Today’s student blogger is Kelin Malcolm. Below, he nicely tells the captivating, perhaps surprising entrepreneurial success story of local landscaper John “Beefy” Houston. Prof. Gabel
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John “Beefy” Houston is what some would call an “old fashioned” businessman. This is due to the fact that he does not own a computer, and does his accounting with ledger books. He is decidedly and purposefully low-tech.
Mr. Houston graduated from the University of Illinois with a Bachelor’s degree in Animal Science. After working on his family farm for a few years, the farm was sold which left John looking for a new job. He did not want to get stuck at a job he hated and “have a heart-attack at age 40” as he has seen several friends come close to doing over the years.
So… Beefy chose to do what he loved doing, landscaping.
John started the company by himself with 1 truck and 1 trailer; 20 years later he now has 2-3 employees at any given time during the summer, 6 trucks, 5 trailers, as well as a few skid-loaders. He also owns a building used for storage, and he rents out the space he doesn’t use.
John is an unorthodox businessman in that he does not want to grow his company. What?? Shouldn’t all businesses want to continually grow?
Not Beefy Houston!… His reasoning: He is perfectly fine where he is at and any more business would just mean more headaches and, possibly, lower-quality service and customer dissatisfaction. He keeps the level of business where he can personally control the high level of quality he is renowned for in the area.
John is also unorthodox in terms of financing his operations. He has no loans to deal with because he has never been a believer in borrowing money from banks.
Houston is also unorthodox in that he does no advertising, not even decals on his trucks. He relies a lot on word of mouth advertising but he also is a very active member of the community. “See and be seen” is a big phrase of John’s, he is always at public events around his community because it generates a substantial amount of business for him.
Ultimately, as he told the class repeatedly, Houston believes what goes around comes around; if you treat others, especially customers, bad then bad things will happen. It is crucial to always be on time and even a little bit early to meetings and John credits this to earning him a couple customers. He believes that you should speak face to face if at all possible and phone calls need to be answered with phone calls, not text messages.
Bottom line… John’s philosophy of treating customers right and having a great work ethic has given him a good base of customers. Some may view the way John “Beefy” Houston runs his business as kind of “old fashioned and unorthodox,” but he has been very successful in being an entrepreneur.
