DIY And The Road To Ruin

Warning. Today’s show contains a real life story that some listeners may find disturbing. 

On today’s show we are talking about how to maximize your profit. Profit, simply calculated is revenue minus expenses. You can increase profit by increasing revenues or by reducing expenses. Often it is tempting to reduce expenses. When something needs to be done on a project you can hire an expert, which can be costly, or if the work is simple, do it yourself. 

I’m here to tell you that doing it yourself is the path to ruin. 

On today’s show we have a cautionary tale about Tony, a pilot with 21,000 hours of flight experience. Tony had a number of trees on his property that needed pruning. But the tree cutting service was going to charge $600 per tree. He did the math and decided to rent a professional cherry picker. These are one of the machines that hoists you high in the air in the safety of a basket with a railing. Most of the controls are at your fingertips. Joystick control makes it quite easy to position the basket exactly where you need it. 

At one point, the cherry picker detected the beginning of instability. When that happens, the joystick controls are disabled and the cherry picker stops working. The only problem is that Tony was by himself. The only way to fix it is to use the manual crank on the base of the cherry picker. But Tony was 30 feet up in the air and he was by himself. Rather than call for help, Tony decided to try and jump onto the roof of the house which was nearby. Only he missed the house and fell to the ground. Sadly, Tony did not survive the fall. Now folks, this is a real life story about a man who made a series of bad decisions, about a wife who lost her husband, about children who lost their dad. 

There is so much do it yourself mentality in our culture. We are thought to do it yourself at school. We are taught to get a job. On the job we are to do the work. 

Even if you didn’t do something involving heights, I’m sure you can relate to Tony’s lapse in judgment. Maybe you decided to do a quick and easy plumbing repair rather than call a professional. Maybe you cut your own grass. 

Overwhelmingly, when I think about increasing profits, I don’t think about reducing expenses. I think about increasing revenue. You can hire the skills to do the work. You can increase revenue to pay for the work. You can’t recover the time it took to do the work.