Palm Pilots were state of the art twenty years ago. I remember I was the only one in Middle School who had “a palm.” I used it all the time to schedule the lawns that I was maintaining and keep the client database up to date. I remember having a palm pilot with a stylus that I would use to schedule task and control client schedules. It was unbelievably ahead of my time for being in middle school.
The Palm was the perfect tool for scheduling the yards that I needed to cut and set them up as weekly or every other week reoccurring calendar events. This one tool allowed me the freedom to get the scheduling and remembering out of my head so I could focus on my school work too.
If it rained and I couldn’t get to it that day, I would just drag it over to the next day and shift things around. I was able to be proactive with communicating to my clients when I was planning to be there and let them know how the weather shifted my schedule. Jobs didn’t fall threw the cracks and I was able to collect addresses, phone numbers and emails for each client and prospect. I would type in detailed notes into the notes section. This data would sync with my Blackberry too. The Palm Pilot worked really well for me. There were many Saturday’s that I would mow 7-8 yards in the morning and be done by lunch…making much more than my friends all put together.
Remember organizing work orders for lawns while teachers talked. Between classes I would take out my metal clipboard, write out carbon copied invoices that I had bought from Office Depot in as best of handwriting as possible. They also made for me a stamp that I would put at the top of each work order. It said Matt’s Lawn Service, my parent’s address and my cell phone number. When I would finish a yard, I would write a simple thank you note, tear off the white copy and leave it in their mailbox or hand it to them and get my check. I would keep the yellow carbon copy and use that as my formal accounts receivables system. If they hadn’t paid me yet, I would keep that yellow copy in my clip board. Once they paid, I would mark PAID on the yellow sheet, hole punch it and put it in a 3 ring binder for my tax records.
One of the things that I loved to do was fill out a work order form for every prospective job or every job that was sold. I would organize them and stack them in the order of which yard I was going to go to work on first to last. It was my method of keeping projects top of mind. In the description, I would write “Mow, Edge, Weedeat and Blow.” I believe these simple tools helped to differentate me from other young kids around the neighborhoods cutting grass. It made me look professional, just one level higher which meant that I could charge more too. These systems also allowed me to be able to sell Matt’s Lawn Service to Billy Reid of Lawn Care Plus my senior year because he had something that was easy to transition. The systems were in place and easy to understand.
WARREN VENTURES was formed. I had to have an email to correspond to my clients but I was into so many different business ideas that I felt that I should have an all encompassing email. Like a parent company or a conglomerate, at age 14, I created my own email address and had to name it something gradious, of course. My middle school business email address was warrenventures@hotmail.com.
