The crap truck

Zee and I were very lucky with the resources we had access to starting up.  My family had been trimming our own palms and taking care of our yard for years so we owned a cherry picker, shovels, rakes, clippers and work gloves.  All of these are essential equipment for starting a landscaping business and the fact that we owned them saved us lots of money starting up.  To be honest, if we had to pay for all of those tools from the beginning, we probably would have never started the business at all.

Our prize possession is an ancient Ford F-250 with an extended bed that dumps.  Zee's family uses it to take care of a few pre-schools that they own and they let us borrow the truck when we have jobs lined up.  We dubbed it The Crap Truck after the first time I drove it and I saw my life flash before my eyes.  The truck's axis is so far off alignment that the steering wheel needs to be held at practically 90 degrees for it to drive straight and the rearview mirror is completely useless.  Coming back from one of our first jobs it started pouring rain.  That was when we found out that the passenger side window doesn't roll up and the windshield wipers don't work.  The truck certainly isn't built for luxury.

We went a week or so driving around in my family's little Toyota Tacoma.  The Tacoma is a baby compared to the Crap Truck.  Having a truck that size opened up a lot of opportunities for us.  We were able to pick up and deliver pallets of sod and mulch.  It also allowed us to haul away debris to the dump.  At the helm of the Crap Truck, we were new people.

Confidence

Zee and I decided to expand our business and offer more services.  We started telling people that we would resod, mulch, pull out hedges, pretty much anything that people needed done we would do.  This opened up a lot of doors for us and we started getting jobs for all sorts of things.  

A few days ago we got a job to put rocks all around the front of a huge house.  I charged the guy $350 for the work and thought that we were getting a steal.  Let me tell you, shoveling and wheeling rocks in the 95 degree South Florida heat is not fun.  Far from it, it was hell.  The job took us literally all day long to do.  We started at 8:30 in the morning and didn't finish until 5 p.m.  It was absolutely awful.  

This tree trimming business/ landscaping has given me so much experience and insight into running my own enterprise, but that job in particular taught me a very important lesson.  Never under charge for your work.   There are some jobs that just aren't worth it.  If some one isn't willing to pay you what the job deserves, then you just have to walk away. 

The rock job was  good experience though.  It gave me a lot of material to talk about when negotiating future jobs.  I now have a better idea of all the work involved in doing something like that and can be able to say a price that a future job deserves with confidence.  I've found that confidence is key in any sort of business.  If you act confidently, you can pretty much get anything you want.

Door to door

The tree trimming business started out slow.  I knew it was going to be something we would have to work with and constantly improve before we would make any significant money.  We printed fliers at Kinkos and started going door-to-door looking for jobs.  We would drive around and look for houses with overgrown palm trees and knock on their door.  If you've ever knocked on a lot of strangers' doors you know that people do some weird things.  Sometimes we would knock on a door and hear people come to the door, look through the peep hole and then just not answer.  There was also the occasional conversation through the door, where people would go on asking questions and talking to you without ever opening the door.  One time we even had a woman shout down to us from a second-story window above her front door.  The door-to-door knocking paid off though and we had done several jobs after just a few days.  

Making Money

When I arrived home for the first half of the summer I started brainstorming every way I could think of to make money.  I was only going to be home for a little over a month, so getting a job was pretty much out of the picture.  I've often found that some of my best ideas come when I'm not trying to think of them.  

It was about 10:30 in the morning when my dad knocked on my door to wake me up.  He wanted me to come outside and help him trim our palm trees and do some yard work.  It was hours earlier than I was used to being awake and doing manual labor was not what I had planned for summer vacation.  I soon realized that trimming palms was something I could do to make money.  In South Florida people pay anywhere from 20 to over 50 dollars a palm to have them trimmed, especially before hurricane season.

I called up my friend Zee, and after a little convincing, sold him on the idea too.  We hopped in my family's Toyota Tacoma and David and Zee's Tree Trimming was born.  

As a college kid in one of the worst economic swings in recent memory, getting a job and making money is not a walk in the park.  The expenses, however, do not slow.  Rent, tuition, books, clothing, food, there is just no stopping the onslaught of bills.  Although the future may look bleak, there are still ways to bring in the cash.

This summer I have made it my mission to make money, learn about money and save up enough to buy a car.  My posts will document my journey through various aspects of the business world and lessons I learn along the way.  I will be living in two different cities this summer and I will not have any one long term job or set way to bring in cash.  This makes reaching my goal just a little more exciting.  

I will  also start researching and learning about investing.  My goal is to take almost all of the money I make and invest it.  Presently I have very little knowledge about the stock market and investing, but I do know that right now stock prices are low and there is a huge amount of potential.    I have started using www.marketwatch.com to check up on the stock market and look at a few stocks.  I plan on getting much more involved in this soon.

My goal is to take what I learn about investing and translate it into layman's terms so that the average college kid (non accounting major) can understand and use that knowledge for their own benefit.