be paying the mortgage late we're going to take every penny we can afford because the sooner I get that money in the sooner I double it when it comes out and the sooner I get that back in the sooner I double it and there's sort of a level that we're trying to get to that once we get to that level then we can start drawing from that money for ourselves again so I told her there was going to be a bottleneck and I'll tell you what there was absolutely a bottleneck there was a big one but so I worked for this property manager for a little while and as I'm working for this property manager I think man you know she didn't have a problem with the 80 trip fee she literally didn't even blink she was excited to have it I wonder if I could get a hundred dollar trip fee so what I did was I got on Google and I just Googled property management companies in Tucson Arizona it came up with a list I don't know how many long I know I made a spreadsheet and put 67 of them in there and the spreadsheet was designed so that as I contacted these people I could check off you know did I text them did I email them I could put the contact name and number so I could remember who it was what date it was if they replied I could check a box to say they replied that way I wasn't calling the same places over and over again and that way I didn't miss any places so what I did was I emailed 10 property management companies here in Tucson with like an introduction letter said hey my name is Ray Duke I'm a handyman here's the services I offer I'm looking forward to working with you if you could utilize my services and out of those 10 emails I sent out by the way the email said my trip fee is a hundred dollars so I got two replies one of those replies was she was excited and she said yeah yeah we could use a handyman you know let me get let me email you some information here later on today and you can fill out a vendor packet and the other one called me and she wanted to give me work right away and she did so they didn't blink that hundred dollar trip fee they were aware that my minimum was a hundred dollars even if it was a five minute job and they did not care so the one that wanted to send me work the same day very quickly very quickly became my biggest client and I'm talking about two months later if they were 90 of my work I was getting up every single day getting in my truck and heading out into town and fixing usually three to four jobs per day like three to four small jobs if they were small sometimes there was bigger punch lists and then eventually they started sending me move outs which are even bigger jobs but suffice to say I was making great money it was starting to turn over properly the way I wanted it to turn over I always had money for materials I always had work and things were just going absolutely swimmingly so that's how I got into this property management side of the business the benefits were number one the tenants aren't emotionally invested so they're not watching you they're not bothering you they're not wanting to go to Home Depot with you they do their thing you do your thing and I'm not so much a people person anyways and the homeowners are not emotionally invested as long as you're doing a good job on their house they don't want to waste your time and the property managers don't want to waste your time so now not only am I charging more money than I would typically be able to charge your average income homeowner and I'm not having to deal with the rich clients which yes sometimes end up paying very well and I do believe if you if you want to go that route if you can put the years in to slowly develop a very loyal clientele I think you can make it very well there also but I enjoy this property management side because nobody wanted to waste any of my time only thing people wanted to do these property managers all they wanted to do was send me work and then receive an invoice so I got very efficient and I got into this very nice habit of every day I was receiving say two to five jobs probably average three a day new jobs some of them being big multi-day jobs and some of them being smaller jobs but I was receiving these jobs every single day and every day when I got home I was invoicing three or four jobs and then I was importing three or four new jobs into my software I was calling tenants I was scheduling my calendar went from a few days worth of work to where the new jobs I received I was getting booked three weeks out because I would have two and a half weeks already filled up and I would have to be getting close to three weeks out that I'm actually booking my services with people so I always had work and it just was rolling along and rolling along it was absolutely amazing and the reason I'm making this video is because what I decided to do at some point finally after I got into this and there are all kinds of stories I could tell you about this big property management company but we'll leave that for the the proper episode to discuss different types of companies different types of relationships you have with them how to talk to them etc etc but the short of the short version of the story is I found a very thin little niche you know and there are a million of these niches but I found mine and I figured out how to make it pay me very well I'm currently right now any any given month if you extrapolate any month out over a year multiply it by 12. where I'm at is I'm I'm always invoicing for my labor something far above 100 000 a year I am six figures now out of that you're paying for your business insurance you're paying for your car insurance you're paying for gasoline to drive your vehicle all over town there are overhead expenses that of course do have to come out of that the very software that I use to run this company I have to pay for and that comes out of that but I guess what I'm trying to get to you is is this is a real career this is a real business this is not putting ads on Facebook and Craigslist and running all over town kind of begging for work and bargaining your prices the position I'm in now is the property managers that I do have as they send me work I import the work I put it into my software I contact the tenants and I get them scheduled I show up on time like a professional clean and I do my job and I try to do three to five of these a day or if their move outs those might be whole day or even more than one day but every day I have work every day I go out and I do work and I'm charging somewhere in the vicinity of let's say a hundred dollars an hour sometimes more if it's electrical and plumbing and more complex jobs that I know are being sent to me because they don't have anybody else that they can afford to do it and many of them are just very very easy jobs like just fixing a leaky sink but this is now a business and what this channel is for the purpose of this channel the reason that I started this Channel and the reason that I made my very first video which is kind of similar to this one where I just tell the story of how I got started the reason I made this channel is because once I figured this out I looked back at my history of having been a handyman many times and I never knew that this whole business to business Property Management world for handymen existed I had never heard of it nobody had ever mentioned it to me I just thought handymen were handyman I probably if you would have asked me how does a property manager get a handyman I would have said I don't know they probably you know if they don't have one that works for them full time as an employee I would have guessed that they go on Facebook and Craigslist and look for a handyman and ask him to do a particular job and that's not how it is it's an industry you become a vendor you're no longer a handyman you're now a vendor they have cleaning vendors they have Landscaping vendors they have handyman vendors they have Roofing vendors they have vendors for HVAC they have vendors for everything and if you wish you can watch this channel look at my system and again I want to be very clear I don't believe that my system is the only system my system is one of many little niches of different types of handyman you can be commercial you can be residential you can work for homeowners you can work for real estate agents you can work for house flippers you can work for property managers you can do commercial work there's so many different types of work you can go on websites and apps and just get work from them and that work could be any any number of different types of work so there are many ways to be a handyman but I've put together a system that for me I call bulletproof and that's the whole point of this channel when I say bulletproof here's what I mean by that I was talking to you about taking that money that that was the more money than what you could charge a typical median income homeowner and rolling that money back into more materials so that I could do more jobs and get paid and when that money comes in I roll that back into more materials and you keep this going and slowly the pot gets bigger the number of jobs get bigger you find more property managers and you grow and as this ball gets bigger as you keep rolling everything into this ball it's like rolling a snowball down a hill that gains in size and what makes you bulletproof is let's take for example one that applies to this business very specifically is let's say you lose a property manager now this could be because somebody cheaper than you comes along and they just want to save some money so they're using the cheaper guy in that scenario they always come back but what do you do for those three months while that property manager is gone well one answer is your ball is so big and you have more than one property manager and you've built up your account such that when a chunk of this ball breaks off it still keeps rolling that bullet did not manage to destroy that ball so it was able to absorb that loss and keep rolling and maybe it's a little smaller but you go grab another property manager and stick them into that hole where that void now is and the ball can get bigger again and it can keep rolling and then let's say the economy tanks now if you're working for property managers you're somewhat bulletproof against that in fact I'm going to tell you right now during covid all of the handymen were doing great because people were home there were stimulus checks going out but people were home more and because that's where they spent more time they wanted that place to be a little bit more functional so we all did well let's also take let's say a housing crash let's say the prices of all the homes just plummet when the housing market moves homes get bought and sold there are some people in this industry the property management management industry there are investors who win the prices of house crash that's when they start buying houses to turn into rental homes so the housing market tanks the economy tanks and if you're working for homeowners if everybody's not stuck at home with covid you may very well may see a dramatic reduction in work now it depends on your clients if your clients are just regular people who need their toilet fixed you may not see a reduction because those regular people who don't know how to do that work they still need a handyman but let's say your clients are making on average median household income husband and wife together let's say they're making 200 a year if they're making 200 a year and a lot of their money is tied up in Investments and maybe a lot of their income is tied up into things like commissions and bonuses because they work for large companies who are now suffering their stocks go down a little bit the company they work for stock goes down a little bit maybe their commissions their sales go down there's a lot of uncertainty so if you have a lot of money and you're used to hiring handyman for a thousand dollars a day and the economy starts tanking you might tighten your belt a little bit and say you know I'd like to remodel that third bathroom but the truth is it's in perfectly good condition let's wait and see what happens with the economy let's make sure we're good to go so if that's what you're doing is selling bathroom remodels to rich people you may find the work go away or you may not but I can tell you that in the rental industry working for property managers all of these properties must be rented if they're not being rented that property manager isn't going to get to manage that property the home owner will find somebody who will get that property rented so they must be rented which means they must be maintained in a rentable condition and they don't care what the economy is doing when a tenant has a leaky sink The Leaky sink has to be fixed and your property manager they need somebody reliable who's going to take care of that so that's the business I got into now let's take you a little further into the story if you care to hear more about how this business has grown over time and the direction I've taken it in because we are in a very good place right now my wife and I are are in a comfortable place where things are rolling well and we are most certainly not rich but what I can tell you if you care to listen to the story some more is we are definitely in a position where am emergencies are no longer emergencies like Financial emergencies Financial emergencies I now call challenges rather than emergencies and I'm going to give you an example I had to have my dog's leg amputated just about a month ago maybe a little more than a month ago and I had to have her leg amputated so it cost me almost 800 from a vet just to be told that the leg needs to be amputated just to be told that nothing more not for any treatment just for some painkillers and the knowledge that I now need to go find a surgeon to amputate my dog's leg and that needed to be done quickly because she was in pain even the painkillers the way her leg was broke was not going to be solved by just some painkillers so I then had to get her leg amputated that was twelve hundred dollars now right before that in fact right after that I had to buy a new washing machine because my washing machine went out that was another five or six hundred dollars it was like 550 or something and before that I had to buy a new dishwasher because my dishwasher went out and right around the same time we had ordered some turkeys funny enough at the end of last year that we're going to show up this spring while the turkeys showed up and I had promised to my wife this particular big beautiful wall with a walk through storm door to get into this new chicken coop so that because what we had before was a little squat one that you had to crouch down in and I was able to do that all of these Financial what otherwise would have been Financial emergencies oh and by the way I had to replace the radiator on her car and I had to replace the water pump I mean things just keep happening and I'm in a position because of the way that I run this handyman business I'm now in a position where when these things pop up do they hurt yes but that's the point of bulletproof if you're wearing a bulletproof vest it's not that you're indestructible if a tank fires around into your chest you're dead of course if somebody shoots you with a 50 cal and your standard bulletproof vest you're dead however all of these little things that come and knock you and hit you and try to push you to the side and try to push you down and try to trip you up in life just simply life happening when you're in this industry and you're treating it like a professional business if you're running it the way that I'm running it you find yourself in a position where even though all of those things hurt even though they are injuries and they do harm you you can absorb them and you can keep rolling and as you keep rolling after you absorb them you can take the necessary steps to put everything back together and get that ball rolling really nice again and it provides your your family which your family deserves a level of security that is your job ninety percent of this channel more than 90 percent actually are male between the ages of 25 well between the ages of let's say 20 and 55 but almost everyone on this channel is a a man who is of working age that typically means you're also of a marriage and family raising and children having age whether you have a family now or whether you have them later you do need to be able to protect them and provide for them and support them so with that being in my opinion my job in this world I'm doing what I need to do to make sure my family is taken care of so I'm going to tell you a little more of the story now and you can hear more about how this process went in a few of the lessons I learned so this one company that was very big that I said became 90 of my work they were extremely happy with me and there came a day I mean I was I was kicking ass they had not had a handyman knocking out the work at the rate I was knocking out the work and during this time my prices were getting higher and higher I did eventually send out 10 more emails to 10 more property management companies with a 125 dollar trip fee and I ended up getting on with one of them even though they were small and they didn't have as much work I found that you could get away with 125 dollar trip fee so one day I get an email and they are interested in they wanted to take my LLC and bring it in under their umbrella LLC and they wanted me to be the exclusive provider of all of the maintenance for all of their rentals well number one I understood how much work that was going to be that was going to consume my entire life I knew how big they were and I was by no means doing all of the work yet at this point so they wanted me to run that program and I understood that meant nights and weekends and weekdays and Men kitten called at two o'clock in the morning and having no choice but to be the one to respond it meant a lot of things it also meant less time with my family less time for me and on top of that I knew that an equivalent amount of work and effort if I were putting that into my handyman business on a daily basis I'd be making over 200 a year for what it would have taken to do that job so I emailed them back and I told them hey we can talk but I do want you to know that I know where I'm taking my business and I know financially where I'm going to get to in about a year or so and if you want me to do this I'm semi-interested and we can talk but I'm going to have to be getting paid before we start wasting a bunch of time trying to work out details I'm gonna need to be getting paid what I would otherwise be making if I succeed at what I'm doing right now and I did not hear back from them on that email about a week later they were purchasing another smaller property management company and they needed a particular job a move out to close before that sale could complete so they told the owner of that other company that they were purchasing to call me to get that move out done because if anything went wrong because I'm their handyman already they knew that on a personal level they could count on me to still close out the job with the the estimate being honored and everything so that guy called me I gave him an estimate and the owner of that other company called me and he was experienced as a contractor as a laborer a Tradesman so he understood what I was doing and he called me and he said hey I just want to go over this estimate you sent me here and he starts going over the estimate line by line telling me how much time he thinks each particular line item should take and what the material should cost and then he came up with a number at the end that said something to the effect of about six hours and X number of dollars worth materials and I said yeah that sounds about right and he said well it sounds to me like you're trying to make about a hundred dollars an hour and I said yeah yeah it's about right I'm trying to make about a hundred dollars an hour I I typically don't leave the house unless it's to make about a hundred dollars an hour for at least four to six hours and he didn't like that he said well you know I've got guys that do move outs for me that charge like eighty dollars and then 35 to 45 an hour and I said well I mean I'm not going to be offended if you want to use them I'm not sure why they sent you to me in the first place but but these are my rates and I'm not going to be able to lower them for you because I have other work that already pays my rates lined up and ready to go so I wouldn't forego that high paying work to do lower paying work for you well I assume he must have called the bigger company that I was working for and told them about it because from that moment forward I never heard from that company again never heard from well I Shouldn't Say Never the story does continue where one day I do hear from them again but they ghosted me that day and they were 90 of my business so I figured out very quickly holy I need new property managers and I need them now so I luckily did what I had done before and I sent out those emails to a bunch of property management companies and luckily the my favorite client of today they're not my biggest client I have one client that technically sends me more work that I make more money from because it's more work but my absolute favorite client the client that if I can someday because of this YouTube channel if I'm able to someday I would absolutely love to get rid of all my other property managers and focus only on this one this man sends me every job he has he does know of one or two skills that I'm going to just tell him to send to somebody else so he may not always send those but he'll even try to send to those most of the time and then he just relies on me to take care of things and to let him know if he needs to send one or two particular jobs to some other vendor I love them to death but the mistake I made and this goes towards how you run this business generally speaking is you need to be a business if you're a person who's working for one particular company and all of your work comes from them now you're not a business now you're tied to them you're almost like a subsidiary of them so I found these new managers you know and my prices continue to go up and I've been feeling this industry out now for almost three years I've experimented with my pricing I've experimented with my vocabulary with how much I do or don't communicate to what depth and extent I do inspections on houses that have already been inspected to find more jobs I've narrowed down the tools that you need I have a very complete list and a very complete understanding of typically every single job that you'll ever receive from a property manager on a rental property and I have just narrowed down and niched in to this little place that I'm at and I've made this channel here for you guys so that I can share this with you because had I known a decade ago had I known that this world had existed I would have jumped into this 10 years sooner and who knows where I'd be today maybe I wouldn't be because today I'm in a position where I'm starting to get some time with my family thank God but I'm still in a position where I don't get enough time with my family and we definitely can't plan trips out of town and vacations and things like that because I'm still building this business to a level that I needed to reach before I'll be able not to step away completely by any means but even just to get it to a point where I could step away for four days where I could fly my wife to Las Vegas so that we can go see some Cirque delay shows or something like that Cirque du Soleil shows or to take her to Costa Rica which there was a time in my life I got to go to Costa Rica many many times like very often I'm not there yet and I want to be there again but I'm getting there and the reason I'm getting there is because I have paid very close attention to how this little segment of this industry works so what I want to encourage you guys to do is if you are in a position like I was where you hate your job you're not fulfilled and I think there's just people with different brains there are many people who love the security and the comfort of just having a full-time job that pays them well that treats them well that is an amazing thing to have and that's something to be grateful for but there are people like me who who just die inside when we're not pursuing whatever it is that our passions and our goals and our interests are in some of us just need Pursuit we need challenges we need success we even need failure so if you're in that position what I'm going to encourage you to do is not to go turn in your two-week notice tomorrow but I would like you to go to this Channel and go back and just start watching these videos listen to what it is that I do listen to how it is that I do it and listen to the lessons that I've learned and either consider building a business the way that I've built this one because this is a model that can be duplicated I have dozens of men now who are letting me know all the time that they've taken the steps that I took that I told them to take they've taken those steps and they are succeeding and they're not at this exponential you know we're not here trying to be millionaires and we're not here trying to be Hustlers they have built a stable business to support their family so I want to encourage you to just check this out and maybe along the way you start thinking of other ideas and you've got your own passions and your own niches that you think you might be able to get into that are different from mine and that's great but I just want you to know that this is how I did it and this is what I've learned along the way and I do believe that you as a young man can do exactly what I can do or as an older man I have some of the people that have taken these leaps with me while watching my channel they're 55 to 60 years old some of them are already retired and they just want to continue to stay busy or they want to supplement their income but suffice to say there are dozens of people who have done this and succeeded at this by watching my channel and taking a lot of my advice as well as other YouTubers advices from other channels but I just want you guys to know that if you're a grown man you can do this you can do the research you can take the steps there's always just a Next Step so start at the first step and just figure out what you need to do and don't pull the trigger until you're confident on pulling the trigger but this is something you can do this is something I've done and I hope you do enjoy this channel if you choose to watch all the way through I hope you enjoy this channel I hope you gain a lot of insights from it and I hope that you can find a way to provide your family with what you feel they deserve just like I've been able to do with mine so as always I love you guys I hope you're out there killing it um and I will see you again very soon

Channel: The Bulletproof Handyman Business

Views: 18,442

Keywords: Handyman Business, Quit, My Journey, Handyman, Construction Business, Contractor, Contractors License, Handyman License, Electrical License, Electrical, Plumbing License, Plumbing, Construction, Property Management, Property Manager, Home Repair, Repair, DIY, Jobber, Estimates, Writing Estimates, Quotes, Estimating, Subcontracting, Subcontractor, Home Improvement, Handyman Tools, Rental, Rental Maintenance, Handyman Insurance, Home Maintenance, Maintenance, Renovation, Trades, Handymen

Id: 8BNYaVk8Alo

Length: 43min 25sec (2605 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 23 2023