His Handyman Business Makes $1,000+/Day (Find Out How)

do you want to start your own handyman business and scale it past 250 000 a year well caleb ingram from north seattle handyman achieved this mark by only investing five thousand dollars into the business today we're talking the man behind the famous north seattle handyman who manages to rake up to 25 000 a month with only one full-time employee caleb's also leveraged online marketing to serve more than a hundred customers a year and is now on track to hit his mid six figure a year mark if you start a handyman business right now you will immediately get phone calls to systemize systemize systemize i'm a believer in spending money to make money they're paying for themselves because if your employees aren't actually making you money then there's no point in having them i have all of my cordless tools throughout here i have all my screws and all that stuff today he'll share with you guys how you too can start a handyman business how he kept his risks small in the beginning the one thing that made his business successful and the mistakes he made along the way put the word north seattle and handyman in their review and that helps with the google algorithm they told me that i had to charge more and i listened to them one of your first purchases should be one of these being able to accurately quote based off of emails and pictures let's dive deeper into the details of the insurance setup i found that i made more money doing the small work the only way for me to make more money at this point is to hire people all right you guys let's go talk to caleb but before we do that take a second like this video subscribe to our channel we greatly appreciate that and let's dive into the interview i think he's right here working away hello caleb hey i'm paul good to meet you nice to meet you i'm caleb awesome let's do it [Music] all right caleb tell us when and why you started the handyman business and what were the goals for your company well i started about four years ago and i originally was just trying to get into the remodel business but once i started doing the handyman work i realized i made more money doing handyman work than i ever would make doing a remodel interesting okay and that's what was the reason for you to just dive in completely uh the reason was because my family was growing and i was working for a corporation and they gave me an opportunity to jump ship which i took and just went running you know that time came the time came and i was ready for it you know i was about 35 years old and i was mature enough and ready to try to start my own thing caleb tell us about the average monthly revenue that you are currently having and uh tell us about a the best month you had and then how did you find a bad month sure so when it was just me uh a great month would be around 25 000 that's cost good cost of goods uh sold included so there is some uh material in that but with two people i would say a great month would be about forty thousand dollars does that fluctuate absolutely seasonality cyclical it does a little bit um the summer is definitely the hotter month uh i would say that in the summer i probably average closer to 40 and then the winners probably closer to 30 or so but it all depends on on what you can offer and the weather does affect it to some extent but not not in any way that impacts my life you know that's good what's your best month that you've ever had uh best month i ever had um was 50 grand 50 grand nice and how do you define a bad month like is that break even do you even have that i've never broken even i i would say the worst month i had i grossed thousand dollars yeah okay show us inside your van kind of like your setup and maybe any special unique supplies absolutely so i have over here i have all of my cordless tools throughout here sometimes it's more organized than this sometimes it's less it just depends on the job okay i have paint over here all my solvents and stuff like that caulks and nails up here i have all my screws and all that stuff and then one of the nice parts about having a big ass van is you can fit a 12-foot ladder in it better inside and outside what's the what's the pro on that well uh if i put the ladder on here i wouldn't be able to go through a drive-through coffee spot so okay so you've got to get coffee when you're going to the job site i wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy for me in a in a van like this having small compact tools is a lot better than having something big because you're going to be moving it in and out of your van every day so i'm looking for things that are small and compact and i'm going to spend my money on something more expensive if it has a smaller compact thing so i have a couple fancy tools my chop saw is a festival and i have a bunch of festool um rail sauce and stuff like that which is probably the top end of the tools i typically buy expensive tools because i think that they work better and i i'm a believer in in spending money to make money [Music] what about your overhead on a monthly basis where are you at what does it cost to run it sure when i break it down for you no problem uh when i first started uh you know i probably had about 3 500 in expenses okay um you know and i was making when i first started between 15 and 20 000 gross per month so it wasn't too terribly bad as i'm starting to grow uh you know you have to take on payroll and l i and there's some expenses there but ultimately they're paying for themselves because if your employees aren't actually making you money then there's no point in having them so um i would say uh you know per employee you're going to you know like in the seattle area you know you're going to probably pay around 6 000 a month in wages and then um you also have to pay l i and insurance for them but like i said if if you're if they're not making you money then you're not doing it right besides labor what's the next most expensive monthly expense insurance you know van insurance contractors insurance to your bond and all that stuff i typically just try to pay it all up front the first month um so it's kind of a big ticket item because i don't like paying every day everyday bills gotcha okay you guys we just launched the podcast and i just want to let you know that in the podcast we dive into more details with people like caleb successful business owners so do check it out upflip.com forward slash podcast i have a job i got to do tomorrow you might have to pack up some tools no yeah let's let's keep talking about uh asking your questions let's talk about like the skills that you need to get involved this in this industry right so for somebody who lacks the experience but wants to get involved in this industry what can you tell us on that well i think that as far as the skills of uh skilled labor goes if you're going to do something like hang a tv you don't need that much time to do it but if you're going to do you know a wide variety of things and it takes about 15 years to have that experience so it's really about how you can um market your skills okay and so define your skills can you hang tvs and and install faucets if yes there's people who will pay you money to do that or if you're a car a lifelong carpenter there's people who pay you to do that too so just over time i guess i mean yeah what i struggled the most with in the beginning was business systems i didn't know how to start a business i didn't know how to invoice and know how to do any of those things okay so that's what i've been working mostly on is is uh trying to incorporate business systems and we've made quite a bit of progress doing that so far okay guys later in the video caleb will share with you exactly what systems he uses that optimizes his business for best performance so keep watching wouldn't it be great if you can set up your business in less than 10 minutes imagine getting the ball rolling right away without long waits and complicated procedures well today better legal is the sponsor for this video and they are hands down the best way for you to set up your business most affordable quick and easy period their prices are transparent the fee is affordable they offer you guys extra help with your business journey and they give you access to an interactive portal that will help you manage things down the road so take a second right now check the link below and get the help you need right away [Music] is it a good time to get into this business being a handyman why or why not i would say it's probably the best time because at least in the seattle area in a lot of other areas people make 200 000 a year and don't own a screwdriver so they'll pay pretty well to have somebody that's professional and thoughtful and wants to solve their problems so i charge a hundred dollars an hour um and sometimes they make a hundred dollars an hour for for building ikea furniture sometimes i make 100 an hour for doing plumbing but sometimes i make 100 an hour for installing light bulbs you know like it just depends so like i think it's a great time and the only the hardest part in my opinion is figuring out the business side of handyman businesses because anybody that wants to start a handmade business already knows how to do the skills probably what they need to do is figure out how to run the business what resources helped you in the first two years of your business and where small business owners watching this can go to to find help and and do a better job in operating and running their business sure online tutorials are great but i found having a business coach was really helpful you do have to spend some money on them but they'll help you make the decisions that you're going to avoid making you know there's a lot of things where you're just going to want to hesitate on and the business coach will help you to be a little bit more aggressive the coach i used was rebecca ellison she was terrific she helped me systemize all my systems she helped me figure out how to build a website she helped me in all sorts of things give us an example of how exactly your coach helped you make the right decisions sure so the very first part was when i was trying to figure out how to choose a name for my company i was going to do something like caleb ingram handyman services or something like that and she coached me into saying no you want to um target your area so part of the reason my name is north seattle handyman is because a i want to do work in north seattle and b if someone is looking for a handyman in the north sale area they're going to type in north seattle handyman into google and that actually helped me become the number one handyman on google and then the other thing that uh she helped me out quite a bit with was was was finding my top my target market so in order to do that um we tailored my website to speak to those people we're speaking to people that have a lot of money but don't own a screwdriver right so she helped me tailor my my website to um attract those people very well so business consultants coaches are worth every penny the right one i believe so let's talk about your website is it important to have a website for a handyman and you know i would say it's what has made the difference in my business is having some place where people can go and see me virtually increases my customer base about a thousand fold because if i'm just working off of word of mouth then i haven't even put a drop in the bucket of the people who can see me so some of the things that we use are our branding right inside of the van well done we use our website and the final part is just trying to do a good job for your customers if you can't do that if you can't do a good job for your customers and and communicate with them then they're not going to come back in general what's your recommendation to other handyman watching you right now in terms of websites uh i would say a square squarespace website has been one of the best parts my business we've focused really hard on it and right now i come up first when you go handyman google wow that has driven a lot of people our way with a website if you get a marketing funnel in there then you will have your pick of the litter and you will be able to say no to jobs that don't make any money if you're just doing word of mouth then you're going to constantly feel like you're up against a a monetary wall you know and and having a website really helps alleviate that pressure [Music] how much money are you spending on an average month for marketing and let's talk specifically like what are you doing absolutely keywords so we we do a lot of things where we try to stay relevant on google and then i think yelp is a great website for handyman services in particular we hear that a lot um i have a relationship with yelp and then i can kind of turn on my marketing as it comes so if i'm three months out and i don't want to be like if i'm a handyman i want to be six months out no one's gonna hire me for six months from now um so i can kind of turn that on and off in general if i want to turn it on it's about 600 a month but i will get about five times what i get right now and right now i get about five inquiries a day any tips and tricks when it comes to yelp and google to get the best roi yeah so one of the things that we do is we ask our customers to put the word north seattle and handyman in their review and that helps with the google algorithms interesting okay how did you is that again from your coach or how did that a lot of that come so i've also hired um marketing director um uh part time right now but hopefully full time in the next six months um and that's a strategy we came up with how do you set up an effective marketing funnel for a new handyman business first one would be name i my name is north seattle handyman because i work in the north seal area next one would be target market so i want to target the people that i want to do work for the next one will be having a good professional website we use squarespace it has been awesome and then the last one is having a customer management system and that has helped us incredibly awesome tell us about how many customers on an average week you service and what's the average invoice yeah absolutely so i service between three and five customers and on some weeks it'll be between five and seven my average uh invoice is anywhere between five hundred and fifteen hundred dollars um so i make about eight hundred dollars a day by myself and then as i include other people i can make you know i think the best day i've had was a 3 000 a day or something like that okay are you on a per hour basis or how do you i offer them both it kind of depends on what somebody asks but if i'm going to bid something i'm 10 i'm going to sort of bid on the worst case because but i try to offer i try to be flexible enough or if and i try to explain that to a customer say i'm happy to give you a bit but if you can trust me and we can do hourly i think you'll probably end up paying less so i try to give them options but it's up to them right that's fair [Music] tell me more about the build out of this van and the importance of doing it so when i first bought the van i bought it for about 28 grand but it was just a husk there was nothing in it except for obviously the driver's side all this stuff brand new i bought it with about 35 000 miles on it um but once i bought that i had to invest into some shelving and the shelving cost me about six thousand dollars and it was a big ticket item but it has made my life so much easier the two things i'm six foot four having a having a van that i can stand in is amazing for me um and then the other thing is being able to be organized in a van like this makes a world of difference so um we i invested in this uh padded flooring i invested in all these uh around the front here i have a bunch of different kits that i can pull out for different jobs so if i have like a bunch of hollow wall anchors or if i have a bunch of plumbing parts so i can just pull them all out and and pick through them i probably use something different in this van every single day so i have a lot of tools but i use a lot of tools [Music] your initial investment how much was it and how did you allocate the money to get going initial investment was five thousand dollars or so um you know a lot of that was just in buying computer and office supplies okay and then it was getting a bond and a license from there i had a couple of friends who needed some work done and my sister helped me start a website and within three weeks i had people calling me to to do work so nice okay caleb tell us about the equipment that you would expect to use do you need anything specialized or can you just do your job with basic stuff from home depot when you first start out you can absolutely do something with a pickup truck and a set of tools as you grow i've always tried to reinvest into my business from the beginning no matter how much money i made i try to put more money into the business than i took out so the biggest piece of equipment i ever bought was my van and that has paid for itself 10 times over the rest of it are drills and saws and all the stuff that you would you know use built and stuff so and now most people that are interested in handyman business i would assume have some tools yeah nothing that's out of this world as far as tools you've got to go out of some specialized place that'll make it eventually i think it's a great idea to buy a sweet ass van okay yeah so that's that's the best tool let's talk about and understand what kind of supplies you use as a handyman any advice on finding the right suppliers that will give you the best value what can you say on that so from a handyman perspective most of the work that i do i just go straight from the person's house to a supplier so i use home depot and lowe's a lot and then locally we have the done lumber here if you have a good lumber yard that has a lot of things they're invaluable but the most important thing for me is that they're spread out across the city because i'm spread out across the city i'm not working in a little you know in a in a neighborhood i'm working in a city so if there's a lumber yard but they only have one location it makes it a little bit more difficult to have a relationship with them because i might be in south seattle one day and then i might be in north sally the next day and i don't want to drive an hour and a half to to go get something i need something that's the proximity is key for me okay [Music] talk us through the process of scheduling a new customer and how far in advance are you booking out so we have an online portal that the customer our customers put as much information as possible that we ask them and we make it require that they put this information in they give us a bunch of pictures and i get that all in an email format right up front so that i don't have to waste a ton of time um going to uh to people's houses if i'm doing a two-hour job and it takes me an hour to get there and back to bid a job then it's a waste of my time so our our systems have been very sort of motivated towards um being able to accurately quote based off of emails and pictures to answer your other question we're we tend to be about six weeks out we have two people right now but i could increase my my uh my marketing revenue a little bit and we would easily be able to um have enough work for four or five or six people [Music] how many employees do you currently have and what it what do they do and what's their average pay what are you paying them uh so for a handyman tech i pay between 30 and 35 dollars an hour and then right now i've cycled through them uh hiring is pretty competitive in the seattle area right now so trying to find the right people just trying to get them to come to you is is a challenge uh um and then for uh like office staff um you know i pay between 20 and 25 an hour um for um admin one of the biggest challenges in scaling is scaling yourself from one to three or four but once those three or four people are in place they can be generating revenue while you peel off and try to work on your um all of your other systems your hiring systems and all that stuff and and we are sort of in the um middle stages of that right now we're creating um you know like we're gonna mark we're gonna create a market to um handyman so we wanna figure out how do we sell ourselves to um our potential employees [Music] is there certain tools that you use more than others can you describe that uh sure um so i typically have bags where i'll keep subsets of tools in and then i'll always have all of my um my my battery powder power tools i have probably 13 or 14 different drills and grinders and all that stuff and then in here i like to keep this is actually a great tool it's called an oscillating tool it's one of the swiss army knifes of tools one of your first purchases should be one of these okay um outside of that you always have to have your cordless drills your tape measures and then your your flat bars and hammers and all that stuff you could do a lot with just this bag just this bag okay just this bag you could install tvs you could do plumbing work you could install light fixtures you could um you could do any number of things let's talk about your 100 hourly rate because you mentioned it a few times in the video how did you come to that is that average for handymen in this area and in general sure when i first started i was gonna charge 60 or 70 an hour but i had a couple friends that had done service businesses and they they told me that i had to charge more and i listened to them so i started and people just started taking me up on it i've always tried to offer value for that so if i get to somebody's house i'm not on my phone i'm not doing anything else i'm serving that customer and i'm working really hard to make sure that i'm using their time well so to those who are watching now who are charging 50 to 60 bucks what would you tell them i mean it sounds like you could charge more but i would say that you're you're always going to be up against the financial wall 100 an hour is perfect for uh middle to upper middle class if you charge 40 to 60 an hour your clientele is actually going to be probably more detail-oriented than a hundred dollars an hour person right like they're going to be trying to get more more out of you at 40 to 60 than somebody that start you're charging 100 an hour so at least that's what i've found okay one of the pros and cons of running this business out of your home have you considered getting a dedicated space somewhere else we will probably get a dedicated space in uh somewhere between one and three years depending on our growth but right now with one van i mean my van is my office pretty much i work out of the van i have a small office in my house and i can get a 20 tax rate off by having something in my house so it doesn't make any sense for me like i ran the numbers and it didn't make any sense so um i just stay at home until it actually until it makes like financial sense and you have enough people that it and enough vans that you have to have the place to park them all what's the point what about insurance do you need any specialized insurances what happens when you're on the job and you damage something or your employee gets hurt let's dive deeper into the details of the insurance setup so in washington state you can be licensed as either a handyman or a general contractor i am licensed as a general contractor um i do have to pay more in insurance for that the handyman distinction would be less but you're allowed to do less things and that insurance covers like i said the damage something that's right if you break something you damage something you do anything you have a choice to make you can either pay it out of pocket or you can involve the insurance companies um i if i damage something small i pay it out of pocket it's the cost of doing business but if i if i were to have a large-scale problem then my insurance would pay for it i'm gonna i'm gonna challenge your your memory here do you do you know what the cost for insurance is like oh yeah sure because yes i think i have a bond for ten thousand dollars and i think i pay two hundred dollars a year for it two and a half it's not too bad and then my uh my insurance um i think it's around four grand or so for the the year okay and what are the coverages though dude for a million dollars i'm it million dollars a million bucks all right you guys it's blitz time with caleb let's dive into it first first question what's your favorite business book be traction by gina wigman okay uh what's the weirdest thing that you have seen in somebody's house i've seen a lot of porno mags uh that that answer i think that answered okay what was the final thing that pushed you to start working on this business starting my family and needing to support them what's the biggest misconception people have about your position your role might well obviously the biggest misconception about handyman in general are that they are is this sort of craigslist handyman kind of thing okay so like you can make handyman be whatever you want it to be i made it into a professional service or you could make it into someone that makes 15 bucks an hour it's up to you a question from ahad thank you for submitting your question what are your plans for the next five to 10 years we're going to try to grow the business and scale up so our plans are to be at a million dollars within a year and a half and in 10 years we want to be a 10 million dollar company awesome this is from adrian walker uh best part of being a business owner uh freedom so you do well not having a boss now your customers are your boss to some extent but um but you get to choose them this is from aria a how did the pandemic affect your business the pandemic grew my business believe it or not um i have probably grown 15 since the pandemic began people want to do not always work on their houses you know they have extra money and they want to do it in their house awesome [Music] how do you know how long a job will take walk us through the process of estimating correctly and not overbooking yourself and you know that process yeah so you're gonna when you first start you're gonna over book yourself you know that's inevitable and so it's about paying attention and and and revising but there are also a lot of great resources out for you we use homewise and they um it's kind of like having uh book time for a car they'll tell you what is industry standard in your area and then you can use that as a benchmark but then you kind of have to play off of that and say okay this is what they say it's going to take how long is it going to take me and can i either give a better price to my customer or take a little bit more profit off of it okay are you taking any different new steps to continue to scale your business if so what are those things that you're doing absolutely because of the success of the website um i have pretty much tapped out my ability to make money by myself so i've started to try to hire i'm bringing on a business partner and then i've hired a marketing director and we're working on handyman systems so we want to offer people that are new to handyman businesses and service businesses sort of an easy way in to the business side of handyman businesses how do you plan to do that more specifically well we have a website coming out and um we will have some online classes okay and tutorials tutorials and all that kind of stuff yeah [Music] what is demand like for handyman and where would a new handyman look for more connections with customers um if you start a handyman business right now you will immediately get phone calls from uh real estate people and like people who are managing condominiums wow so that that high and that's by just starting a business they will get your phone number because there's so much demand at least in our area in seattle there's so much demand that i wouldn't hesitate to guarantee that you will have some work people will be knocking on your door you really don't have to do a ton you know now the whole point of getting good jobs is is creating that website and doing all this stuff that's how you get your pick of who you want to work for okay so if you just want to work for a contractor you can make a relationship with a couple contractors or you can make a relationship with a couple real estate people but typically they're going to charge you know 30 on top of you so if you want to go direct to customer which is what i do and charge what they charge that's why i can charge a hundred dollars an hour because i'm not using a third party i go direct to customer and that makes me more money okay yeah as a real estate agent man i only have like two people on my contact list i'm like where are the handyman totally that actually know what they're doing they're on time and they're professional like you so boom right here too bad you're not in bellingham [Music] so it's you and another full-time employee yep curious about your workload is it hard to get time off as an owner pretty hard to get time off like on a on a weekly basis because there's a lot going on but the nice part about owning your own business is if you schedule it you can take as many vacations as you want so i probably work you know 50 to 50 hours 55 hours a week but you know i'll take a week vacation every you know three to four months so nice it's there's parts of it that are hard but by the end of it like if you're if you're running a business well i think that what you're doing for fun is running your business like that's kind of what i do for fun nowadays is try to grow and figure out how to run my business i have other hobbies too but that's the that's the major one right now what's your favorite hobby my favorite hobby is scrabble i love playing scrabble okay little chess every once in a while nice and then uh i love watching the seahawks too awesome we love the seahawks go hawks and you guys if you're enjoying this video please take a second subscribe like this video and you will support caleb as well by doing that what else can you share with us in terms of hiring employees finding the best talent what do you look for sure to find the right team um so we try to focus on our core values and rather than trying to hire somebody with the right skill set that has different values than us we're going to look for people that have the same values as us and then train them up on the skills can you share with us what are your core values yeah core values are trust first value your customers time and what's the last one it's uh it's it's work for your customers and you look for that and everybody you interview absolutely so like rather than having somebody that has different values then we want to bring them in and try to train them up [Music] what's the most challenging thing for you as a handyman and what's the most rewarding thing most challenging is definitely scheduling if you're going to service five customers a week and something runs long you might and and you're booked out six weeks then you might have to reschedule 25 people so that can be really challenging and that's where having a great system comes in handy okay if you're just trying to do that off the top of your head you're going to miss a lot of things but if you have everything in one place if you have a piece of software that can inform everybody it makes it make something that's like that's hard into something that's doable if i didn't have that i think i don't know that i would have ever stuck with this because you do have cost you have time over runs and if you can't effectively reschedule people then you're going to hate your life scheduling okay what about rewarding what are the rewards of this business for you personally yeah i for me it's it's it might sound corny but it's just being of service to people i take pride in the fact that there are some people out there if their toilet stops running and they need somebody to call they call me and i can help them and i enjoy making money from that but you know it's not all about the money it's part of it is is helping my neighbors and countrymen what type of jobs does a handyman do are there jobs that you absolutely won't take from a financial standpoint and things like that when i first started out i did a lot bigger jobs i would get into the medium-sized remodels and i found that i made more money doing the small work than i did it's interesting one of the other things we have done recently is uh in the first couple years i was doing a lot of exterior work and we're in the pacific northwest and it rains a lot so we targeted our marketing to try to advertise to more interior work and that's nice because it just keeps me out of the rain a little bit you wanted to get out from the rain a little bit you know i don't mind a little bit i'll do it but uh you know i've given the choice i'll see you i'll be inside yeah seattle is rainy so so that's it's it's something that you can easily do right in terms of shifting who you want to target absolutely yeah it's it's it's even easier if you have a website and you can target market and that comes from a combination of having a business coach having a website and having uh target target marketing earlier in the video we told you that caleb's going to share an incredible tip to the success of his business when it comes to systems so caleb why don't you specifically share what those things are and what turned your business around sure so when a client is looking for north seattle handyman they get routed to my website they put all their information in and that goes to a google form okay once that google form goes that we have a third party software called zapier which connects other parts of the business they send that to an email for me that gives me all that for information up front so i can see it all in one email thread it also sends it to my customer management system and in that customer management system what that does is it keeps everything in one place so i can invoice i can talk to the customers through that system i can schedule through that system i can do everything in one spot which makes it so that if i have to change things i can do it easily and efficiently okay and what did that do to your business ultimately i mean i it's made it so that i can't i've hit my ceiling the only way for me to make more money at this point is to hire people and that that uh customer platform is called field pulse and i've field pulse yeah yeah they've been great what are you spending monthly on the subscription subscriptions for these three four platforms um maybe a hundred bucks that's it yeah wow it's not much so for those not using it they're really missing i would say so yeah in conclusion any just general advice to young entrepreneurs people currently in this industry looking at this video what would you tell them just three pieces of advice three pieces of advice one is get started go to your friends go to those people but start a website two is treat your customers like people and they'll treat like you like a person um third piece of advice is systemize systemize systemize okay the more you systemize the easier life becomes awesome caleb this has been wonderful we lied a lot learned a lot so thank you so much appreciate it thanks for coming out i trust you guys enjoyed this really fun episode with north seattle handyman took away advice that you will implement and execute a new business starting right now take a second like this video subscribe to our channel we appreciate your support you guys we do this for you and thank you for watching

2021-11-10 22:14

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